Arcade Machine Pack And Play

November 14, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 3 Comments

There’s something about the large imposing wooden box of an arcade machine that lends a confident presence to a room. The problem with a tall and heavy box is that it takes up quite a bit of space and readily draws the eye. So [Alexandre Chappel] set out to avoid that and build an arcade machine that could hide in plain sight.

Extra points awarded for neat wiring on the inside.

The idea is a wooden box hung on the wall that folds up when not in use. [Alex] starts with Baltic birch plywood cut into the panels. Next, he applies edge banding (a thin veneer with some glue on the backside) so that all the exposed edges look like natural wood. Next, a screen hole is routed into the face frame, allowing an LCD monitor to sit snuggly in. A combination of pocket holes and biscuits allows [Alex] to assemble everything with no visible screws or fasteners.

With the help of a 3D printer, he quickly fabricated a locking mechanism to keep the front panel attached when it folds up. The hinge is also 3D printed. The typical Raspberry Pi 4 powers this particular machine. Two french cleats hold the box onto the wall, and once the system is on the wall, we have to say it looks incredible.

If you’re looking for a smaller but more traditional arcade cabinet, why not take a look at this arcade cabinet for toddlers? Or, if you loved the solid wood look of the hidden arcade, this full-sized solid oak cabinet would be something you would enjoy. Video after the break.

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Literary Camouflage For Your Router

June 27, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 39 Comments

What is suspicious about the books in the image above? Is it that there is no bookend? How about the radio waves pouring out of them? [Clay Weiland] does not like the way a bare router looks in the living room, but he appreciates the coverage gained by putting it in the middle of his house. He added a layer of home decorating camouflage in the form of some second-hand book covers to hide the unsightly bit of tech.

There isn’t a blog post or video about this particular build anywhere. The photos were submitted to our tip line as-is with the note that a table-saw is involved. We can safely infer that book covers are stripped of their pages and filled with wooden blanks painted white and stuck together to look like a cluster of literature. The takeaway from this example is that our tech does not have to be hidden away like a secret, or disrupt the decor, it can be placed as functionally as possible without sacrificing Feng Shui.

If hiding behind books piques your interest, try a full-fledged version, or this smooth operator.

Thank you, [George Graves], for encouraging people to use our tip line.

Distorted Text Says A Lot

May 31, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 21 Comments

Getting bounced to a website by scanning a QR code is no longer an exciting feat of technology, but what if you scanned the ingredient list on your granola bar and it went to the company’s page for that specific flavor, sans the matrix code?

Bright minds at the Columbia University in the City of New York have “perturbed” ordinary font characters so the average human eye won’t pick up the changes. Even ordinary OCR won’t miss a beat when it looks at a passage with a hidden message. After all, these “perturbed” glyphs are like a perfectly legible character viewed through a drop of water. When a camera is looking for these secret messages, those minor tweaks speak volumes.

The system is diabolically simple. Each character can be distorted according to an algorithm and a second variable. Changing that second variable is like twisting a distorted lens, or a water drop but the afterimage can be decoded and the variable extracted. This kind of encoding can survive a trip to the printer, unlike a purely digital hidden message.

Hidden messages like these are not limited to passing notes, metadata can be attached to any text and extracted when necessary. Literature could include notes without taking up page space so teachers could include helpful notes and a cell phone could be like an x-ray machine to see what the teacher wants to show. For example, you could define what “crypto” actually means.

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Secret Book Light Switch

March 10, 2018 by James Hobson 9 Comments

You enter a study and see a lightbulb hanging on the bookshelf. You try all the switches in the room — nothing is turning it on. Remembering you’re in [lonesoulsurfer]’s home, you realize that you’re going to have to start yanking on every book in sight.

While often associated with the likes of Bat-caves and other complicated hidden passageways, turning a shelved book into a secret switch isn’t complex in its own right. [lonesoulsurfer] is basing their build on one by B.Light Design revolving around a fan switch, some aluminium strips, a block terminal, fishing line, a hinge, and — of course — a book with a dust jacket and something to trigger.

Bend the aluminium into an angle bracket and drill a hole to attach the fan switch — ensuring the whole is small enough to fit behind and not distinguish the book you’re using. Cutting the hinge to the size of the book and screwing a strip of aluminium to it, both this lever and the fan switch’s bracket are then mounted on the shelf. Once a length of fishing twine is tethered to the lever and fitted through the book’s pages to the fan switch — ensuring the line is taut — sliding the dust jacket back onto the book completes the disguised switch!

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The Nest: Album Release Hidden In A Rock

December 11, 2016 by Elliot Williams 31 Comments

First there were vinyl records, then came cassettes, CDs, those failed audio-on-DVD formats, and then downloads. To quote the band, [Bateleur], “you can’t pay someone to take a CD these days.” So how do you release your new album? By hiding a Raspberry Pi in a semi-transparent fake rock on a mountainous cliff, and requiring a secret whistle to enable it, naturally.

Once activated, you’ll be able to plug into the USB port and download the album, or sit there on a remote hillside cliff overlooking the ocean and enjoy the new tunes. Because there’s a headphone jack in the rock, naturally. Besides being a cool hack, we think that putting people in the right physical and mental space for a serious listening is brilliant. Watch the video embedded below for an idea of the making of and a view from the site.

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Use Your Mouse Pointer To Send Data

August 30, 2015 by Richard Baguley 11 Comments

[Ido Gendel] was thinking about new and interesting ways to send data between devices, when he realized that the answer was right in his hand. Literally: he decided to try sending data using the mouse pointer. What he came up with was an interesting hack that uses small movements of the mouse pointer to send data at up to 1200bps, or about 150 bytes per second.

The way he did this was very, very clever. He used an Arduino Leonardo that is set to emulate a mouse, working alongside his existing mouse. This setup means that he can use his existing mouse: the system just sees the Arduino as a second mouse, and the pointer just looks a little jerky when you zoom in. That is because the Arduino is just sending tiny movements, each of which is a code that represents a nybble (4 binary bits) of data. By using both a combination of three left-right or up-down movements, he was able to create 16 movements, each of which can encode 4 bits of data. Each of these encoding movements also returns the mouse to its origin point, so the mouse doesn’t mysteriously scroll off the screen when data is being sent.

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Kitchen Computer Hides In Pantry Door

February 4, 2014 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

hidden-kitchen-pantry-computer

You might look at the images above and think “oh neat” and then go about your business. But you’d be missing a great motorized hidden computer build. We simply must insist that you click on that link and look at all that went into it. Do it. DO. IT.

Still here? Okay, we’ll give you the gist and then you won’t be able to help yourself. First off, [Designforhire] built that door completely from scratch using skills that your average hacker wields. At first glance you’d think it was a retrofit or done with serious woodworking tools (quality table saw, router table, etc.). This actually started with a simple frame out of 2″x3″ pine studs. This is faced with Masonite which was affixed with glue and brads. From there the upper half was outfitted with a dry-erase panel, and trim pieces were added.

Now the hack really starts to get interesting. The opening for the monitor and the keyboard are both motorized. An old cordless drill (borked handle and dead battery) was cannibalized for its motor which is run using the two black switches just above the left corner of the monitor. When closed, a dry-erase calendar covers the monitor and a blank panel keeps the keyboard secret. The computer itself is actually in the basement, with cables running down the hinged side of the door and through a hole in the jamb.

We didn’t see a video showing off the build, but you can satisfy that craving by looking back at the Kitchen HAL installation from a few years back.