Update: 50MHz To 100Mhz Scope Conversion

March 31, 2010 by Mike Szczys 59 Comments

Changing this 50MHz Rigol oscilloscope into its larger, more expensive brother just became quite a bit easier. When we originally looked at this hack it required pulling some capacitors off of the board. Now all it takes is three commands over a serial terminal connection.

Take a look at the walk through video after the break. You’ll see that there’s one chip that needs to be setup differently to change the functionality. Removing capacitors was actually changing the commands sent to initialize that chip at power-up. Now you can just change the model number and one letter of the serial number via a terminal and the firmware will recognize this as the more expensive DS1102E.

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RFID Reader For IPhone

March 14, 2010 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Benjamin Blundell] built an RFID reader for the iPhone. A jailbroken iPhone connects to this project box by patching into a standard iPhone USB cable. Like in past iPhone serial projects, [Benjamin] is using openFrameworks for the software interface. Right now this reader only detects low-frequency tags but he’s working on the code to read MIFARE tags as well. See the magic of a tag ID displayed on the screen in the video after the break.

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LED And Fan Controller

March 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Needing a front fan to keep his hard drive cool, [CalcProgrammer1] found he was unhappy with a single LED color for the fan. He swapped them out for a set of four RGB LEDs and whipped up his own controller board for the unit. It is based around an ATmega168 and patches into the COM2 header on the motherboard, providing a serial interface. [CalcProgrammer1] wrote a GUI to control fan speed, and individual LED color settings. You can take a look at and enthralling, edge-of-your-seat demonstration of how slider controls work after the break. Wouldn’t it be great if the HDD LED clock could be adapted to use a fan so that the front panel had a colorful analog dial on it? Continue reading “LED And Fan Controller” →

WRT54GL, Meet Alice

February 27, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 22 Comments

When it comes to routers, there is one that is hacker’s favorite, the WRT54GL. But a slightly lesser known company, Pirelli with their “Alice Gate2 plus Wi-Fi”, seems to be a popular choice among our Italian friends.

[Esteban] has done everything from installing serial and parallel ports, to unlocking firmware while installing Debian. Our personal favorite is the creative wiring of an additional USB port, where he had to custom create a power circuit to run his webcam and external drive.

[Thanks Marco]

[Update: It would appear Roleo, Beghiaro, and Zibri did the actual grunt work at ilpuntotecnicoeadsl and Esteban simply wrote the guides. Thanks for your hard work and hacking skills guys!]

Oscilloscope Doubles As A Serial Terminal

February 24, 2010 by Phil Burgess 25 Comments

PC-based USB oscilloscopes are fast becoming all the rage. [Matt Sarnoff’s] Terminalscope takes the reverse approach, adapting an oscilloscope into a full serial terminal. You may have seen something similar before in the Dutchtronix/SparkFun O-Clock, but [Matt’s] project goes one further by adding a PS/2 keyboard port for full bidirectional serial communication, and with much sharper display resolution to boot.

The mostly VT-100 compatible Terminalscope is built around two AVR microcontrollers: an ATmega328P runs full-tilt to generate the video signal and handle serial I/O, while an ATtiny45 handles keyboard input to avoid interrupting the ’328’s duties. Rather than vector trace each character, a raster-scanning approach is used: the beam follows a fixed X/Y path (like a television), while modulating the Z input (beam intensity) to form an image. The device can be connected to a PC via serial port or USB-to-TTY adapter, or directly to another microcontroller to debug serial output.

We recently showed an oscilloscope being used as a multichannel digital logic display. The Terminalscope provides yet another use for this essential bench tool and could nicely round out a “poor man’s” testing setup. The schematic and full source code are available for download.

Serial Communication With Cell Phones

February 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

Hackaday alum [Will O’Brien] has been doing some cellphone integration work. He recently picked up some Motorola c168i cellphones from eBay. It turns out there is a serial port that uses TTL communication with a standard head-phone jack as an interface. [Will] soldered up a connector and used a USB to FTDI cable to interface with the phone. To his surprise he was able to read off the stored text messages even though they were PIN protected in the phone’s operating system. The messages on these units were trivial but this is another example of the importance of clearing your data before discarding your devices.

Developing For IPhone Serial Communications

February 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Hcgilje] threw together a tutorial on using serial communications in iPhone applications. It builds upon the DevDot tutorial which was posted back in 2007. A lot has changed since then; the firmware has come a long way and there are several development tools that now make things a bit easier for you. His examples use Interface Builder and openFrameworks to demonstrate GUI control of an LED and a servo motor. Now go out and design your own peripherals for this popular handset.