Four Tear-downs For Your Friday Afternoon

November 27, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 9 Comments

We know that feeling, you’ve been up all morning working hard, and now you just want to relax. What better way than to sit back and watch as helpless electronic devices are stripped, forced to show their goods, then put back together only hap hazardly – not that we’re into that or anything. Today, we had one thing on our mind, game systems.

With the release of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver shoppers were also given a device called the PokéWalker. A pedometer that helps your pocket monster gain experience and affection towards you. Here is a tear-down of the device next to Nintendo’s other try at getting children active, the Activity Meter pedometer. [Thanks Arty2]

Sega, while in todays day all we see is more and more rip offs of everyone’s favorite Hedgehog, we do remember a time when you brought more to the game field, especially with your advanced consoles. It does bring a tear to our eyes seeing this beast being torn apart, but its all for the best.

Those keeping up with Nintendo’s DS series will notice one thing, the console keeps getting smaller and smaller. That trend continued until the (Japan) release of the DSi LL. Some think its size can be attributed to an easier to see screen, others feel its jam-packed with more features. Make your own decision after seeing its tear-down. [via engadget]

Finally, we couldn’t decide what a fourth tear down should be, and couldn’t just leave with only three. So how about 10 separate Sony gadgets torn apart!

EyeWriter Is The Fruit Of The KanEye Project

November 11, 2009 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

The EyeWriter is an open source eye tracking initiative. This is the mature version of the KanEye project we covered in April. Collaboratively developed by Free Art and Technology (FAT), OpenFrameworks, and the Graffiti Research Lab, they seek to aid a friend of theirs who suffers from the degenerative muscle disease ALS.

They’ve come a long way since we last looked in on the progress. The hardware used is pretty much the same: a set of sunglasses sans lenses with the CCD from a Sony PlayStation 3 Eye mounted in front of one eye. IR LEDs surround the CCD and point at the eye to increase the contrast between pupil and the rest of the eye. The major improvement comes with the software. Eye tracking appears to be extremely precise and they’ve written a custom drawing program to take advantage of their interface. Check in on their developer page for source code and a video walk-through of the software.

After the break you can see video of [Tempt1] using the system to create some tags. We’re thankful for the success this project has seen as this guy can do a lot better with his eye than we can with our hands.

Continue reading “EyeWriter Is The Fruit Of The KanEye Project” →

Sony’s Wireless Electricity Offering

October 3, 2009 by Mike Szczys 45 Comments

In August we covered a wireless electricity presentation from the TED conference. Now Sony has put out a press release on their wireless flat panel television prototype. The device is capable of operating without audio, video, or power cables connected to it. This is possible at distances up to 50cm at efficiencies as high as 80%.

As was talked about in the comments of the other article, the efficiency compared to that of a cable doesn’t blow our socks off. But this does show mainstream development of this technology. We hope to see advances in both efficiency and distance. We also look forward to that small black box (which we presume facilitates the energy transfer) being integrated into the TV’s body.

[via Gizmodo]

PSP Laptop

June 5, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 30 Comments

30j0m1l (Custom)

[Folklord36] on the Acidmods.com forums has been working on a PSP laptop that we think gives the PSP GO a run for it’s money. Sure it may be a bit bulkier but it has a full keyboard, thanks to an Xbox chat pad. The original psp is on the bottom. The screen and speakers have been moved to the top. He says there are still a lot of things that need to be finished, but this is pretty impressive already.

[thanks Robin]

PSP 3000 Firmware 5.03 Hacked

May 7, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 88 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn2Z8bYr3tE]

PSP firmware 5.03 has been hacked by Team Typhoon. This allows you to run custom code on the PSP by taking advantage of the tiff exploit. You’ll have to wait to download the hack though, they haven’t released it yet. This means those of you still on 5.02 or still using the little blue tool will be able to upgrade soon.

Vaio P HSDPA Mod

February 13, 2009 by Eliot 4 Comments

sim

[tnkgrl] has concluded her Sony Vaio P by adding GSM support. We covered the switch to XP earlier, but this should work on Vista too. The Vaio P is sold in the US with support for Verizon’s EVDO wireless broadband, but it uses the same hardware as the European model that uses GSM. This is possible because of the the Qualcomm Gobi radio module. To get GSM support, you trick the VZAccess Manager into loading a different firmware than the stock EVDO. The difficult part is that the Vaio P doesn’t come with a SIM card slot, so you’ll have to solder in your own. When you’ve got the computer reassembled, just change VZAccess Manager to use your carrier.

UPDATE: Wired has an article on the Gobi chipset.

VAIO P XP Install

February 10, 2009 by Eliot 31 Comments

vaio_p

Sony recently started to shipping the VAIO P don’t-call-it-a-netbook netbook. It comes stock with 2GB of RAM, which means it’s not eligible for Microsoft’s XP ultra low cost pc licensing. Hackers wanting to exorcise Vista have run into a few issues. After doing her unboxing photoshoot, [tnkgrl] wrote a guide for replacing Vista with XP on the Vaio P. She used the Universal Extractor to pop open the driver downloads and remove the Vista check. This got the WWAN radio and GPS working in XP. The only casualty was the volume and mute buttons are no longer working. You can see an annotated image verifying all the components here.