Nintendo DS OSC Support

December 6, 2008 by Eliot 22 Comments

dsmi

OpenSound Control protocol is an emerging standard for communication between musical programs. It’s meant to replace MIDI. The DSMI, DS Music Interface, team has just added support for OSC. You can now use your DS as generic OSC music controller over WiFi. OSC has TCP/IP support built in, so there is no need to run a host sever to talk to DSMI like you did when they only supported MIDI. We’ve seen OSC used in other projects like the monome. It’s also the basis for the multitouch communication protocol TUIO.

[via CDM]

Xbox 360 Portable

December 3, 2008 by Eliot 50 Comments

ben_heck

A couple months ago we posted [Ben Heck]’s in-progress photos of his Xbox 360 laptop (with links to his other versions). He’s just put the finishing touches on it, and dubbed it the Xbox 360 Portable. It has a removable hard drive on top and memory slots on the side. The webcam is embedded in the frame and there’s internal WiFi. With chatpads available now, he’s decided not to include a keyboard. It’s really a nice machine. Check out the video below for a tour of the system.

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Pandora Dev Unit Unboxed

November 28, 2008 by Eliot 12 Comments

pandora

[skeezix] has got his hands on one of the first Pandora dev kits to make it out the door and took a few photos. This is 1 of the 20 MK2 devboards that were produced. Although, not final it certainly is close to the version they’ll be shipping. Pandora is a Linux based portable game console. The main chip in the clamshell device is a TI OMAP3530. It has OpenGL hardware acceleration and an 800×480 touchscreen. A QWERTY keyboard is included along with analog and digital game controls. WiFi, bluetooth, USB host, TV-out, and dual SDHC card slots round out the package. The team has already presold 4000 devices.

New WPA TKIP Attack

November 9, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

wifibox

[Martin Beck] and [Erik Tews] have just released a paper covering an improved attack against WEP and a brand new attack against WPA(PDF). For the WEP half, they offer a nice overview of attacks up to this point and the optimizations they made to reduce the number of packets needed to approximately 25K. The only serious threat to WPA so far has been the coWPAtty dictionary attack. This new attack lets you decrypt the last 12 bytes of a WPA packet’s plaintext and then generate arbitrary packets to send to the client. While it doesn’t recover the WPA key, the attacker is still able to send packets directly to the machine they’re attacking and could potentially read back the response via an outbound connection to the internet.

[photo: niallkennedy]

[via SANS]

Aspire One 3G Hack

October 29, 2008 by Eliot 12 Comments

[tnkgrl] is back with part three of her Acer Aspire One hacking. This time she’s adding in 3G. You may look at the picture the above and think, “Cake. She just plugged the card in”. No, the Acer doesn’t ship with the mini-PCIe slot or the SIM card holder. First you have to solder a right angle mini-PCIe connector to the board pads and bridge two others to provide power. The SIM holder was another problem. She wasn’t able to find a pin compatible one. The one she installed is mounted to a riser so she could change the wiring order (let her know if you can find the correct part). This mod definitely requires some good soldering skills and she warns that even she managed to destroy a SIM in the process.

The Dell Mini 9 is another netbook that doesn’t have the appropriate connectors soldered on board, but JKK has a work-around. You need a 3G modem that has the SIM card on board. You plug it into the WiFi slot after taping over a few pins and then use a USB WiFi card instead.

Wearable Project Inspiration

October 18, 2008 by Eliot 3 Comments

Yesterday, Gizmodo published a roundup of wearable gadgets for people who “don’t mind looking like a tool”. It’s interesting to see what has been deemed commercially viable and put into mass production. The list covers HMDs, embedded WiFi detectors, integrated keyboards, tech jackets, speaker hats, and others. We thought you might find some inspiration from the list for your next project. In the past, we embedded a WiFi detector in a backpack strap for our Engadget how-to. The natural choice for wearable projects is the LilyPad Arduino which was featured most recently in the turn signal jacket.

[photo: cksthree]

Inexpensive Powerful Router Based Robot

October 7, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[Andrey Mikhalchuk] Has posted some great instructions on how to build an inexpensive router based robot. Starting with a Linksys WRT54GL, he takes us through the process of disassembling and modifying it to directly control servos. He has put together a custom version of OpenWRT Linux that you can download from his site. After testing to make sure everything is functional, he goes through a quick and dirty chassis build. As you can see from the picture above, there are lot of household items thrown in there such as rubber bands and zip ties. After adding a camera mounted on two servos for x y movement, he fine tunes it and lets it go.

This project looks fairly simple, cheap, and fun. It may look familiar as it is very similar to our Wifi Robot post from August.

[thanks Matt]