Ultra Mouse Modification

March 16, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 75 Comments

mouse

When traveling with a laptop, we often find that the list of peripherals that we have to attach can get pretty long. Especially if it is an older laptop without wireless built in. [Dawning] has taken steps to consolidate some of his peripherals(registration required)by cramming a USB hub and a wireless card into his mouse.

He started by dismantling a USB hub. After placing the board in the mouse to see how it fit, he realized that he was going to have to reduce the size. To do this, he removed the USB slots themselves. This forces him to wire things directly to the board, but saves a ton of space. Next, he took the guts from a USB wireless adapter and wired them up. The decorative LED in the mouse was then moved to the wireless card. This way he could see light flicker with his network traffic. At this point, that’s all he’s added, though there’s still plenty of space for other items. He notes that he’ll probably add some storage or a CF reader. The only problem he has encountered is that his mouse tends to get warm during use. What peripherals would you put in there?

Update: [Dawning] let us know that he didn’t actually remove the LED from its original location. He connected a wire from the wireless adapter that causes the LED to short when traffic is going through. Also, there’s a video which you can now see after the break.

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Zigbee AES Key Sniffing

March 15, 2009 by Eliot 8 Comments

zigbeesniffing

[Travis Goodspeed] posted a preview of what he’s working on for this Summer’s conferences. Last weekend he gave a quick demo of sniffing AES128 keys on Zigbee hardware at SOURCE Boston. The CC2420 radio module is used in many Zigbee/802.15.4 sensor networks and the keys have to be transferred over an SPI bus to the module. [Travis] used two syringe probes to monitor the clock line and the data on a TelosB mote, which uses the CC2420. Now that he has the capture, he’s planning on creating a script to automate finding the key.

Standalone Eye-Fi Upload

March 15, 2009 by Eliot 14 Comments

eye-fi

Former Hack a Day contributor [Will] has been using a Eye-Fi SD card to automate his photo transfers. Unfortunately this requires using Eye-Fi’s software and talking to their servers. He used [Jeff Tchang]’s replacement server written in Python to recieve the images from the card. [Will] manages his own online photo gallery using Gallery 2. To get the images uploaded, he added a call to GUP. Now all of his photos are transfered just as easily as with the standard Eye-Fi but without all of the middleman.

[photo: Eye-Fi teardown]

Wireless TAC-2 Joystick

February 4, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

wjs

[Aki] had a broken TAC-2 joystick that was just begging for some new and improved use. Since it was the cable that was broken, [Aki] had the idea to make it wireless. He designed custom boards for the transmitter and receiver. Each is controlled by an ATTiny2313. He fitted it with the stock connector so it could possibly even still work on a commodore 64. He hasn’t tested that yet though.

[via the Hack A Day flickr pool]

UHF Power Harvesting

January 29, 2009 by Eliot 15 Comments

hdpowerharvesting

[Alanson Sample] and [Joshua R. Smith] have been experimenting with wireless power transfer for their sensing platform. Their microcontroller of choice is the MSP430, which we used on our e-paper clock. They chose it specifically for its ability to work with low voltages and they discus its specific behavior at different voltages. The first portion of their paper uses a UHF RFID reader to transmit to the sensor’s four stage charge pump. They added a supercap to provide enough power for 24 hours of logging while the node isn’t near a reader. For the second half of the paper, they use a UHF antenna designed for digital TV with the same circuit and pointed it at a television tower ~4.1km away. It had an open circuit voltage of 5.0V and 0.7V across an 8KOhm load, which works out to be 60uW of power. They connected this to the AAA battery terminals of the thermometer/hygrometer pictured above. It worked without issue. The thermometer’s draw on a lab power supply was 25uA at 1.5V.

It’s an interesting approach to powering devices. Do you have an application that needs something like this? For more on wireless power, checkout this earlier post on scratch building RFID tags.

[via DVICE]

Wireless Bootloading

January 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 3 Comments

[vimeo= 2976417]

Tired of having to physically connect to your microprocessor to upload new code? Just do it over a wireless connection. [Nathan] takes us through the process of setting up a wireless bootloader for the ATmega168. He is using the XBee base and remote modules for the wireless communication. While people have been doing wireless bootloading with the Arduino already, [Nathan] found that it was common for them to have timeout issues. His remedy was to make his own custom one that is much faster. He’s asking for help though. At this point it is tested and working, but he needs someone with more programming knowledge to help him make it “drop-in” compatible with the Arduino IDE.

Don’t forget to submit projects to our tip line.

Wireless BlinkM Control

January 10, 2009 by Eliot 5 Comments

blinkm

[John] has been working with several BlinkM RGB devices. He’s created a controller to talk to each of the BlinkMs wirelessly and change their behavior. The core is an old relay tester box used to test telephone circuits. Each of its four knobs are connected to the analog inputs on the Arduino. The signal is transmitted using RFlink devices. Each BlinkM is paired with an ATmega168 and receiver. The control box also has a switch to send the same signal to all of the devices at the same time. The transmit and receive code are available on his site. You can find a video of it embedded below.

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