Posted Apr 28th 2008 8:44PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, peripherals hacks
Whenever [sprite_tm] sends in his
latest project, it's like getting a Christmas present and a night off. He put together a whiteboard, x/y stepper system, serial interfaced microcontroller and added a webcam with perspective correction for the online view. Me? I'm tempted to build one of these for leaving notes for the wife when I'm out.
Posted Apr 21st 2008 8:37PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, peripherals hacks, xbox hacks
[CyberPyrot] and [l0rdnic0] released their
spitfire mod on acidmods for XBox 360 controllers. It involves some fine wiring, but a relatively low parts count. The heart of the mod is a PIC16F84A, a crystal for the clock and a few passive parts. It took me a little while to find it, but the code for the pic hiding under the parts list. For a lengthy demo of the mod in action, you can check out this
video.
Posted Apr 10th 2008 11:59PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: home entertainment hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
[rustlabs]
put together an interesting looking gaming gun for FPS games. He wrote up his build and how to use a webcam to provide gun tracking for games like Half Life 2. He gutted a keyboard to provide the button interface, and infrared LEDs on the gun body are tracked by the cam. Surprisingly, no USB game pads were sacrificed in the build, just a USB keyboard and mouse.
Posted Jan 29th 2008 10:52PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, peripherals hacks
[Jock] sent in
this photo gallery showing a Lego Mindstorm automated microscope. I dug up
the paper that was published about this hack to find out just what the idea was. It's a proof of concept showing off automated data collection - the Mindstorms are used to allow the intel QX3 microscope to take data over a grid area. It's an interesting idea for collecting time series data. The computer interface is a bit overly complex, but the Lego's make this sort of project accessible to the amateur roboticist.
Posted Jan 27th 2008 1:11AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
[Computer Guru]'s LCD power supply went out, making it a useless pile of plastic. He used an old computer PSU to
replace the defective one. After he identified the outputs on the built-in supply (The one's I've pulled apart were labelled) he stripped down the replacement PSU to provide the necessary voltages.
Posted Jan 24th 2008 10:14PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: peripherals hacks
[Auger] sent in
this nice little hack. The instructable says to get a USB keyboard (it looks like a Dell USB keyboard to me), gut it and label the flexible membranes inside after you join them together. If you've got a supply of this style of keyboard, it could be a cheap source... or better yet, maybe you can use the guts to produce high quality custom keybads.
Posted Dec 23rd 2007 10:54PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: peripherals hacks
[Samu] sent in his freaking awesome
JediPad mouse creation. It's got seven touch-point style mouse buttions, as well as a pair of gryroscope sensors. Each touch-point has it's own micro-controller and the signals are input to the computer via USB. He's looking for help, so shoot him an email if you're interested.
Check out his demo video after the break.
Continue reading The JediPad AKA Uber-gyro-mouse
Posted Dec 16th 2007 11:48PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: peripherals hacks
We
mentioned the
original IR LED multitouch array a while back, but I ran across
this DIY version built by [Thomas Pototschnig]. It features an ARM7 controller with USB 2.0 with a 25hz+ capture rate. He's promised to put up code and schematics when he builds the next version.
Posted Dec 13th 2007 8:43PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
[Eric] sent in
his iPod transmitter radio modem hack.Given the short range of these FM modulators (and FCC rules) I'd call this an academic exercise. Combined with a few mods, it could be useful for bursting data from a micro-controller. (Think APRS)
Asus EeePC Bonus:About a week ago, [johnx]
added a 16GB flash drive and a bluetooth adapter to his. Yesterday, [ta2cba] showed off how he
squeezed a four port hub inside his - allowing a pair of devices to live in the extra min-ipcie bay and leave two ports to spare for later add-ons.
Posted Dec 4th 2007 10:12PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
[PaulJ] sent in this older, but excellent little hack to
silence your mouse. Don't like the click that your mouse makes? If your mouse has the right kind of switch inside, it can be quieted down with a quick soldering job. Just remove it, turn the upper half around and re-assemble.
Posted Dec 2nd 2007 6:30PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: peripherals hacks
We first covered breaking the commodity 27MHz radios used in wireless keyboards, mice, and presenters when [Luis Miras]
gave a talk at Black Hat. Since then, the people at Dreamlab have managed to crack the encryption on Microsoft's Wireless Optical Desktop 1000 and 2000 products (and possibly more). Analyzing the protocol they found out that meta keys like shift and ALT are transmitted in cleartext. The "encryption" used on each regular keystroke involves XORing the key against a random one byte value determined during the initial sync with the receiver. So, if you sniff the handshake, you can decrypt the keystrokes. You really don't have to though; there are only 256 possible encryption keys. Using a dictionary file you can check all possible keys and determine the correct one after only receiving 20-50 keystrokes. Their
demo video shows them sniffing keystrokes from three different keyboards at the same time. Someone could potentially build a wireless keylogger that picks up every keystrokes from every keyboard in an office. You can read more about the attack in the
whitepaper(pdf).
[via
Midnight Research Labs]
Continue reading Wireless keyboards easily cracked
Posted Nov 18th 2007 10:29PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: peripherals hacks
Today, I stumbled across
this morse code keyboard. I couldn't find any sign on the promised schematics or code, but I like the design. It's not that hard to train yourself in Morse code, and it's nearly impossible to send an erroneous code thanks to the unique slide=dash tap=dot physical interface.
Posted Nov 17th 2007 10:00PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
Since I mentioned
Sparkfun electronics in the
parts finding how-to, I started poking around their forums and stumbled across
this interesting USB RF modem. It uses an off the shelf Semtec DP1205 RF module that's controlled by a PIC 18F2550. The really interesting thing is that it uses spread spectrum frequency hopping - which means that by FCC rules, it can transmit up to 1 watt at 900Mhz.
Posted Nov 12th 2007 10:25PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks, peripherals hacks
Remember
Christopher Reeve's blow controlled wheel chair? [
Shwetak] sent in his blowable computer interface. It doesn't require anything but an on-board microphone and a decent set of lungs. It works by taking audio fingerprints to determine the location on the screen that you're exhaling on. The
demo video (avi) shows off some surprisingly accurate location detection. You can get a few more details from his
research paper. (If you need a decent avi video player, check out
VLC player.)
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