Hackaday Extra

I spent 14 hours at airports today, after staying up all night. My internet access at Toorcon was bandwith starved, so I wanted to catch up a bit. I’ll try to highlight more Toorcon stuff later in the week.

[Clinton] and [bart] both sent in Clinton’s electric shock alarm clock. (Don’t even think about building one of these things, it could kill someone if you’re not careful.)

[capagotks] sent in his USB refitted hand crank LED flashlight.

I got this a few times, so here’s a simple work surface made from an old PC case. (I use self healing cutting mats.)

[Ian] presents us with a bunch of cell phone repair (and upgrade?) information. Let me know if you actually rebuild a broken phone. The most likely scenario would be LCD replacement.

[Jim] sent in these candy(sugar) powered rockets. sweet!

Finally, [Leigh Norton] in Essex (Yes, Essex.) has an HP pen plotter like the one used to make a vinyl cutter. Post if you want it and maybe he’ll give it to you.

19 thoughts on “Hackaday Extra

  1. I have built a few stunguns and electric shock devices, but none as dangerous as this (clock and other shockers on his site). A high voltage electrolytic capacitor can deliver dangerous amounts of current when used like this (the sparks aren’t the kind a stungun makes). By all means blow stuff up with this (low value resistors make an impressive bang – wear goggles)but dont go poking people with it, I dont think this guy has any idea how dangerous this is.
    I will happily discharge stun guns into my arm as they produce harmless levels of current, but no way I would do the same with a 2-300V 300uF capacitor.

  2. is anyone else woried that two of these hacks have the potential to maim or kill one of the script kiddies that visit this site, or worse their little brother? some of the hakcs recently have been getting a little dangerous, perhaps the site needs to think of some ethical guidlines for the things that get posted.

  3. Hey, at least this stuff is accurate. If “script kiddies” have survived the anarchist’s cookbook, I doubt supered alarm clocks are going to increase the mortality rate much.

    Also, this is not exactly a site targeted to the lowest denominator. Anybody who can put hackaday to good use is quite above par in the spectrum of intelligence. Is it really fair to treat the people who operate on this level like children? If they are intelligent enough to pull it off but not reasonable to be safe about it, do you honestly think that not mentioning things like this on hackaday is going to miraculously circumvent their inclination to do things like this?

    If anything, I would be more worried about the people who just realized that the alarm-gizmo is the perfect detonator for their homebrew explosives.

  4. The capacitor isnt all that strong. I have been shocked by similar ones (the flash unit out of disposible cameras have plenty of uses) quite a few times. Worse thing that happened from it was a light electrical burn that went away in a day. Unless the person who is getting shocked has a pacemaker or something similar i doubt it could cause any kind of serious harm. If it was one out of a microwave or something then I would get worried.

  5. I’ve rebuiltd a broken cell phone before, a bowling ball was dropped on it, but a simple LCD replacement; as you assumed. I had a couple of old kyocera phones and my friend had a new one which he had dropped a bowling ball on, so I simply swapped the screens and all was good, they used the same screen.

  6. My dad and I make these rockets all the time. All you need is some KNO3 and suger (I use sobatol)and there you go. If you want to see a video of my CATO (see yawns site for the term CATO if you dont know) Email me at cltreat(at)comcast.net

  7. Got here by accident. Does someone know how to hack a generic Chinese mobile phone with 2 sims? One sim is cool but the second hasn’t got the right IMEI so I can’t use it. Couldn’t find the tool to hack the phone and get it right. Can someone help please?

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.