July 2010

Name the Thing Contest - 139

Thanks to Dangerous Prototypes and Gadget Factory for sponsoring the contest this week. They will be providing a project that they jointly collaborated on. The Open Logic Sniffer logic analyzer is sure to make quick work out of troubleshooting your most complex circuit on your bench. “Features (partial list) Capture 50MHz+ waveforms on 32 channels 200Msps captures up to 100MHz waveforms on 16 channels 100Msps captures up to 50MHz waveforms

Door Alarm

Hacked Gadgets Forum member Alexander125 from Romania is using his ioBridge IO-204 to help him secure his house. “I’ve been recently working on a sistem to keep my house safe while I’m away.Using the IO-204 module I’m building a simple sistem to monitor power consumption in the house, movement(if there is any) using PIR motion sensors and the doors or windows. For the interface with the IO-204 I decided to

Meter Clock

Len Bayles has designed a great looking Meter Clock which is based on the Atmel AT89C2051 microcontroller. The design is similar to the Multimeter Clock that I created.  Len provides the code and schematic on his site so you can make your own. “The software in the microcontroller handles the count for the time. It “talks” to a 4 channel Digital to Analog converter to derive the voltage to position

Wireless Pan Tilt Project

Sparkmuseum user on Youtube demonstrates his Wireless Pan Tilt Project. It is so responsive that it looks like it is a wired connection but it is wireless. He is using an xBee to communicate the data generated by a Parallax Basic Stamp over to a Pololu servo module. Thanks for the tip John.

Microsoft Bidirectional Battery Holder - Instaload

Looks like Microsoft is trying to make our lives a bit better with their new battery holder design. What is so cool about a battery holder that needs to be talked about? Well this battery holder can accept the battery inserted either way. I know so many people who just slot the batteries into everything and wonder why it doesn’t work… This device would solve this issue since it doesn’t

Arduino Rocket Launcher

If you are looking to have a bit more fun with your Arduino why not use it to launch some model rockets! That is what the guys from  NortHACKton did. They have a full schematic available on their site. Thanks Martin. “It’s a very simple little board, consisting of a driver chip and a relay and the connection to the dot matrix display. I chose to use the ULN2003 to

Laundry Payment Card Hacked

This article is for educational purposes only, ripping off a poorly created system is still theft. That being said we can learn lots about how not to create a card payment system. Koala from Because life is a hack was curious what made his laundry card payment system work, after cracking open the case he was surprised to see an EEPROM inside. Using a Bus Pirate and a Openbench Logic