Author: sweethess

Not every cool hack needs to involve microcontrollers, LEDs or other bling. We were initially drawn to the Bloxes display simply because we love a good multipurpose construction set, whether it be Lego, 80/20 aluminum, or in this case, a system of interlocking cubes formed from six identical pieces of corrugated cardboard, cut and scored in such a manner as to form a surprisingly sturdy little building block. They can become simple furniture, groovy Logan’s Run-style room decor, or the all-important kids’ forts…then later dismantled and made into something else.

A elegant concept executed in the humblest of materials…we were already infatuated. We were blown away then to learn of Bloxes’ background: they’re a 1970s brainchild of computer pioneer [Jef Raskin], perhaps best known as the “Father of the Macintosh.” [Raskin]’s son and daughter [Aza] and [Aviva] revived the Bloxes concept in 2008 and now sell kits through their web site. Even if you’re not at the Faire, they welcomed readers to use the discount code MAKERFAIRE2011 (good through June 12th 2011, limit one per person), which will net you a kit of five Bloxes (30 pieces, some assembly required) for $12.63 vs. the normal $15.59.

[Will] submitted his ski goggle mod. He has mounted an Oregon scientific ATC3K digicam in his goggles. This must make recording ski trips a lot easier. a lot of of the electronics fit just fine in the mask, though he did need to use an IDE cord to extend parts of it to the custom-made pack mounted on the strap. We’re also curious how much wind noise he’s going to get on that microphone.

stop whatever you’re doing and get this book. I’ve just finished reading it and I have to say that [Wendy] and [Mikey] could easily be the poster children for modern day hacking, and this book could be the manual for a life built on hacking.

When I went to [Wendy] and [Mikey] last year I was blown away.  Their little homestead was a veritable smorgasbord of hacks. all over I looked, things were cobbled together, modified, repaired, and improved. There wasn’t a single piece of their lives that wasn’t somehow improved by their efforts to play an active role in their own living.

That sounds a bit cheesy I know. we all play an active role in our lives right? Sure. but what they have done is created a hacker’s homestead. My projects tend to live on my workbench, occasionally poking into my daily life, but they went were there was practically nothing and hacked together everything they found they needed.  Their life is their workbench.

If there was a need, something would be made to satisfy that need. The buildings they built were constructed from scrap and paper, the power they use was harvested from their own cobbled together solar system and battery array, the food they eat was cultivated from the desert using intelligent planning. It was not only an outstanding display of hacker ingenuity, but also inspiring.

The book essentially comes in two parts.

Part 1. the Story:

[Wendy] and [Mikey] were hackers in new York. You might remember [Mikey] from some articles he wrote for hackaday ages ago, as well as his projects that appear on our pages. [Wendy] started swap-o-rama, which you may have also seen. This part of the book is an interesting view of hackers struggling to live two different ways at the same time (DIY/Hacking vs get a job and be normal). Ultimately, they chose they would relocation to the middle of new Mexico and just make what they need.  They’ve been documenting this whole process on their blog, holy Scrap, as well.

I wasn’t too interested in a “hackers falling in love” story, and I was pleasantly amazed to find that this is much more of a first hand account of some of the amazing stuff they were doing in new york. There are stories of things like when [Wendy] orchestrated a large event involving decorative burn barrels on the streets of new York, or that time when [Mikey] built a bunch of vibrating underwear with remote controls to pass out to strangers at burning man.

Part 2. the Lab.

After spending so much time doing what they do, they’ve compiled chapter upon chapter of projects to survive on. ranging from electronics projects like harvesting and repairing automobile batteries to growing and harvesting your own medicinal plants, creating entire buildings from old phone books to converting cars to run on grease. I think this section ought to be handed out in high schools as part of the curriculum.

In case you couldn’t tell, I loved this book. It practically seemed like a peek into an imaginary place that belonged in a [Niel Stephenson] book (I could think of passing through this area in the diamond Age). I ought to also mention that even though I did check out them last year, I don’t really know them. I knew they were in my path for that trip and shot them an email. They were wonderful hosts who fed us, amused us, and took us swimming in the Rio Grande.

[Chris] had made a durable mount in his car for his iPAQ. He uses the iPAQ for directions and playing mp3s. After nearly ripping apart his line-in cable each time he took the iPAQ out of its cradle he chose to create a wireless solution. He chopped up a pair of HP FA303A Bluetooth headphones to extract the receiver portion. The headphone’s band is prone to breaking so it might be possible to find a damaged pair for cheap. The receiver was placed into an old mouse. once the buttons were hooked up to the mouse buttons and a voltage regulator added the unit was ready to start streaming audio directly to the stereo.

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We love seeing hard-core firmware reverse engineering projects, but the number of hackers who can pull those off is relatively small. It’s possible to grow the ranks of the hacker elite though. A hackerspace is a great place to have a little challenge like this one. [Nicolas Oberli] put together a capture the flag game that requires the contestants to reverse engineer Teensy 3.0 firmware.

He developed this piece of hardware for the Insomni’hack 2013 event. It uses the Teensy 3.0 capacitive touch capabilities to form a nine-digit keypad with a character LCD screen for feedback. When the right code is entered the screen will display instructions on how to retrieve the ‘flag’.

To the ideal you can see the disassembly of the .elf file generated by the Arduino IDE. This is what [Nicolas] gave to the contestants, which gets them past the barrier of figuring out how to dump the code from the chip itself. but it does get them thinking in assembly and eventually leads to figuring out what the secret code is for the device. This may be just enough of a shove in the ideal direction that one needs to get elbow deep into picking apart embedded hardware as a hobby.

affordable stuff gets our innovative juices flowing. situation in point? [Andy Grove] developed an eight-sensor HC-SR04 breakout board, since the ultrasonic distance sensors in concern are so economical that a hacker can barely prevent ordering them by the dozen. He originally developed it for robotics, however then it’s just a few lines of code to turn it into a gesture-controllable musical instrument. inspect out the video, embedded below, for an overview of the features.

His Octasonic breakout board is just an AVR in disguise — it reads from eight ultrasonic sensors as well as delivers a single SPI result to whatever other controller is serving as the brains. In the “piano” demo, that’s a Raspberry Pi, so he needed the usual 5 V to 3.3 V level shifting in between.

The rest is code on the Pi that allows gestures to play notes, modification musical instruments, as well as even shut the Pi down. The Pi code is written in Rust, as well as up on GitHub. An Instructable has more detail on the hookups.

All in all, building a “piano” out of robot parts is surely a situation of having a hammer as well as every issue appearing like a nail, however we discover a few of the resulting nail-sculptures arise that way. This isn’t the very first time we’ve seen an eight-sensor ultrasonic configuration before, either. Is 2017 going to be the year of ultrasonic sensor projects?

If you online somewhere where summers are hot as well as dry, you can instantaneously tell which houses don’t have automatic sprinklers installed. Or they may have them installed, however like the blinking “12:00” on that VCR of yore, the owners may not have grasped the art of programming the controller. To be fair, the UI on most residential irrigation controllers is a bit wanting, which is the rationale behind letting Google calendar tell your sprinklers when it’s time to water.

Granted, somebody who is mystified by setting a digital clock is not likely to pull off [ClemRz]’s build. It’s still quite simple stuff, though, centered around an ESP8266 as it is. as well as calling the result an “irrigation system” is a bit bit of a stretch, provided that it might only support a single zone with a solenoid valve harvested from a defunct sprinkler timer. however as a proof-of-concept, or to water a little area, it hits all the marks. The ESP8266 drives the latching solenoid valve with an H-bridge chip after reading your Google calendar as well as looking for upcoming events to open or close the valve. The Google script as well as the ESP8266 code default to failsafe so that a error doesn’t leave the valve open as well as run up your water expense or drain your well.

It’s simple to see exactly how this can be broadened to manage a multi-zone irrigation system as well as support a smartphone UI for immediate manage of the valves. Overrides based on weather condition forecasts would be a nice function too. Or you might just checked out the soil wetness levels directly with backscatter sensors.

[Johna as well as Justin] are working to take the emotion out of playing the market. They developed this piggy bank which immediately purchases stock when your coinage totals the expense of a single share. That’s right, just turn the selector to one of your three selected stocks (Google, Facebook, as well as Apple are utilized in this example) as well as plug in some coins. The bank counts your money, compares it to the present on the internet stock price, as well as pulls the activate if you have sufficient dough. You can inspect out a demo clip after the jump.

The hardware is rather basic thanks to Adafruit’s programmable multi-coin acceptor. It handles the money as well as it’s quite simple to interface with the Arduino which handles the rest of the work. It links to a computer by means of USB, depending upon a PHP script to poll the present price. We dug with the code repository just a bit however didn’t discover the snippet that does the actual stock purchase. Whether or not they really implemented that, it’s definitely an fascinating concept.