[Tijmen Schep] sends in his project, Candle Smart Home, which is an exhibit of 12 smart home devices which are designed around the concepts of ownership, open source, and privacy.

The central controller runs on a Raspberry Pi which is running Mozilla’s new smart home operating system. Each individual device is Arduino based, and when you click through on the site you get a well designed graphic explaining how to build each device. The devices them

It’s also fun to see how many people worked together on this project and added their own touch. Whether it’s a unique covering for the devices or a toggle switch that can toggle itself there’s quite a few personal touches.

As anyone who’s had the sneaking suspicion that Jeff Bezos was listening in to their conversations, we get the need for this. We also love how approachable it makes hacking your own hardware. What are your thoughts?

USB chargers are everywhere and it is the responsibility of every hacker to use this commonly available device to its peak potential. [Septillion] and [Hugatry] have come up with a hack to manipulate a USB charger into becoming a variable voltage source. Their project QC2Control works with chargers that employ Quick Charge 2.0 technology which includes wall warts as well as power banks.

Qualcomm’s Quick Charge is designed to deliver up to 24 watts over a micro USB connector so as to reduce the charging time of compatible devices. It requires both the charger as well as the end device to have compatible power management chips so that they may negotiate voltage limiting cycles.

In their project, [Septillion] and [Hugatry] use a 3.3 V Arduino Pro Mini to talk to the charger in question through a small circuit consisting of a few resistors and diodes. The QC2.0 device outputs voltages of 5 V, 9 V and 12 V when it sees predefined voltage levels transmitted over the D+ and D- lines, set by Arduino and voltage dividers. The code provides function calls to simplify the control of the power supply. The video below shows the hack in action.

Quick Charge has been around for a while and you can dig into the details of the inner workings as well as the design of a compatible power supply from reference designs for the TPS61088 (PDF). The patent (PDF) for the Quick Charge technology has a lot more detail for the curious.

Similar techniques have been used in the past and will prove useful for someone looking for a configurable power supply on the move. This is one for the MacGyver fans.

Due largely to the overwhelming dominance of mobile phones, payphones are a sometimes overlooked relic from the 90’s and earlier eras. While seldom seen out in the wild these days, they can however still be acquired for a moderate fee — how many of you knew that? Setting out to prove the lasting usefulness of the payphone, Instructables user [Fuzzy-Wobble] has dialed the retro spirit way past eleven to his ’90 from the ’90s’ payphone boombox.

Conspicuously mounted in the corner of his office, a rangefinder sets the phone to ringing when somebody walks by — a fantastic trap for luring the curious into a nostalgia trip. Anyone who picks up will be prompted to punch in a code from the attached mini-phone book and those who do will be treated to one of ninety hits from — well —  the 1990’s. All of the songs have been specifically downgraded to 128kbps for that authentic 90’s sound — complete with audio artifacts. There’s even a little easter egg wherein hitting the coin-return lever triggers the payphone to shout “Get a job!”

[Fuzzy-Wobble] notes that a payphone bracket is indispensable as most all payphones are made of cast iron, and nobody likes holes ripped out of their walls due to improper mounting. They’ve also provided their code as well as links to other tutorials for aspects of the build — such as the Adafruit music maker — throughout. Now you’ll have to excuse us as we groove while lost in a reverie.

Kick it back an extra decade and you get an 80’s boombox bluetooth speaker.

[Thanks for the submission, Alex S!!]

[Markus Gritsch] and his son had a fun Sunday putting together a little toy airboat from a kit. They fired it up and it occurred to [Markus] that it was pretty lame. It went forward and sometimes sideward when a stray current influenced its trajectory, but it had no will of its own.

The boat was extracted from water before it could wander off and find itself lost forever. [Markus] did a mental inventory of his hacker bench and decided this was a quickly rectified design shortcoming. He applied a cheap knock-off arduino, equally cheap nRF24L01+ chip of dubious parentage, and their equivalent hobby servo to the problem.

Some quick coding later, assisted by prior work from other RC enthusiasts, the little boat was significantly upgraded. Now the boat could be brought back to shore using any R/C controller that supported the, “Bayang,” protocol. He wouldn’t have to face the future in which he’d have to explain to his son that the boat, like treacherous helium balloons, was just gone. Video after the break.

As we’ve mentioned previously, the integrity of your vehicle in an era where even your car can have a data connection could be a dubious bet at best. Speaking to these concerns, a soon-to-be published paper out of the University of Birmingham in the UK, states that virtually every Volkswagen sold since 1995 can be hacked and unlocked by cloning the vehicle’s keyfob via an Arduino and software defined radio (SDR).

The research team, led by [Flavio Garcia], have described two main vulnerabilities: the first requires combining a cyrptographic key from the vehicle with the signal from the owner’s fob to grant access, while the second takes advantage of the virtually ancient HiTag2 security system that was implemented in the 1990s. The former affects up to 100 million vehicles across the Volkswagen line, while the latter will work on models from Citroen, Peugeot, Opel, Nissan, Alfa Romero, Fiat, Mitsubishi and Ford.

The process isn’t exactly as simple as putting together $40 of electronics and walking away with a vehicle. The would-be thief must be close in order to detect the fob’s unique key — although they only need to do so once for that vehicle! — as well as reverse-engineer the other half of the code from the vehicle’s internal network. Exploiting HiTag2’s vulnerabilities to unlock the vehicle can be achieved within a minute by a well-prepared thief. [Garcia] and his team note that only the VW Golf 7 has been spared from this exploit.

If thievery is not your thing and you’re looking to white-hat hack your vehicle, Volkswagen still has the best option in the form of the loveable Beetle.

[Thanks for the tip therafman!]

Grand Theft Auto V has a few mobile apps of its own, but one enterprising modder has taken the idea to its natural conclusion: an application that lets you control the in-game cellphone with an iPhone. With the application you can scroll through text messages on-screen, peep your current list of objectives and, among other things, even control the in-game phone's camera. The YouTube video's description (spotted by former Joystiq'r Dave Hinkle) does't offer much by way of details other than it's running on an Arduino Leonardo with an Ethernet shield connected to a PC, sadly.

Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Mobile

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Via: Dave Hinkle (Twitter)

Source: DIY Projects Planetleak (YouTube)

Grand Theft Auto V has a few mobile apps of its own, but one enterprising modder has taken the idea to its natural conclusion: an application that lets you control the in-game cellphone with an iPhone. With the application you can scroll through text messages on-screen, peep your current list of objectives and, among other things, even control the in-game phone's camera. The YouTube video's description (spotted by former Joystiq'r Dave Hinkle) does't offer much by way of details other than it's running on an Arduino Leonardo with an Ethernet shield connected to a PC, sadly.

Via: Dave Hinkle (Twitter)

Source: DIY Projects Planetleak (YouTube)

Fighting games like Mortal Kombat provide you with a variety of different available moves. These include kicks, punches, grabs, etc. They also normally include various combination moves you can perform. These combo moves require you to press the proper buttons in the correct order and also require you to time the presses correctly. [Egzola] realized that he could just hack his controller to simulate the button presses for him. This bypasses the learning curve and allows him to perform more complicated combinations with just the press of a single button.

[Egzola] started by taking apart his Playstation 3 controller. There were two PCB’s inside connected by a ribbon cable. Luckily, each individual pad for this cable was labeled with the corresponding controller button. This made it extremely simple to hack the controller. [Egzola] soldered his own wires to each of these pads. Each wire is a different color. The wires then go to two different connectors to make them easier to hook up to a bread board.

Each wire is then broken out on the breadboard. The signal from each button is run through a 4n25 optoisolator. From there the signal makes its way back to various Arduino pins. The 4n25 chips keeps the controller circuit isolated from the Arduino’s electrical circuit. The Arduino also has two push buttons connected to it. These buttons are mounted to the PS3 controller.

Now when [Egzola] presses one of the buttons, the Arduino senses the button press and simulates pressing the various controller buttons in a pre-programmed order. The result is a devastating combination move that would normally require practice and repetition to remember. You might say that [Egzola] could have spent his time just learning the moves, but that wasn’t really the point was it? Check out the video below for a demonstration.

Not everyone has Minecraft-creator Markus "Notch" Persson's money (or candy room) so the rest of us have to devise our own methods of sorting M&Ms by color. The English blogger behind reviewmylife has an idea that combines, among other things, an iPhone 5s, an Arduino and an eBay-sourced 12V 80RPM motor to do the menial task. Oh, and an awful lot of ingenuity, foam-board and hot glue was involved too -- but you kind of figured that already, right? Unlike the Lego-powered contraption we've seen before, this one takes advantage of the Cupertino smartphone lens' color sensor to ID the candy's hue during free-fall after it leaves the hopper. The author has a step-by-step breakdown replete with his or her hardships (apparently finding the right motors and magnets took some experimenting) and photos detailing each part of the process, in case you're curious. Or, because maybe you'd just like to spend Christmas building your own.

Filed under: Cellphones, Apple

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Via: Physorg

Source: reviewmylife

If the words "ARM-powered wireless Arduino" send your heart aflutter, then you might be interested in... Flutter -- a development platform with the aforementioned qualities. The Kickstarter project claims the device has a usable range of over half a mile, letting you nail that wireless letterbox-checker project with ease. Similar tools, such as Xbee and Zigbee already exist, but the $20 price tag for the Flutter basic, and $30 for Flutter Pro (adds battery charging, another button, more memory) make this a tempting option for tinkerers on a budget. So, if building that mesh network of quadrocopters has been sitting at the top of your to-do list for too long, we recommend you get backing right now.

Filed under: Networking, Internet

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Via: Ycombinator

Source: Kickstarter