[drj113] posts his cool word clock. After seeing a similar clock on an industrial design website, he set out to make his own version. He made custom pcbs with the toner-etch method. The front is a solid piece of copper clad board and the light shines through the etched areas. It’s powered by a PIC microcontroller and uses approximately 120 ultra bright LEDs. [drj113] has all of the circuit board diagrams, silkscreens, etch negatives, and code on the intructable so you can build your own.
Hack
Word clock: tell the time with words
Software
AnyDVD & AnyDVD-HD 6.5.8.7 Final
AnyDVD is a driver which descrambles DVD Movies automatically in the background This DVD appears unprotected and region code free for all applications and the Windows operating system as well With AnyDVD 39 s help copy tools like CloneDVD Pinnacle Instant Copy InterVideo DVD Copy etc are able to copy CSS protected Movies You can remove the RPC region code thereby making the movie region free and viewable on any DVD player and with any DVD player software With the help of AnyDVD you can watch movies with non matching region codes with every DVD Player Software you like AnyDVD…
Computer
Lunascape, triple engine browser
Do you install more than one browsers on your computer? Some people run more than one browsers. They use such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari.
Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome all use different rendering engines. The software that figures out how to process the code of a web site and display it for you. Like me, sometimes I use Firefox as my favorite browser, but sometimes websites do not work then I must switch over to another browser. Now, you don’t need multiple browsers because Lunascape has released an alpha version of its Lunascape browser. Lunascape is…
Hack
Arduino Thermoscanner
[Steve] sent in a tip to show us his Thermography scanner. Constructed from an Arduino, two servos, a thermal sensor and a little bit of code, it is fairly simple. The results aren’t groundbreaking. You can see his examples are fairly low resolution and took about 30 seconds to capture. It isn’t bad for a quick project though. The source code is available on his site.
Facebook
Social Ad Summit One Day Discount
We’ve finalized our agenda for the upcoming Social Ad Summit in New York City being held on October 5th. For today only we are providing all interested attendees with a discount of 50 percent off. The event is bringing together marketers, publishers, ad networks, and industry executives. As this space is constantly evolving, we think it’s important to bring together the current leaders and other participants to discuss the trends and the future of marketing on the social web.
If you are interested in attending the event, you can use the discount code “onedayfifty” to get 50 percent off via…
Business
USB group says iTunes can block Pre
Apple now has the support of a USB industry standards group in its battle to keep the Palm Pre from using the iTunes music service.The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) said in a statement Tuesday that Apple can block the Pre from connecting to iTunes. The group issued a letter to both companies warning Palm that further attempts to use iTunes would violate the group’s policy.The voice of the USB-IF is strong in this case since the group is responsible for issuing Apple the hardware vendor ID that lets its devices connect to iTunes via USB. Palm has used this process…
Hack
Steal the administrator password from an EEPROM
Did you forget your hardware-based password and now you’re locked out? If it’s an IBM ThinkPad you may be in luck but it involves a bit more than just removing the backup battery. SoDoItYourself has an article detailing the retrieval of password data from an EEPROM.
The process is a fun one. Disassemble your laptop. Build a serial interface and solder it to the EEPROM chip where the password is stored. Connect this interface to a second computer and use it to dump the data into a file. Download a special program to decipher the dump file and dig…
Hack
Vintage Hack – Game Boy Camera
Back in 2005, a member of a French robotics team named [Laurent] wrote a wonderful how-to that we somehow missed on using the Game Boy Camera as a vision device for a robot. The images above are actual shots from his project. The Game Boy Camera features a stunning 128×123 pixel resolution in a gorgeous 4 color gray-scale palette. Possibly the most attractive feature of this hack is that it is still possible to get a hold of these cameras for under ten dollars on ebay.
He connected the camera sensor to an Atmel AT90S4433 using a combination of…
Hack
RCDC: DC motor control via servo signals
[Spikenzie] has put together this nice kit for controlling a DC motor with RC servo signals. He’s using a PIC12F629 to convert the signal to PWM. As you can see in the video above, it seems to work quite well. It is in a neat and tidy package and available as a kit. We have to admit though, what caught our eye was the prototype. Even though it is a kit for sale, it looks as though they plan on releasing the PCB files and code.
Hack
Universal credit card in the palm of your hand
Do you remember the magnetic card spoofer in Terminator 2? It was a bit farfetched because apparently the device could be swiped through a reader and magically come up with working account numbers and pin numbers. We’re getting close to that kind of magic with [Jaroslaw's] card spoofer that is button-programmable.
Building off of a project that allows spoofing via an iPod and electromagnet, [Jaroslaw] wanted something that doesn’t require a computer to put together the card code. He accomplished this by interfacing a 20-button keyboard and a character LCD with an AVR ATmega168 microcontroller. Card codes can be…
Hack
Photographic key duplication
[Ben] and his associates over at the University of California at San Diego came up with a way to duplicate keys using a picture of them. They developed an algorithm that uses measurements from known key blanks to extrapolate the bitting code. Because the software is measuring multiple points it can correct the perspective of the photo when the key is not photographed on a flat surface, but from an angle.
They went so far as to test with cell phone cameras and using a telephoto lens from 195 feet away. In most cases, correct keys were produced within…
Hack
Barcode scanner in Processing
Reader [Nikolaus] decided that instead of using an existing image based bar code decoder, he would write his own. Using the Processing language he created a scanner that parsed the black and white pattern when a bar code was centered on the image. His code then parsed that data and compared it with the initializing character to provide a reference. Currently his scanner supports three character sets of the Code 128 encoding, and provided his complete code so that others could add as they see fit. He admits that the code is a bit messy due to the lengthy character tables,…
