Blog Title: Hacked Gadgets

Loo Log - Washroom Usage Monitoring

  If you live in a house that has more washrooms than people you have probably come across the situation where you are waiting for one to free up. Sven has come up with a solution, use a microcontroller to capture usage information and graph it so that you can see what the typical usage patten read more..

Understanding and Controlling Motors

  Driving motors from a microcontroller will be required for a project eventually. This video by NerdKits will go over some of the basics that are needed. Thanks Humberto. "Electric motors are a key way of converting electrical power (voltage and current) into mechanical power (torque and speed), and because electric motors are simple and reliable machines, they read more..

USB Cigar Storage

  If you have some top secret into that needs to hide in plain sight have a look at this USB Cigar. When the cigar is together there is no sign that it has been hacked! "Materials: A thick cigar An USB flash disk of small dimensions Some wire, 2 x LEDs (red!), 1 x 10K resistor Wood primer Some tape A short read more..

Computer Transformer Videos

  Computer generated special effects seem to be getting better and better by leaps and bounds these days. I have watched the first video at least 6 times and can’t seem to find any flaws in it. I am still a pushover for real innovation thought like this video of the Sony QRIO Baseball Pitcher.

HD Projector Build

  Maxi Huber sent in this HD projector build that he documented in a Youtube video. He purchased the kit from a German company. Looks like a cool project. "The benefits from this projector are: The price is very cheap (499€) for an HD projector with DVI, HDMI (Playstation3 is working via HDMI!), S-VHS and many read more..

Coffee making Robot

  I need one of these robots to make me some coffee in the morning! Even though I a sure there was lots of prep prior to each mini scene this robot is actually very strong and flexible! Thanks for sending it in Alex.

High Tech Roller Skates

  Roller skating got taken over by roller blading, what technology is next? Have a look at the next generation of wheels that can be attached to your feet and take your pick. They all look very interesting but I wonder how hard they are to use?        

Arduino Nano Drives 8X8 LED Matrix using Micrel MM5450

  When working with a microcontroller there are never enough pins to do the job. Sure you can move up to a hundred pin microcontroller and call it a day but you will have to pay a huge price for that chip, instead it is generally better to pass off the IO complexity to another chip. read more..

Drill Motor used for RC Car

  Instead of spending big bucks on one of those high power RC car motors Rabbithazen was thinking outside the box and used a Ryobi drill motor in his RC car. It wouldn’t make sense to go and buy a new drill just to harvest the motor but there are lots of ways to pick these read more..

Name the Thing Contest - 93

The prize this week will provide you lots of rubber band fun, it needs a few servos to make it real fun though. This week we have an old piece of equipment which might be hard to identify, lets see if anyone can identify it! This contest will run for one week (June 27 read more..