Hackszine.com: Hardware Archives

Archive: Hardware

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March 27, 2008

Shredz64: Guitar Hero for C64

Toni Westbrook authored a new C64 game called Shredz64, bringing the best game of all time to the best computing platform of all time:

You can use the real Guitar Hero controller using the PSX64 PS2-to-DB9 converter which Toni also created. This takes the game controller input and maps it to the appropriate up, down, left, right and potentiometer lines for the Commodore.

Shredz64 uses the internal SID audio processor to play any of your favorite SID tunes. In addition to the built-in songs, you can import new SID files and even create new levels by editing note tracks (using the game controller, naturally).

I'm speechless.

Shredz64

March 25, 2008

iNoteBook: repurpose an old laptop

It seems like I end up updating my laptop every couple of years, but as cool as new hardware is, sometimes the challenge of finding a new use for the old machine is more interesting. The iNoteBook mod is a classic example, transforming a broken, screenless iBook into a stealth desktop machine.

What's your favorite laptop reuse project? If you've got one, please share in in the comments.

The iNoteBook

March 19, 2008

From Nand to Tetris in 12 Steps

Shimon Schocken gave a really interesting Google Tech Talk titled From Nand to Tetris in 12 Steps. In the video, he describes a course where students design a complete virtualized computer system from scratch, building from the humble nand gate, to a functional cpu and memory architecture, to compiler software and an operating system, all culminating in a simple game that runs on the virtual hardware.

The hardware projects are done in a simple hardware description language and a hardware simulator supplied by us. The software projects (assembler, VM, and a compiler for a simple object-based language) can be done in any language, using the APIs and test programs supplied by us. We also build a mini-OS. The result is a GameBoy-like computer, simulated on the student's PC. We start the course (and this talk) by demonstrating some video games running on this computer, e.g. Tetris and Pong.

Building a working computer from Nand gates alone is a thrilling intellectual exercise. It demonstrates the supreme power of recursive ascent, and teaches the students that building computer systems is -- more than anything else -- a triumph of human reasoning.

It looks like most of the course materials are available online. The necessary hardware emulator and simulator software is open source and available from Shimon's website.

CS101 Digital Systems Construction
Video - Building a Modern Computer from First Principles [via Slash7]

January 27, 2008

HOWTO: Make a roll-up keyboard

Making a flexible, "roll-up" keyboard from a standard USB keyboard is a lot easier than I would have expected. Rolling your own is about as simple as removing the membrane from inside an existing keyboard and gluing key labels in the appropriate places.

Aside from having a portable full-size keyboard, and the additional geek-cred that your workspace will attain, it also seems like this is much easier to clean. Considering what a biological cesspit of a petri-dish most keyboards are, this may have a beneficial health impact for you too.

Make your own Roll-Up Keyboard - Link

January 21, 2008

OS X on the Asus Eee PC

We've posted about installing Ubuntu and Vista on the little Asus Eee PC, so to round things off, here's a guide for installing Leopard. Using a few tools of the hackintosh trade, Dan from Uneasy Silence was able to get OS X running on the little lappy.

So, ever since I got the eeePC I've loved how easy it is to tinker with. Since I'm not a Linux guy, I dumped the Xandros preload and opted for Windows XP so I could you my EVDO USB datacard and blogging software easier, but I wondered could I install OSX on it? And, after trial and error - you can!

One thing that Dan mentions is that Leopard is a bit pokey on the Eee. He opted to run OS X 10.4.8 instead, and it sounds like it performs quite a bit better.

Load OSX 10.5 Leopard on the eeePC - Link
Vista on the Eee PC - Link
HOWTO - Install Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC - Link

January 4, 2008

Add Bluetooth to your iPod

fstedie came up with a nice hack for adding internal Bluetooth audio support to your iPod:

1st Ever Bluetooth-Enabled iPod!
If you're like me, you've often asked yourself why Apple has not added native Bluetooth capability to their iPod line up. Even the iPhone only supports mono Bluetooth!

Sure, there are numerous adapters that plug into the iPod's dock connector to give you wireless music, but they are clunky, they come off easily, can't use them with your case and you have to charge them separately!

So, here is my way to add "native" internal Bluetooth support to your 4G iPod. The same method may be used with other iPod versions, I leave that up to you.

The hack essentially involves disassembling a small Bluetooth audio adapter and wiring it directly to the iPod mainboard. Audio input is tapped from the headphone jack and draws power directly from the iPod's battery, giving you a completely wireless and dongle-free audio device.

Check out the picture above, though, and you'll also notice fstedie has replaced the iPod hard disk with a CF card. He has an instructable for that, too. I mentioned Mark Hoekstra's hack to create an iPod-to-CF adapter last year, and it looks like these are now more readily available and can be ordered online. Pretty cool little iPod hacks, I must say.

Add Internal Bluetooth Capability To Your iPod - Link
Convert your 4th Gen iPod to use Flash Memory - Link
iPod CF and SD Card Capability - Link

December 29, 2007

Laser projector

Instructables user echo_anomie posted a nifty howto for creating a very simple portable laser projector. With a bright enough laser, you can project an image across long outdoor distances and there's never any need to adjust focus.

When it's all assembled, you just drop photo slides in the path of the beam and they are projected wherever you have the thing aimed. It'd be interesting to try this with some kind of LCD in place of the slide. This should let you project eerie green videos on skyscrapers around town.

Laser Image Projector - [via] Link

December 22, 2007

HOWTO - add a touch screen to the Asus Eee PC

jkmobile added a touch screen to his Eee PC and he's posted a video showing how to do it. He was able to find a properly sized after-market touch panel that could be fitted on top of the stock screen just behind the bezel. It then connects to the PC using a USB connection, which he was able to completely hide by soldering the connector directly to the motherboard's USB pins.

I wasn't aware that these touch panels were readily available. It looks like this mod could be easily adapted to just about any laptop model. Cool stuff.

Add a Touch Panel to Asus Eee PC - Video, Link

December 21, 2007

Essential hacker stocking stuffers

Like most of us, you've probably got some last-minute shopping to take care of. Or maybe there's a special someone in your life who keeps asking you for gift ideas and you need to start dropping hints to avoid another button down and a neck tie. Whatever the reason, here's a quick and dirty hacker gift guide with a variety of gift ideas that should put a smile on someone's face.

Make sure to add your own favorites to the list in the comments area and pass it along. I'm focusing primarily on smaller items that are available in local stores, but feel free to toss in whatever you think is important and shouldn't be missed.

Reading Material:

Make: The Best Of - a killer collection of the best 75 projects from our favorite magazine.
The Dangerous Book For Boys - this is a great book for sharing with your kids. Chock-full of essential information like how to tie knots, play poker, use a compass, build a tree house, and relate to girls.
Knoppix Hacks, 2nd Edition - the swiss army knife for your computer.
Illustrated Guide To Astronomical Wonders - ideal for anyone who's interested in knowing their way around the universe.
Also check out other books from the O'Reilly Hacks Series - Link

Gadgets:

Asus Eee PC - this ultra-tiny Linux laptop is just starting to appear in stores - Hacks
Linksys WRT54GL Router - the L in the GL stands for Linux. It's a $60 router that can be customized to do more than it's thousand dollar big-brothers - Hacks
Western Digital MyBook World Edition External Hard Drive - any extra storage is really nice to have, but this network-available drive contains mirrored RAID storage and a mini Linux computer that can run a web and database server - Hacks
iPhone or iPod Touch - did I really put that here? - Hacks
Broadband Mobile Card from Verizon or Sprint - they are getting super
popular, and heck, they are cheaper than an iPhone.
Nokia N95-3 - the winner of our most hackable mobile phone survey - Hacks

Toys:

Air Hogs Havoc Heli Laser Battle - remember the Picco-Zs and their clones from last year? Here's two of them in a single package, enhanced with a trigger that let's you zap your friend's heli down.
E-Sky Lama V4 Helicopter- Yeah, I'm crazy for helicopters right now. The counter-rotating models like this one are about $100, ready (and easy) to fly, and very hackable.
WowWee RoboSapien V2 - fun for the kids. More fun with a soldering iron - Hacks

Gear:

2GB or larger micro SD card, plus various SD and USB adapters - perfect for scooting files around, the size of a finger nail, and you can put a full Linux distro, anti virus software, or a Puppy Linux virtual machine on it - Hacks
Mini Multimeter - always handy.
Bike Multitool - a good one will pack allen and hex wrenches, screw drivers, and a knife into a pretty small package. Perfect for voiding warrantees in a pinch. Oh, and there's a chain tool, too - Link, Link
Soldering Tools - whether it's a new Weller or just a pair of helping hands, it'll be welcome in any stocking - Link, Link

What have we missed here? Add your wishes to the comments. Then find a completely non-tacky way to get this list into the hands of someone who wants you to be a happy hacker.

November 30, 2007

Aleutia E1: 8-watt Linux box

After so many years of successively bigger, faster, hotter, less reliable, power hungry computer hardware, I'm really tickled to see that a lot of manufacturers are testing the waters with something altogether different. There's the OLPC, the Asus EeePC, and now the Aleutia E1, a little mini desktop that sips 8 watts and is packaged with a flexible solar panel.

200Mhz might hurt a bit for crunching a kernel, but with a lightweight linux distro and window manager, you can still have a really responsive interface for general PC use. The big deal is that it has no moving parts, including a CF card for a hard drive and zero fans due to its low power consumption.

It might be a fun exercise to use these recent devices as a reference model and attempt to source the cheapest configuration for a DIY low-power, small footprint, zero noise, solid storage system. If you add a mirrored raid configuration, you'd have the ideal desktop system for the majority of PC users.

Tiny Linux PC uses just 8 watts of power, can be solar powered - Link

November 25, 2007

Recovering a dead external hard drive

What do you do when good hard drives go bad? Tell me if this sounds familiar. You spend a year or two filling up an enormous external hard drive, and just as you start thinking it might be a good idea to buy another enormous drive to back up your data, you boot your computer and hear a heart-stopping sound from your disk: thuck... thuck... thuck... thuck... @#$%!!!!

I had a huge amount of data go dark on me two weeks ago. I suppose I reached the end of the grieving process this weekend, because my mind started to clear up and it occurred to me that maybe all was not lost. After all, there are a lot of electronics in those external hard drives, separate from the drive itself. Inside your typical external hard drive is just a normal 3.5 inch internal hard drive plus the electronics necessary to power everything, control the drive, and provide USB or Firewire connectivity to the host computer.

So, voiding the warrantee, I pulled the enclosure apart and replaced the suspect drive with a working EIDE drive I had lying about. Sure enough, when I turned things on, the drive I knew to be good started clacking away. At this point, I was pretty sure my data was still safe and sound, but being that I didn't have a machine handy that could mount an XFS formatted disk, I couldn't verify things for sure until I could get the disk connected back to my iMac.

Most computer stores sell really cheap (approx. $30) hard disk enclosures which you can just slap an EIDE disk into to create an external Firewire or USB drive. I ran to my local store, picked one up, and I'm happy to say that I just recovered 320GB of data that I had just about given up on.

If you own an external drive that's failed on you, make sure to test the drive and enclosure before you throw it out. It's quite possible that your data is still intact and you can save yourself a couple hundred bucks and a lot of trauma by just replacing the enclosure.

At the very least, you might have a bad disk but a working enclosure that you can use to make a new external disk.

On a side note, until today I only owned a single external drive. Being that there's only one data point, I can't say a whole lot for sure, but I keep thinking that I'm just a random person with a 100% enclosure failure rate. Until I hear otherwise, I remain suspicious that this might be a fairly common failure point.

November 16, 2007

HOWTO - Fix a "Red Ring of Death" Xbox 360

The photo above is taken from a Wikipedia entry titled Xbox 360 Technical Problems, which describes a hardware failure issue that is not uncommon for Xbox 360 owners. The general problem is that the array of solder joints that attach the GPU and CPU to the motherboard can break overtime due to heat expansion during normal use. This is actually quite similar to an issue with many early model iBooks, and the fix is similar: you find a clever way to re-fuse the electronics back onto the motherboard.

Brian Whitfield wrote in about his own experience:

So ... all the Xbox 360 owners out there have one thing in common. We all dread to wake up and turn on our 360 only to find the 3 "Red Lights of Death" (RoL). That happened to me the other day, and I started to panic. Christmas time is soon, and I have absolutely no money to spend to fix up my 360. So I started looking for tutorials on how to fix this problem (as my Microsoft is off warrenty since I bought it off eBay).
I came across this lots of these "Towel Trick" tutorials. So I watched a couple videos on YouTube and read a bunch of blogs (I never knew so many people had soo much time on their hands), in any case, I figured I'd give it a shot. Now for those who don't know, the "Towel Trick" (TT) is where you turn on your Xbox 360 and then wrap it in a towel and leave it on for a certain amount of time (most tutorials say 10 mins, but I only left mine on for like a minute to a minute and a half). I turned off my Xbox and then unwrapped the towel and turned it on, and it worked. I played for a good 3 hours and no problems.

Today, I went to use my Xbox 360 and yet again, I received the 3 RoLs. So I did the same thing, and it worked again. Now most people will say this is stupid and overheating something only causes more damage to it. Well it might, but if the Xbox works, you can save yourself $140 (which is what is cost to send and have Microsoft repair it without warrenty). I can't believe something this simple worked. I was reading online somewhere (not saying this is entirely true, but hey, worth mentioning) that the reason for the 3 RoLs, is because of the solder between the GPU and the board. Supposedly, if you heat up the 360 enough, the solders melt a bit back into position. Again, not saying that is true, but good enough reason for me.

As long as my Xbox 360 works, I will probably continue to use the "TT", cause let's face it, everyone would rather have a more damaged Xbox 360 that works, then a minor damaged one that doesn't.

If the towel trick works for you, awesome. For most people, though, it sounds like it's a very temporary fix. To get the job done right, you need to liquify those solder joints and allow them to make a more solid connection.

In the case of the similar iBook issue, Mark Hoekstra from GeekTechnique was using a can of sterno atop the GPU to heat things up. That route, while demanding some sincere applause, freaks me out too much.

YouTube user twitch88 has a video showing how to use a heat gun to get the same effect. It requires a little extra equipment, but the process is a bit more controllable that an open flame. To each his own, though (and send me a pic if you are brave enough to try the sterno trick and it works).

References:
Towel Trick Info @Engadget - Link
Fix the Xbox 360 With a Heat Gun (video) - Link
Xbox 360 Technical Problems - Link
Fix an old iBook's video problems... with fire! - Link

November 5, 2007

Give one (XO laptop), get one, and get free T-Mobile access for a year

T-Mobile just announced that when you participate in the "Give One, Get One" program (donate an XO laptop to a child in a developing country for $400, get one of your own), you'll get a year of free Wi-Fi at T-Mobile hotspots:

The Give One Get One philanthropic campaign puts laptops into the hands of children in the developing world. For a limited time - from Nov. 12 to Nov. 26, 2007 - people can donate $399 for two laptops. One laptop will be given to a child in the developing world. The other laptop will be sent to the donor along with information on how to activate the one year of complimentary T-Mobile HotSpot service.

We're hoping to see a lot of cool and fun hacks come out for this uber-gadget when lots of hackers and kids get their hands on them - Link [via]

October 4, 2007

Make a power outage sensor and reboot devices remotely

Dingolishious tipped us off to a cheap way to receive power outage notifications, as well as remotely power-cycle electronics.

Our remote wireless site keep being unplugged or having the circuit trip from some combination of cleaning devices. I took a spare UPS and asked if we could get a $200 SNMP card for it so we would know when the power was off. Boss asked me if we could do it for less.
My solution: $70 IP Power 9200 delux. The IP Delux has 4 voltage input sensors, 4 current sensors and 8 web controlled switches. There is a 5v wall wart plugged into the switched part of the UPS running to a input. When the power goes out the ups kicks in running the POE and the wall wart turns off pin 1 on the IP Delux which sends me an email.

The added bonus is that the POE is now switched so if a AP on one wireless segment locks up I can go in one of the others and power cycle the POE remotely. IP Delux even hosts WAP so I could do it from the cheapest of cell phone web browsers.

I like the idea, and it's a cheap way to monitor power status with a bottom-end UPS. Take a normal "wall wart" 5vDC adapter, plug it into an outlet, and the 5 volt output raises and lowers the input logic pin on the IP Power or your own homebrew monitoring electronics - Link.

August 13, 2007

HOWTO: Power Over Ethernet on a Linksys WRT54GL router

With a little quick soldering, you can convert your Linksys router to receive it's DC power through the ethernet uplink instead of through a separate power cable. This is incredibly useful if you want to place your router above the ceiling or in a location that is inconvenient to get power to.

After the conversion, the 12v DC from the power adapter is sent along the unused blue and brown ethernet pairs. You'll be able to place your router over 500ft from the switch without the voltage dropping below the 5.5v that the router needs to operate.

HOWTO: WRT54GL DIY Internal POE! (Google cache) - Link

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