Category Archives: hacks

CD2003 – yet another simple FM radio receiver

Dilshan Jayakody writes: In last few days we are looking for some simple FM radio receiver to integrate into one of our ongoing project. For that we try several FM radio receiver ICs including TDA7000, CD2003/TA2003/TA8164, CXA1019 and KA22429. Out of all those chips we select CD2003 (or TA2003/TA8164) based receiver for our project because of […]

Soldering iron cycle timer temperature control

A soldering iron temperature control cycle timer from PCB Smoke: Shown below is a photo of the unit that started me thinking about how to find a way to control the temperature of a regular plug-in soldering iron. The unit got very hot the first time I used it. It has a built-in adjustment dial. […]

Low cost DC millivolt source

Dilshan Jayakody has published a new build, a DC millivolt source: DC millivolt sources are often used for thermocouple simulations, DMM, ADC and analog circuit calibrations and fault findings, etc. Most of the DC millivolt circuits are based on expensive (and sometimes hard to find) operation amplifier like OP7, LT1077, etc. In this article we introduce […]

Soldering Iron PID temperature controller

Mike has posted a detailed tutorial on how to modify an ordinary plugin soldering iron to work with a digital temperature controller: A thermocouple was mounted internally inside the soldering iron so it is out of the way. The idea was to find the “sweet spot” at the back of the heating unit inside the soldering iron […]

DoorBell + Moteino = Awesome

Felix of LowPowerLab has written an article detailing his DIY Moteino DoorBell: A lonely doorbell activated by a boring push-button at the front door is not very exciting in a world of Arduino and “Internet of Things”. I’ve been wanting to Arduinize the doorbell into the Moteino Framework gateway interface so that I could: observe/count/graph when the doorbell […]

Keep an eye on the sky with the Sat-light

In this video Chirag Nagpal demonstrates his Sat-light project, he writes: It uses a Beaglebone Black connected to the Internet, and download TLE values of the ISS and other satellites. It then calculate the exact location of the satellites using the Python Library PyEphem. Incase one of the Satellites is hovering above, it lights up! This is […]

Low power longwave transmitter experiment

Sverre Holm writes: There are several low power transmitters around that can be purchased, but most of them only cover the mediumwave band and not longwave (153-279 kHz). Further they are quite complicated as the frequency necessarily has to be user settable. I looked for a simpler way to make a single-frequency transmitter and found […]

Video: Electronic safe vulnerabilities

Think electronic safes are fail safe? Here’s a video by Jeff Popio, Sr. Security Architect for Stealth Entry LLC, demonstrating an electronic safe fail and highlighting the vulnerabilities of these units. This talk was presented at the Central Ohio Infosec Summit held last February. Video courtesy of Irongeek.

RTL SDR upconverter for shortwaves (0-30MHz)

Tomasz Watorowski has published a new build, a NE612 RTL SDR Upconverter: This is a simple yet completely functional upconverter for the popular SDR donlge. The construction was build around cheap and easily obtainable mixer IC marked as NE 612, manufactured by Phillips Semi. Despite its limitations, it performs outstandingly well, at least when price-to-quality factor […]

KeySweeper – covert Microsoft wireless keyboard sniffer using Arduino and nRF24L01+

Samy Kamkar has written an article detailing the build of his KeySweeper project: KeySweeper is a stealthy Arduino-based device, camouflaged as a functioning USB wall charger, that wirelessly and passively sniffs, decrypts, logs and reports back (over GSM) all keystrokes from any Microsoft wireless keyboard in the vicinity. All keystrokes are logged online and locally. SMS alerts […]

Yet another laser oscilloscope

Kerry Wong writes: You can generate some pretty amazing patterns by shining a laser onto a mirror mounted on a vibrating speaker cone, a lot of people have experimented with this kind of laser show. But how about building a true laser oscilloscope that is capable of displaying signals? In this post, I will show […]

LaserOscope project

Steve Schuler over at Science2.0 published a new build: A laser oscilloscope using Lego, littleBits, Erector set, and the Kano Computer Build a laser oscilloscope using Lego, littleBits, Erector set, and the Kano Computer. In honor of The International Year of Light I’ll demonstrate how use the Kano computer to drive a littleBits motor with an […]