Here is simple hack that allows you to use a breadboad with the Arduino. Alex simply bent the Arduino’s digital IO header so it would fit the standard 0.1” pitch of breadboards. Via the forum.
Tag Archives: hack
Hacking a tank toy
Wardy hacked a tank toy he got from eBay. Motors are driven through a L298N dual full-bridge driver, while the tank is currently controlled with an Arduino. Soon the Arduino will give way to a Propeller-based custom board. That toy tank I snagged on Ebay has undergone some surgery to remove the hideously cheap and […]
Fixing cheap female pinheaders
Lindsay lets us know about a problem he ran into with cheap female pinheaders: I once had problems with a 0.1″ pin header connector – the sockets inside the female connector made extremely poor contact. It was for an LCD display and only about half of the pins were connected! Swapped it for a different […]
Jeri Ellsworth C64 bass guitar explained
We talked to Jeri (@6:22) at this years Bay Area Maker Faire about her C64 bass guitar. In this video she goes into the internals of her project. Jeri shows a bass guitar she build from an old C64. It uses the original sound chip (SID 6581) for keytar and string sounds.
Tutorial on modifying servos for continuous operation
How to modify standard servos for continuous operation. This hack involves opening up the servo, removing the limit mechanics, and modifying the feedback pot. In his second tutorial Andrey shows how to add a rotatory encoder to the servo, for position feedback. It will stand still with control pulse of around 1,5ms (mine likes 1515us; […]
Fixing the EDID ROM of a monitor using the Bus Pirate
Matthias fixed the EDID ROM of his Samsung monitor using the Bus Pirate. He documented the whole process on his blog. Also included is a tip on how to connect the Bus Pirate to I2C line through the VGA, or DVI cable. This post is about fixing a broken EDID ROM in a monitor. There […]
Replace a dead surface mount regulator with a through-hole part
Flavor accidentally shorted the power on his Open Bench Logic Sniffer 3.3volt regulator and blew it out. With some quick thinking and a TO-220 through-hole voltage regulator his Logic Sniffer was back in business. Via the forum.
Half Ohm adapter for multimeters measures small resistances
Half Ohm is a adapter for multimeters that allows you to measure resistance in the milliohm range. The project is open source, the design files are available in KiCad. Half Ohm milliohm adapter is ready! Multimeter adapter that transforms any multimeter into a precision milliohm meter and debugging device. Notice that your multimeter is useless […]
DIY sous-vide cooker
Here is a tutorial on how to build a sous-vide cooker. Sous-Vide cookers cook food placed inside a plastic bag, which is inserted into temperature controlled bath. NerdKits describes all the theory, along with plenty of instruction on how to build your own. Via Hacked Gadgets.
Replacing resistor arrays with single 0603 resistors
If a project calls for resistor arrays, but all you have are singles and mad soldering skills, you can try this hack. Yoganerdnl used a bunch of 0603 resistors on their side to replace the resistor arrays on his Bus Pirate SOIC DIY edition board. It takes patience and a steady hand, but it’s a […]
Fixing botched prototypes
We go through a lot of prototypes, and many are not perfect the first time around. Here is a pic of one of our prototypes that had 2 pins cross-connected. The simplest solution was to cut the offending traces and reroute the signals with wire and tape.
Digitaly enhanced vintage music box
A digitally-enhanced vintage music box: “Digital Enhancement” is an interactive sound installation consisting of an electrified Symphonion Brevet No. 28, a synthesizer, an amplifier and four headphones. The Symphonion musical box dates back to the beginning of the last century and its mechanical workings are combined with digital technology to convert it into a MIDI […]
Bus Pirate 802.15.4 ZigBee sniffer tools
Bruno hacked his Bus Pirate to be a ZigBee sniffer. He built a small protoboard adapter that connects the Microchip MRF24J40 module to the Bus Pirate IO header. He also wrote custom firmware that captures IEEE 802.15.4 traffic, and passes it on to a custom client app over USB. Check out his wiki page for […]
Reverse engineering car parking sensors
James decided to reverse engineer car ultrasonic parking sensors. These sensors have integrated electronics that handle all the measurements. They are connected to the car’s internal computer via a low-speed single wire CAN network. James provides pinouts, protocol interface, and some source code to interface with them. Since I know a thing, or two, about […]
Pager network snifffing
Kenneth tapping a pager’s output to sniff pager traffic. He bought an old pager and was happily surprised that he could easily tap into the demodulated digital signal. A little poking around between the circuit boards and Google and I found that this pager uses the Toshiba TA31142 FM detector specifically designed for pagers. What […]
Hacking an infrared cooker for pcb reflow
SadE is exploring the possibility of building a reflow oven from an IR cooker. He was able to implement a simple switching temperature control and get some initial temperature response results. A graph of his first run is below. I received my oven 2 days ago and modified it in order to get temperature over […]
Re-purposing an LCD from a cheap picture-frame key chain
Here is a hack to extract, and use the LCD from a cheap picture-frame key chain. The project involved desoldering the LCD from its mainboard and building a breakout for it. With the help of a DSO it was possible to find out the pin-out for the LCD. The AVR library used to drive this […]
DIY surface mount to through-hole “blob” hack
Victor converted an SMD IC into a through hole device using perfboard, wire, and lots of hot glue. Wire from each lead is soldered to pinheader mounted through a perfboard, and everything is held in place with a giant squeeze of hot-glue.
Christmas LED card morphed into a singing birthday card
Drew had a few of our X-mas LED cards left over from the holidays, so he decided to re-purpose one of them into a singing birthday card. He connected a small speaker to one of the LED pads, and reprogrammed the AVR to output an 880 Hz note. Via the comments.
Nook Tablet hardware protection hacked with the Bus Pirate
The Nook Tablet hardware protection was hacked with some help from the Bus Pirate. The Bus Pirate was used as a simple USB to UART bridge so nook hackers can talk directly to onboard ICs and bypass the standard bootloader. The device was released allowing ADB to be accessed. Barnes and Nobel quickly patched this […]