We’ve been hiding away in air-conditioned comfort to wait out the hot weather afflicting most of the US right now. Luckily we’re keeping busy with the great links coming into our tips box. [Brett] sent us a note about his work on the new Arduino PID library. He is the author of the original library [...]

So your electronic hobby skills are coming along quite nicely but you’re not very comfortable doing more than blinking a few LEDs. Now’s a good time to try something new by driving a couple of DC motors. You probably know that you can’t just hook these up to the pins of your favorite uC and [...]

[Brendan Robert] has been sending us forum thread links outlining the things he’s learned while hacking LG televisions. They were a bit hard to follow for the uninitiated, so we asked if he could give us an overview of what he’s been working on. Not only did he do that, but he made a little [...]

When [Barret] went to use his camera the other day it kept shutting down on him, and upon inspecting the battery, he found that it was a bit swollen. Knowing that he needed a replacement, he turned to an aftermarket battery he had sitting around, but grew pretty annoyed when his Sony Cybershot camera would [...]

When we first covered [Markus]‘ portable SID player we starting dreaming about an alternative universe circa 1987 that included a pocket-sized music player called the Commodore ePod. [Markus]‘ updated firmware that connects his SID player to a PC will have to do for now, we suppose. The new firmware boots the Portable SID player as either a [...]

Feeling pretty good after putting together your brand new standing computer desk? Step aside please, [Kagen Schaefer] has something he’d like to show you. His Pipe Organ Desk is undoubtedly one of the coolest pieces of furniture we have seen in a long time. The project took [Kagen] over three years to complete, which sounds [...]

The next time you set off for a long day in the coal mines, forget the canary – bring your Roomba along instead! While we are pretty sure that canaries are no longer used in the mining industry, this Roomba hack could make a suitable replacement if they were. A team from the Public Laboratory [...]

Here’s an Arduino library that will let you drive a very large number of LEDs. [Elco Jacobs], an electrical engineering student, is the author of the library. He has a work-study job that has him helping out others with their electrical projects and he was constantly being solicited for methods to control droves of light [...]

When an earthquake is about to strike in Chile, who do you think is first to sound the alarm? You might be surprised that it’s not the government, but rather a 14 year old boy. After living through an earthquake in 2010 and seeing the devastation this spring in Japan, Chilean teenager [Sebastian Alegria] decided [...]

[Rob] built this hexapod one day when he had some free time after work. Just like the last hexapod we saw, he based the build on the Pololu design which uses three servo motors for surprisingly reliable movement. The hardware is very straight forward. A Dorkboard serves as the brain. It’s a PCB that is wider on [...]

Behold the Land-Bear-Shark, a quadcopter on a rather grand scale. At a full eight kilograms it’s an easy target to compare the [Howard Hughes] behemoth, but in addition to the weight, this still has yet to make its first flight. To give you some scale to the image above, the board at the center is [...]

Gambiologia, according to the source article, is the “science of Gambiarra.” For those not from Brazil, Gambiarra is “a Brazilian cultural practice of solving problems creatively in alternative ways with low cost and lots of spontaneity.” In other words, the hacking of real-world items. Gambiarra also has a connection to recycling, as instead of throwing [...]

[Bill's] worked on his homebrew computer for almost a decade. He didn’t start with a Z80 processor like a lot of the projects we’ve seen, but instead build the CPU itself from 74-series TTL chips and a ridiculous amount of wire wrapping to connect it all. The video after the break shows off the functionality. [...]

When Google released their ADK allowing Android smart phones to interact with Arduino-based devices, we’re sure there were at least one or two iPhone users who felt left out. Thanks to the folks over at Redpark, those people can now interact with an Arduino without having to jailbreak their phone. For anyone looking to do [...]

Like any learned individual, [Justin] has a whole mess of books. Not being tied to the dead-tree format of bound paper, and with e-readers popping up everywhere, he decided to build a low-cost book scanner so an entire library can be carried in a his pocket. If that’s not enough, there’s also a complementary book [...]

[Dane] bought a reasonably cheap ($17) Hobbyking Echo-6 battery charger and wanted to see what sort of information he could pull from the unit. Since the charger is designed for a variety of battery chemistries and sports an LCD screen, he figured that it contained a fairly decent microcontroller which he could tap into for [...]

Instructables user [mzsolt] enjoyed making his own PCBs, but he wanted to speed up the etching process just a bit. While some people put together elaborate bubble tanks and agitators, he wanted to keep his simple and more importantly, cheap. He looked around the house and discovered an ancient CD-ROM drive that was collecting dust, [...]

This amazing steam punk keyboard was sent in to the tip line, and while it’s not necessarily a ‘hack’ in the purest sense, the level of quality in the build is incredible. Each key was crafted from brass tubing that was later filled with a wooden dowel and covered with the key cap label. While there’s no [...]

Hackaday contributor [Nick Schulze] popped out an impressive set of LED headgear for a hat-themed party. [Nick] is no stranger to working with LEDs. Previously he built a blue 8x8x8 cube something like this other 512 node full color version. He had a bunch of LEDs left over from that project and decided to put [...]

[ Jack Gassett] is working on an FPGA shield for the Arduino. At first the idea of this expansion board seemed a little silly. But [Jack] mentions that the FPGA board can be quite useful for adding higher-order electronic complexity like HDMI capabilities to an Arduino. We’re not totally sold on the idea, but he’s not [...]

[Harrison Jackson] figured out how to add DVD playback to an iPad. It doesn’t require a jailbreak, or any hardware modifications to your prized tablet. The work is done with some server-side processing and played back through the browser. The popular open-source multimedia player VLC has the ability to encode from the command line during [...]

[Dino] got his hands on an FM transmitter “bug” kit via a friend, and thought it would make for an easy and fun Hack a Week project. The kit is simple two transistor half-wave FM transmitter, which the manufacturer suggests could be used to bug a room, hence the name. After poking a bit of [...]

We abhor vandalism, but we love art. Here’s a skateboard hack that lets skate punks young and old tag their turf while they ride. [D*Face], a multimedia street artist who grew up in London, added a mounting system to the bottom of his skateboard which includes a can of spray paint. We’re a bit surprised that there’s room enough [...]

Last year, when [Alex] was asked by his friend [Martin] to help him out with building some LED POV modules for a race car, his response was a enthusiastic “YES!” [Martin’s] goal was to involve fans more deeply in the race, so he decided that the POV modules would carry messages from fans on-board, printing [...]

Voice-controlled home automation doesn’t have to be wildly expensive if you have a little bit of time and some know-how to do the job yourself. [jjshortcut] wanted to control the lighting in his room without using physical switches. On his blog, he describes how he did it without spending a ton of money. He picked [...]

[gijs] sent in an Arduino video sampler he’s been working on. The sampler is able to capture, pause and play a short video forwards and backwards. The video capture circuit is based on the Nootropic Design video experimenter. We’ve seen a few project use this video experimenter board, but never with such smooth video. The [...]

[Mark] and his friends love fireworks, but got tired of the traditional ground-launched mortar rounds, so they decided to spice things up a bit. A while back he purchased an Army-issue bazooka at a gun show but didn’t use it for much, so it sat unused for about 10 years. He dug it out of [...]

[John Boxall] of Little Bird Electronics was thinking about combination locks, and how one might improve or at least change the way these locks work. Traditional combo locks can be implemented in a variety of ways, most of which we are all familiar with. Standard rotary padlock and keypad-based electronic safes work just fine, but [...]

As phone systems have evolved over time, the desire to break them and exploit their usage continues to flourish. Just recently, [The Hacker’s Choice (THC)] announced that they had accessed secure data from Vodafone’s mobile phone network last year, via their femtocell product. The purpose of the femtocell is to extend mobiile network coverage to [...]

72 hours of hacking came to a head with the completion of the Red Bull Creation. This years challenge was to build something out of junk that moves a human. It’s hard to pull all the aspects of the event together in one place, so here’s some links you’ll want to check out if you [...]

Finding alternative ways to unlock doors is a favorite hacker pastime. TkkrLab recently took on the challenge themselves. The hackerspace, which is located in the Netherlands, faced a problem common to communal workshops; how could they manage keyed access for a large number of members? The metal keys for the door are special, and cannot be [...]

Like all of us, [Jonathan Guberman] has a list of projects and builds that ‘will get done when I have time.’ His Kiwi drive robot is no exception. It’s intended to be one piece of a much larger project, but he decided to document it anyway (we think in the hope of getting is rear [...]

While many mobile phone manufacturers are moving towards the micro-USB interface as a standard, others such as Apple and HTC are still bucking the trend. Part of [arto’s] job includes repairing mobile phones, and last month he found himself faced with a pair of broken HTC handsets that needed their charging ports replaced. Replacements for [...]

All EL wire drivers use a resonator circuit to supply power to the EL wire. It’s an efficient system, but [Paul] noticed that there was some color change when powering different lengths of wire off of the same driver. He realized that this is because of the changing frequency of the resonator circuit, so the [...]

On many new cars, automatic wiper speed control can be had as an upgrade, though most cars do not offer front-end collision prevention at all. [Rishi Hora] and [Diwakar Labh], students at the Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology in New Delhi, developed their own version of these features, (PDF warning, skip to page 20) which [...]

While it seems that many people are wise to shoulder surfing, keeping a lookout for anyone spying on their passwords, [Haroon] wrote in to remind us that the threat is just as real today as it ever was. The subjects of his research are touch screen phones and tablets, which utilize on-screen keyboards for data [...]

Here’s an Android accessory project that adds a secondary LCD display. It utilizes the Android Open Accessory Development Kit standard to connect the 16×2 character LCD as a USB device. It pairs an app on the phone which runs transparently with firmware for the ATmega2560-based Arduino compatible board you see to the left. The app [...]

[Mike Field] just finished implementing SPDIF generation on an FPGA. SPDIF is an industry standard for transmitting digital audio signals; the acronym stands for Sony/Philips Digital Interconnect Format. It’s been around for more than a decade and since it’s found on most home-audio equipment, building an SPDIF output into your projects may be quite a desirable feature. [...]

The wooden frame seen above hosts a parabolic reflector making up one side of a wireless network link. This is a Fab Lab project called FabFi which uses common networking hardware to setup long-distance wireless Ethernet connections. It’s a bit hard to tell in the image above, but the reflector focuses radio waves on the [...]