Here’s a wristwatch concept we haven’t seen before. instead of trying to sandwich everything inside of a case it uses a stack of PCBs as the body of the watch.

[Mats Engstrom] wrote in to idea us off about his build. The design opts for LEDs which is nothing new. but unlike previous offerings [Mats] didn’t opt for one LED for each minute. When the touch sensor in the middle of the enjoy is activated the twelve LEDs on the face will let you know the hour and the nearest five minutes. A video of this is embedded after the break.

The design uses three different circuit boards. The bottom board is the largest and supplies slots through which the wrist bands can connect. It also serves as one of the two battery connectors. The second PCB is a spacer with a cutout for the coin cell that powers the device. The top board is where all the magic happens. It’s dual sided to host the LEDs and touch senor, with the photo microcontroller and support circuitry on the other side.

This isn’t a hack that shows you how to start a car without the keys. It’s a way to ditch the bulky keyring for a set of fold-out keys. [Colonel Crunch] removed the blades from the pocket knife and replaced them with the two keys for his car (one is ignition and door locks, the other opens the trunk). He didn’t take pictures of the process, but he did link to this unrelated guide on how it’s done.

About one minute into the video after the break we see each step in the build process. first the plastic trim is removed from either side of the knife. The blades are essentially riveted on; there’s a pin which holds them in and either side of it has been pressed to that it can no longer relocation through the holes in the frame. To get around this one side is ground off with a rotary tool, and the pin is then tapped out with a hammer. The removed blade/scissors/tool is used as a design template to cut the body of the essential down to size and shape.  The pin is then hammered back into place before putting the plastic trim back on.

[via Reddit]

Joystiq has been tracking the new starlet of Xbox 360 failures: the E74 error. It appears as the lower best light on the console turning red as well as an on-screen message telling the individual to get in touch with support with the error E74. The number of reported E74 errors seems to have risen because August 2008 as well as people are wondering if the much more recent boost in errors are associated to the release of the new Xbox Experience (NXE) dashboard update. Did Microsoft reclass Red sound of death (RROD) failures as E74 to prevent guarantee replacements?

From day one, the Xbox 360 has been plagued by hardware failures. So numerous failures that Microsoft ended up pushing the 90 day guarantee as much as a full year. less than a year later they acknowledge the systemic RROD issue as well as prolonged replacement for impacted consoles to three years. The RROD is named since of the three red lights displayed when the console failed. The culprit appears to be bad cooling of the console’s components. elements like the GPU would overheat triggering solder joints to fail. people were able to repair work their own consoles by reflowing with a heatgun. Microsoft has never officially disclosed why these systems fail. Our console bought on introduce day RROD’d, however [bunnie]’s solder joint inspection of it shown inconclusive. Every Xbox owner on Joystiq’s personnel has had an RROD.

The E74 error is obviously not new. While Microsoft officially phone calls it a “general hardware failure“, individuals have been calling it a general video error because launch. It can happen when you have a poor video cable television connected to the console. individuals are blaming the HANA video scaler chip for the most recent issues. There have been five different motherboard versions of the Xbox 360 so far. Each version upgraded the cooling and/or the size of the GPU as well as CPU. The HANA chip was introduced when the consoles started supporting HDMI. The original ANA video scaler on the Xenon board was a quad-in-line style SMD bundle with pins around the perimeter. The HANA chip on newer board styles is a sphere grid range (BGA) package, which implies it can stop working the exact same method the GPU does for an RROD.

Did Microsoft modification the error reporting on the Xbox 360 so they’d replace fewer consoles? No, we don’t believe so. Is this a similar hardware failure? many certainly. Unfortunately, E74 errors are only covered under a one year guarantee instead of the RROD’s three year in spite of it being the exact same failure mode. Why are so numerous E74s happening now? There aren’t any type of difficult numbers on exactly how numerous failures there have been or exactly how it compares to the RROD. We believe that it’s just a result of much more people having Xbox 360s with HDMI support now. A big part of the Xenon 360s have been replaced with much more trustworthy HDMI consoles, however that just implies a larger set up base of E74 prone consoles. much more consoles implies much more possible failures.

Related: Xbox 360 Hacks, Xbox Hacks

It seems unusual that RAM is being added to a computer so late in the build, but [Quinn Dunki] should have had it in the back of her mind the whole time because it turns out to be a rather painless experience. For those of you keeping score, this makes her Veronica project Turing complete.

The brightly colored rats nest imagined above connects the new components to the 6502 computer backplane seen in the upper left. [Quinn] chose to choose two 32K SRAM modules which need very little in the way of drive hardware (it’s hanging out on the breadboard to the left). The RAM module will simply listen for its address and react accordingly. There is one hitch concerning a two-phase clock and the need to safeguard the RAM from erroneous data during the first of those phases.

Getting this all to work actually pointed out a bug in the ROM module she had long ago completed. After picking up on the problem she was able to appropriate it simply by cutting traces and soldering in jumper wires.

photography is all about light. It’s literally best there in the name – stemming from the Greek word, photos. This is why photographers obsess over the time of day of a shoot, why Instagrammers coalesce around landmarks at sunset, and why a flash helps you take photos in darkness. Historically, flashes have worked in all manner of ways – using burning magnesium or xenon lamps for example. For this Hackaday prize entry, [Yann Guidon] is developing a portable flash using LEDs instead.

By this point in time, you might be familiar with LEDs as flash units from your cellphone. However, [Yann] is taking this up a notch. The build is based around 100W LED modules, which certainly can pump out a lot of light. The interesting part of the build is its dual nature. The LEDs are intended to operate in one of two ways. The first is in a continuous lighting mode, running the modules well below their rated power to decrease the tension on the LEDs and power supply, and to enable the flash to run on the purchase of an hour. In this mode, temperature feedback will be used to control the LEDs to manage power use. The other is a pulsed mode, where the LED will be overvolted for a period of milliseconds to create a much much more powerful flash.

It’s this dual nature which gives the LED-based flash a potential advantage over less versatile xenon-based units, which are limited to pulsed operation only. We can see the continuous lighting mode being particularly helpful for videographers needing a compact, low-cost lighting service that can also work as a pulsed unit as well.We’re thrilled to see how [Yann] tackles the packaging, thermal and control issues as this project develops!

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[Rich] needed to find up with a senior style job as well as made a decision to integrate two things he loved: his Android phone as well as incredibly Nintendo.

While touchscreen phones are great, he felt that nothing beats the tactile comments of a physical controller when it pertains to gaming. He figured out exactly how the controller’s signaling works, then wired it as much as an Arduino pro tiny 328. The Arduino interprets the SNES controller’s signals, sending them to his Android phone by means of a BlueSMiRF Bluetooth module.

He originally had all of the elements crammed in a cardboard box, however much like we explained yesterday, he realized that a job truly comes together when housed in a appropriate enclosure. He handled to capture all of his elements into the SNES controller’s shell aside from the battery pack he utilized to power the remote. After a bit bit of Bondo as well as a few coats of paint were applied, the controller is looking rather sharp.

Stick around to see a quick demo video of his controller in action, as well as inspect out this tutorial he put together describing a few of the principles he utilized to build it.

If you’re planning to do some hacking with CPLD or FPGA chips you’ll need a way to program them. JTAG is one of the options and here’s a low-cost method that uses the serial port (translated).

This method requires only four signals (TDI, TMS, TCK and TDO) plus ground. but the problem is that an RS232 serial port operates with 12V logic levels and the JTAG side of the programmer needs to operate with the logic levels native to the device you’re programming. commercial programmers use a level convert IC to take care of this for you, but that doesn’t mesh with the low-cost goal of this project. Instead, [Nicholas] uses Zener diodes and voltage dividers to make the conversion. There is also an LED for each data signal to give some feedback if you’re having trouble.

You can use this along with a programming application that [Nicholas] whipped up using visual Studio. It works well via the serial port, but he did try programming with a USB-to-Serial dongle. He found that this method slows the process down to an unbearable 5-minutes. Take a look, maybe you can help to get that sloth-like programming up to a manageable speed.

[Thanks Alex]

It had been requested that we make a short video covering the top worst hacks in movies. Being the neighborhood that we are, it seemed like an fascinating request. We requested your input, as well as you were happy to deliver! However, the proposition of producing a “top 10” listing [turned out to be] rather difficult. There were just SO many horrible scenes that I started believing about exactly how to even categorize them. We might most likely to a “top 10” in any type of of the complying with classifications without even having to dig as well deeply:

hacker lingo

mocked up interfaces

fake input devices

virus screen-takeover moments

access rejected messages

hardware taped together

Honestly, after breaking it down in such a manner, making the top 10 movie hacking failures, felt painfully general. It is like making a listing of “top 10 animals that ever existed”. The specify of innovation portrayal in movies is frankly abysmal. It is obvious that the only people who understand less about tech than “hollywood” are the people making legislations about it.

So, lets take a look at this listing as well as see what we ended up with.

10.  The Core

There’s a scene where they have to get with a door as well as it won’t budge. To open it, they’re going to have to fracture into the manage panel as well as hotwire the the thing. What do they discover inside? A breadboard.  Ok, well, all of us understand that in that environment, you wouldn’t be discovering any type of breadboards. then again, I’ve seen some duct taped together networks in big corporations that may persuade me that this isn’t a failure at all.

9. Jurassic Park

I’ve heard so many people point out this scene as a failure, as well as it is usually for the wrong reason all together. The young lady sits down at a computer as well as announces to everybody “hey, I understand this, it is unix!”, while the camera switches to a 3d rendering that appears like a physical design of a neighborhood.

“aha! that’s not a genuine interface!” is usually what I hear from people, however they’re wrong. It was called FSN as well as did really exist. nobody truly utilized it though because, while neat, it wasn’t a excellent method to really work.  tons of people packed it up as well as played with it, however it never truly caught on. I really wouldn’t have been surprised to see a super gratuitously funded IT department packing stuff such as this in their spare time since they had persuaded the manager guy that they totally needed that SGI for… uh… network security or something.

The genuine hack failure is the truth that her just acknowledging the operating system means that she now has full manage over whatever in the Jurassic park network.

8. Firewall

This one is fun since it gets into a bit hardware hacking. I like improvised devices, so it caught my interest. It turned out quite silly though. In the movie Firewall, [Harrison Ford] needs to get data off his screen to somebody far away. To pull this off, he rips the scanner head from his fax machine as well as attaches it to an ipod. He comments that the ipod won’t understand the difference between “10,000 data or 10,000 songs”.

This is where the hackaday crowd truly comes into play. many will acknowledge that it is wrong, however only right here will you discover people that may really figure out exactly how it would have to truly work.

First, you requirement something to checked out the data from the scanner head. Then, it needs to be converted to an actual data that is compatible with the ipod. then you would have to initialize the transfer onto stated ipod. That means that there’s got to be a decent amount of hardware as well as code going on in between the two items. To be fair though, they do show something there as an interface, so perhaps I should have left it off the list. However, I difficulty anyone to pull this off as quick as he did.

7. Goldeneye

In the beginning of the movie Goldeneye, they are establishing just exactly how amazing [Boris] the hacker is. After an “access denied” screen that might quickly be part of one more list, [Boris] proceeds to hop into the network of the CIA. When he’s caught, he just problems this wonderful command: send SPIKE. The nasty security guy who caught him is promptly disconnected. Wow. I don’t even understand where they were going with this. I assumption it was just supposed to be one more notch on the “[Borris] is incredible ” tally sheet.

6. Hackers

This movie always comes up when speaking about hacking. Some people like it, some dislike it. The accuracy of the movie is about as split as the fan base as well. They do a decent task of showing exactly how tedious as well as silly hacking can really be, however when they show the 3d renderings of the data, everything falls apart.  However, this movie was released in 1995, as well as during that time we truly had high really hopes for the instant future of 3d interfaces (see FSN).  It is like our generations version of “jet pack disappointment”. I was guaranteed spacial data navigation as well as I’m not upset that it hasn’t been delivered.

5. Swordfish

Swordfish came out in 2001. It has no reason for 3d renderings of data. By this time around we understood that the 3d interface of the future wasn’t truly extremely usable (again, see FSN). Not to mention the gratuitous strike job/ gunpoint uber hacker scene that made my beverage attempt a quick getaway out my nasal passage.

4. Skyfall

In this latest installment of the James bond series, I was incredibly let down. As a child, I discovered [Q] to be one of the coolest things ever. I desired that job, poor (this task is slowly turning into that actually). When I heard that the actor who played him passed away, I believed they would take this as an chance to do a resurgence of gadgetry with the new [Q]. unfortunately they continued their sluggish slide toward an entire 2 hours of sullen looks as well as knees to the ribs.

The scene that truly almost triggered an aneurism was where [Q] proclaims that the only method to look at the data on the computer is to connect it to their network (wow, really?). then they proceed to look at the encrypted data as a giant 3d sphere. This trope is already bad, I mean why would you look at encrypted code as a sphere? On top of that, [James Bond] recognizes a word in ordinary text. This somehow unlocks all the encryption.

What comes next is the truly agonizing part. We are looking at encrypted CODE. When you decrypt code, you get code. Sure, you may be able to then RUN that code to get some type of a visualization, I guess. What you don’t get is your encrypted code morphing into a visualization of a map.

3. online free or die Hard

Hackers don’t put bombs in peoples computers. If they did, they wouldn’t set them to initialize utilizing a keystroke.  I mean if you can remotely make their screen go all wiggly, can’t you just detonate your damn bomb?

2. opponent of the State.

I’m not exaggerating when I state that I didn’t understand if this was a joke. [Jack Black] does that bit where you rotate an picture in a direction that is physically impossible. [Jack Black] is a comedian. Admittedly I didn’t see this movie till after [Jack’s] career was more established, so perhaps it wasn’t as obvious back then.

1. stupid criminal offense shows on TV like NCIS, CSI, BONES, etc.

Yes, I understand it isn’t a movie. They’re just so amazingly horrible that I couldn’t leave them out. It has ended up being this large joke just exactly how horribly inaccurate they are. It has really gotten to the point that I’m persuaded they’re doing it on purpose. While I can comprehend a small bit of composing being targeted for audiences that aren’t familiar with the technology, a few of it is just as well much.

The example of “two idiots one keyboard” is one that stands out. It is conceivable that you or your audience may not be familiar with hacking, or don’t understand what a believable game would look like, however every one of you has utilized a keyboard. The script was most likely written in a word processor utilizing a keyboard. Hell, this is older than computers themselves, typewriters have them. two people can not type on a keyboard simultaneously. It doesn’t work as well as everybody on the world understands it.

As the most direct interface between computer as well as programmer, keyboards can be a deeply personal, in some cases practically religious thing. Some discover solace in their vintage IBM design M, or elegant leather keyboard, but maker [Carol Chen] took things into her own hands, rather literally. [Carol]’s maker Faire display has a half lots specimens of fascinating commercial tactile as well as ergonomic options…but [Chen]’s personal keyboard, where she commits to her work as a full-time coder, has been made to her own exacting specifications.

Cherry switches are offered in different colors corresponding to diverse tactile feels. These can either be scrounged from existing keyboards (as [Chen] does for the essential caps), or vendors such as Digi-Key can source the different colors if you want customized pressure for every finger (as on some industrial ergonomic models). A laser-cut acrylic backing plate holds the essential switches in place, while wiring was soldered in point-to-point fashion rather than etching a PCB. Custom-fabbing the keyboard enables [Chen] to tailor the design to her vim-heavy coding style. note the miniature area bar, as well as curious placement of modifier as well as macro secrets around the periphery. A YouTube video shows an earlier iteration of the keyboard in action: