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Data Storage

Build Your Own Time Capsule Work-Alike For $200 208

Posted by timothy from the stash-stuff-here dept.
An anonymous reader writes "If you're a Windows or Linux user, or simply an Apple user that can't justify the $500 price tag on those beautiful 3TB Time Capsules, why not build your own? With a wireless router, an external USB hard drive, and a little bit of setting up, you can make your own wireless, network-attached backup device for around $200."
Hardware Hacking

The Fanless Spinning Heatsink 380

Posted by CmdrTaco from the get-your-whirl-on dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There's a fundamental flaw with fan-and-heatsink cooling systems: no matter how hard the fan blows, a boundary layer of motionless, highly-insulating air remains on the heatsink. You can increase the size of the heatsink and you can blow more air, but ultimately the boundary layer prevents the system from being efficient. But what if you did away with the fan? What if the heatsink itself rotated? Well, believe it or not, rotating the heat exchanger obliterates the boundary layer, removes the need for a fan, and it's so efficient that it can operate at low and very quiet speeds. That's exactly what the Air Bearing Heat Exchanger, developed by Jeff Koplow of the Sandia National Laboratories, has developed. It's even intrinsically immune to the build up of dust and detritus!"
Hardware Hacking

Exercise Your Thumbs and Eyeballs With a Tiny Space Invaders Cabinet 24

Posted by timothy from the thinkgeek-needs-to-get-on-this dept.
dotarray writes with this piece on GamePron with a piece of game pr0n: "If you're big on nostalgia, but small on space, we might just have the solution for you. A clever gentleman has created a teeny-tiny '80s arcade cabinet that will fit happily on your desktop – and while it might look like a mere mock-up, this one actually works, playing Space Invaders on the miniature screen."
Hardware Hacking

Ask Slashdot: Large-Scale DIY Outdoor Cooling of Cairo's Tahrir Square? 259

Posted by timothy from the squares-must-be-different-over-there dept.
ClimateHacker writes "The struggle for freedom is still ongoing in Egypt and one of the many challenges that face the demonstrators in Tahrir Square is the sweltering heat. Skies are mostly clear and temperatures can reach up to 44 degrees Celsius (111 F) with hardly any shade. The risk of life-threatening heat stroke is quite real. I ask clever Slashdotters out there for novel DIY passive and active ambient cooling techniques. Perhaps some ideas could be a model for saving energy on cooling elsewhere."
Hardware Hacking

Playdough For Fun and Profit 70

Posted by timothy from the not-the-trademarked-version dept.
morgan_greywolf writes with this snippet from Wired:"You're never too young (or too old) to start learning the joys of electronics. You don't need to know how to solder, or even how to plug circuit components into a breadboard. As long as you're past the 'I'm going to stick this up my nose' phase, this homemade playdough circuit project is a great way to introduce kiddos and adults alike to basic circuits and electricity."
Hardware Hacking

Ask Slashdot: How To Safely Saw Up Motherboards? 247

Posted by timothy from the letters-we-get-letters dept.
James-NSC writes "I like to do arts and crafts. I've been saving up motherboards for a while as a new medium and I started working on it last night. I wore the same gear I wear while painting – fine particulate respirator and safety goggles. I just cut some templates out of some motherboards and when I was done I used the shop-vac to clean myself & workspace up before removing my mask. Even after 5+ minutes, in a well ventilated area (not as well as it should have been apparently) my first breath was pins and needles. I'm looking into containment and exhaust solutions – ala baby's first iron lung, but seriously, am I nuts? Are these materials just too toxic to work with?"
Image

Using Old Linksys Routers to Control BBQ Smokers Screenshot-sm 118

Posted by samzenpus from the check-out-the-brisket-page dept.
mache writes "It's scary when you find two completely unrelated areas that you are passionate about merged. It happened to me with BBQ and hacking home network infrastructure. People have taken old Linksys WRT54G (and their derivatives) routers and made them into automatic temperature controllers for BBQ smokers. They support Wi-Fi and even have a web browser to monitor progress."
Hardware Hacking

Dangerous Prototypes: Open Source Hardware Seeding 48

Posted by Soulskill from the may-or-may-not-explode-upon-use dept.
MojoKid writes "Dangerous Prototypes is a two-year old organization with the stated mission of producing 'one new open source project every month.' In its nearly two years of existence, DP has created about 30 projects, such as the Flash Destroyer, which tests the limits of solid state storage by writing and verifying a common EEPROM chip, rated for 1 million writes, until it burns out. The projects themselves are being sold by another interesting company, Seeed Studio. Seeed is a contract manufacturing/sales channel for hire. It helps hardware designers get their ideas manufactured in China and sold worldwide with a service called Propagate for manufacturing small quantities (100+) of open source hardware."
Hardware Hacking

How Printed Circuit Boards Are Made 88

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the can-i-have-an-electroplating-machine-for-xmas dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ever wanted to see how printed circuit boards are made en masse at a professional production house? Well, here you go. The folks over at Base2 Electronics recently got to tour Advanced Circuits, a PCB production house. They took some rather incredible pictures and explained the process along the way."
Printer

A Solar-Powered 3D Printer Prints Glass From Sand 139

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the print-your-dishes-off-the-grid dept.
Tx-0 writes in with a story in Colossal Art & Design. From the article: "Industrial designer and tinkerer Markus Kayser spent the better part of a year building and experimenting with two fantastic devices that harness the sun's power in some of the world's harshest climates. The first he calls a Sun Cutter, a low-tech light cutter that uses a large ball lens to focus the sun's rays onto a surface that's moved by a cam-guided system. ... Next, Kayser began to examine the process of 3D printing. Merging two of the deserts most abundant resources, nearly unlimited quantities of sand and sun, he created the Solar Sinter, a device that melts sand to create 3D objects out of glass."
Networking

Afghans Build Open Source Internet From Trash 140

Posted by timothy from the like-comcast-but-open-source dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Residents of Jalalabad have built the FabFi network: an open-source system that uses common building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles."
Hardware Hacking

The 8-Bit Computer That's Been Built By Hand 161

Posted by Soulskill from the just-enough-bits-for-mario dept.
nk497 writes "Forget snapping a few components into a motherboard — programming enthusiast Jack Eisenmann has made his own PC from scratch. His Duo Adept, as he's named it, features 64KB of main memory, 256 bytes of RAM and, in total, 263 lines of code for his homemade OS. Sure, it can't run Crysis, but it does run a game he's written himself."
Android

New Android Malware Attacks Custom ROMs 146

Posted by timothy from the now-that's-offsides-innit dept.
drmacinyasha writes "Today Lookout disclosed a new form of Android malware found in Chinese markets which attacks third-party firmwares (ROMs). By using permissions granted to apps which are signed with the same private keys as the ROM itself, an app can update itself or install and uninstall other apps without user interaction. Most third-party ROMs use the private keys included in the Android Open Source Project, making them vulnerable to this attack. Last month's release of CyanogenMod 7.0.3 (and all subsequent builds) included an "important security fix" which a team member confirmed protects users against this vulnerability by preventing applications signed with the platform key to be installed to user or app-controlled storage."
Education

Ubiquitous Computing Gadget To Teach Coding 107

Posted by Soulskill from the i-know-kung-fu dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A distance learning university in the UK has revamped its IT curriculum to attract more students — the biggest change is that budding coders will get a chunk of hardware which plugs into a computer via USB and can be programmed using a language called Sense — based on MIT's Scratch 'drag and drop' programming language. The university hopes this gadget-based approach will encourage fewer students to give up on their studies."
Hardware Hacking

How One Man Helps Keep Game Controllers Accessible 130

Posted by timothy from the division-of-labor-limited-by-extent-of-market dept.
capedgirardeau writes with a clipping from the AP about engineer Ken Yankelevitz: "[W]ith the retired Bozeman engineer's 70th birthday approaching, disabled gamers say they fear there will be no one to replace Yankelevitz, who has sustained quadriplegic game controllers for 30 years almost entirely by himself. The retired aerospace engineer hand makes the controllers with custom parts in his Montana workshop, offering them at a price just enough to cover parts." Yankelevitz builds interfaces to control an Xbox 360 or PlayStation.
Hardware Hacking

Arduino Music Controllers With Horns, Finally 19

Posted by timothy from the we've-all-been-waiting-for-this dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Patrick Flanagan serves as the token human in robot percussion group Jazari. In this video Flanagan controls his bots with a Wiimote and a custom Arduino controller made from arcade buttons, zebra wood, and springbook horns. Due to production costs and environmental concerns, we haven't seen many new musical instruments made from dead animals in this century, but who knows? Maybe 2k11 is the year music device makers go stone-age."
AI

Making a Real Batcopter, With Parts From the Hardware Store 50

Posted by timothy from the get-your-mesh-on-and-move-out dept.
garymortimer writes with an excerpt from a story loaded with eye-popping pictures and video on how to create — with some bamboo and mesh lashed on — a UAV to fly through and learn from swarms of bats in rural Texas. "Brazilian Free-tailed bats (also called Tadarida) come together in the millions in caves all over Texas, leaving every night in swarms so big they can be detected by doppler radar. Somehow, they manage to fly through this dense self-clutter without major collisions, and so our goal is to better understand this behavior. For the AIRFOILS project, the IML team created the previously mentioned Batcopter. The goal was to fly a UAV through the dense clutter, and record the bats' response with three ground-based high-speed FLIR cameras and an airborne 3D HD GoPro camera. The hope is to extract fundamental control laws of flying behavior in order to achieve better autonomous UAV flight."

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