Did you know that your optical mouse contains a very tiny, very low resolution camera? Your Mouse Is A Terrible Webcam article tells how to turn that tiny optical sensor into a webcam. Logitech RX 250 has an ADNS-5020 optical sensor (15×15 pixel grayscale image sensor) with SPI interface. The project uses Arduino, Ethernet shield, →
Safe Automated Mains Sockets page describes how to turn mains powered appliances on and off under computer control without risking killing yourself. It describes how to use a Raspberry PI computer to control three mains sockets. Audacity was used to capture the codes from the original RF remote, and the captured codes were sent to →
Just because new computers no longer include the venerable serial port doesn’t mean it’s dead. The Serial Port: It Just Keeps Going article tells (and I can agree to that that) in fact, the serial port is still thriving in many test instruments, industrial controls and medical devices. You’ll find RS-232, RS-422, and RS-485 serial →
I just found out some interesting reverse-engineering hack related to Helsinki bus stop displays. Tapping Data From Radio-Controlled Bus Stop Displays tells that a couple of weeks ago hacker Oona Räisänen told about finding a 16 kbps data stream on FM broadcast frequencies, and her suspicion was that it’s being used by the public transit →
Liquid nitrogen (finally) makes an Arduino project cool. Overclocking Arduino with liquid nitrogen cooling. 20⇒65.3Mhz @-196°C/-320°F article has this video that shows how it is done. It turns out that you can run an Arduino UNO at 65.3MHz when it is cooled with liquid nitrogen. Arduino UNO / ATmega328P at 8V is stable at 65.3Mhz →
How to hack to an embedded device? On-chip debug (OCD) interfaces can provide chip-level control of a target device and are a primary vector used by engineers, researchers, and hackers to extract program code or data, modify memory contents, or affect device operation on-the-fly. Depending on the complexity of the target device, manually locating available →
Some days ago I had to help a friend to interface several microphones to a Canon camcorder microphone input. I had interfaced earlier years ago microphones to several prosumer and professional video cameras, but I though it would be a good idea to do a Google search to check what is said on interfacing to →
RS-232 serial interface is still quite widely used in many applications. Usually RS-232 Mini Tester with LEDs for indicating state of different signals is all that is needed to make things work. But sometimes seeing signals with your eyes is not enough for troubleshooting and testing. There are nowadays cheap logic analyzers (like Saleae Logic →
I write some time ago about USBEE AX clone. tubbutec blog writer got the remark about the bidirectional driver gave and investigated this a little bit further. It turned out you can modify this logic analyzer pretty easily to provide output capabilities. Adding output capability to a 10€ logic analyser article tells how you can →
I bought Fuji HS20 camera few months ago (just some months before the model was discontinued). HS20 is a pretty good superzoom digital camera. It has a very long zoom lens and good macro properties. I have taken many of the photos posted recently to this blog using this camera. To take good macro photographs →