[Geordy] wanted to use some IDE devices but he didn’t have an interface card for his XT system, which can’t handle 16-bit  IDE. He looked around for 8-bit ISA controllers but they were hard to find and quite expensive. Lucky for him there’s an open source project that makes a solution to this problem. The XTIDE project brought together a group of vintage computing enthusiasts to design this ISA card. [Geordy] was even able to order a professional PCB from one of the forum members. He ordered the parts an soldered it together, costing about $30 total. He had a friend help him burn the code to the EEPROM but that’s easy enough to do with an Arduino, Bus Pirate, or one of several other methods. Now his grand plans at installing DOS 6.22 have been realized.

The details are out for the DefCon 18 badges. The new design has a lot of goodies packed into it, most notably a 128×32 LCD display. You can’t see it in the image above because it’s on the other side of the badge; the ribbon cable passes through a slit in the substrate to reach the connector on the back. The board has a mini-USB connector and is meant to get even the unseasoned novice up and running with some firmware tweaks. The Freescale processor (which is the same chip as last year’s badge) is running a bootloader that can be accessed and flashed using a terminal program. Yeah… impressive.

But it doesn’t stop with the component selection or firmware mastery, these badges are beautiful too. What you see above is the prototype, but the 7780 badges produced come in seven different flavors (as usual), laser etched on a PCB that uses Aluminum as the substrate. Line up all the badges side-to-side and you get a graphic art storyboard. [Joe] outdid himself this year, and he’s been nice enough to share the development details (PDF) which we spent way too much time drooling over.

[Thanks Kim]

[Kenneth] built this scoreboard for use at a ballpark that lacks such luxuries. We think this a phenomenal application for his skill and his pocketbook. He laid out PCBs for each digit in Eagle and etched them himself, then installed the indicators for home score, visitor score, inning, balls, strikes, and outs in a laser cut case. A pretty beefy battery along with the folding stand make this quite portable.

In the demo video after the break he’s connected to the scoreboard via telnet to update the score. This trick is accomplished using SparkFun’s WiFly GSX breakout board to set up an adhoc wireless network. The goal is to write an iPhone app that will be used to control the board in the field (or the outfield as it were).

This could definitely be used for different types of scoring during the off season.

School will be starting again in a few weeks but it’s not too late to enjoy a little time with your kids. This water rocket launcher lets you do just that. Built using the frame from an old grill, a soda bottle takes its place on the upturned PVC pipe. There’s a connection for your garden hose that allows you to inject water into the bottle. From there, a compressor connection pressurizes the bottle in preparation for launch. Watch it happen in the video after the break. That bottle could use some fins and a nose cone but there’s no denying the delight the kids are enjoying when they chase after the downed craft.

If you’ve already got a compressor and some empty 2-liter bottles you might also pick up some extra PVC to make this pressurized water cannon.

[Jason Statham] [Martin Magnusson] wrote in to tell us about his adventure in building a wearable computer. The device in its current state is a Beagleboard running Angstrom Linux tethered to an iPhone for internet. A bluetooth keyboard allows for input, while output is displayed on monocle-ized Myvu. And last but not least, the entire setup is powered by 4 AA batteries for 3 hours of life.

Its not as small as some of the wearable computers we’ve seen before, but if you wanted to whip out your own it sure takes a lot less soldering.

[Daniel's] homemade digital picture frame looks great, it’s well-built, and it has a nice set of features. It’s not made from a broken laptop and he didn’t build it around a microcontroller. Instead, he saved a 19″ LCD monitor with a burnt out back light caused by the extremely common blown capacitor problem. Twenty dollars on eBay landed him a small industrial single board computer to drive the system.

The software end of things is a curious conglomeration but considering the hardware constraints [Daniel] made some great choices. He’s using MS-DOS along with LxPic for slide shows and Mplayer for video. The rest of the software gets him up on the home network and enables IR remote control via LIRC. All o this makes for a beautiful product (video after the break includes some Doom footage) and the package is pulling just 40W when in use.

If you’ve got a Samsung Vibrant and want to take advantage of that unlimted 3G account you can tether without rooting the phone. This method uses a USB cable to provide internet access to Windows XP and Windows 7 computers. Samsung’s own Kies software handles the tethering, as long as you have the magic number to get connected on T-Mobile USA networks; ‘epc.tmobile.com’ for the APN name and ‘*99#’ as the phone number. [Zedomax] made the video after the break which takes you through the tethering ritual.

[Photo credit: Tnkgrl]

Wired took a look at this year’s Ninja Party badges. We were giddy about all the goodies involved in last year’s must-have badge that served as an invitation to the party. It was tailor-made for hacking, including an on-board disassembler. This year’s details are still a bit sparse but the offering is more along the lines of a market-ready product. The badges come in hand held gaming format, with a d-pad and two buttons. They can connect wirelessly with each other and with hidden base stations, allowing participants to fight in the digital realm for LED-indicated achievements. The teaser is tantalizing and we can’t wait to hear details about the real/digital gaming adventure soon to unfold.

If you’ve got an iPhone or Android device that you use with a Wii remote when gaming, this quick hack will give you the third hand you need to manage all of that hardware. [Syanni85] mounted his Android phone to a Wii wheel for just a few dollars in parts. He ran across the wheel itself at the dollar store, and the phone is held in place using a universal mounting bracket. A small square pad sticks onto the back of any device and mates with a base. He cut off the unnecessary parts of the base and glued it to the back of the wheel.

If you haven’t tried using a Wii remote with your phone yet, find out how to do it with iPhone or with Android.

[Michael Vincent] turned his TI-84 Plus into a spectrum analyzer. By running some assembly code on the device the link port can be used as an I2C bus (something we’ll have to keep in mind). After being inspired by the cell phone spectrum analyzer he set out to build a module compatible with the calculator by using an I2C port expander to interface with a radio receiver module. Now he can sniff out signals between 2.400 and 2.495 GHz and display the finds like in the image above.

[Thanks Cecil]

Our favorite Soviet-Era display that found its way into a present-day kit now displays time from orbiting satellites. A GPS module patched into an Ice Tube Clock with modified firmware will be able to provide a satellite-synced time. The firmware, modified by yours truly, parses the GPS module’s NMEA RMC sentences for the time and date information and then updates the clock’s time and date. Fun was had making sure the alarm went off at the correct times when the time was updated by the GPS. Overall, it was a fun project and we look forward to seeing additional Ice Tube Clock hacks.

[Petar and Sylvain] are teaching this robot to flip pancakes. It starts with some kinesthetic learning; a human operator moves the robot arm to flip a pancake while the robot records the motion. Next, motion tracking is used so that the robot can improve during its learning process. It eventually gets the hang of it, as you can see after the break, but we wonder how this will work with real batter. This is a simulated pancake so the weight and amount at of force necessary to unstick it from the pan is always the same. Still, we loved the robotic pizza maker and if they get this to work it’ll earn a special place in our hearts.

[Thanks Ferdinand via Flabber]

The Sprint version of the Palm Pixi doesn’t have a WiFi option but the Verizon version (called the Palm Pixi Plus) does. The hardware is almost the same and [Gitit20] figured out how to do some hardware swapping to add WiFi. The radio board inside the phone is fairly easy to remove. Close inspection of the Sprint radio board shows some solder pads where a WiFi chip would go. The Verizon version has this chip, and moving that radio board into the Sprint phone will enable WiFi. This is strictly a hardware hack as the device identification (IMEA) is paired with the motherboard and not the radio board.

Now we want to see someone source that WiFi chip, solder onto the board, and enable it within the OS so that we don’t need a donor phone to make this work.

[Thanks Juan]

[Retromaster's] Ultimate Floppy Emulator is a wicked display of hardware mastery. It is the culmination of several design stages aimed at replacing an Amiga floppy drive with a modern storage solution. You may be thinking that using an SD card in place of a floppy isn’t all that interesting but this hack does much more. The board, controlled by a PIC32, patches into the Amiga keyboard and monitor. This allows you to bring up an overlay menu for controlling the emulator in order to configure which virtual floppy disk is currently ‘in the drive’. He’s even gone so far as to add a piezo speaker to mimic the sounds the original drive head would make while reading a disk.

[Thanks Gokhan]

[Derek Hughes] wanted to use inductive charging on his cellphone without voiding the warranty. He picked up a Pixi charging backplate meant for a Palm Pre and scavenged the coil and regulator circuitry from it. To make the electrical connection with his HTC HD2 he removed the mini-USB plug from a charging cable and connected it with 30 gauge wire. The whole package will fit beneath the back plate for use with a Touchstone charger (as we’ve seen with the HTC Evo) but there was one problem. The metal backplate from the HD2 interferes with the inductive charging. For now he’s using tape to hold everything together while searching for a plastic case replacement.

He walks you through the hack in the video after the break. We’re usually not worried about voiding warranties, but a phone like this takes a lot of abuse and having warranty protection or even a service agreement isn’t a bad idea.

For those living under a rock, the latest ‘greatest’ news to hit hacking front page is the the Copyright Office granting Six Exemptions Regarding the Circumvention of Access-Control Technologies. Of the six the one of the two regarding iPhones is as follows,

“(2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.”

Which (along with section 3) really just means that you can unlock and crack cellphones and companies can no longer fine you $2,500. Not that many ever have but the threat was there. Apple however, can and still will void your warranty if you jailbreak.

The 4 other areas not involving phones are the ability to circumvent DVDs for portions of video, video games in order to better the security of said game, computer programs that require dongles but dongles are no longer available, and literary works that prevent read-aloud or rendering to a specialized format.

One tidbit I keep hearing about in these exemptions is the ability to now break DRM on music, as much as I wish this were true, I can’t seem to find any sources on it, sorry pirates.

Regardless, now that the world is one step closer to an open framework, whats changed? For me, I’ve been jailbroken for years so sadly nothing. If you agree with the ruling, disagree, or just want to tell about your now legal jailbreaking joys, please leave a comment.

Additional Sources: FOXNews and CNNMoney thanks to [Voyagerfan99], [Ryan Knight], and [Steve S.] respectively.

[Image credit: Fr3d.org]

Some new products have worked their way into our hands and are just waiting for some awesome Hack a Day logos to be put on them. We’ve added a couple bags, some huge mouse pads as well as normal ones, and we’re considering adding the Hack A Day badge. You’ve seen the badges before, when we took them to CES. [Devlin] estimates that the cost would be $25 each before shipping. We would like to get some feedback before he starts pumping these things out. How many of you want one?

If there is one thing we like, it’s a fellow hacker so enthusiastic about his or her work that they write the article practically for us by including as much detail and information as possible.

In this two part hack, [Scott] wrote in to let us know not only about a high school built high altitude balloon, but also his $5 long range RF transmitter. The former is simply GPS and video data logged over the flight, but [Scott's] specialty comes in the latter. A 74HC240 octal buffer is using to amplify the signal (Morse code) from an ATTiny44a with a 29MHz oscillator, producing a usable signal as far away as 200 miles.

It is low bandwidth, but if you’re looking for a simple transmitter in your project and need something with more power (and a smaller package), this might be the ticket.

[Aleksander Zawada] makes vacuum tubes in his home. One of the most challenging builds he has taken on is to produce a working Nixie tube. He describes the process in a PDF, covering his success and failure. It seems the hardest part is to get the tube filled with the proper gas, at the proper pressure, and firmly seal it. In the end he managed to make a tube with three digits (0, 1, and 2) that worked for about 700 hours before burning out.

[Aleksander] joins [Jeri Ellsworth] on the short list of hackers who can pull off extreme industrial manufacturing at home. Kudos.

[Thanks Duncan]

In an effort to improve his marital standing [Tech B] hacked an air freshener to make it Internet controllable. The main component here is a Glade Sense and Spray. It cost him $7 and is meant to spray out some sweet smells when it senses motion in the room. The unit also has a manual spray button which he patched into with the help of a relay. From there some Arduino code and an IRC bot take over, letting him unleash freshness from anywhere he has IRC access.

When reading about this we were also thinking: “motion sensing circuitry available at local stores for just $7?”. We may have to conduct an investigation into the alternative usefulness of that package.

If you have another brand of automatic freshener around it should be just as easy to hack as this one was.