__ __ __ ___ / // /__ _____/ /__ ___ _ / _ \___ ___ __ / _ / _ `/ __/ '_/ / _ `/ / // / _ `/ // / /_//_/\_,_/\__/_/\_\ \_,_/ /____/\_,_/\_, / retro edition /___/Now optimized for embedded devices!!
| About | Successes | Retrocomputing guide | Email Hackaday |
This circuit board is from the USB dongle of a Girl Tech IM-ME. [Joby Taffey] took it apart and poked around to learn its secrets. These dongles come along with the pink pager that has become a popular low-cost hacking platform. But we haven’t seen much done with the dongle itself up until now.
[Joby] used the OpenBench Logic Sniffer to gain some insight on what’s going on here. The board has two chips on it, a Cypress CY7C63803 USB microcontroller which talks to the computer over USB and also communicates over SPI with a Chipcon CC1110 SoC radio. It looks like reprogramming the Cypress chip is a no-go, so he went to work on the CC1110. The inter-chip communications data that he acquired by sniffing the SPI lines gave him all he needed to reimplement the protocol using his own firmware. As a proof of concept he to reflashed the CC1110 and can now send and receive arbitrary commands from the dongle. There’s a tiny video after the break showing a script on the computer turning the dongle’s LED on and off.
[JoblessPunk] recently finished his what-a-psp-should-be mod. He’s internalized a camera and added a switch in the body to toggle between using the camera or using the USB port. There’s an additional analog stick, and added charging functionality via the USB port. He’s also packed in an additional 32 GB of flash memory. The device is of course running custom firmware which facilitates the ubiquitous flock of emulators and homebrew apps.
We agree that the original PSP is a pretty powerful handheld that never saw a full realization of its potential. With the impending release of the next generation PSP Go we hope the price and availability of the older units leads to more mods of this sort. Check out the video after the break.
Here’s a well made video from [JoblessPunk] detailing his work. The first half is propaganda to help find partners for a future commercial venture involving these mods. The second half shows-off the new features, connectors, control, etc. Try to resist the urge to strangle when you get 25 seconds into the video; it’s all uphill from there.
Here we see [Christopher Suprock] hanging out in his basement laundry area in order to show off his intelligent heat exchanger. The reason for the device is simple, when you use your clothes dryer , hot water heater, other other utilities that generate heat, energy is often wasted in the form of hot exhaust gases. Why not get the most for you clothes drying dollar by sourcing that hot air to warm your house.
The block you see on top of the dryer is a heat exchanger. The exhaust from the dryer passes through a radiator assembly before being vented outside the house. Some control hardware monitors the temperature of the input side and switches on the fan when it detects a higher temperature than the ambient air. Air then flows through the radiator, picking up heat energy from the exhaust gas. See [Christopher's] explaination, and some thermal readings while the dryer is running, in the video after the break.
This makes us wonder, if the heat exchanger drops the exhaust gas fifty degrees before being vented, will this cause any issues with condensation?
[Peter] found that Polaroid film was an easy medium to play with, as the ability to develop it is built in. He has done several fun experiments, from electrocuting it to making giant mozaics. The Polaroid film may not be easy to get your hands on though. They stopped producing it in the summer of 2008. Some former employees are trying hard to get it back into production, but that may never happen. Polaroid has recently received permission to sell itself at auction. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Finally, there’s a way you can feel like a real bad-ass while you’re formatting those TPS reports. It’s all thanks to this computer mouse built inside the skull of a dog. [Shannon Larratt] dug through his collection of skulls and came up with this one because it fits nicely in the palm of your hand.
Before you get too grossed out, this is not actually part of an animal’s body like another notable mouse hack that comes to mind. [Shannon] started with the skull of a small dog, making a mold for the pieces used in the finished version above. He was quite creative when fitting the electronic parts inside of his reproduction. He pulled the PCB from a $10 Logitech mouse and had no trouble getting it to fit into the base of the skull. But when it came to the buttons he ended up engineering a couple of rockers and used a belt to reposition the scroll-wheel. Not wanting to lose the middle-click feature there’s an additional lever for that functionality. We’d also like to compliment him on the quality of his write-up. Fantastic!