Archive for the ‘Hacks, Mods and DIY’ Category

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DIY Friday: Charge Your iPhone With AAs or Solar Power

Limor Fried’s MintyBoost project is a great example of DIY and commercial tech working together. Take an Altoids tin, a couple of AA batteries, and some very smart hackery, and you’ve got a lightweight USB charger that you can use to charge/run your handheld iWhatever, or almost any other phone, camera, or small device that can take a charge off USB power. About a month ago, she released this video outlining the Apple hackery needed to make this work.

Reverse engineering Apple’s secret charging methods from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Clive Thompson profiled Fried and her company Adafruit Industries as part of a 2008 feature in Wired on “open source hardware.” The idea is that hackers like Fried can use what they find out about consumer devices to make and sell their own products, but also to produce DIY kits and share information with others who then build their own projects.

As a case study in the value of sharing this information, consider Rob Scott. Before he took his son on a week-long bike trip this summer, he used Fried’s schematic to hack together what turns out to be a really striking-looking solar charger for his son’s iPod.

It’s always nice to see what the maker community is doing to accessorize their retail gadgets; the results aren’t always super-polished, but they generally solve real problems in important use cases that don’t get addressed by manufacturers, either because they’re too unusual or they can’t be easily solved by more plugs, more peripherals, more complex devices that cost a lot of money. And in turn, we all find out a little bit more about how these magical devices get put together and how they work.

See Also:

• DIY Graphing Calculator Is Built From Open Source Hardware
• Why Arduino Is a Hit With Hardware Hackers
• Beautifully Hypnotic Video Details Canon Macro Lens Hack
• Hacker Stuffs MiFi Inside iPad, Ruins it in the Process

Overclocked HTC Evo Runs Almost 30 Percent Faster

The HTC Evo’s 1-GHz processor is one of the fastest in smartphones today, but there’s always room for improvement.

An Android developer at the xda-developers forum has overclocked his Evo 4G phone to run at 1.267 GHz, nearly 30 percent faster than the standard issue. The developer Michael Huang, who posted the hack under the nickname ‘coolbho3000′, says he’ll try and push the processor to do even more.

“Right now, it’s a proof of concept,” Huang told Wired.com. “I built a version of the kernel that’s running on the phone to overclock it and found it worked fine.”

The hack is pretty technical but the idea is to let advanced Android users and programmers see the potential of the device.

HTC introduced the Evo earlier this month as the first 4G Android phone. The Evo, available exclusively on Sprint, has a huge 4.3-inch touchscreen, a 1-GHz Snapdragon processor, a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera for video conferencing and a 8-megapixel camera for shooting photos and videos. It costs $200 with a two-year contract.

The phone has become the bestselling device on the Sprint network and at Best Buy Mobile.

Overclocking the HTC Evo is not the first such attempt developers have made with an Android device. Earlier, Huang says he has tried to overclock the Google Nexus One, which has the same 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor as the HTC. But that hack pushed the speed of the processor to only about 1.1 GHz.

The HTC Evo overclocking has resulted in speeds of a little more than 1.2 GHz for most users on the forum who have tried it.

But, a few words of warning for those who might attempt this at home: It isn’t a DIY project for just anyone. The files necessary to overclock the HTC Evo are posted online but you need to know what you are doing with it.

“If you have a rooted phone, you can get an update.zip file to apply to that phone,” explains Huang. “What I have done is packaged the special overclocked kernel into the file.” Huang used an Android app called SetCPU available in the Android Market to adjust the overclock.

Huang says he doesn’t have access to the full source code of the HTC Evo OS, which has limited some functions in the phone.

That means the sensors and camera on the phone do not currently work with the hack.

The overclocking also affects the phone’s battery life — despite Huang’s attempt to tweak the voltage piped to the processor.

“If you put less voltage on the processor, then the phone will use less battery, so my Evo kernel is running at a lower voltage than normal,” he says. “But because the processor is at a higher speed, the battery life is lower than usual.”

Once the overclocked device gets running, it also heats up a fair bit, say commenters on the forum. So, try this one at your own peril.

If you don’t want to go through all that, just enjoy the video of the overclocked HTC Evo.

See Also:

• Oops! Sprint Says it Overstated HTC Evo Phone Sales
• HTC EVO 4G $200, on Sale June 4
• Wired Video: HTC Evo 4G Dissected
• Storage Bug Hits HTC Evo 4G Phone Just Before Launch

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

[via Android Guys]

Zune Hackers Create Toolkit to Make Apps, Games

A team of three developers has created a toolkit that can bypass Microsoft’s limitations on developing programs for the Zune. The kit allows independent programmers to create applications for the digital music player.

“This is the first Zune hack that works,” Glenn Anderson, one of the creators of the toolkit told Wired.com. “People can now bypass all of Microsoft’s limitations and develop for the platform.”

The toolkit called OpenZDK will allow developers to make new games, port old ones, create emulators and even have a rogue app store on the device. It will work on the original Zune and Zune HD.

OpenZDK could let people make applications on par with Microsoft-published games such as PGR: Ferrari Edition and Audiosurf Tilt. It could also spark a healthy homebrew community that would offer programs that are much better than what is available on the Zune now. 

Microsoft launched the Zune music player in 2006 and a HD version of the device last year. Zune, though, has barely made a dent in the market that Apple iPod consistently dominates. Zune reportedly has a market share of about 2 percent.

Earlier efforts to make Zune apps relied on a Microsoft kit called XNA development tools. In 2008, Microsoft released XNA Game Studio 3.0, which supports Zune development. But some developers say that XNA’s sluggish performance and lack of 3-D or internet access make it difficult to produce quality apps.

The OpenZDK toolkit could allow programmers to get around the limitations Microsoft has placed. The OpenZDK crew met on ZuneBoards, a popular online Zune development community, where they go by usernames Netrix (aka Anderson), Nurta and itsnotabigtruck. It took them a few months to work around Microsoft’s protections, Anderson said, and they have been testing it for the last two weeks.

But since OpenZDK has just launched, there are no apps or games based on it available yet. Getting started is easy enough, though, by following the steps on the OpenZDK wiki.

Microsoft’s newly announced Kin phones will also be running some of Zune’s software, but the OpenZDK team says it won’t be possible to simply port the hack onto the phones, because Microsoft has “locked the phone down.”

Which isn’t to say Kin is unhackable. “That remains to be seen,” Anderson said, hinting it could be possible in the future.

Photo: Zune

DIY Lens Cap Saver Is Ingeniously Inventive

If you take photos with anything other than a little point and shoot, you will have, once in your life, lost a lens cap. Shortly afterwards, you would have found out that a simple plastic disk can be sold for almost $20 (or even $40).

This stung, you will be particularly pleased with this little hack from Benny Johansson. It’s a lens cap saver, and unlike the annoying commercial products which dangle the cap from a cord stuck to the camera body, this one is elegant, functional and free.

The holder consists of two parts. First, you cut a hook from an old shampoo bottle and slide it onto the camera’s neck-strap. Next, you drill a couple holes in the edge of the cap itself and thread through a short elastic cord. Now, when you take off the cap you can hang it by this little elastic loop. Benny has thoughtfully provided a PDF template so you can cut the hook to make a snug enough fit.

A further improvement can be made if you only ever use one lens, or have a fixed lens on the camera. You still hang the cap from the plastic hook, but the cord can be permanently attached twixt cap and camera as an extra safety measure.

We prefer the version without the “cute” animal faces, and as soon as I get home from the Wired office, where they won’t let me near the scissors, I shall be making a couple.

SkottiRotta Lens cap holder [Benvelo via DIY Photography]

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