Archive for the ‘hacks’ Category

Newest Kinect hack: a grocery cart that loyally follows disabled shoppers (video)

Microsoft’s Kinect is the gift that keeps on giving for hackers, spawning everything from glasses-free teleconferencing to Tesla coil manipulation to uh, well, Android dance parties. But Luis de Matos’s wi-Go project is one of the most socially conscious we’ve seen: it adds a laptop and (despite its name) a Kinect to a shopping cart, enabling the cart to follow a wheelchair user. Improving on the B.O.S.S. bot we saw a half-decade ago, the wi-Go could allow anyone — including the disabled or elderly — to shop independently, regardless of physical capability. De Matos doesn’t offer many technical details, but see the video above for a before-and-after demonstration.

Newest Kinect hack: a grocery cart that loyally follows disabled shoppers (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 05 Jun 2011 02:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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

Mindflex Hacked To Provide Negative Shock Therapy

By Chris Scott Barr

Remember that really cool MindFlex game from Mattel that we showed you last year? It’s been out for a little while now, and has given some modders a few creative ideas. Since it can provide a reaction to brain activity, the possibilities are endless. One group decided to use a modded version of the device as something to promote relaxation of the mind.

Okay, so they probably had no real intentions of using this thing for any real beneficial reason. They just wanted to shock the crap out of people. Essentially they hooked up an electroshock unit up to the device. When someone used more than low frequency brainwaves, they’d receive a painful shock. As you can see in the video, it’s hard to not concentrate when people are standing there heckling you.

This is a hack that you should probably never actually do. Negative reinforcement for using high frequency brainwaves could theoretically cause issues with concentration and cognition. However, for those curious, there are full instructions over on the creator’s website.

(These guys totally get bonus points for the background music.)

[ HarcosLabs ] VIA [ Coolest-Gadgets ]

Chinese pirates are making a pretty penny installing hacked Win7

Arr… Vendors in Beijing’s Zhongguancun market are charging customers $7 to install Windows 7 onto any computer. The hilarious part? The copies of Windows are pirated.

The service takes about 40 minutes and includes a full install as well as a quick crack. Win7 Family Edition costs $11.

I haven’t actually seen any Win7 cracks – it just never came up in my searches – but this points to the possibility that either Win7 is hard to install (which I don’t believe is the case) or that the cracks are quite complex right now, similar to the old tricks you had to play with XP.

via Shanzai

Old $4 Sega PC turned into real computer

Well how do you like that? An old Sega SC-3000H from 1983 has been given new life as a fancy keyboard PC. An enterprising modder named Cuzza over in the TechPowerUp forums laid out $4 for the old-timey computer, rolled up his sleeves, and got to work.

The updated internal components include a VIA Nano-ITX board with 1.5GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, 80GB hard drive, and a slot loading DVD/CDRW drive from an old iBook. Cuzza got the actual keyboard on the Sega PC to work, too.

All told, the project spanned at least a couple months. This recently-uploaded YouTube video details the ins and outs rather thoroughly:

[TechPowerUp via technabob]

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