A few years ago we featured a harmonica crammed into a NES cartridge. YouTuber basami sentaku’s harmonica not only has a Famicom cartridge case, it produces 8-bit sound with the help of a sound chip from a NES. It also has a mode that plays the coin sound effect from Super Mario Bros. when you blow into it.
Watch basami sentaku and his friends play some chiptunes on the harmonica:
I’d love to hear non-video game music played on that. Basami sentaku-san, I’m sure you’d make a lot of chiptune fans happy if you started selling 8bit harmonicas.
A few days ago we found out that some, if not all SD cards actually contain computers. At the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Intel unveiled an offshoot of those flash devices. The Edison is a computer that looks like an SD card and can be read by SD card readers.
The Edison has an x86 dual-core 400Mhz Quark processor as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity. It also has LPDDR2 RAM and flash storage, though Intel has not yet revealed how much of either is in the tiny computer. It runs Linux by default but can be loaded with “multiple operating systems to run sophisticated high-level user applications.”
Intel made Edison as part of its bid to stay relevant in the emerging class of wearable devices, but the company also said that the Edison can be used in pretty much any project that needs a low-power and small computer, similar to Arduinos and the Raspberry Pi.
As you saw in MAKE’s video, Intel collaborated with Rest Devices to create prototype smart gadgets for parents, all of them powered by the Edison. The onesie monitors a baby’s “respiration, skin temperature, body position, and activity level”…
… and can supposedly trigger this baby bottle warmer to activate when the baby is awake and hungry…
…or help this coffee mug inform parents about their baby’s status using embedded LEDs.
Intel also promised that Edison “will be compatible with accessible developer tools used by the maker community”, although it did not yet provide a release date or price for the computer. With its size and capabilities I highly doubt that it will be as cheap as the Raspberry Pi, but I’m sure lots of tinkerers are still keen to get their hands on one.
A couple of years ago we saw a pair of taser gloves made with everyday items. But both gloves had to be in contact with the target in order for them to deliver a shock. GreekGadgetGuru’s stun glove lets you ward off attackers with just one hand.
The metal spikes on the glove are wired to the stun gun on his wrist. GreekGadgetGuru made it so that the polarity of the fingers are alternating. This means he only has to touch something – or someone – with two adjacent fingers for the current to flow. He also incorporated what appears to be a flex sensor into the glove’s switch, enabling him to toggle the flow of electricity just by flexing his hand.
Send GreekGadgetGuru a message on Facebook if you want to know how he made the stun glove. Then send a message to all the jerks who – nope. Just kidding. Breathe. Easy.
There are programs and services that can store your passwords for various websites and type them in for you. But if you set a login password for your computer, you better remember that or you’re screwed. Or you can fund Jonty Lovell’s invention. Lovell came up with a small USB device that can reset the login password of Windows computers.
Lovell simply calls it the Password Reset Key. It works with computers running Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1. To use the key, set your computer to boot from USB, plug the device in and restart your computer. You’ll then see a fairly understandable interface, which you can check out at 0:27 in the video below.
Lovell is well aware that his device can be used in unethical ways. Speaking with CNET, Lovell said that his invention is a testament to the “inherent insecurity of the Windows password system.” He even revealed how you can protect yourself from his invention: use disk encryption.
Lovell is currently raising funds for the Password Reset Key on Kickstarter. A pledge of £8 (~$13 USD) gets you a copy of the software, which you can install on any USB drive. Pledge at least £10 (~$16 USD) and you get a key-shaped 1GB drive with the password reset software pre-installed on it.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Most personal computers available today are already modular. That’s true, but what Razer wants to do is to make swapping computer components as easy as replacing the batteries on your remote control.
Project Christine has a base station with a number of slots with proprietary connectors. To build your PC, you just plug in the components to the base. But instead of dealing with fragile chips and odd-looking doodads, Project Christine’s CPU, RAM, GPU, storage drives and other parts will each have its own container.
Each container will be labeled and it will be able to connect to any slot or slots on the base station. No cables, no fragile connectors and no need to figure out which part goes where. In other words, the modules work like USB devices. Project Christine will also have an LED touchscreen that shows the status of its modules.
This means even non-techies can assemble, maintain and customize their own rigs. If you want more storage, then fill the slots with storage drives. Project Christine can have up to five storage drives, one SSD and four HDDs, with the latter configurable to a RAID 5 setup. If you want multiple GPUs, by all means slot them in. The computer can have up to a quad-SLI setup for its graphics cards. Same goes for repairs. Busted power supply? Swap it out. No need to open a dusty case.
The tradeoff here is probably going to be the price of the components, especially if Razer monopolizes the distribution of the modules. But even though it has not released any estimates, the company has a proposal to make upgrading Project Christine easy on the wallet: a subscription service. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan mentioned this idea in his interview with Gamespot. Skip to 4:00 in the video below to him talk about it.
Subscription-based hardware? I can’t decide if that’s brilliant or stupid. Will it also cover repairs? How fast will Razer release module versions of computer parts? Do upgrades to computer parts even come at a steady pace? What if you subscribe and nothing awesome comes out in a year?
I do however love the idea of a foolproof yet infinitely upgradeable computer, and I get what Razer is doing here. It’s taking a page from Apple’s books: make beautiful and easy to use hardware, then charge a premium for it and control the upgrade path.
Upgrade your browser and head to Razer for more on Project Christine.
Tired of hosting his Arcade Club’s gaming sessions at home, Travis Reynolds made the Briefcade. Arcade Club, Assemble!… Somewhere else.
Travis originally wanted to make a foldable tabletop arcade machine, but he eventually scrapped it in favor of the Briefcade.
Travis bought a used briefcase for $5 and then tore down one of his LCD monitors. Then he bought Sanwa-style joysticks and buttons, but found out that the joystick was too big and wouldn’t let him close the briefcase as it is, so he just takes the balltop off of the stick when he closes the Briefcade.
Travis is using a Raspberry Pi and a Linux-based MAME emulator for the Pi called PiMAME. He also connected a USB car charger to step down the voltage on its way from the monitor to the Raspberry Pi.
Hold all calls, cancel all meetings and head to Travis’ blog for more on his Briefcade.
Cell phones are great, but they aren’t always cheap – especially after you get wrangled into a service contract. If you want all of the basic functions of a phone, but don’t want phone manufacturers to get your money, just make one yourself. Sure, it won’t have all of the bells and whistles of a real phone and it won’t look as polished, but at least you had a neat project and created something.
This do-it-yourself cell phone by David A. Mellis really works. It will make and receive calls, send out texts, and display the time. No mobile gaming on this phone, but for homemade, it’s not bad. It builds on the hardware and software in the Arduino GSM Shield but extends it with a full interface, including display, buttons, speaker, microphone, and more. You can choose from a grey LCD or red LED dot-matrix display. Plus, you can decorate the wood case pretty much any way you’d like.
The main circuit board will cost you $60(USD), but the completed phone will cost you about $200 in parts. Okay, so it isn’t cheap after all, but it will be a fun project and maybe you will learn something along the way. Go all get the details here, and check out more photos of the DIY cell phone’s various incarnations on Flickr.
This is the tale of faceless translators who, on the verge of despair, changed history. Last Christmas a group of fans released an unofficial English language patch for the PSP game Valkyria Chronicles 3: Unrecorded Chronicles, a critically acclaimed tactical RPG that’s only available from Japanese stores. Unfortunately, the patch requires a jailbroken PSP to play, and there’s a bit of software hacking involved to patch a copy of the game.
The video below shows an early version of the patch applied to the game. Naturally, it contains a fair amount of spoilers:
You can download the patch from the Valkyria Chronicles 3 Translation Project website. The instructions for patching are also outlined on the download page. Obviously you need a copy of the game as well, either a UMD or a digital copy from the Japanese PSN store. See this SEGA? The hard work’s already done. The ragnite’s on your court. Seriously I’d love to see a Valkyria Chronicles trilogy bundle for the Vita and the PSP.
A couple of months ago we found out how Redditor dekuNukem hacked his Nintendo 3DS to automatically hunt for shiny Pokémon in Pokémon X/Y. It turns out he built on that hack and drastically improved it. His new hack, which he calls Poké-O-Matic, not only hunts for shiny Pokémon, it also hatches eggs and does all the other time-consuming tasks associated with hatching.
The Poké-O-Matic is powered by two microcontrollers an Arduino Micro and a Teensy 3.0. dekuNukem switches between his hack’s functions with a push of a button.
As I mentioned, Poké-O-Matic can hatch eggs on its own. That includes biking back and forth to pass the time until his Pokémon at the Day Care Center produce an egg, then retrieving said egg, then walking back and forth until said egg hatches. Then Poké-O-Matic deposits the hatched monster into his PC and repeats the cycle. It can even release Pokémon if his deposit boxes become full.
As before, dekuNukem’s hack can also catch shiny on the field by entering battles repeatedly. It can do so on water…
…on land…
…and even against hordes by using the Sweet Scent skill.
So far so good for the lazy gamer, right? But dekuNukem’s Poké-O-Matic has one more ability, one that is straight up cheating. It takes advantage of the trading glitch in the game to clone Pokémon. It doesn’t work all the time, but dekuNukem himself seems to regret putting this mode. It’s bar none the quickest way to get a shiny, and therefore ruins the monsters’ value.
With all three methods – endless hatching, brute force catching and cloning – it’s no surprise that dekuNukem now has a ton of shiny Pokémon.
Watch his video for the full details and demo. Be sure to turn annotations on so you can read dekuNukem’s explanation.
You can download the Poké-O-Matic program from dekuNukem’s Dropbox, but he recommends that you streamline it further as it’s a mess as-is. As for the merit of this hack, I think this will only cheapen shinies for anyone who uses the hack. As with many things, if you’re not the one who earned it, you probably won’t appreciate its value. But I still admire dekuNukem’s skill and ingenuity for building Poké-O-Matic. The man practically invented a gamer, albeit one that’s a cold-blooded cheater.
Ever wonder why SD cards are dirt cheap? At the 2013 Chaos Computer Congress, a hacker going by the moniker Bunnie recently revealed part of the reason: “In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception.” But that tidbit is nothing compared to the point of his presentation, in which he and fellow hacker Xobs revealed that SD cards and other flash storage formats contain programmable computers.
Bunnie also summarized his presentation in a relatively easy to understand post on his blog. The images I’m sharing here are from the slides (pdf) that he and Xobs used in their 30C3 talk. Here’s the full paragraph where Bunnie claims that flash memory is cheap because they’re unreliable: “Flash memory is really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it’s too good to be true. In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception. The illusion of a contiguous, reliable storage media is crafted through sophisticated error correction and bad block management functions…”
“…This is the result of a constant arms race between the engineers and mother nature; with every fabrication process shrink, memory becomes cheaper but more unreliable. Likewise, with every generation, the engineers come up with more sophisticated and complicated algorithms to compensate for mother nature’s propensity for entropy and randomness at the atomic scale.”
Simply put, Bunnie claims that flash storage is cheap (partly) because all chips made are used, regardless of their quality. But how do flash storage makers deal with faulty hardware? With software.
Apparently flash storage manufacturers use firmware to manage how data is stored as well as to obscure the chip’s shortcomings. For instance, Bunnie claims that some 16GB chips are so damaged upon manufacture that only 2GB worth of data can be stored on them. But instead of being thrashed, they’re turned into 2GB cards instead. In order to obscure things like that – as well as to handle the aforementioned increasingly complex data abstraction – SD cards are loaded with firmware.
And where does that firmware reside? In a microcontroller, i.e. a very tiny computer. The microcontroller is packed inside a memory card along with the actual chips that store the data. Bunnie and Xobs then proved that it’s possible to hack the microcontroller and make it run unofficial programs. Depending on how cynical you are, that finding is either good news or bad news.
For their talk, Bunnie and Xobs hacked into two SD card models from a relatively small company called AppoTech. I wish I could say more about their process, but you can read about it on Bunnie’s blog…
…or you can watch their entire presentation in the video below:
Long story short, Bunnie and Xobs found out that the microcontrollers in SD cards can be used to deploy a variety of programs – both good and bad – or at least tweak the card’s original firmware. For instance, while researching in China, Bunnie found SD cards in some electronics shops that had their firmware modified. The vendors “load a firmware that reports the capacity of a card is much larger than the actual available storage.” The fact that those cards were modified supports Bunnie and Xobs’ claim: that other people besides manufacturers can manipulate the firmware in SD cards.
The slide above outlines the other ways a memory card’s microcontroller can be abused. Malware can be inserted into memory cards to discreetly open files, make data impossible to erase (short of destroying the card itself) and even discreetly scan and replace data. On the other hand, Bunnie and Xobs note that this revelation opens up a new platform for tinkerers and developers. If a memory card is both a storage device and a computer, then it may be powerful enough to control another device on its own.
It’s worth noting that this particular investigation had an extremely small sample size. That being said, Bunnie believes that this vulnerability exists in “the whole family of “managed flash” devices, including microSD, SD, MMC as well as the eMMC and iNAND devices typically soldered onto the mainboards of smartphones and used to store the OS and other private user data. We also note that similar classes of vulnerabilities exist in related devices, such as USB flash drives and SSDs.”
Turns out the memories of our computers are as unreliable as ours.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
