Wii telescope control
This enterprising stargazer figured out how to control his Orion Atlas EQG telescope mount with a Wii controller. Fun with an Atlas. Video inside. – Link
Technology
Learn to navigate by the night sky
Can you spot Ursa Major, Polaris, Cassiopeia, Betelgeuse, and Orion in the photo above? Know which way is North? If not, here’s a quick 15 minute drill that will teach you how to recognize a few constellations and navigate at night (assuming you live in the northern hemisphere). For you city folk, this could come […]
BEAM bots with complex behaviors
I just realized that Bruce Robinson’s impressive analog robots have not been blogged here on MAKE. His articles on “The Application of Human Motor Control Theory to Robotics” and “Learning Robots” blew my mind when I first read them years ago. People are always asking me how far BEAM concepts can be taken. I point […]
Game machine hacking at Vienna Dorkbot
The Vienna chapter of Dorkbot did a video of their last meeting, focused on game machine hacking. The hacks range from refurbishing and computerizing an analog pinball machine, to an electric guitar casemod (the NES Paul), to making music with the Nintendo DS. The meeting takes place at Metalab, an amazing playground for hackers in […]
Ordering PCBs from China
Julian Bleecker has a piece on his blog detailing how he goes about ordering cheap (and amazing for the price) custom PCBs from a company in China. Shown here are ten copies of six PCBs, all for $159. Sweet. More PCB Stuff – Link
Power-Saving pedometer also measures speed
AVR based pedometer! – A pedometer is a device that counts the number of steps taken by a person and calculates the distance traveled by multiplying the number of steps by the length of the step. Here’s a design solution for building a pedometer using the AVR MCU. The circuit not only combines all of […]
iPhone buffer overflow exploit
Whoops. Looks like somone’s found a buffer overflow exploit on the iPhone which allows arbitrary code to be executed as root. Details won’t be released until the Blackhat convention in Vegas on August 2nd, but it looks like Safari is the culprit – [via] Link. The exploit’s authors suggest that you not use unfamilar WiFi […]