Mobile

Clear iPhone 4 mod

Clear iPhone 4 mod

Yesterday the general public learned what a pentalobe is. You might be asking yourself why you’d need such a thing, but if you’re like Uwants member mkmarken, then you’d want it to disassemble your iPhone 4 in order to strip the black coating from the inside of the Gorilla Glass enclosure with a little paint thinner. Just because you’re continually discouraged from opening your device doesn’t mean you can’t make it easier to see what’s inside.

HiJack power and bandwidth from iPhone headset port

HiJack power and bandwidth from iPhone headset port

Project HiJack is an elegant take on an old idea. Ye-Sheng Kuo, Thomas Schmid, and Prabal Dutta from the University of Michigan’s EECS Department have done the iPhone hacking world a solid by producing one of the coolest little pieces of kit to come around in a long time. In short, the device can pull several milliwatts at 3 V and communicate at 8.82 kbaud using the iPhone’s headset port. Its design encourages the use of daughterboard peripherals to sense and collect data.

Moveable Kitchen

Moveable Kitchen

Judging from the fleets of gas grills parked outside almost every big box home improvement store for the last five or six years one could assume that there’s been a bit of an uptick in outdoor cooking. While barbeque tends to take center stage in this ritual, there’s almost no thought given to basic kitchen amenities outside of the more elaborate setups. If you do a fair amount of your cooking outside, when the weather’s nice, and you’d like access to a sink, gas burner, cutting surface and storage space, check out this handsome DIY outdoor kitchen from London-based designer Nina Tolstrup. Step-by-step PDF instructions are available on her site.

Solar Vox on Kickstarter

Solar Vox on Kickstarter

We covered the work of Eric Strebel in the lead-up to Maker Faire Detroit. He contributed to our “Making Detroit” series. Now he and partner Jim Nogarian have brought their design for the Solar Vox personal USB solar charger to Kickstarter. They’re looking for $35,000 in funding to bring their product to market. Solar Vox […]