sensors

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.

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New video from O’Reilly Media on iPhone augmented reality programming

This video guides you through developing applications for the iPhone and iPad platforms that make use of the onboard sensors: the three-axis accelerometer, the magnetometer (digital compass), the gyroscope, the camera and the global positioning system. You’ll learn how to make use of these onboard sensors and combine them to build augmented reality applications. This will give you the background to building your own applications independently using the hottest location-aware technology yet for any mobile platforms.

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Sensor nodes utilizing powerline infrastructure

Sensor nodes utilizing powerline infrastructure

This fascinating article and paper have been making the rounds amongst DC dorks. Seems like there’s lots of potential here for smart metering and other low power sensing, including medical applications. If these walls had ears, they might tell a homeowner some interesting things. Like when water is dripping into an attic crawl space, or […]

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Telerobotic Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots

Just when you thought Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots couldn’t get any cooler, makers Zachery Shivers and Anne Flinchbaugh go ahead and add a bunch of servos, a custom controller board, and some fancy sensor-laden wireless watches from TI to allow you to control your robot remotely. As an entry to the Texas Instruments Co-op Design Challenge, the souped-up game uses sensor readings from a pair of Chronos watches worn by each opponent to control their respective robot.

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Open Source Hardware track at OSCON in Portland, OR

Open Source Hardware track at OSCON in Portland, OR

OSCON this year will be a delight for anybody interested in working with hardware. A full open source hardware track offers a range of talks to get you started with hardware hacking, and gives a great insight into the current options for prototyping.

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