We mourn the loss of the physical keyboard with the advent of tablets. After all, we do a bit of typing getting all of these features posted throughout the week. And we kind of blame tablets for the decline of the netbook industry (we still use a Dell Vostro A90 when not at home). But …
Ask Hackaday: Are we close to reinventing the keyboard for touchscreens?
Remote control command center includes RF and IR functions
We’re still not quite sure what to call these projects, but as we’ve said before, it’s a pleasure to see what people are doing to use one remote control to rule them all. The project being developed by [Kalle Löfgren] seeks to simplify the remote controlled items in his home by combining all control into …
Arduino compatible home automation for smart phone or voice control
[Joseph] wrote in to share this home automation system he’s working on as a college project. He calls it the Room Engine and the house-side of the hardware is built on top of the circuit you see here. This is the most basic part of the REBoard, which is meant to connect to a computer …
Spring clamp tripod mount has potential
Admittedly this post is flirting with flamebait, but we think the concept of using a spring clamp as an iPhone tripod mount has a lot of hacking potential. Hear us out, and if we havn’t made our case you can rant about it in the comments. [Joe] wanted an easy way to mount his iPhone …
Impromptu lamp runs Linux
This LED lamp, which uses a soda cup as a lampshade, is Internet enabled thanks to a Linux board (translated). To say the system is overpowered would be a gross understatement. But at least there’s plenty of room for growth. The lamp is really just a hardware extension for the Linux board. A half-dozen colored LEDs …
Simulating PenTile RGBG displays
Here’s an interesting experiment that lets you simulate PenTile displays on a normal LCD monitor. [Barrett Blackwood] wanted to test out how some graphics look on PenTile RGBG displays with different pixel densities. These PenTile RGBG matrices are sometimes used in OLED displays. For instance, the Nexus One smart phone features a display of this …
Vowel recognition using an ATmega644
[Youchun Zhang] and [Annie (Wei) Dai] found a way to differentiate vowel sounds using an ATmega644 as their final project for a microcontroller design class. Voice recognition is not out of the ordinary, but most of the time it uses a computer, smart phone, or specially designed hardware. This implementation uses an ATmega644, a microphone …
We don’t need to brainstorm projects; xkcd does that for us
[Randall Munroe], the guy behind our favorite web comic xkcd, gave us yet another great project idea that falls on the heels of securing our valuables and silencing loud car stereos. The xkcd forum has been talking about how to implement this, and we’d like to hear what Hack A Day readers think about this …
Barcode tattoo has a lot of thought put into it
This bar code tattoo was sent into us by [Lifespan]. Before going under the needle, [Lifespan] didn’t care much for tattoos. After seeing this video he realized that a tattoo could have dynamic content through domain redirection. [Lifespan] spent a lot of time going over the different styles of 2D bar codes. QR codes were …
Gyroscope-based smartphone keylogging attack
A pair of security researchers have recently unveiled an interesting new keylogging method (PDF Research Paper) that makes use of a very unlikely smartphone component, your gyroscope. Most smart phones now come equipped with gyroscopes, which can be accessed by any application at any time. [Hao Chen and Lian Cai] were able to use an Android phone’s …
