[Fileark] built an RFID entry system that uses a pretty ingenious alternative to an electronic strike plate. An electronic strike is a rather expensive hinged plate that mounts in the door frame and catches the door latch. But this system opens a set of double doors. The door without the handle is fixed in place and has a normal strike plate. But it also has a deadbolt mounted in line with that plate. When the deadbolt is extended it is flush with the strike plate, pushing the latch from the door knob back and freeing the door to swing open. This is a bit hard to put into words so watch the video after the break to clear things up.

The system uses a cheap RFID package that provides a single signal line. This line connects to an old VCR motor which turns the deadbolt. Timing is provided by a 555 chip, and the deadbolt movement is limited by a couple of switches mounted along with the motor.

Now that the unlocking mechanism has been built it would be simple to use other authentication methods for unlocking the door, like a wristwatch-based proximity system.

Irongeek.com is hosting an online class on password exploitation. The event was a fundraiser called ShoeCon, but they are hosting the entire series for everyone to share. Not only are the videos there, but you can download the powerpoint slides as well. There is a massive amount of information here on various topics like Hashcat, OCLHashcat, Cain, SAMDump2, Nir’s Password Recovery Tools, Password Renew, Backtrack 4 R1, UBCD4Win. There’s so much info, they split it into 3 sections. The videos are fairly long, between 1 and 2.5 hours each. What might surprise people is the amount of time that google is actually one of the main tools.

These videos can be a fantastic resource for hobby hackers, IT admins, and security professionals.

[Firestorm_v1] has done a fabulous writeup on not only resurrecting his dead DockStar with JTAG, but also includes some handy techniques and useful information that could be used with other hardware and JTAG equipped devices.

The tutorial itself goes into the details of finding the JTAG, correctly identifying the ports and making an adapter cable. Then wiring a TIAO Parallel JTAG kit and finally the flash and upload of firmware to the deceased Dockstar to give it new life.

While the fun stops a little short, we’ll be sure to keep an eye out for [Firestorm_v1's] future plans involving these surprisingly useful (read: hackable) storage devices, “roving USB camera with WiFi” we hear?

Here’s a great tutorial on building your own quadrotor helicopter. This build isn’t necessarily less expensive than others we’ve seen since quality motors, propellers, and control circuitry aren’t cheap. But the design and assembly is well documented and presents a well-planned building procedure. The carbon-fiber tubes that make up the frame have extensions to protect the motors and propellers in the event of a crash. The Arduino, IMU, and transceiver are all tucked away between two aluminum body plates as well. They only thing missing is a solid methodology for tuning the four motors, a critical procedure that is just touched up at the end of the article.

This is a nice solid hardware platform from which we can envision a couple of other hacks. The feed could be parsed to make a nice map graphic like the webpage for that Twittering Road Bike. It also might be nice to have a d-pad and character LCD to post your own tweets to the feed at the end of the day.

[courtervideo] shares an instructible with us on how to build a mirror rig to take stereoscopic pictures with one camera. We’ve had the thought “couldn’t you just do that with some mirrors?” when looking at a dual camera rig. Well, as we all suspected, you can. There are some advantages here, a single click gives you your 3d image or video without any post processing, and unless you just happen to have an extra camera lying around you can save money there. You do however lose some resolution compared to two separate cameras. This setup could actually add some steps if you were wanting to interlace your images for viewing on a 3d tv.

[Christian] was running a Linux box as a home server but needed a way to quiet the noisy machine. Like many Linux servers, he’s using some pretty old hardware which doesn’t have an on-board header for the CPU fan which generates much of the unwanted sound. Those headers are nice because software can monitor the CPU and board temperature and adjust the fan accordingly.

[Christian's] solution was to use the serial port for the task. He built a small circuit in which serial pin 3 drives the base of a transistor, pin 5 provides ground, and a floppy drive power cable supplies 5 volts. From there he wrote a RUBY program to monitor the CPU temperature and generate a PWM signal on the serial port, throttling the fan speed as needed.

[CC Photo Credit: Garrette via Flickr]

We must find out where you can acquire these industrial robots pictured above. Sure, you expect car companies like BMW to have a few lying around, which they used to make into a Twitter message writing robot. But Bungie, a video game company, to have one as part of an advertisement for Reach?

The former is just a scratch on the surface, with some pictures, but a much more decent writeup will be provided after September 12th. The latter has a few videos, and you can watch it recreate a monument with light ‘live’. And while both are impressive uses of old tech, neither answered our first question, we gotta get us one of these.

[Thanks Matt and FurryFriend]

What do you do after you make a BeagleBoard graphing calculator? [Matt] over at Liquidware Antipasto made a BeagleBoard Elastic R Cluster that fits in a briefcase. Ten BeagleBoards, are connected to each other though USB to ethernet adapters and a pair of ethernet switches connected to a wireless router. The cost for this cluster comes in around $2000 and while consuming less than 40 watts of power, out-paces a $4500 laptop. How might you use this cluster? What improvements would you make?

The laundry machines at [Hans Viksler's] apartment were converted over from coin operation to stored value cards. We’ve all dealt with these cards before and [Hans] thought it would be fun to do a little sniffing around at how this particular company implements them. We’ve covered how to read these cards and there have been several stories regarding how to bypass the security that they use.

But [Hans] wasn’t interested in stealing value, just in seeing how things work. So he stuck the card in his reader and after looking around a bit he figured out that they use the Atmel AT88SC0404C chip. He downloaded the datasheet and started combing through the features and commands. The cards have a four-wrong-password lockout policy. He calculated that it would take an average of over two million cards to brute force the chip’s stored password. But further study showed that this is a moot point. He fed the default password from the datasheet to his card and it worked.

We know it takes quite a bit of knowledge for the average [Joe] to manipulate these cards at home, but changing the default password is literally the very least the company could have done to protect their system.

For everyone using  a later version of Windows like Vista or Windows 7 they will probably never get to enjoy the awesomeness that was Wing Commander…until now. [Jari Komppa] has managed to use DirectDraw to his advantage and hack out a solution to this disappointing problem.  He used DirectX to do this and has even managed to get OpenGL to load from a DLL after a few problems with Windows XP and Windows 7.  This is truly a step forward in retro gaming.  No more should we have to load a virtual machine to play Starcraft.  Hopefully getting this ported to even older games such as Sim Farm or Commander Keen are on the way!

[Mike] built a sensor rig to measure projectile speed. The setup uses a tunnel with two sensors in it. Each consists of a laser diode on one side focused on a photodiode in the other. The two are monitored by an op amp and measured by an ATmega128 microcontroller. When the beams are broken the elapsed time between the two events is measured in order to calculate speed. There is a setting to adjust the calibration for a range of speeds, which came in quite handy as [Mike] initially tested the device with rubber bands before moving on to a pellet gun and then a rifle.

It seems like he’s tempting fate by shooting a target just a few inches below his exposed circuitry but his marksmanship prevailed. We’ve seen bullet speed detectors in the past, used just for the delight of seeing how fast the projectile is moving, and also to capture an impact at just the right instant.

The Equinox clock is made up of simple parts but a combination of fine design and precision make it a gem of a timepiece. The guts are made up of an Arduino, a DS1307 real time clock, twelve LED drivers, and sixty RGB LEDs. These combine with a capacitive touch interface to tell the time using three lit blocks for the hours, one for the minutes, and a fading block for the seconds. See for yourself after the break.

To our delight, [Bram Knaapen] shared the specifics of the case. The black ring that makes up the body was laser cut and spray painted. He uses small blocks of acrylic that have been sandblasted to diffuse the light. This is also a great example of clean circuitry using interconnects between the different circuit boards.

We always enjoy seeing clocks no matter what level of finish is involved, but great design is something that makes us want to hang a project on the wall rather than stow it in a parts bin.

[Thanks Mowcius]

This vintage radio can play AM, FM, and MP3, all with a classic sound. Inside you’ll find a new AM radio tube-amp, providing the functionality you’d expect from the device. The rest of it comes from a conglomeration of parts; an FM receiver board from another radio and an MP3 player with remote control and USB connector. The classic sound we mentioned above comes from an AM modulator. That’s right, the auxiliary audio boards aren’t connected directly, but are broadcast on the AM band so that your latest MC Lars album has the same sound quality as the traffic report.

Check out this similar project from last year that adds RDS to a vintage radio.

While you are out enjoying your Labor Day festivities, keep an eye out for robot snakes in the trees. The CMU robotics lab has built a snake bot named Uncle Sam that can climb trees and poles. As you can see in the video after the break, the bot seems to have no problem at all scaling a tree. It wraps itself around the tree, then rotates down the center of its entire body. Once it has reached the top, it can take in the scenery. Though it is a little creepy looking, at least it isn’t in the water.