Open your Hackerspace Door with a Phone Call

[Mário] sent us a tip detailing the access control system he and his friends built for the eLab Hackerspace in Faro, Portugal. The space is located in the University of Algarve’s Institute of Engineering, which meant the group couldn’t exactly bore some holes through campus property and needed a clever solution to provide 24/7 access to members.

[Mário] quickly ruled out more advanced Bluetooth or NFC options, because he didn’t want to leave out members who did not have a smartphone. Instead, after rummaging around in some junk boxes, the gang settled on hacking an old Siemens C55 phone to serve as a GSM modem and to receive calls from members. The incoming numbers are then compared against a list on the EEPROM of an attached PIC16F88 microcontroller, which directs a motor salvaged from a tobacco vending machine to open the push bar on the front door. They had to set up the motor to move an arm in a motion similar to that of a piston, thus providing the right leverage to both unlock and reset the bar’s position.

Check out [Mário's] blog for more details and information on how they upload a log of callers to Google spreadsheets, and stick around for a quick video demonstration below. If you’d prefer a more step by step guide to the build, head over to the accompanying Instructables page.

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Unlock the iPhone 3G by Hardware Hacking

Previously you could unlock the iPhone 3G by installing simple jailbreak hacking software.  That is, until Apple released the 2.2 software update.  You could also buy a sim card adapter to unlock the iPhone but it tends to drain the battery and be quite unreliable.

Now, however, a Vietnamese entrepreneur has developed an incredibly basic, yet tedious unlock which involves removing the bandpass chip (which contains the locking data) and using a Hex editor to remove the locking data from the chip.  Read more details about the unlocking process.

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How to Unlock the iPhone 3G

The iPhone dev team released their new app which unlocks the iPhone 3G for use on T-Mobile and many other networks.  A far easier way to achieve wireless freedom than by hardware hacking where you’d have to remove and reprogram a chip. Now that you’ve learned how to unlock your iPhone, see our other cell phone hacks;

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Dirt Simple Office Supplies iPhone Stand

Holding your iPhone for hours while watching a movie can be an annoyance.  Using five pencils and a few rubber bands, you can easily construct a makeshift iPhone stand.  So easy a noob could do it.  Not much of a hack, more of a simple, useful tool.  See all of our fantastic iPhone hacks, mods, and projects:

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Adding a SIM Card to the Photon Q 4G LTE

[Charles] is a big fan of phones that have physical keyboards. He thinks they are better suited for writing lengthy emails, but unfortunately his HTC Desire Z was getting old so he had to replace it. [Charles] therefore decided to import the Motorola Photon Q from the USA which exposed one major problem. The Verizon phone uses CDMA so there is nowhere to put a GSM SIM. But a bit of hacking allowed him to add a SIM card slot to it.

Even though he’s not the one who originally found this hack (XDA thread here), his write-up is definitely an interesting read. To perform this modification, he needed a hot air reflow station, a soldering iron, a Dremel with the appropriate cutting wheel and several SIM card slot assemblies from the Galaxy S3 (as the first ones usually get burned during the disassembly process).

Obviously the first steps involved opening the phone, which may have taken a while. Using hot air, [Charles] removed the EMI shield covering the SIM card IC . He then extracted the latter using the same technique. Finally, he removed another EMI shield covering the contacts to which the SIM card slot should be connected. A few minutes/hours of delicate soldering and case modding later, [Charles] could use his SIM card on his brand new phone.

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The Phone-o-Chrome Color Filter for Smartphones and Tablets

You can use various photo apps to add gorgeous effects to your photos, but if you prefer doing it by yourself or want to capture videos with dynamic color effect, the Phone-o-Chrome color filter may be more suitable for you.

This is a creative color filter designed for smartphones and tablets. As we can see from the images, the color filter features ultra portable design in order that you can conveniently keep it in your pocket or wallet. When needed, you can hold it over your smartphone or tablet’s lens for capturing photos or videos, and using the flexible gradient color filter you can take beautiful photos with amazing color effect or capture videos in beautiful rainbow shades. Apart from that, the color filter works well with various smartphones and tablets.

The Phone-o-Chrome color filter is priced at $15 USD. If you’re interested, jump to Photojojo for more details.

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Smarty Smart Ring

We have introduced a few nice smart watches, but if you need a more portable wearable accessory, the following Smarty smart ring may be able to draw your more attention. Smarty Ring is a multi-functional smart ring designed to become a convenient companion for you and your smartphone. The smart ring measures 13mm wide and 4mm thickness, and as we can see from the images, the smart ring features minimal and stylish design.

Using built-in Bluetooth 4.0 technology the smart ring is able to pair with smartphone, and its integrated LED display shows you time, incoming & outgoing call notifications, alerts for SMS and Email messages, and real-time updates from Facebook, Twitter and more.

Moreover, the smart ring allows you to remotely control your smartphone such as accepting or reflecting calls, triggering smartphone camera, making outgoing calls to present numbers and etc, and custom designed application gives you more options to set your own smart ring. Apart from that, the smart ring support wireless charging, and built-in rechargeable battery offers 24 hours of use time.

At present the team of Smarty Ring is raising fund at Indiegogo. Pledging $175 will let you own the smart ring. If you’re interested, jump to Indiegogo official site for more details or check out the following demo video first.

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iPhone Controlled USB Missile Launcher

By hacking the fantastic USB missile launcher, this modder can control his missile attacks remotely with his iPhone. The video above demonstrates the functionality and you can learn more about the project, grab the code, and build your own remote control launcher.

Furthermore, you can take this hack to the next level by adding a wiimote to the mix and creating an automatic aiming USB missile launcher. Don’t miss out on more fantastic projects – subscribe now.

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Make Cell Phone Calls With your Arduino

Cellular shields for the Arduino have been around for ages, but this is the first one we’ve seen that turns your Arduino into a proper cell phone.

The shield is based around the SIM900 GSM/GPRS radio module, and is compatible with the SIM908 GSM/GPRS module that adds a GPS receiver. Also on board this shield are a pair of 1/8″ audio jacks, perfect for connecting a microphone and headphones. Yes, you can actually make cell phone calls with your Arduino now.

The real star of this build is the new GSM Shield library. This library of code includes the methods necessary for an Arduino to function as a cell phone (answer, hang up, dial a number), but also includes a lot of improvements for TCP/IP communication.

Even though the cost of getting an Arduino communicating through a GSM or GPRS network is fairly high, we’re thinking this would be the perfect starting point for a completely open source, open hardware cell phone.

A phone with the same functionality as an old Nokia brick that is also a MiFy would be an amazing piece of hardware, and would surely make for a profitable Kickstarter.

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Fireworks Triggered by Cell Phone

By using a dirt cheap disposable cell phone, learn to create cell phone triggered fireworks. It’s an incredibly simple project, basically just soldering two wires to the phone and attaching them to a hobby fuse which ignites when current is passed through it. Don’t miss out on our other pyrotechnic projects below:

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How to Watch Your Own Videos on a Plane: Barf Bag

Air travellers take note, [Asthmaticatom] figured out how to comfortably watch your own videos on the plane. We know you always have your phone with you, now you just need to find a barf bag. A little bit of papercraft turns the waste disposal device into a neat little hanging dock.

The bag in the image above is actually upside down. A rectangle the same size as your phone’s screen is ripped out of the top. The metal clasp used to seal the top of the bag is rolled up to hold the phone securely in place. The bottom of the sack has a flap which acts as a one-way catch. When it is shoved into the crevice on top of the monitor it holds the whole thing in place.

Of course we don’t remember ever having been on a plane where there was a monitor in the seat in front of us, but perhaps we’re just buying tickets on the wrong airlines.
[via Reddit]

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DIY Multi-Room Wireless Music Remote

With the help of some external hardware and a handheld wireless device such as an iPhone or iPod touch, you can build your own wireless music remote. It’s a bit spendy if you don’t already have an Iphone/iTouch and a router, but there’s a step by step tutorial to guide you through the setup build.

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Tripod Mount Anything!

[Shawn] wrote in to tell us about his extremely simple method he used for mounting a webcam on a tripod. His article explains it better, but the basic premise is to glue a 1/4 – 20 nut onto the bottom of it. The hack-worthiness of this could be in question, but the technique could come in handy at some point.

After seeing this tip, I was reminded of a slightly crazier, if effective mount that I made for my state of the art Env2 phone. Referenced in a links post in March, it was made of a 2×4 with a 1/2 inch slot milled in it.  After some thought, it was drilled and tapped for a 1/4 – 20 bolt in the other side to mount it on a tripod. So this could be an option in very limited circumstances.

On the other hand, if you want something a bit more hack-worthy, why not check out this motorized camera rig that we featured in July. Sure, it’s more complicated than gluing a nut onto a webcam, but at least it still uses 2 x 4s in it’s mounting hardware!

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Twitter Robot makes Popcorn, starts a Movie

Imagine this… On your way home from work, you send the Twitter command “Prep movie 15″, to your robot.  Your robot reads the command, waits for a bit, pops some corn and starts a movie.  Build your own twitter powered roboslave and learn how it was done.

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Stacking GPS, GSM, and an SD card into an Arduino shield

A few years ago, [Phang Moh] and his compatriots were asked by a client if they could make a vehicle tracking device for oil tankers all around Indonesia. The request of putting thousands of trackers on tanks of explosives was a little beyond [Phang Moh]‘s capability, but he did start tinkering around with GPS and GSM on an Arduino.

Now that tinkering has finally come to fruition with [Phang]‘s TraLog shield, a single Arduino shield that combines GPS tracking with a GSM and GPRS transceiver. There’s also an SD card thrown in for good measure, making this one of the best tracking and data logging shields for the Arduino.

The shield can be configured to send GPS and sensor data from devices attached to an I2C bus to remote servers, or a really cool COSM server. [Phang] is selling his TraLog for $150, a fairly good deal if you consider what this thing can do.

Seems like the perfect piece of kit for just about any tracking project, whether you want to know the location of thousands of oil tankers or just a single high altitude balloon.

Tip ‘o the hat to [Brett] for finding this one.

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A DIY Mini RF (Celll Phone) Jammer

Geeks can be pranksters too. If you’re a little mischevious, an RF Jammer is a must have gag tool for the belt. Think of all the pranks you could pull off by blocking radio frequency signals using a jammer, even blocking cell phones from functioning.  Interested? Then take read more about RF Jamming on this wiki page.

An RF jammer can be built as a DIY project as Adafruit’s Wave Bubble, a self-tuning portable RF jammer shows. The Wave Bubble calls itself a self-tuning, wide-bandwidth portable RF jammer. Self tuning is via dual phase lock loops which nullify the need for a spectrum analyzer. Multiple programmable frequency bands make it work across a range of RFs. Tuned antennas give it a range of 20 feet.

Output power is .1W (in high bands) and .3W (in low bands). Two hours of jamming work over dual frequency bands (as used by some cell phones) with a rechargeable internal lithium-ion battery should be enough for your dirty deeds. Or you can get more hours over a single band as used by cordless phones, GPS, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. All this can be crammed in a palm sized cigarette pack. That’s about 7″ x 4″ x 3.2″.

 The Wave Bubble site backs-up the project with details under Share-Alike so go ahead and make yourself one.  As the site warns, this is advanced stuff asking for lots of circuitry savvy.

Note: Using a RF Jammers to block communication by disrupting the signal is an exclusive right of the authorities. Among other things they are extensively used to prevent remote activation of explosive devices by terrorists. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules apply and they take a dim view against illegal use of RF jamming devices.

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We’re *this* Close to a Real Pip-Boy

Whether inspired by the vaults of Fallout or the mysterious wrist device worn by [Turanga Leela], we’re just glad to see someone finally made a wrist-worn cellphone,  The Ultimate Wrist Watch, as the creator [Rob] calls it, is based on his Motorola Defy smart phone, tucked inside a neatly modified iPod wrist band meant to hold a runner’s music player.

Simply mounting a cellphone to a wrist would be a bit awkward and a huge drain on battery life, so [Rob] wrote an app to automatically turn on the display when the accelerometer detects the phone is in the correct watch-reading position, and turns it off when [Rob] lowers his arm once again.

Right now the Ultimate Wrist Watch only stands in for the functions of a standard wrist watch – time, date, a chronometer and stopwatch are just about the only features implemented so far. Still, this is dangerously close to the wrist-mounted computers we’ve been promised for so long.

You can grab the source for the Ultimate Wrist Watch on [Rob]‘s git, or just download it off Google Play. Check out the video of the Ultimate Wrist Watch after the break.

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Vodafone USB 3G Modem Driver From Mbed

Wow, that’s a really simple hardware setup to supply your device with a 3G Internet connection. Better yet, the software side is just as simple thanks to the Vodafone USB Modem library for mbed. It will work for any of the cell data plans offered by Vodafone. The only problem you may have is not living in one of the 30 countries serviced by the telco.

The dongle seen at the right is sold by Vodafone and is meant to be used for Internet data, so you won’t be doing anything that might get your SIM banned. Connecting to the network is a one-liner thanks to the previously mentioned library. From there, gets and posts can be done with your favorite package. The  Hello World example uses HTTPClient. And since the mbed is simply an ARM platform it shouldn’t be hard to use the library with the ARM chip of your choice.

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Android VOIP phone and Raspberry Pi Mate for an Intriguing PBX Setup

[Ward Mundy] has found something great by combining a GXP-2200 phone with Raspberry Pi to create a private branch exchange. So the idea behind a PBX setup is kind of like a company intranet. All of the phones in the system are assigned an extension number and have access to the internal system functions like voice mail, and sharing phone lines to the outside world.

We’ve talked about using an RPi as a PBX before, but the high-tech phone he’s using this time around pulls everything together remarkably well. The GXP-2200 is available for under $200. It runs Android and has a full color touch screen pictured above.

It is marketed as a multimedia phone and indeed it brings Skype and Google Voice to the party. But it also offers six SIP lines. The hardware even seems to be planned for this type of use as the phone offers a second Ethernet port to which the RPi board can be connected.

In this example [Ward] simply screws the RPi to the phone’s plastic stand and connects the two using a six-inch cable. From there the PBX can be configured with the phone’s browser. How’s that for slick?

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Making a TARDIS Bigger On the Inside

Over Thanksgiving, [Greg] had a little time on his hands and decided he needed an afternoon project. Having a few bits of plywood, an xacto knife, and some blue paint on hand meant a miniature TARDIS would take shape on his workbench. After finishing the model, [Greg] continued improving it with a blinky LED when the thought of adding an interior to the TARDIS entered his mind.An idea too good to pass up, really.

The TARDIS, of course, is smaller on the outside, so [Greg] needed a way to virtually model the interior of [9] and [10]‘s home. After playing around with Blender for a few days, [Greg] had a reasonable 3D facsimile of the TARDIS interior. Now the only problem was to display it behind the front door.

[Greg] whipped up a small app for his phone that reads a zebra print pattern behind the door and overlays the 3D modeled TARDIS interior. Yes, it’s only viewable through augmented reality, but tilting the desktop TARDIS from side to side makes the entire console room visible. You can check out [Greg]‘s TARDIS interior in the video after the break.

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