Interfacing with the HTC Desire Display and its Touch Panel

Part of [Linas]‘ submission to last year’s Cypress Smarter Life Challenge involved using the HTC Desire display and its touch screen. This particular phone includes a full-color active-matrix OLED (AMOLED) display that has a 3.7″ diagonal and a 480×800 resolution, resulting in a 252ppi pixel density. Using a...
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Testing The Limits Of Home PCB Etching

[Quinn Dunki]‘s Veronica, a homebrew computer based on the 6502 CPU, is coming along quite nicely. She’s just finished the input board that gives Veronica inputs for a keyboard and two old Nintendo gamepads. [Quinn] is building this computer all by her lonesome, including etching all the PCBs. She’s gotten...
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A Low Cost Dual Discriminator Module for the Easy-phi Project

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A few months ago I presented you the Easy-phi project, which aims at building a simple, cheap but intelligent rack-based open hardware/software platform for hobbyists. With easy-phi, you simply have a rack to which you add cards (like the one shown above) that perform the functions you want.Recently...
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Easy Multi-Touch Table

[2bigbros] put up an Instructable on his multi-touch table build. It’s a nice setup, using the typical frustrated total internal reflection method for touch sensing. Tinkerman’s Method was used for the screen itself, which involves rolling silicon onto vellum with a paint roller to improve the bond. [2bigbros]...
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Hacking SD Card & Flash Memory Controllers

We hope that some of our readers are currently at this year’s Chaos Communication Congress (schedule can be found here and live streams here), as many interesting talks are happening. One of them addressed hacking the memory controllers embedded in all memory cards that you may have. As memory...
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Testing Six Hundred Fish

That’s the best and most obtuse title you’ll ever see for a Hackaday post, but surprisingly it’s pretty accurate. [Bob] over at the Sector67 hackerspace took part in a 111-day accelerator program in Shenzhen last year to improve his manufacturing skills. He’s just about ready to release his first product,...
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OpenMV: The Camera For Your Next Project

Last month we saw [Ibrahim] tackle the lack of cheap, high speed, high resolution serial cameras with full force. He designed a serial camera based on the STM32F4 microcontroller that’s the perfect solution to anyone wanting to add visual processing or machine vision to a project. It’s cheap, too: instead...
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Using Ultrasonic Sensors to Measure and Log Oil Tank Levels

[Mike] lives in a temperate rainforest in Alaska (we figured from his website’s name) and uses a 570 gallon oil tank to supply his furnace. Until now, he had no way of knowing how much oil was left in the tank and what his daily usage was. As he didn’t find any commercial product that could do what he wanted,...
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Easy Capacitive Touch Sensors In Eagle

Capacitive sensing libraries for the Arduino and just about every other microcontroller platform have been around for ages now, but if you’d like to put a slightly complex cap sense pad in a PCB without a lot of work, you’re kind of out of luck. Not only do you need a proper education in how capacitors work,...
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DIY Thermal Imaging Camera

Thermal imaging cameras – those really useful devices that give you Predator vision – are incredible tools. If you’re looking for heat escaping your house through a window, or just trying to figure out where your electronics project will explode next, they’re invaluable, if expensive, tools. [Kaptein...
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Building an Audio Box out of thrown Away boards

The last time [Mark] was at the scrap yard, he managed to find the analogue input and output cards of an old Akai DR8 studio hard drive recorder. These cards offered great possibilities (8 ADC inputs, 12 DAC outputs) so he repaired them and made a whole audio system out of them.The repair only involved changing...
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Building an Ethernet Connected RFID Reader

For the last few years, [Lt_Lemming] was the president of Brisbane’s hackerspace. Until several months ago, access to the local was done using 125KHz RFID tags and an Arduino board with a prototyping shield. As the hackerspace gained members and moved to bigger facilities, [Lt_Lemming] decided to build...
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Building a ‘high-end’ USB audio DAC

As [Jan-Erik] had already built a simple USB connected Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC), he decided to make the high-end version of it.The prototype you see in the picture above is based on: the PCM2707C from Texas Instruments which takes care of the USB communication and outputs I2S audio datathe PCM1794A,...
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Open Activity Tracker Webcast

The Upverter team loves their FitBit activity tracking devices, but wanted access to raw data. They decided to build their own Open Activity Tracker that would pump data onto an SD card or to a Bluetooth device for processing.The device uses MPU-9150 motion tracking IC to gather information on movement....
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Disabling under/over voltage protection on ATX power supplies

[C] just recently put together a RepRap. Not wanting to spend the money on a dedicated power supply, he looked around for a cheaper solution and found one in an off-the-shelf ATX computer power supply. These ATX supplies are actually a little finicky when not used in a computer, as [C] found, with voltage...
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Persistence of Vision Planetary Map

Looking at the looping GIF above you’re probably thinking, oh, another hard drive POV setup… Well… Not quite. This is one of [Dev's] latest projects, and it is a planetary map that shows the angular positions of all 8 of the major celestial bodies from any given date between 1800 and 2050. It’s also capable...
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Measuring The Lifespan Of Nixie Tubes

Nixie tubes have two things going for them: they’re awesome, and they’re out of production. If you’re building a clock – by far the most popular Nixie application, you’re probably wondering what the lifespan of these tubes are. Datasheets from the manufacturers sometimes claim a lifetime as low as 1000 hours,...
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Making an UNIX Clock While Making a Few Mistakes Along the Way

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Sometimes the projects we think are easy to design are the ones on which we end up making the most mistakes. The UNIX clock that you see in the picture above is one of these projects. For our readers that don’t know it, UNIX time is the number of seconds since 00:00 on January 1st 1970. The clock that [James]...
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A Low-Cost Modular High Altitude Balloon Tracker with Mesh Networked Sensors

[Ethan] just tipped us about a project he and a few colleagues worked on last year for their senior design project. It’s a low-cost open hardware/software high altitude balloon tracker with sensors that form a mesh network with a master node.The latter (shown above) includes an ATmega644, an onboard GPS...
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Laptop to All-in-One PC Conversion

You probably have an old laptop shoved into a far, dark corner of your closet, gathering dust as it sits there alone and unwanted. Show it some love like [Oakkar7] and hack it into a desktop all-in-one PC. He had his work cut out for him, though: dead motherboard, busted case, worthless battery. [Oakkar7] starts...
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