Hacks

Controlling stepper motors

I’ve become so familiar with using standard DC and servo motors for my electronics projects that I’ve been neglecting a resource that I seem to have an unlimited supply of. There is a mountain of old floppy drives growing in the basement chock full of stepper motors waiting to do a robot’s bidding. The benefit […]

Home security with Twitter and a webcam

Shantanu Goel created a cool home security tool using Twitter and a linux application called Motion, a program that will monitor a webcam looking for differences between frames. When Motion detects movement, it archives a photo of the event and has the option of triggering an external script. Shantanu combined this with a simple curl […]

Milk plastic

Casein, a protein found in milk, can be easily precipitated from standard moo juice with vinegar and turned into a malleable homemade plastic. Coffeebot wrote an Instructable that shows you how: The final product is quite rigid when it’s thick (1/8 inch or thicker), moderately pliable when it’s a little thinner, and brittle if it’s […]

HOWTO – scrub private data from your iPhone

Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Open Application Development, has been working on a forensics toolkit for law enforcement that allows the recovery of personal data from the iPhone. Apparently, the inspiration for this came from a discovery that refurbished iPhones, straight from the Apple store, often times contained personal information on the reformatted filesystem. This […]