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Rebuilding the electronics in a remote control car
Inspired by the many autonomous rovers such as Curiosity and the self-driving Google car, [Rohit] decided to build his own by taking an off-the-shelf remote control car and adding his own electronics....
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An atmega328-based radioteletype XY scope display
[Jack] tipped us about a Crossed Bananas Display (CBD) he just designed. A CBD is a tuning aid for frequency-shift keyed (FSK) modes and is basically an oscilloscope in X-Y mode. At one time,...
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Sniffing Data from Radio-Controlled Bus Stop Displays
A few weeks ago in Finland [Oona] discovered a radio data stream centered around 76KHz in a FM broadcast and she recently managed to decode it. This 16,000bps stream uses level-controlled...
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Decoding News Helicopter Signals on YouTube
A serendipitous YouTube video recommendation led [Oona] to a raw copy of a news helicopter car chase video. While watching the video she noticed an odd sound playing from her left speaker. That was...
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Open Source Power Line Communication
Since we all have wires running throughout our houses to provide mains power, there’s a number of devices that piggyback on mains lines for communication. For his thesis project, [Haris Andrianakis]...
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Retrotechtacular: How to Teletypewriter
This week, you’re going to learn the ins and outs of the AN/GRC-46 thanks to this army training film from 1963. What is the AN/GRC-46, you ask? Why it’s a complete mobile-tactical sheltered...
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Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) Explained by [Bil Herd]
One of the acronyms you may hear thrown around is DDS which stands for Direct Digital Synthesis. DDS can be as simple as taking a digital value — a collection of ones and zeroes — and processing it...
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See Who’s Calling with Caller Pi-D
One of the hardest things in life is watching your parents grow old. As their senses fail, the simplest things become difficult or even impossible for them to do. [kjepper]’s mom is slowly losing her...
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Pea-Whistle Steganography
Do you see the patterns everywhere around you? No? Look closer. Still no? Look again. OK, maybe there’s nothing there. [Oona Räisänen] hears signals and then takes them apart. And even when there’s...
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Synchronize Data With Audio From A $2 MP3 Player
Many of the hacks featured here are complex feats of ingenuity that you might expect to have emerged from a space-age laboratory rather than a hacker’s bench. Impressive stuff, but on the other side of...
View ArticleReading Old Data Tapes, the Hard Way
Those who were around for the pre-floppy days of computer mass storage were likely to have made the mistake of slipping a cassette tape containing data into a stereo tape deck. Instead of hearing the...
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RF Modulation: Crash Course For Hackers
When you’re looking to add some wireless functionality to a project, there are no shortage of options. You really don’t need to know much of the technical details to make use of the more...
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Impatience is a Virtue When Testing This Old Maritime Teleprinter
[Larry Wall], inventor of Perl, once famously said that programmers have three key virtues: sloth, hubris, and impatience. It’s safe to say that these personality quirks are also present in some...
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A Cassette Interface for a 6502 Breadboard Computer, Kansas City-Style
It’s been a long time since computer hobbyists stored their programs and data on cassette tapes. But because floppy drives were expensive peripherals and hard drives were still a long way from being...
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Add a Little Quindar to Your Comms for that Apollo-Era Sound
If there’s one thing that ties together all the media coming out of the Apollo era, it’s probably the iconic Quindar tones. These quarter-second beeps served as control tones for the globe-spanning...
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Persistence Pays in TI-99/4A Cassette Tape Data Recovery
In the three or four decades since storing programs on audio cassettes has been relevant, a lot of irreplaceable personal computing history has been lost to the ravages of time and the sub-optimal...
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CATS: A New Communication and Telemetry System
CATS is a new communication and telemetry standard intended to surpass the current Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) standard by leveraging modern, super-cheap Frequency Shift Keying (FSK)...
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A Look Inside the Space Shuttle’s First Printer
There was even a day not too long ago when printers appeared to be going the way of the dodo; remember the “paperless office” craze? But then, printer manufacturers invented printers so cheap they...
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