Here’s the smallest GPS chip ever! Great news for us
hackers and DIYers!

PhysOrg.com says “thanks to clever use of space-saving technology the S4E19863 series is the world’s smallest GPS module (7 mm x 6 mm x 1.28 mm), making it ideal for applications with limited component space, such as mobile phones. ”

Epson’s new GPS is already being massed produced and is already integrated into NTT DoCoMo’s FOMA 903i series mobile phone. It does look extra tiny on that finger there.

via ministryoftech

Yes, someone evidently is controlling their entire house with a wii controller. Nice!

The true mastermind here is the WACI NX control server that sets everything up, and the entire Wii interface can be emulated with a Nokia 770, as shown. The amount of convergence, and the merit of using the Wiimote as a remote controller, is very clever

via

Check out this interesting red rotary phone from sparkfun. It looks like a regular phone but
actually you can put your cellphone sim card in and use it wireless for about 4-5 hours. Lots of
possibilities seems to be there for modding and hacking it.

This is the ever popular Portable Rotary Phone, now in Red! Phone comes fully assembled and tested. All you have to do is open the phone, insert your SIM card, and turn the unit on! The unit will utilize your phone number and account minutes. Phone dials out like normal through the rotary. Incoming calls ring the original, loud, gong style metal bells. Please note: As with all cellular phones, there is no dial tone. While we thoroughly enjoying taking the Port-O-Rotary out on the town, please realize the sound quality will not be as good as your pocket phone.

The GM862 cellular module from Telit works within any country that has one of the 900MHz/1800MHz/1900MHz cellular bands (90% of the world). Each phone is specially built to customer needs. The battery can run the phone for 4-5 days and is charged by unscrewing two screws on the bottom of the phone, opening it, and attaching the charger.

via sparkfun

In case you haven’t checked out what we’ve been digging up lately, you can click on the pictures
below and check them out!

Nicely done Wii drum machine hack!

Bob Somers managed to turn a Wiimote into a drum machine using this custom script and GlovePIE. Video after the jump.

Now if you could just get two Wiimotes running at the same time, along with some sort of foot switch mechanisms for the kick drum and hi-hat, you’d have a full-fledged electronic drum kit. Anyway, we like the graphics of the Wii demo better. But both approaches look like tons o’ fun

Instructions:

With all the hacks for the Wii remote going around, I kept hearing people say they couldn’t wait until someone made a drum machine.

So I did.

To get this working, you first need to go over to either WiiLi.org or LiquidIce’s Wii Hacks page and get your Wiimote working with bluetooth. Follow all the great information they have to get your remote working with GlovePIE. Once your remote is working fine with GlovePIE, then your ready for the following files:

• Download WiiDrums.zip

NOTE: You’ll need the latest version of the .NET framework to run the Wii Drums program, so shame on you if you haven’t been keeping up with your Windows Updates!

Unzip those files to a directory of your choice and run the setup program. When you get a security warning, click Install anyway, sorry I haven’t paid Microsoft lots of money to be a “verified publisher”.

Once the program is installed you’ll see a program on your Start menu called DrumSounds.

Connect your Wiimote, load up GlovePIE, and run the WiiDrums.PIE script I included in the WiiDrums.zip file. Then run the DrumSounds program from your Start menu, and make sure it is the front-most program. Then just follow the instructions on the program and have fun drumming!

via via

Here’s the guts of wii dissected by Sparkfun team showing all the parts including some type of I2C
interface and Broadcom wireless solution as you can see in the above pics.

U7849 6Q63 could be anything. All those flat round things (330, 100, 4R7) are inductors 33uH, 10uH, and 4.7uH. These are predominantly used for DC to DC step-up or step-down (also called boost and buck respectively). They can also be used for filtering - probably both on this board. Filtering is crucial for a clean RF signal out of the Broadcom Bluetooth IC (center).

BCM2042 is a low-cost Bluetooth wireless keyboard/mouse IC. It features an 8051 core and RAM/ROM memory featuring the HID bluetooth profile and stack. Any chance they used a flash part that we can hack instead of the masked ROM (un-changeable) version? Highly unlikely. But lemme know if someone figures out how to get into the core. The small crystal is 24MHz. They make it look so easy don’t they?

Here you get a feel for the pinout of the connector. The small LEDs are shown. I can’t identify M 626 3322 IC but it has the Mitsumi logo - seems to be connected to something on the power system.

Hitting Digikey, the H7824HE comes up as an MSOP-8pin Mobile Phone Audio device from Rohm - that seems very plausible as it is located near the speaker connection.

Accelerometer and EEPROM

Finally, the ADXL330 with date code 0614 (my chip was manufactured the 1st week of April of 2006!) with the ‘to be expected’ three axis filtering caps and power decoupling cap. The ST 4128 BWP part seems to be a 128kbit I2C serial EEPROM - datasheet is here. This agrees with the pinout of the ST datasheet. Pins 1 through 4 are grounded (address lines E0,1,2 are 0), VCC is pin 8. Pin 7 is WC (write control) and is tied to resistor R38. Pins 6/5 are the Serial Data (SDA) and Serial Clock (SCL) lines. Anyone feel like clocking out the internals of the I2C EEPROM? My guess is that it contains mundane info like a Bluetooth identifier, perhaps a serial number, and some trimming values for the accelerometer and IR sensor. A task for another tutorial some day…

Okay so we couldn’t wait that long.

We hot-aired off the EEPROM and soldered it down to our SSOP breakout board. We then hooked up the unit to an AVR micro that could handle the I2C communication and clocked out all the I2C data from the M24128 into the AVR and down the serial pipe to the computer and captured it. You will find the binary file here. My bet was that the EEPROM contained all constants like Bluetooth ID, firmware revision, etc. And that all the fun Wii Remote functionality was burned into the Broadcom part. David’s bet was that the Broadcom part was just the Bluetooth HID stack and protocol and that it pinged the EEPROM during boot up for actual Wii Controller firmware. We were both right!

Looking at the binary file, the fun thing to note is the word ‘Nintendo’ a couple thousand bytes into the file. Boy would that be fun to alter. The real kicker was that we found unencrypted 8051 code in the file. We don’t know if it is checksumed or anything, but you should be able to hack away. This seems to indicate that the entire Wii Remote functionality is contained on this M24128 EEPROM. Nifty.

via

Some guy in Austria Australia hacked the wiimote to work with his RC car. Nice job dude!

All you need seams to be a different bluetooth stack than the original windows bluetooth stack. So I just purchased the BlueSoleil Stack which works perfect for me (its cheap, around 10 Eur).

To connect the wiimote you just have to press the “1″ and “2″ buttons at the same time. Then the wiimote is discoverable. You just have to click on the icon which appears in BlueSoleil and refresh the services. You can then connect to the new found service.

The rest was rather simple. I found some sourcecode for accessing HID devices - there I just had to make some modifications that the wiimote accellerator output was enabled.

The rest was simple. The accellerator data is computed a bit, so that it fits the needs for my PC-RC-Car Controller board (no english doc yet) which has to be connected to the serial port. This hardware creates the PPM Signal for a normal Radio transmitter (Graupner DX6 Works at 2.4Ghz.). See the video and enjoy

via schoeppl

Wow, here’s some really cool laser pointer control. Sorta like your PDA device except you can point it anywhere with your laser pointer.

After I linked his basic laser pointer webcam interface the other day, [mnt] sent me this excellent demo of his gesture based laser pointer control. This one works alot like graffiti on the old palm pilots. My question? What does he make when he’s not sick?

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