Switch Tester Servo-Slaps Them ’til they Fail

[James] is designing an open-source 3D printed keyboard switch, with the end goal of building a keyboard with as many printed parts as possible. Since keyswitches are meant to be pressed quite often, the DIY switches ought to be tested just as rigorously as their commercial counterparts are at the …read more

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Palm’s Mini-Mobile Phone Becomes Bike Phone

The mini-mobile phone [Jim Yang] got his hands on deserves a bit of background. Palm had the concept of a companion mobile phone, and this manifested itself in late 2018 as a cute palm-sized smartphone that one could carry around when one didn’t wish to haul along their “real” phone. …read more

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Writing Android Apps in C, no Java Required

Older Android devices can be had for a song, and in many cases are still packing considerable computational power. With built in networking, a battery, and a big touch screen, they could easily take the place of a Raspberry Pi and external display in many applications. As it so happens, …read more

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Checking In On Relatives Using Old Android Tablets

With social distancing it can be harder to stay in touch with our relatives, especially those who are elderly and not particularly tech-savvy. Looking for a solution to that end for his own grandmother, [Steve] came up with the idea of using an inexpensive used tablet and a mobile data …read more

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OpenChronograph Lets You Roll Your Own Smart Watch

At first, smartwatches were like little tiny tablets or phones that you wore on your wrist. More recently though we have noticed more “hybrid” smartwatches, that look like a regular watch, but that use their hands to communicate data. For example you might hear a text message come in and …read more

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RemoteXY Simplifies Arduino Control

[Labpacks] wanted to build a robot car controlled by his phone. As a Hackaday reader, of course you probably can imagine building the car. Most could probably even write a phone application to do the control. But do you want to? In most cases, you are better off focusing on …read more

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36C3: All Wireless Stacks Are Broken

Your cellphone is the least secure computer that you own, and worse than that, it’s got a radio. [Jiska Classen] and her lab have been hacking on cellphones’ wireless systems for a while now, and in this talk gives an overview of the wireless vulnerabilities and attack surfaces that they …read more

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Getting the Heat On with A Thermal Camera

Need a quick way to tell your temperature before work tomorrow? Student maker [The Marpe] recently fashioned a sleek home-use thermal camera that even looks like a point and shoot. It works as an Android hardware add-on by integrating the readings from a MLX90640 far-infrared (FIR) thermal sensor with a …read more

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Open Source Smart Display Takes the Long Way Around

Thanks to the relatively low cost of the Raspberry Pi and high resolution LCD screens, “smart displays” have become a favorite project of those looking to clear out their parts bins. Just hook the Pi up to the screen, setup some software, and you’ve got yourself a digital bulletin board …read more

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Installing Android On Your Nintendo Switch, Because Why Not?

In a continuing trend of ‘but does it run Android?’, enterprising folk over at the XDA-Developers forum have found a way to get LineageOS (the successor to CyanogenMod) installed and running on the Nintendo Switch. Promising to release the necessary files to replicate this effort has obviously made other people …read more

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