Category Archives: Cellphone Hacks

Amazon Dash Button Finds Your Phone

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This scene replays quite often in our house: my wife has misplaced her cell phone so she asks me to call her. But where did I leave my cell phone? And the race is on! Who will find their phone first to call the other?

[Zapta] solves this problem with his Phone Finder. The system comes in two parts: a base station with WiFi that’s also connected to the house’s phone line, and an arbitrary number of Amazon Dash buttons that trigger dialing commands.

[Zapta] presses a Dash button, which connects over WiFi to the base station. The base station …read more

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Turn Your Motorola Android Phone Into a Raspberry Pi

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In the surest sign that hardware hacking is the new hotness, Motorola and Farnell/Element 14 have developed an add-on board and SDK that will let you connect virtually anything to your mobile phone. Motorola is calling it the “Moto Mods” system, and it looks like its going to be a dedicated microcontroller that interfaces with the computer inside the phone and provides everything from GPIOs to DSI (video). Naturally, I2C, I2S, SPI, UART, even two flavors of USB are in the mix.

The official SDK, ahem Mods Development Kit (MDK), is based on the open Greybus protocol stack (part of …read more

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Bunnie and Snowden Explore IPhone’s Hackability

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[Bunnie Huang] and [Edward Snowden] have teamed up to publish a paper exploring the possibility of introspection on the iPhone.

The idea is that phones are increasingly complex and potentially vulnerable to all kinds of digital surveillance. Even airplane mode is insufficient for knowing that your phone isn’t somehow transmitting information. The paper looks at the various radios on the iPhone, going so far as opening up the device and reading signals at each of the chips for cell, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and NFC to determine whether the chip itself is doing anything, regardless of what the screen says. This …read more

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Pokemon Go Egg Incubator Takes Your Eggs For A Spin

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Pokemon Go has done a great service to the world health. Or would’ve done, if we wouldn’t hack it all the time. The game suggests, you breed Pokemon eggs by walking them around, but [DannyMcMurray] has a better idea: Strapping your smartphone to the propeller of a fan and taking them for spin that way.

He shows how he built a Pokemon incubator using just a rubber band and a fan. This little trick saves you from physically leaving the house, but the process is still painstakingly slow: The time-lapse spin in the video results in about 0.01 km of …read more

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Pokédex Case Keeps Your Phone Powered Up So You Can Catch ‘Em All

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The launch of Pokemon Go has unleashed the franchise upon the world once again but this time it’s encouraging users to get active and socialize in the great outdoors. To show off their dedication to the cause, [Npoole] 3D printed a Pokédex external battery and case to combat the game’s already legendary drain on their Galaxy S4’s resources.

Mimicking the first-generation Kanto design, [Npoole] 3D printed it in red ABS and added a small circuit with a red, yellow and green LED to complete the effect. Inside, a 18650 lithium cell provides the much-needed backup power via a micro B …read more

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Ask Hackaday: Does Apple Know Jack About Headphones?

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If you’ve watched the tech news these last few months, you probably have noticed the rumors that Apple is expected to dump the headphone jack on the upcoming iPhone 7. They’re not alone either. On the Android side, Motorola has announced the Moto Z will not have a jack. Chinese manufacturer LeEco has introduced several new phones sans phone jack. So what does this mean for all of us?

This isn’t the first time a cell phone company has tried to design out the headphone jack. Anyone remember HTC’s extUSB, which was used on the Android G1? Nokia tried it …read more

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Going Lo-Tech For The Perfect Pokemon Go Throw

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We have our eyes on the horizon for an epic GPS spoof to catch some legendaries in Pokemon Go, but until that hack shows up, we really like [Brian McEvoy’s] hack for the perfect Poke Ball throw.

[Brian] started out thinking that a mechanical build would be the best way (we know he’s got the servo motors and controllers to drive them from this tea steeping robot he built last year). But the mechanics of that are just too complicated for what you get in return (less wasted Poke Balls).

He came to the realization that your finger is the …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Selfie Bot Let’s You Vlog Hands Free

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[Sergey Mironov] sent in his SelfieBot project. His company, Endurance Robots, sells a commercial version of the bot, which leads us to believe that in a strange and maybe brilliant move he decided to just sell the prototype stage of the product development as a kit. Since he also gave away the firmware, STLs, BOM, and made a guide so anyone can build it, we’re not complaining.

The bot is simple enough. Nicely housed hobby servos in a 3D printed case take care of the pan and tilt of the camera. The base of the bot encloses the electronics, which …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: MyComm Handheld Satellite Messenger

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We live in a connected world, but that world ends not far beyond the outermost cell phone tower. [John Grant] wants to be connected everywhere, even in regions where no mobile network is available, so he is building a solar powered, handheld satellite messenger: The MyComm – his entry for the Hackaday Prize.

The MyComm is a handheld touch-screen device, much like a smartphone, that connects to the Iridium satellite network to send and receive text messages. At the heart of his build, [John] uses a RockBLOCK Mk2 Iridium SatComm Module hooked up to a Teensy 3.1. The firmware is …read more

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Smartphone Hack For Adding Magnet Power Dock

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Here’s a neat hack for making a magnetic charging mount for a cell phone. We know what you’re thinking, but this is definitely not a traditional contactless charging system. Those use magnets but in a different way. This hack involves putting a couple of magnets onto the case of the cell phone, and a couple more on a charging base. You then wire these magnets into the power inputs of the USB port, and a USB cable onto the base, so putting the phone on the base magnets completes the circuit. The magnets themselves become the charging contacts.

It’s a …read more

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