Hackaday Podcast 078: Happy B-Day MP3, Eavesdropping on a Mars Probe, Shadowcasting 7-Segments, and a Spicy Commodore 64

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys go down the rabbit hole of hacky hacks. A talented group of radio amateurs have been recording and decoding the messages from Tianwen-1, the Mars probe launched by the Chinese National Space Administration on July 23rd. We don’t know exactly how magnets work, …read more

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MP3 Is 25 Years Old!

In the streaming era, music is accessed from a variety of online services, ephemeral in nature and never living on board the device. However, the online audio revolution really kicked off with the development of one very special format. The subject of bitter raps and groundbreaking lawsuits, this development from …read more

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A Wearable that Jives to the Beat of Your Heart

We’re always searching for the coolest biohacking projects all over the web, so imagine our excitement when we ran across [marcvila333’s] wearable biometric monitor on Instructables. This was a combined effort between [Marc Vila], [Guillermo Stauffacher], and [Pau Carcellé] as they were wrapping up the semester at their university. Their …read more

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DIY Pocket MP3 Player

When [Neutrino-1] saw DFRobot’s DFPlayer module, he decided he wanted to make his own retro MP3 player. This tiny module comes packed with a ton of interesting capabilities such as EQ adjustment, volume control, and a 3 watt amplifier amongst other things. It can even play ads in between songs, …read more

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ESP32 Becomes Music Player In Under 40 Lines of Code

The demo code for [XTronical]’s ESP32-based SD card music player is not even 40 lines long, though it will also require a few economical parts before it all works. Nevertheless, making a microcontroller play MP3s (and other formats) from an SD card is considerably simpler today than it was years …read more

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Musical Mod Lets MRI Scanner Soothe the Frazzled Patient

Hackers love to make music with things that aren’t normally considered musical instruments. We’ve all seen floppy drive orchestras, and the musical abilities of a Tesla coil can be ear-shatteringly impressive. Those are all just for fun, though. It would be nice if there were practical applications for making music from normally non-musical devices.

Thanks to a group of engineers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, there is now: a magnetic resonance imaging machine that plays soothing music. And we don’t mean music piped into the MRI suite to distract patients from the notoriously noisy exam. The music is …read more

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PiPod: A Raspberry Pi Zero Portable Music Player

[Bram] wasn’t satisfied with the portable music playback devices that were currently available. He craved an offline music player that had a large storage capacity but found that this was only available in high-end, off-the-shelf options, which were far too expensive. [Bram] decided to make his own, powered by a Raspberry Pi zero. After building an initial prototype, the design was iterated a few times, with the latest version featuring a BOM cost of roughly €80.

The whole project is open source, with hardware and software files available on the project GitHub. A 2.2″ TFT displays the UI, which is …read more

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Fake DHL Arrival Notice or Shipment Notice delivers malware via embedded exe files inside MP3 music files

  Following on from last week with an almost identical DHL malware campaign, today I am seeing yet another email pretending to be a DHL Shipment Notification  with the subject of  Arrival Notice For BL – 06/08/2018 / Vessel – DHL ATLAN… Continue reading Fake DHL Arrival Notice or Shipment Notice delivers malware via embedded exe files inside MP3 music files