Category Archives: Toy
Ask Slashdot: What’s The Most Useful ‘Nerd Watch’ Today?
He’s worn the same watch for two decades, but now Slashdot reader students wants a new one. For about 20 years I’ve used Casio Databank 150 watches. They were handy because they kept track of my schedule and the current time. They were very cheap. They… Continue reading Ask Slashdot: What’s The Most Useful ‘Nerd Watch’ Today?
VGA Monitor Becomes Drawing Toy
We hate to break it to [Rob Cai], but he’s built a VGA drawing toy, not an Etch-a-Sketch. How do we know? Simple, Etch-a-Sketch is a registered trademark. Regardless, his project shows how an Arduino can drive a VGA monitor using the VGAx library. Sure, you can only do four colors with a 120×60 resolution, but on the other hand, it requires almost no hardware other than the Arduino (you do need four resistors).
The hardware includes two pots and with the right firmware, it can also play pong, if you don’t want to give bent your artistic side. You …read more
Turning Broken Toy Into Laser Target Practice
[Mathieu] wrote in with his laser target practice game. It’s not the most amazing hack in the history of hackery, but it’s an excellent example of the type of simple and fun things you can do with just a little bit of microcontrollering.
First off, the gun is a broken toy gun that used to shoot something other than red collimated light beams. The Arduino knockoff inside reacts to a trigger pull and fires the laser for around 200 milliseconds. The gun also has a “gas gauge” that fills up with repeated shots and cools down over time. And therein …read more
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Cheap Toy Airboat Gets a Cheap R/C Upgrade
[Markus Gritsch] and his son had a fun Sunday putting together a little toy airboat from a kit. They fired it up and it occurred to [Markus] that it was pretty lame. It went forward and sometimes sideward when a stray current influenced its trajectory, but it had no will of its own.
The boat was extracted from water before it could wander off and find itself lost forever. [Markus] did a mental inventory of his hacker bench and decided this was a quickly rectified design shortcoming. He applied a cheap knock-off arduino, equally cheap nRF24L01+ chip of dubious parentage, …read more
Parent To The Power Wheels Rescue
If the [realjohnnybravo] is the one from the show, it appears he finally managed to get a girlfriend, marry her, and produce at least one son. As the old schoolyard rhyme goes, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes filling the whole *!$&# backyard with brightly colored plastic garbage. One of these items, a Power Wheels quad bike, suffered a blow from planned obsolescence leaving behind a traumatized child. [realjohnnybravo] decided to fix it.
He made frequent mention of how one could go to a store and purchase replacement gears for the toy. Perhaps it’s a German thing. Regardless, …read more
The Citadel is the King of K’nex Builds.
Following one’s passion can lead to amazing results. Sometimes this results in technological marvels; other times, one marvels at the use of the technology. An exemplary display of the latter is The Citadel.
Over the course of three years, redditor [Shadowman39] pieced together this monstrous K’nex structure. With over 17 different paths(!), 45 different elements, and over 40,000 parts, you would expect some meticulous planning to go into its construction — but that’s not the case! [Shadowman39] assembled it largely on the fly with only a few elements needing to be sketched out and only the main elevator proving to …read more
Reverse Engineering Quadcopter Protocols
Necessity is the mother of invention, but cheap crap from China is the mother of reverse engineering. [Michael] found a very, very cheap toy quadcopter in his local shop, and issued a challenge to himself. He would reverse engineer this quadcopter’s radio protocol. His four-post series of exploits covers finding the right frequency for the radio, figuring out the protocol, and building his own remote for this cheap toy.
[Michael] was already familiar with the capabilities of these cheap toys after reading a Hackaday post, and the 75-page, four language manual cleared a few things up for him. The ‘Quadro-Copter’ …read more
Watch How An iPhone was Hacked with a Simple Toy
By Waqas
While the FBI is almost begging Apple to let them
This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Watch How An iPhone was Hacked with a Simple Toy
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VU#719736: Fisher-Price Smart Toy platform allows some unauthenticated web API commands
The Fisher-Price Smart Toy does not perform proper authentication of some API commands,and it may also use a vulnerable version of Android. Continue reading VU#719736: Fisher-Price Smart Toy platform allows some unauthenticated web API commands