Tag Archives: Bluetooth

A Robot In A Day

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While building a robot (nearly) from scratch isn’t easy, it needn’t be a lengthy process.  Is it possible to build a bot in a single day? With some musical motivation (a 10 hour loop of the A-Team theme song), [Tyler Bletsch] answers with a resounding ‘yes’ in the shape of his little yellow robot that he built for a local robotics competition.

Designing and fabricating on the fly, [Bletsch] used Sketchup to design the chassis, and OpenSCAD to model the wheels while the former was being 3D printed. Anticipating some structural weakness, he designed another version that could …read more

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Easy DIY Telemetry Goes the Distance

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[Paweł Spychalski] wrote in to tell us about some experiments he’s been doing, using cheap 433 MHz HC-12 radio units as a telemetry radio for his quadcopter.

In this blog post, he goes over the simple AT command set, and some of the limitations of the HC-12 part. Then he takes it out for a spin on his quadcopter, and finds out that his setup is good for 450 meters in an open field. Finally, he ties the radio into his quad’s telemetry system and tethers the other end to his cellphone through a Bluetooth unit for a sweet end-to-end …read more

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It’s Up to Developers to Bring This Amazing Audio Wayfinding App to Blind People

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Wayfindr’s open standard will let developers world over have access to tech that lets the blind navigate their environment through sound. Continue reading It’s Up to Developers to Bring This Amazing Audio Wayfinding App to Blind People→

Add Bluetooth to a Cheap Electronic Lock

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[James] works from home. His office is filled with objects that can be described with adjectives such as, “expensive,” and, “breakable.” His home, however, is filled with professional object-breakers known as children. To keep these two worlds from colliding, he installed a keypad lock on his office door. The potential side-effect of accidentally training his children to be master safe-crackers aside, the system seems to work so far.

However, being a hacker, the tedium of entering a passcode soon grew too heavy for him. Refusing to be a techno-peasant, he set out to improve his lock. The first step was …read more

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Bluetooth Water Cannon Junk Build Shoots Into Our Hearts

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We’ve seen a few remote controlled turret builds in the past, but this one from [Noel Geren] is pretty neat: it shoots water and uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for control. Check it out in action in the video below.

[Noel] used the guts of a Nerf Thunderstrike water gun for the firing mechanism, combined with a 3D-printed enclosure and a servo that rotates the turret top. The pump from the gun is connected to a simple relay that replaces the trigger. Both the relay and the servo are connected to an RFDuino with a servo shield, which is programmed …read more

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VU#615456: Lemur Vehicle Monitors BlueDriver LSB2 does not authenticate users for Bluetooth access

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The Lemur Vehicle Monitors BlueDriver is an aftermarket automotive device that connects to a vehicle’s OBD-II port and provides information about the vehicle’s performance. The BlueDriver does not require a PIN for Bluetooth access,which allows anyone in range to send arbitrary commands to the vehicle’s CAN bus. Continue reading VU#615456: Lemur Vehicle Monitors BlueDriver LSB2 does not authenticate users for Bluetooth access→

Nanocounter: Frequency Counter with an Android UI

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Have you ever started a project, run into an issue, started a new project to solve the issue, and completely forgot about the original project? [Andy] went down a rabbit hole of needing a tool to calibrate an MCU oscillator, but not having an accurate way to measure frequency. Most people would just buy a frequency counter and be done with it, but [Andy] decided to build his own.

The Nanocounter is an accurate, open source frequency counter that uses an Android phone as its display. It’s based on a high accuracy temperature compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO) fed into a …read more

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