Oh boy. Just when I thought the forces of good would prevail, those crazy kids at MIT had to come up with a Warcart.
Basically a laptop or two and a bunch of WiFi antennas. The warcart was part of their presentation at DEFCON describing how they hacked the Boston metro system. It looks like they never actually got to present because a federal judge placed a restraining order on them. Checkout their presentation to find out why. It's actually a very good analysis of the problems with security as well as the low-level encoding of the magnetic stripe on the subways cards. Comon' - we all knew it was not encrypted all that well, they just sat down and documented it! Nice work!
TiVo let me down over the weekend and I failed to record the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games. Luckily, we got an email from a SparkFun user who pointed out this fantastic LED wall:
Basically a laptop or two and a bunch of WiFi antennas. The warcart was part of their presentation at DEFCON describing how they hacked the Boston metro system. It looks like they never actually got to present because a federal judge placed a restraining order on them. Checkout their presentation to find out why. It's actually a very good analysis of the problems with security as well as the low-level encoding of the magnetic stripe on the subways cards. Comon' - we all knew it was not encrypted all that well, they just sat down and documented it! Nice work!
TiVo let me down over the weekend and I failed to record the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games. Luckily, we got an email from a SparkFun user who pointed out this fantastic LED wall:
Supposedly powered by solar (did anyone else notice the solar panels are not facing the sun?), the 2,292 RGB LEDs demonstrate a pretty impressive control system.
Now for the new stuff at SparkFun...
The Icecube is a creative combination of a light pipe and a switch actuator. You've always wanted a button that could light up any color - the Icecube does this in style.
Liquidware is kind enough to let us carry their really neat OLED based TouchShield. Add full color and video to your next Arduino project.
We now carry a range of fun colored bread-boards. Why you ask? Why not?
9 new, low-cost, simple perf boards have been added. We especially like the 'wired' PCB that allows you to wire circuits together by cutting traces (subtractive) rather than soldering wires (additive).
Stick a GPS in it. We heard people were experimenting with GPS on the older iPhones and iTouches and thought we'd help out a bit. The GPS iPhone Module is not pretty, but it'll get NMEA GPS strings into the serial port on any iPhone or iTouch. The pet tracking application is left up to you.
Speaking of... If you need to add audio to your iTouch, here's the microphone for you - VOIP not included (but close).
I really wish they'd put the quarter back in some of these photos. This LCD is about 20 times larger than that microphone. This huge graphical LCD is 4x5" and weights more than half a pound. If you need to represent a lot of data to a user, from across a room, this large format LCD is for you.
I agree, coinage in the photos was a nice touch.
One question, who is the they in "I really wish they'd put the quarter back in some of these photos." I thought the SparkFun crew took the product pictures, no?
Us, we, the proverbial we, whatever. Yea - we take the photos. We'll try to get the quarter back in there. theChipmunk - We went to the agnostic ruler instead of a quarter because of some of the comments on the forum. We'll bring the quarter back when we think it's needed. A fifty pence would be cool to see though.
I also wish you'd get the quarters back in there!
...though if you feel like taking a rush of blood to the head and including a British fifty pence piece for all (two) of us in Northern Ireland, I'd appreciate it...
:-D
theChipmunk
Colored breadboards... is it possible to have translucent, not just opaque colors?
Cool idea - I'll ask around
Somehow your news post appeared in my RSS before you were done writing it :)
Yeah, I've noticed it too. It's been happening for a while. I've just learned to not load the post the second after it is created :)
Really? That's no good. I'll poke the ITs.