Citizen Engineer Inspires (Vicarious) Hardware Hackers

No time to hack? Don't know which end of your soldering iron is hot? Well, check out Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone's fabulous new video series, Citizen Engineer, a fun and thought-provoking show about hardware hacking.

In Volume One, Fried (also known as Ladyada) and Torrone demonstrate SIM card and pay phone hacking. For the former, Ladyada shows how to decode the cards and even decrypt the secret code that authenticates the call. (Not coincidentally, she offers a SIM reader kit in her online store.) The second part shows her popping open a Western Electric payphone to make it work with Skype, and playing around with the payment system. She even adapts the phone to allow her to red box it.

If that weren't geeky enough, Citizen Engineer features digital art made with open source Processing and music made with Ladyada's x0xb0x synthesizer.


Citizen Engineer from citizen engineer on Vimeo.

A Home Lab/Shop For Kids?

Slashdot contributor "sharp-bang" put the following question to the supernerds who follow the site:

When I was growing up, my Dad let my brother and I have the run of his wood shop, and kept up a steady stream of Lego kits, Estes model rockets, chemistry sets, Heathkit projects, and other fun science stuff from the Edmund Scientific catalog, and the rest was history. I'd like to give my kids that kind of experience. If your kids were interested in science, computers, robots, and building stuff, how would you build and outfit a lab/shop for them (and you) to play in?

Check out the responses. Many of them are tongue-in-cheek but a many responders left thoughtful comments.

So what about you? How would you equip your child's lab for maximum geekification?

Photo by Ladyada (cc)

Test & Take at Studio Bricolage

Someone donated a monster pile of electronic components to Minneapolis' awesome maker space Studio Bricolage. They needed geeks to play around with it and take stuff home. About eight of us answered the call.

There was a lot of junk, to be sure, but there were treasures to be found. One lucky father-and-son team snagged a working oscilloscope. There were six big infrared lasers. I opened up one with my handy dandy 100-piece screwdriver set and we all gathered around and geeked out over the guts, finding the solenoid shutter and the focusing chassis. The actual laser was an unassuming tic-tac-box-sized block of metal with a large copper heat sink on top. Another gem was an awesome control board for a CC camera system, though I regretfully passed on it. I did snag 3 of the cameras, however.

Of course there were countless smaller prizes like switches and old resistors. I grabbed a bunch of stuff I wouldn't normally have, figuring I could spice up my contribution to the TGIMBOEJ I'm sending out next week.

One of the best part of the experience was listening to 96-year-old telecom engineer Rob Pratt telling stories of pre-WWII phreaking, and discussing technologies that were obsolete even before the end of the war.

1-31-07 Never Forget!

To celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Panic, certain persons of a geeky repute have set up mock LED boards with caricatures of Bush, Zebbler and Bin Laden flipping passers-by the bird. Apparently small stickers inform panic-prone authorities that the boards aren't bombs. Phew!

Via Make.

Toy Hacking Workshop

I'm guessing at least a couple Robosapiens are busted already. Or maybe last year's gifts are long forgotten and destined for the trash bin. Well, what better to do with the junk than pop it open and play with its electronics?

For those who are too scared or success-oriented to DIY, there's a cool-sounding Toy Hacking workshop being held in London this month.

Don’t know what to do with those spare toys lying around post-Christmas season? This workshop just might be the thing for you. After a successful Pimp my Gadget workshop in Budapest, we have the pleasure of having Adam Somlai Fisher and Massimo Banzi lead his 2 day fun workshop during which you will be doing some wire bending, learn about basic electronics and hack toys!

Put on by Tinker.it, a "technology and design consultancy" with offices in London, Milan and Amsterdam, they also offer workshops on Processing and Arduinos. No electronic knowledge is necessary but you do need to bring a laptop and a toy to hack. Tickets are 90 pounds or 75 for students.

What I wanna know is, why can't we get cool workshops like this around where I live?

(Note, the picture is of a similar event put on for students of the Willem de Kooning Academy.)

Photo by Danja Vasiliev

GeekKid Survival Tool: DIY Magstripe Reader

I bought a beer at the Twins game the other day and the concession worker scanned my driver's license into her computer to verify my age. But what else did she get? My social security number? My street address?

No idea.

The sad fact of the matter is that our personal info is being bandied about by all sorts of companies, and this is only going to get worse as our geekkids grow up.

The best thing we can do to prepare them to guard their privacy is to show them how to read what's on their cards. That means a magstripe reader... basically the same thing as those little boxes that cashiers use to scan credit cards. But since we're geekdads, let's not buy one, let's make one!

So, where to begin? Blogger Tim Matheson has step-by-step instructions on his site. Refined from a 2600 Magazine article, Matheson details how to create a magstripe reader from a cassette player head, a 3.5 mm mono phone plug and a soldering iron. Helping your geekkids with this project will teach basic electronic theory as well as keep them informed of what's going on in those mysterious black strips.

Note that there may be laws in your area restricting "tampering" with magstripes, so do your research beforehand.

DIY Bike LEDs

Doubtlessly you've seen all those cool pix from the Maker Faire showing the amazing LED displays on bike wheels. The only thing cooler than having such a gadget is building it first! Hacker and electrical engineer Limor Fried (a.k.a. Ladyada) has easy-to-solder kits available from her online store. Or, if you're more daring (or just component rich) she has free schematics, software and firmware available for download. Just the thing to get the kids to pick up the soldering iron!