Tag: project

Nerf Hacking Notes

My kids asked me, yet again, to fix busted Nerf darts. There’s a few sitting here beside me waiting for cyanoacrylate as I type this in fact. One or two have a plastic tip that is starting to separate, another has double splits down it’s shaft. This would be less of a big deal if we had more, but looking at the stores just walking around and Nerf replacements aren’t cheap!

This led me online and down the rabbit hole of DIY foam ammo, gun mods (dart post / air restrictor removals) and inevitably looking at DIY guns (which are very similar to the water guns). I collected the kid’s 3 Nerf guns, and started researching their hackability, to see if I could get the owner’s permission to upgrade their gun.

[Pictures coming soon, will edit the post and add them when I post them]
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RePhone, SIM testing and more keyboard hacking

This is a follow up on my previous RePhone Keyboard post.

My sim-card cutter arrived, so I chopped my pay-as-you-go sim card and got the phone activated. That process went remarkably smoothly, simply following the instructions provided with the card. I’m using a 711 Speakout card currently, but bought it before their new nano cards were released.

The phone itself as it is is very basic, but does that job just fine. The microphone seems to pick up sound ok, but the audio out seems very quiet by default even at full volume. After confirming the initial phone setup worked, I loaded my first version of the keyboard hack code onto the phone and sadly confirmed that my code didn’t work. 🙁

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RePhone Keyboard Hack.

So, I posted before about the RePhone stuff I’ve been playing with but here I’ll talk about one specific deficiency and the fix I’ve programmed and released to the wild.

The RePhone Kit Create software (source code on github) provides a very basic cellphone and Xadow module interface. By default, it provides the following interfaces:

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Introducing the RePhone!

A while ago, while my wife and I were doing that Modern Canadian Task we all love: What to do now that the cellphone contract is over?

I’ve been unhappy with the current cellphone/smrtphone/handheld computer options for a while, and have looked into building my own in various and sundry ways, but never got one done. With the end of the contract and the ability to do WTF we wanted with our old Blackberry’s and the contract, I thought I’d look again at the offerings available online. And that’s when I came across the RePhone Kickstarter.

Completed RePhone Kit Create
Completed RePhone Kit Create

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Entertainment Center

EntCent - Front

Finally got around to mounting the monitor on the VESA-mount arm I’ve had kicking around for ages.
Moved the Raspberry Pi to behind the wooden support, wired everything up and hid most of the wires behind the support.

EntCent - Back

The Pi is currently running OMSC, but basically only for the weather plugin right now. I have used it for watching videos, but the internal setup isn’t fixed yet and the games we play on the Homebrew-modded Wii.

Planned/Wanted updates include:

  • I would like to add a USB MPEG Encoder, HD/LD capable to encode things like VCR movies, stream Wii video games, but also accommodate upgrades and adding HD to the mix.
  • I want to create some power-adapter bits-and-pieces, so I can use a regular computer power supply to power the various USB/5V and 12V devices with a single device. Molex-USB female adapters anyone? 😉
  • I need a shorter HDMI-DVI24+1 cable.

Door Computer

Another use I had for a Small Board Computer was as a door security system. The Raspberry Pi with attached Adafruit touchscreen and camera would be perfect for this. Also add a magnetic sensor for “door open”, and a more general motion or even position sensor.

I actually got most of the way through the basics of this project. One of the problems I ran into was getting a clean picture to the rpi’s camera through the door’s existing peephole. It would probably be best to figure out a solution better suited to the camera, and just swap out eye-pieces when the door camera is installed (remembering to keep the original one for replacement if you ever need to).
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Balcony Computer

I’ve been thinking of how useful a little computer on the balcony would be. Not for any kind of interactive use, but for data collection and light controls and other such things. I thought I’d make up a list of these “such things”, to see what it would take to make it a reality.

The original seed for the idea was a weather station, just to see how cold and windy-ish it was, as well as barometric pressure readings. Since it’s on a covered balcony, the wind readings will be interesting but probably quite local. I’m also not going to worry about precipitation measuring, nor wind-direction measuring at first. It shouldn’t get much rain, nor will the direction of the wind be generally useful most of the time I don’t think. I’m certainly prepared to be wrong on that, but that’s what the prior versions will be for.
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DIY/Homemade Water Guns – Collected Thoughts

The heat of this summer (2015, Vancouver, BC Area), along with something that happened to my youngest child, prompted me to look into how to DIY a good water gun.

My youngest was at an end-of-the-school year party at a local park. The kids were told it was OK to bring water guns, yay! So we went out and bought a couple of cheap water guns. Long story short, my kid had fun, but was severely outgunned…

So I thought maybe I’d see if the internet had a solution to that. 😉
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