Category Archives: Elettronica

Arduino day 2015 – Telephone game

Arduino Telephone gameThis year’s Arduino day we left our hackerspace Crunchlab in the morning to spend the day with our friends from Trieste and help them in the opening of their hackerspace, the Mittelab.  After an evening filled with Arduino and soldering workshops, I was looking at all the arduinos left from the workshop and had a dumb idea: let’s play a telephone game! So I connected all the arduinos together, loaded a simple sketch and started throwing characters at them!

Continue reading Arduino day 2015 – Telephone game

The HackADay Prize 2015

The moment that every hacker has been waiting for has arrived!!! Today HackADay launched the HackADay Prize, a contest where the best product that can change the world will be awarded A FRIGGIN’ TRIP TO SPACE!

Last year I “lost”, well I wouldn’t call it losing as I scored an awesome t-shirt and got the chance to meet a lot of awesome people at the big event in Munich, but this year I’m in for the grand prize! And for that I must always be up to date with all the news about the contest, so I started to get my hands dirty and built this thing to print tweets from the HaD Prize account:

This years contest is all about green technology, so what better way to offset all that good will than printing all @hackadayprize tweets on paper?
Just kidding, I saved that printer from the dumpster and the paper I’m using would have gone to waste anyway; also, I was already using the back of the “discarded” paper to take notes! :)

I tried the ESP8266 modules as soon as they became available and made a few projects, but nothing to write HackADay about… Continue reading The HackADay Prize 2015

1337 c0nn3kt0r sk1llz

20141226_184246This article is part of a larger project to build a multi-purpose board that can replace a Nokia 3310′s mainboard.

Well, today I started testing the analog input circuitry. As you can see, I’m soldering wires directly from resistors to the connector. The casual observer may see this as being too lazy to route a proper connector on the PCB, but it’s really a very sophisticated way to relieve stress on the connector! :P

I also had to add a bodge flyback diode to the buzzer, as I forgot to include one… That’s the second error on the PCB: the other one is taking for granted that I could put two green LEDs in series. I’m too used to modern, super efficient LEDs, but since I’m reusing the original Nokia 12 years old LEDs, they need a bit more current and seem to have an higher forward voltage than the ones I use everyday.

Nokia 3310 firmware hacking

This article is part of a larger project to build a multi-purpose board that can replace a Nokia 3310’s mainboard.

Some history

A long time ago, (I felt like) I was the coolest kid on the block, with my heavily modified Nokia 3310. A thriving community existed with the purpose of reverse engineering Nokia DCT3 phone firmwares, creating from the simplest mods like changing a few bitmaps to writing a full alternative open source firmware, aka Project MADos. Yes, I was “cooking ROMs” before it was cool.

Continue reading Nokia 3310 firmware hacking