Sluggy Wind Speed Sensor

Sometimes when we look at a hack, its to see how someone chose those parts for the project. In this case, it would have been hard to see it coming. [Janne Jansson] decided to combine a set of measuring cups, a hacked Linksys NSLU2 NAS, and a PS/2 Mouse together to make a self-contained Wind Speed Sensor for his roof. The measuring cups act as wind catchers, which in turns drives the rotation of one of the mouse ball sensors. This data is then logged and transmitted by the NSLU2. The NSLU2 is running a custom Linux based firmware, similar to how OpenWRT works for wireless routers.
To calibrate the device, he also made the best logical choice: to duct tape it to the hood of his car along with a much more expensive wind sensor and use that data to make his own device as accurate as possible. When placed atop his house with a 1500VA 220V UPS, the device managed 250 days of uptime before meeting its demise. Those 250 days also included 5 days of being frozen solid, yet still transmitting (somewhat meaningless) data. All of the relevant code and build instructions are available, for those of you with similar parts to spare.

STK200 pocket change programmer

A common complaints of beginners to microcontroller programming is the availability of DIY tools that do not require a parallel port.  Using not much more than a couple of 74xx series chips and some protoboard, [Rue] was able to create an AVR programmer for less than the cost of some chips it can program – giving parallel programmers a run for thier money. [Rue] used Linux treat the ubiquitous PATA/IDE port as a parallel port. By having avrdude treat the programmer as an Atmel STK200, [Rue] was able to upload a blinky program to his AVR microcontroller through ISP. If anybody can think of an even lower cost unconventional solution give us a shout.

a face for radio

The help of fellow members of the Austrian technology collective/hackerspace [Otelo] allowed [Georg] to develop a networked audio streaming board, with less than $20 worth of components. Dubbed the OggStreamer for obvious reason, it’s designed to relay audio from a mixing board to an Icecast server (an open source implementation of SHOUTcast) in real-time. The board is based on the STM8 Discovery kit and the Xport Pro. It features stereo input, an onboard OGG Vorbis encoder, and (to top it off) is running uClinux. We think it’s very well thought out - but don’t take our word for it… the OggStreamer won second place last year in the Lantronix XPort Pro Design Contest, and [Georg] has documented it extensively (pdf).

Rotary dial authenticates sudo commands

[W1ndman] won’t win any security awards for this build, but it’s an interesting idea. On many Linux-based systems commands can be run with administrator privileges by prefacing them with the keyword ‘sudo’. Normally you’d be asked for a password but [W1ndman] used the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) to authenticate via his own shell script. That script checks a code from this rotary dial for authentication. An Arduino takes care of listening for each digit that is entered and then sends the code via USB for comparison with a stored file. We’re not sure if that stored code is in a plain file or is otherwise protected, but at the very least this prevents you from using ‘sudo’ willy-nilly.

Security Audit Kit in a Mouse

Sometimes it helps to have an entire set of tools with you to tackle a problem, and sometimes it helps to take the discreet route. [StenoPlasma] took the latter of these approaches, and stuffed a USB hub, a 16 GB flash drive, and an Atheros based USB wireless adapter into a regular looking USB mouse to make a Linux bootable system in a mouse. Because he chose the Atheros adapter, he is also capable of doing packet injection with tools like Aircrack-ng, which can invaluable in a security audit or (white hat) hacking situation.
This is the only photo we have, so it could be possible that the mouse is no more than a mouse, however we know all of what [StenoPlasma] claims is 100% possible, so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, and hope this inspires others to hack up your own mouse kits. Be sure to check out the full parts list after the break.