This looks like a fun little project. [Chris] has built a tank that he is controlling using his iPhone.  Constructed mainly of off the shelf parts, like an Arduino and an Xbee wireless unit, the tank is controlled via processing. You can see that it is fairly responsive as he changes the speed of the motors. You don’t need an iPhone for this, really to do exactly what he’s doing any multi-touch input would work. You can download the code for it from his site.

We’re a bit curious about the solar charging. How much power does this use? Doesn’t that panel look a bit small? How long does it take to charge?

[via HacknMod]

Why take an iPhone, a slim device that already takes decent photographs and add several macro magnifying lenses? For [Mathijs], simply because he could, But now he can take some awesome macro pictures.

[Bhautik] (maker of the tilt-shift Plungercam) took the concept further. With some more trademark plumbing supplies and a lot of duct tape, secured an interchangeable SLR lense assembly to the back of his iPhone.

Check out some photos from both setups after the break.

[Mathijs']

[Bhautik's] (Before hack/After)

[Jesus Alvarez] sent us this funny little project. If you happen to have an iPhone and an old Apple Newton, you can use the iPhone as a keyboard for the Newton. You can download the schematic from his site to build the wire to connect the two. After that, you have to run an app on your iPhone that you can find once you’ve jailbroken your phone. At that point you are ready to go. Aside from the ability to say you could, we’re not sure why you would do this. It made us chuckle though. Maybe we’re not firing on all synapses though due to turkey overload.

The chill of autumn is upon us, and with it comes the awkward sport of trying to work touch-sensitive phones and gadgets with gloved fingers. One can try toughing it out with fingerless gloves, or we’ve seen some costly solutions in the forms of specialized gloves and capacitive-compatible styluses, but sometimes simple is best: all it takes is a few stitches of conductive thread in the fingertips.

Conductive thread is available from various sources; SparkFun Electronics comes naturally to mind, but most vendors carrying the LilyPad Arduino will stock a suitable thread as well. Don’t fret if you’ve never sewn before — just a few simple loops are required, and it doesn’t need to be especially tidy. In principle this should work for trackpads and capacitive mice as well, if you use those in the field. For multitouch devices, add a separate conductive bit to each fingertip.

[via Lifehacker]

This is happening because Iphone users are unlocking features to use their Iphone with another companies.

This virus was detected first time in Holland and is attacking those Iphones which were unlock and disabled some security features that were installed in the device. This malicious virus is called Duh Worm.

When Iphone users were trying to access to any banking site, Duh Worm direct the explorer (safari) to a similar place but this place is controlled by hackers with bad intention.

We’re filing this one under “best interface implementation”. This robot is controlled by finger gestures on the surface of an iPod Touch. It can walk forward, turn, sidestep, jump, and kick a ball based on the input it receives from your sweaty digits. Unlike vehicles controlled by an iPhone (or by Power Wheels), this has some potential. Especially considering the inevitable proliferation of multi-touch devices in our everyday lives.

Here’s one that brings back that giddy feeling we got when the original episodes of thebroken were posted all those years ago. The lunatics over at Waterloo Labs have altered a beat-up Oldsmobile for remote control via laptop, iPhone, and…. wait for it… Power Wheels.

Brake and gas pedals are actuated using a wrench connected to a motor bolted to the floorboards of the car. The steering wheel has been replaced with a gear and connected to a motor using a motorcycle chain. Much like the van we saw last month, an iPhone app has been written to wirelessly control the car of doom. This leads to some car surfing and ghost riding the whip in the video after the break.

To our delight, they’ve also implement the most unorthodox automotive interface yet, Power Wheels. A chain has been added to measure the orientation of the toy steering wheel, and an optical encoder is used to measure the speed of the tiny electric vehicle. It looks like it doesn’t do the best job of translating to a full size vehicle, but it maxes out their style points.

Related: thebroken

Here’s further proof that you should understand what it is you’re doing when you go to hack your handheld. Jailbreaking an iPhone has been made quite easy to the point that a lot of folks do it without reading any of the accompanying documentation. Those who didn’t heed the warning to change the default SSH password on a Jailbroken phone might get a bit of a surprise. A worm has been unleashed that finds Jailbroken iPhones and changes the background image to a picture of [Rick Astley]. That’s right, they’ve been Rickrolled.

It’s a clever little devil that propagates by grabbing the IP address of the iPhone it is currently on, then testing all of the IP address in that family to find other devices using the default password. Luckily this worm’s activities are not what we’d call malicious. It doesn’t format the root or create a cell based bot-net (that we know of). This would be akin to the antics of searching Google for unprotected installations of MythWeb and setting some poor schmuck’s MythTV to record every infomercial ever. The point is, this could have been a lot worse, but the attack is predicated on stupidity. In our digital age, why are people leaving default passwords in place?

Sure making a robot that plays the game RockBand for you seems a little cheap at first, but no human can possibly hit that 30 triplet note straight ending in a button mashing contest. To finally get his high score [Joe] made a setup to play the game for him, on the iPhone. We’ve seen some very different Guitar Hero hacks before, but none that had to get around the touch capacitance screen on the iPhone. What version of the game should be hacked next? We think Football Hero would be a good start.

[via Make]

[Emuboy] lets us know about some software advances that will make iPhone and iPod Touch syncing possible under Linux. Apple made big changes to how the iPhone syncs compared to legacy iPods. Locking out all communications other than through iTunes was surely part of their motivation. This has left Linux users out in the cold with shoddy sync capabilities which should be coming to an end. If successful, syncing will be be possible with phones that have not been jailbroken.

One of the biggest hurdles in reverse-engineering the new protocol is the non-standard way in which the devices communicate over USB. The usbmuxd developers have been working to implement communications and now have a Release Candidate for the 1.0.0 version. Along with testing of this package, libgpod is now being updated to play nicely with the new database format and hash of the iPhone.

This isn’t quite at the plug-and-play level of convenience yet but if you’re comfortable working with Linux packages you should be able to get this working and help report any bugs you might find. But if you’re tired of open source playing cat and mouse with Apple you can always switch over to a device based on Android.

The Spirit of Berlin team has developed an iPhone app to remotely control a minivan. They didn’t have to do much to the vehicle to get this working because the platform was  developed for the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge. The iPhone connects with the driving circuitry via WiFi and offers a gas button, a brake button, and a steering button to enable the accelerometer for turning. The front camera video is transmitted to the iPhone in real-time.

In the picture above you can see the operator in the center of the van’s camera view. It looks like the van’s top speed is limited, but remembering our own ineptitude in piloting RC vehicles, we hope this doesn’t result in a Darwin Award. We’ve embedded a video after the break. Everyone loves to see some Mario Kart reeneactment. You can catch some around 2:28 into the video. Enjoy.

[Thanks Miketron]

[John Boiles] introduces us to dimlet, his portable network controlled light dimmer. Inside the box is a fonera 2100 router that is running openWRT connected to an unnamed AVR microcontroller. Right now, he’s controlling the unit with his iPhone. It has three modes of control; a manual “slider” mode, an accelerometer controlled “dance” mode, and a programmable “tap” mode. You can download all the source code and schematics on his site.

[via Makezine]

We can’t say we’ve had problems typing on our iPhones here at HackaDay, must be the elfin fingers, but for [Ben Kurtz] it was a real pain. The obvious solution is to carry around an Arduino, 9 volt battery, iPhone breakout board, a ps2 keyboard, and of course the iPhone itself. Well, maybe it could be a little smaller with fewer parts, but at least it works. The Arduino reads input from the keyboard and converts it to serial, then the iPhone pulls the data via VNC. Like we said, a little roundabout, but we love the amount of ingenuity involved.

Ever wish your iPod touch or older generation iPhone had GPS capability? Now it can by using a Bluetooth GPS module along with the roqyGPS app.

In April we saw a pretty creative way to add GPS to an iPod by using a homebrew accessory. The new app is a better solution because it utilizes the larger screen and more functional UI of the iPod touch. We’re glad to see this come along because we’d rather not upgrade to the iPhone 3G just to get GPS support. roqyGPS has a fairly long supported hardware list, which should make it relatively inexpensive to pick up a GPS module either on sale or second-hand.

We’ve got a video of the release candidate after the break. As always, we’d like to hear from anyone already using this so please leave your thoughts in the comments.

[Tim] wanted to make some recordings of himself driving similar to those made by the dashboard cameras on police cars.  In a simple two step hack (1. Measure, 2. Drill), he altered his iPhone windshield mount so that it didn’t block the lens of the camera. We will admit (sheepishly) that at first glance we thought this might be connected to the outside of the windshield but it’s not. Take a look at his drive to work after the break.

Last week we saw a rotating iPhone dock built from Lego. This week we’re happy to put up another example of a dock made of these popular building blocks. Thank goodness this one takes into account all of the sudden jolts that our desk is prone to by incorporating shock absorbing springs. The design is very sleek with a jazzy red scheme and a less-is-more attitude. We are a bit concerned about our expensive hand held falling out but then again that’s what the springs are for. Who can be the first to put together a step-by-step guide for building this one?

[via Engadget]

The iPhone doesn’t have the market cornered on the use of accelerometers. The tiltphone project incorporates a three axis accelerometer into a set of headphones transforming them into a remote control for an iPod. A PIC16F690 reads in data from the analog sensor, translates specific movements into commands, and like the Arduino iPod Remote from last week, relays them to an iPod via the Apple Accessory Protocol. A quick nod left or right skips tracks, holding a sideways nod controls the volume, and setting the headphones down pauses.

This project is a bit older but we’re glad [anon] tipped us off as we hadn’t seen it before. There doesn’t seem to be any code or schematics available but because the Apple Accessory Protocol is known, it’s only a matter of working out how to interpret the sensor data. There is video after the break and if you pull off this hack yourself be sure to send in details for a followup.

After making it to the top 20 in most regions, Apple has removed the c64 emulator for the iPhone from the App Store. Apparently the thorough app review process didn’t discover that the BASIC system had not been removed from the app, but was instead merely hidden.

Another revision of the emulator has been submitted for review but how long will that take?  What is the review process for if they’re not looking deep enough to find specific functions they don’t want an app to have? Approving apps and pulling them a few days later is another Hot Coffee waiting to happen.

[POCKET GAMER via Slashdot]

Hot on the heels of the aluminum dock and the Lego camera mount, [Steve] sent in his iPhone/iPod Touch dock made out of Lego bricks. It’s very stylish with a black and grey theme but we think the function makes this DIY spectacular. In the design [Steve] has included the ability to rotate the cradle so that the iPhone can be presented either vertically or horizontally. A step-by-step guide is not yet available but resourceful Lego lovers should be able to build this using his flickr set.

After a lengthy process that had previously met with rejection, Manomio’s Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone and iPod touch has finally been accepted by Apple. This marks the first time a multi-purpose emulation title has been approved by the App Store. The $4.99 C64 app comes bundled with five fully-licensed classic games, and additional titles can be purchased and downloaded directly within the application.

App Store policies prohibit software that could run downloadable code, which barred most emulation attempts in the past. A couple of Sega titles worked around this by nature of being single-purpose emulators. The condition by which the C64 title was finally approved was the removal of the BASIC programming language (though ironically it’s still shown in screen shots, even on the App Store). Since only sanctioned programs can be installed and run from within the application, no user-alterable code is present.

The C64 emulator is neat enough in itself, but the really encouraging news here is that a precedent has been set; the business model may open the floodgates for developers to bring more classic gaming titles to the iPhone platform. So download that SDK and get hacking!

[via TouchArcade]

Update: The iPhone Blog has a simple work-around for accessing BASIC!

Update 2: App pulled, no surprise. If you jumped on the opportunity while it was available, [George’s] comment might be of interest.

Last week we mentioned an article to cover up that ugly iPod dock; [Jozerworx] did one better by creating his own iPhone dock entirely. He had access to a machine shop where he combined some spare aluminum with an existing iPhone connection cable, but mentions the dock could probably be created with basic hand tools and a power drill. The design is quite minimalist and we would go as far as to say it has that shiny-and-made-by-apple-so-I-have-to-buy-one look. Alternatively, frosted acrylic with some leds would probably look pretty cool too, maybe it would blink whenever there is activity. What kind of dock would you hack?

[Marco Tempest] has developed some software called MultiVid that allows synchronized video across multiple iPhone or iPod Touch devices. For this to work, all of the devices must be connected to the same WiFi network. Playback can be controlled from any one of the iPhones/iPod Touches or from the Mac running the controller software. There is of course the option of connecting to larger monitors through a video output cable. The app also supports OSC. We’ve embedded the example video as well as a video detailing the software setup after the break.

The client software is available at the apps store and controller software can be downloaded from [Marco's] website. Both are free which is our favorite price point.

Example video of MultiVid in action

How to setup and use MultiVid

[Thanks tommEE]

Update 9/6/09: We contacted Marco because this app was MIA from the App Store. He responded promptly to let us know that his app is “still in approval limbo”. He’s going to contact us when it is approved and we’ll be sure to pass on the update to you.

There are so many apps available for the iPhone, one might even say there are a plethora. We would like to take a moment to help you find a few that might help with your hacking projects. Ever have problems remember a formula when you need it? Need to track the acceleration of your brand new rover? How about beginners needing help remember resistor codes. Well, there’s an app for that. Check out our suggestions after the break.

Here at Hack A Day, we are strong believers in frugality. We think most hackers are. With that in mind, lets start off with our recommendations of free applications to get the job done. These are in no particular order.

The iPhone camera: Not only is this free, its already on your iPhone. yeah, we know its not a great camera, but it is indispensable. Taking apart a project? Snap some pics along the way so you can refer back to them when you reassemble. Project ready for testing? Document it quickly and easy with pictures. Project burst into flames on the tarmac? Snap a pic for posterity. We love the camera.

Electrical toolkit: Even the most experienced hackers need a little help  sometimes. Need to find the SCR Firing angles this app can help with that.

Electronics toolkit: Another app meant to help us find the missing pieces to a circuit. This one has some different circuits than the Electrical toolkit above.

iResist: Maybe you never committed the resistor codes to memory, or maybe you’re a beginner just learning. Either way, this appears to be a pretty useful application. Simply select the appropriate colors and it will tell you the value of your resistor.

ResistorCode: Another resistor code application. This one has the ability to do up to 6 band resistors. We listed both because some people really have a preference between the text selection or color selection. We like the more robust feature set of this one.

LED resist: Who hasn’t been left scratching their head when wiring LEDs? This handy little app will help you figure out what resistance value is needed to keep those LEDs functioning optimally.

Runkeeper free: Runners have been raving about this one for a while now. It will track your time, distance, GPS location, and speed. You can view your path on a google map. We’re not exactly sure what project would merit this, but it just seems perfect for tracking rovers or measuring experimental vehicle performance.

Though we do love the free applications, sometimes things just merit a little payment. We really only found 2 apps that we thought could be useful enough to pay for when it comes to hacking.

Formula Pro: We don’t care how l337 of a hacker you are. You simply can’t know everything. This application is a compendium of the most common formulas needed for Engineering, Optics, Thermodynamics, Electronics and much more. There are over 680 formulas out of the box, with features like the ability to modify and save formulas or even add your own. At 1.99, this is a steal.

Accelleration 3d detector: This feature rich acceleration detector will log and chart in 3d your acceleration information. You can even download the results to your computer for inspection. Though we have concerns about the destruction of our iPhone, this just seems like it would be a great tool in a pinch for finding out some acceleration data.

Lastly, we understand that no project goes perfectly. Sometimes you are so frustrated and your brain is so fried, you just can’t function. It is times like these that Bubble Snap comes to the rescue. There are no rules, just the soothing pleasure of popping bubble wrap. Careful though, your kids or significant others might get addicted to this one and steal your phone.

Well, those are our favorites. What do you use? Did we miss any? The iPhone is supposed support accessories with the latest iteration, are there any must have accessories for the hacker?

Vonage has promised to release an official iPhone app to compete with other providers such as Skype, and it is currently working its way through Apple’s well documented approval process. Unfortunately, this app would most likely come with an initial cost and/or subscription fee, though a way has been figured out to retrieve Vonage’s SIP authentication information, which would allow use of the Vonage network over other iPhone SIP Clients such as Fring. This solution does still contain the Wi-Fi only clause, but we have ways of making you talk, iPhone. This could also possibly be used on other platforms with SIP clients such as Android or WinMo.

Not so long ago, mapping WiFi required a laptop, GPS, a big antenna and Kismet/NetStumbler. Today’s smartphones have replaced even this task. For those of us running a GPS and WiFi equipped Windows Mobile phone, WiFiFoFum is an excellent and simple solution, as well as a great companion for installing an AP. Start up WiFiFoFum, put your phone on the dash and let it collect the locations of the APs you find while driving around. You can then save the file in several formats: XML, txt, Wi-scan, POI Database, MemoryMap, Netstumbler, and even as a KML File for Google Earth/Google Maps. We have also found it to be a really handy tool for setting up WiFi in a large area, to help find the best home for the router which provides the best coverage. WiFiFoFum is also available for the iPhone via the App Store.