MightyOhm

MayorMike, inspired by the article I wrote for Make vol. 20 (Retro Wireless Handset), stuck a bluetooth headset in a plastic toy gun to create his Handgun Bluetooth Earpiece Project.  The best part – the earphone is located at the end of the barrel, so to answer a call, you stick it up to your ear.  Genius.

The innards are shown below.

Nice work, MayorMike!  May I suggest that you pair this with a Hand Grenade MP3 Player?

via BoingBoing

I didn’t know at the time that I was being recorded, but here’s a somewhat low quality video of the Retro Bluetooth Handset talk I gave on Sunday of the 2010 Bay Area Maker Faire.

The talk starts about 7 minutes into the video, so skip ahead unless you want to watch John Edgar Park of Make: television greet his fans.

Enjoy!

Hack a Day posted yesterday that a guy named Ross turned his 50MHz Rigol DS1052E into a 100MHz capable instrument by removing part of a lowpass filter on the analog inputs.

I think it remains to be seen whether there are any other mods required to make this work like a real DS1102E (ie. does the 1052E firmware limit the minimum horizontal timescale?) but this is hardware hacking at its finest!

Read more about it on the EEVblog forums.

Bill Owens recently shot a couple photos of the Samsung WEP470 Bluetooth headset, aka the $3 Woot Headset.

This headset looks like a great platform for hacking, but to my knowledge noone has turned one into a Retro Wireless Handset yet…

There is some more info about the WEP470 in the forums.

This weekend I am attending the European hacker conference Hacking at Random.  HAR takes place every four years at a former socialist youth-camp about an hour away from Amsterdam in the beautiful Netherlands.

Rather than fly directly to HAR, my wife and I decided to make a larger vacation out of our trip, and we have been busy touring Europe for over a week now.  We still have over a week left, so expect slow updates until I return and have a chance to catch up!