1. DIY Multi-Room Wireless Music Remote

   
   With the help of some external hardware and a handheld wireless device such as an iPhone or iPod touch, you can build your own wireless music remote. It’s a bit spendy if you don’t already have an Iphone/iTouch and a router, but there’s a step by step tutorial to guide you through the setup build.

2. DIY iPhone Controlled Car (Complete Control)

   These guys took an iPhone and using a special app, the onboard GPS and Wifi along with some serious modding they managed to make a life size R/C car. I bet it was difficult to drive using the six-axis in the iPhone but it’s still a great mod. Learn how it was done in an upcoming post. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

3. iPhone Controlled Mazda (without gas and break)

   By tapping into his car’s onboard wifi and diagnostic systems, this hacker can control his car from anywhere in the world.  He’s able to start the engine, pop the trunk, lock/unlock, and view all vehicle diagnostics from his iPhone. As seen in the video, electronic controls are housed in the trunk along with an Arduino to help process commands.

4. How to View your Webcam on your iTouch or iPhone

   

   In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to watch a live feed from your webcam on your iPhone or iPod touch from anywhere in the world. Setup is pretty simple, basically just download and install a windows program and the necessary app and you’re ready to stream live.

5. Build a Solar-powered iPhone Charger

   

   How many times has your cell phone died in the middle of the day because of its lousy battery life? You have several options: you could recharge via wall socket, via USB, through an external battery or the green way, with a DIY solar iPhone charger. Don’t forget to pick up any needed supplies for this build (including solar panels) at our store!

6. Make a Laser Matrix Projector for the iPhone

   
   The idea is to add some kind of projector capability to mobile phone (e.g. iPhone) that isn’t too complex or expensive. Instead of using an expensive mini projector, I decided to use lasers instead to any bitmap font using a matrix of laser points, which is controlled by iPhone.

7. How to: iPhone as a Wireless Router for your Laptop

   Transform your iPhone into a wireless router, allowing you to connect your wifi deprived laptop to the internet anywhere phone service is available. It’s also perfect when you’re browsing the web but the small screen is too cramped. Now you can easily switch over to your laptop for a larger viewing window.

8. RC Car Controlled Via the Web

   

   Strap on a standard Linksys router to an RC car and you can wirelessly control it through the web from up to 1640 feet away. It’s also equipt with a webcam and operates through a brain comprised of PIC microcontrollers or the Arduino’s ATmega168. The in depth tutorial will guide you through the build.

9. Home Automation Using the iPhone and X10

   Like most people, we’re huge fans of home automation. We’ve even covered quite a few ways people have used Twitter to automate your home. This time, however, we’ll be automating our homes by managing SmartHome’s X10 home automation modules using the iPhone.

10. The Rockband Robot iPhone.

    This guy obviously wanted to break a world record in Rockband because he built a robot to attach to his iPhone that plays it perfectly for him. It works by light sensors telling the prosthetic fingers when a note is coming up and driving a motor to press the screen and thus play the note.

Honorable Mention: How to disassemble the iPhone and unleash your hardware hacking skill.

More iPhone Projects:

• Jailbreak and Unlock iPhone 3.1.2
• iPhone Controlled USB Missile Launcher
• How to Build a Simple iPhone Tripod Mount

Since Apple’s newest upgrade, not even the iPhone dev team (the group who is famous for jailbreaking the iPhone) has been able to crack it…Until now.  Now you can crack the newest version of the iPhone OS 3.1.2 and you can jailbreak previous versions as well, allowing you to use the iPhone with Verizon, Sprint, T-mobile, or any network of your choice.  If all else fails, you can actually unlock the iPhone by hacking the hardware, but that’s quite a bit more complicated.

*Update* Correction: You can jailbreak it and not unlock it quite yet.

You may also enjoy:

• Build a Solar-powered iPhone Charger
• How to: iPhone as a Wireless Router for your Laptop
• How to View your Webcam on your iTouch or iPhone

The Concept

The idea is to add some kind of projector capability to mobile phone (e.g. iPhone) that isn’t too complex or expensive. Instead of using an expensive mini projector, I decided to use lasers instead to any bitmap font using a matrix of laser points, which is controlled by iPhone.

The Hardware

The hardware contains 3 basic parts:

• 5×7 laser matrix
• 5 8-bit D-type latches (SN74LVTH573PW) to control the total 35 laser pointers
• Microcontroller (PIC16F722) to control the decoder and manage the serial communication with iPhone – grab the code.

The laser modules can emit 650nm red laser light, with power consumption of 2~5 mW. Since the laser light is very narrow, any tiny movement is misalignment alters the matrix. So the tricky part is how to position the total 35 laser lights in parallel. I drilled the holes in a plain PCB board, and placed our lasers into the holes.

The Software

The micro-controller software is fairly strait forward, it just waiting for command sent by iPhone via the serial port, and execute the command by controlling the 5 latches. It’s that simple and could be done with the Arduino if you wanted.

Here’s what the application looks like on the iPhone. You can type any message to be displayed with the lasers. Amazing displays can be made using lasers. It won’t be long before similar projectors are used to project the best casino using iPhone technology. With laser projectors the skies aren’t the limits.

The iPhone side software is a bit more complex. Apple just added the serial port support in its iPhone SDK 3.0 beta. However, I’m still using the old iPhone 2.2 firmware and haven’t bothered to upgrade yet. So I used an unorthodox way to implement the serial port communication. Basically, I grabbed the IOKit framework from iPhone and load it into Xcode, so that the program no is able to access the /dev/tty.iap. Looking back on it, it’s probably better to use the built in 3.0 SDK serial.

After establishing serial communication, the rest is fairly easy, just send out the commands to eLaser hardware and illuminate the laser lights.

The End Result:

If you wanted, you could put more powerful lasers in your matrix and project on the sides of buildings from a few hundred yards away.

It’s only a matter or time before people hook their laser controllers up to their iPhones and play online bingo on the wall. It’s an interesting concept one that is surely attainable.

Video Demo:
(I had some issues getting the keyboard to come up

This post was submitted by a Hack N Mod fan, just like yourself. If you’d like to earn money from your projects, feel free to contact us.

How many times has your cell phone died in the middle of the day because of its lousy battery life? You have several options: you could recharge via wall socket, via USB, through an external battery or the green way, with a DIY solar iPhone charger. Don’t forget to pick up any needed supplies for this build (including solar panels) at our online store!

Don’t forget to check out our other iPhone hacks

• Home Automation Using the iPhone and X10
• Car Hacking: iPhone Controlled Mazda
• iPhone Controlled USB Missile Launcher

In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to watch a live feed from your webcam on your iPhone or iPod touch from anywhere in the world.  Setup is pretty simple, basically just download and install a windows program and the necessary app and you’re ready to stream live.

What You’ll Need:

1. WebcamXP Pro
2. iPod touch or iPhone
3. An app called “I-C-Livecams“

How to Setup your Streaming Webcam:

• The first thing you should do is download “i-c-livecams” from the app store and install WebcamXP Pro on your computer. Of course, be sure your webcam is plugged in and you see your webcam’s live feed on webcamXP.
• Click the web/broadcast tab on WebcamXP to show you your IP address and the port that it’s using.

Setting it up:

1. On your iTouch/iPhone start up i-c-livecams.
2. In the private icons section select your iPod or iPhone’s name. (Ex: my ipods name is “Matt’s ipod”)
   
   
3. Choose “Add a new WebcamXP Camera”
4. Fill in your IP address and your port with the correct information from the web/broadcast tab on WebcamXP. You can name your camera anything you want, if you set a username and password on Webcam XP then also fill in the correct information.For example: Name: Living Room Host or IP address: 0.0.0.0  port: 80 Camera #: 1

   

If all of the information you provided on i-c-livecams was correct you should now be online and watching the live feed on your ipod or iphone.

• Home Automation using the iphone and X10
• How to make your own ringtones
• DIY Multi-Room Wireless Music Remote

Here’s an absolutely outstanding project about how to make a DIY Ratchet and Clank gun which doubles as a sweet iPod amp.  We’ve seen a few similar projects such as a Nerf gun turned into a Gears of War lancer and also a handheld portal gun.  The author does a great job salvaging materials for the project including:

Basic Materials:

• LED lights – Three seen in the front of the gun.
  
• Raw speaker – Goes inside the main tube.
  
• Empty ink cartridges – Grey things on sides of the red tube.
• Batteries – Also inside the main tube to power the amp.
  
• PVC Pipe – Main tube of the gun.

Check out the full Ratchet and Clank tutorial and be sure to stay updated through our RSS feed.

Part’s you’ll need:

1. iPhone or iPod touch: $199 (8GB iPhone minus wireless costs) or $299 (8GB touch)
2. Linksys WRT54GL Wireless Router: $50 (not the only supported router; see below)
3. Headphone-to-RCA Cable: $2 (local RadioShack)

We have plenty of other iPhone and Audio projects. Don’t miss out:

• iPhone Controlled USB Missile Launcher
• DIY Custom Guitar Hero Keyboard & Drum Controllers
• How to: Huge Christmas Music & Light Display

Not enough? See our other dead hard drive projects:

• Turn a hard drive into a sander/grinder
• Prevent a dead hard drive – automatically backup your data
• Make a dead hard drive clock

Learn to build custom speakers by installing bare speakers in two of the original iPods where the scroll wheels normally are.  Instead of gutting your old iPod, you can purchase iPod front panels and back panels on eBay for a few bucks.  Just add a simple amplification circuit and you’ve got yourself a pair of custom iPod speakers.

• How to Display Music as Light
• How to: Huge Christmas Music & Light Display
• More Creative Custom Speakers

Legend has it that if you put a dead hard drive in a freezer, pull it out and plug it in, it should run long enough to recover the data. Is it true? Indeed, it seems so.

While freezing the drive for a while extends life momentarily, the real trick is to run the hard drive while it’s in the freezer. Just throw in a water tight bag first, of course. Works pretty well with other gadgets including iPod hard drives too.

Evidence:

• Two techs encounter an uncooperative drive, this is their epic recovery story.
• More stories of how freezing a hard drive brought it back from the dead.

Note, this only temporarily extends the life of the device, allowing you to recover data before it completely dies.

More Hard Drive Hacks:

1. Encrypt your Entire Hard Drive
2. Salvage Rare Magnets from a Hard Drive
3. Recover lost Hard Drive Partitions