Posted by on under halloween sound effects, red butt, car horn, jack o lantern, pumpkin, stab, gadgets, possibilities, nbsp, halloween |

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Pumpkins outfitted with LEDs are certainly all
well and good, but the ever-versatile
Arduino platform has now upped the Jack O' Lantern modding possibilities considerably, and MAKE's Marc de Vinck looks to have made a decent stab at things with this immodestly dubbed "scariest pumpkin ever." To help it snag that title, de Vinck did away with the usual spooky halloween sound effects and instead opted for a
car horn, which lets out a blast whenever someone presses the impossible to resist red button. That, obviously, presents a number of problems, and MAKE warns not to leave the pumpkin unattended, or let someone press their ear up against it. Or, if you're not quite ready to tackle the project yourself, you can simply get a taste of it at a slightly more tolerable level by checking out the video after the break.
Continue reading Arduino-based pumpkin promises to scare off trick-or-treaters
Arduino-based pumpkin promises to scare off trick-or-treaters originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tagi: halloween sound effects, red butt, car horn, jack o lantern, pumpkin, stab, gadgets, possibilities, nbsp, halloween
Posted by on under halloween sound effects, red butt, car horn, jack o lantern, pumpkin, stab, gadgets, possibilities, nbsp, halloween |

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Pumpkins outfitted with LEDs are certainly all
well and good, but the ever-versatile
Arduino platform has now upped the Jack O' Lantern modding possibilities considerably, and MAKE's Marc de Vinck looks to have made a decent stab at things with this immodestly dubbed "scariest pumpkin ever." To help it snag that title, de Vinck did away with the usual spooky halloween sound effects and instead opted for a
car horn, which lets out a blast whenever someone presses the impossible to resist red button. That, obviously, presents a number of problems, and MAKE warns not to leave the pumpkin unattended, or let someone press their ear up against it. Or, if you're not quite ready to tackle the project yourself, you can simply get a taste of it at a slightly more tolerable level by checking out the video after the break.
Continue reading Arduino-based pumpkin promises to scare off trick-or-treaters
Arduino-based pumpkin promises to scare off trick-or-treaters originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read |
Permalink |
Email this |
Comments


Tagi: halloween sound effects, red butt, car horn, jack o lantern, pumpkin, stab, gadgets, possibilities, nbsp, halloween
Posted by planetbeing on under large data structures, iphe, ftl, comex, iboot, redundancies, dev team, underbrush, pumpkin, pointers, insight, job |

I don't know how I was talked into reversing a FTL, but we're actually on our way. I've managed to enlist the aid of CPICH (who has been helping with the lower layers as well, he's our human HexRays) and just recently, pumpkin, who you will know from the Dev Team. pumpkin will be the heavy support that's necessary to take down _FTLRestore, which is the most complex function I've seen in 1.1.4 iBoot (and I've pretty much have seen all of it). pumpkin is very good, so this task should be now be cut down to "fairly difficult" from "completely impossible".
The strategy so far has been me methodically hacking through the functions in the order that they are called, completely decompiling them, understanding them, and assimilating them into openiboot. Toward this end, I've been working on FTL_Open, which is a fairly large (but as it turns out, boring) function, but has been useful in enlightening us on several of the large data structures FTL uses.
Meanwhile, CPICH works on functions ahead of me, so that when I reach them, a lot of the thorny underbrush has been cleared out and my job becomes much easier and faster. Toward this end, he has been working on FTL_Read, which uses the data structures that the now-completed FTL_Open should populate.
_FTLRestore is sort of a "bonus", since it's not normally called if the iPhone was shut down normally and everything is cleaned up. However, since recovering faulty data structures require all redundancies to be exploited, reversing this would let us gain a lot of insight into how the FTL works. It's also, naturally, an enormously complex function, and hence I wisely delegated it to pumpkin. =P (We will probably end up working on it together)
The one thing that troubled me was that the code we were reversing is for 1.1.4 whereas we primarily need it to work on 2.0. However, due to the fact that I had it better mapped out than the 2.0 iBoot, and the fact that the equivalent 2.0 code was much more complex (lots of function pointers flying around, and a weird switch idiom I haven't quite figured out yet), We decided to stick to the 1.1.4 iBoot.
After completing FTL_Open, I had a bit of a panic when I discovered it did not work at all on my 2.1 phone, and I could not find any obvious bugs with it. This might've meant that all our work on 1.1.4's FTL was for naught. Forgoing sleep, I tore through the 2.1 iBoot, locating the analogues to my already reversed 1.1.4 functions (I had given up trying to trace through the function pointers the first time around), and called them directly with my special version of iBoot (patched so that one of the commands was able to call arbitrary iBoot functions with arbitrary arguments). I managed to find a couple of bugs with my VFL code, and after having fixed them, FTL_Open appears to have worked. I think. It just finds and reads several data structures from NAND. It remains to be seen if I'm even reading the right thing.
Now for some sleep.
Tagi: large data structures, iphe, ftl, comex, iboot, redundancies, dev team, underbrush, pumpkin, pointers, insight, job
Posted by planetbeing on under e mail address, usb serial cable, slush fund, sparkfun, th project, iphe, paypal address, coue, piz, mths, media sources, mth, binge, pumpkin, late night, datis, butt, donations, bas |

A couple of people asked for a donate button of some sort. I hesitate because of the sudden complexity of things when money is involved. Here is what I think would be best:
- Donate your time and skills if you can rather than money.
- If you cannot do so, please consider sponsoring something we could directly use: Such as a USB serial cable (about $45 for parts from Sparkfun), or perhaps upgrading the Slicehost slice we're borrowing from pumpkin ($60 per month, though it would only be useful if we could get enough money for at least six months), used or broken devices for testing, etc. Or something like a pizza for one of our contributors on a late night hacking binge (we will distribute food donations on a round-robin basis =P)
- My paypal address is my gmail e-mail address (planetbeing). If you do make a donation, please specify exactly what it is for. A gigantic slush fund is something that I wish to avoid.
For the record, contrary to what was published by some media sources, the iphonelinux group is not associated with the group commonly known as the "iPhone Dev Team". I'm a member of the Dev Team, and other members sometimes lends assistance or advice, but this is an entirely separate project. The Dev Team does not accept any donations whereas this project tentatively will.
Tagi: e mail address, usb serial cable, slush fund, sparkfun, th project, iphe, paypal address, coue, piz, mths, media sources, mth, binge, pumpkin, late night, datis, butt, donations, bas
Posted by on under nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp, creative ideas, power tool, pumpkin, youtubes, power tools, checkout, blogs |


It seems like last year there were more power tool blogs and YouTubes about pumpkin carving with power tools(see the coptool post from last year). I just saw the Dremel tool for Carving Pumpkins on ToolGuyd, looks pretty similar to many of their other consumer tools but could be really handy for the once a year fun.
If you want some really creative ideas this year checkout the Pumpkin Carving Contest on ExtremePumpkin.com.
Tagi: nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp, creative ideas, power tool, pumpkin, youtubes, power tools, checkout, blogs