Homebrew camera-phone se-cam looks like a bomb
Here's a brilliant rube goldberg security camera made out of a camera phone, some homebrew circuits and solenoid relays. When the phone is called, it activates the relays, which tap out the "take picture/send picture" sequence on the phone-keypad, which then takes the pic and sends it off. Added bonus: this thing actually looks sinister. If I were god-emperor of the world, all CCTVs would look this alarming, so every time you were in their scrutiny, you'd get that atavistic taste of being surveilled.
Link (via Geekologie)
The idea is to replace your fingers with the relays and your brain with a microcontroller. Depending on how complex your phone is, i.e. number of different keys to press in order to send a picture, choose your microcontroller accordingly.My setup uses four outputs (four different keys on the phone) and one input on the microcontroller. It allows me to send a SMS text message (or call) to my hacked phone and it then cycles through the code, clicking its way through the menus, taking photos and returning them to me.
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Wait. Woah, woah, woah. This isn't a bomb? Great. How am I supposed to blow up random things now?
Neato. But not really "Rube Goldbergian" at all.
Yeah, I also must ask what Rube Goldberg has to do with this...
Just because something (a cobbled-together device for instance) has a lot of connected parts doesn't mean it's "Rube Goldbergian"
A better catch-phrase would be "Marx Brotherian"
Rube Goldberg's hand-drawn imagined machines contained myriad complicated parts in order to achieve a very simple or mundane result (ie; flip a light switch, pour a glass of milk)
The machine above uses complicated separate parts to achieve a complicated result.
Cory, I see you've been taking bomb detection lessons from the Boston PD. Good work.
Bombs are primarily chemical devices, not electrical ones. Any explosive that requires that much control circuitry isn't a bomb; it's a guided missile.
Doesn't a bomb also require explosives like sticks of dynamite or jugs of liquid or slabs of plastique?
I'm happy to call this "Rube Goldbergian".
Look at the part count there for a job that ought to be pure software; a dirt simple script if the phones software were remotely open.
In theory, Google's Android mobile OS should make this possible. It is supposed to open all API's to the programmer, so one could devise a program that would react to an SMS by taking a picture and MMS-ing it to the sender of that SMS.
It will look less impressive though.