Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Everyone Needs This and it’s Under $10 – Handy Tech Under $100”.
The beard is gone, which means nothing can slow me down as I dive head first into this rapid fire. Roundup want to keep your devic’s batteries fresh for longer. Is that USB device hacking, you o? You can control app volume without digging into the software menus? How cool is that we’re going to build one for ourselves for less than 10 bucks? Oh and we’re going to clean up after ourselves when we’re done with a bottomless can of air it’s time again for Handy Tech under 100? Let’S go back here, which is where we’re doing it. You may already know that leaving your portable Electronics plugged in all the time can be really hard on the batteries causing them to die bulge or even light on fire. But the issue is that it’s getting harder and harder to find a phone or a laptop that you can pull the batteries out of in order to protect them when they’re being stored or when they’re being used in a permanent fixture.
Now some devices have Smart charging or other battery saving features, but many of them don’t, and that is where the $ 30 charge omatic comes in now. The inventor suggests using it to protect battery powered tools, uh to prolong the life of USB charged devices and to top up generator batteries, which gave us some ideas of our own. Like keeping our emergency battery Banks ready to go at a moment’s notice, or my personal favorite, plugging into a power bar to help protect the hundreds of battery powered devices that sit in our warehouse slowly dying now, unfortunately, wow that is really tight. Hey there we go now.
Unfortunately, in spite of the claims, it’s not especially smart, meaning it’s essentially a Christmas light timer with extra steps, but the charger Matic lets you choose how long the power stays on anywhere from 1 to 99 hours. That’S this guy right here, then this one controls how long it’s days off anywhere from 1 to 99 days. So if your manual calls for trickle charging once a month for no longer than 48 hours, something no one is actually going to bother to do manually. You just dial it into the charger attic and you never have to think about it again and in all that time we save by not dealing with dead batteries.
We can segue to our sponsor ug green, their nexe x65 wall. Charger is small, light and Powerful. With two USBC ports and one usba a port, so you can charge up to three devices at the same time, with a maximum output of you guessed, it 65 Watts check it out at the link down below okay, okay, guys, I’m coming I’m coming! Oh crap! That game is loud now I can’t hear you guys, you know someone should make a volume knob for oh perfect, meet the Dej, an open-source Hardware, volume control for Windows and Linux, PCS, with this minty little guy, I have independent control over my PC’s master volume. Voice chat and my games, and it is super simple to build your own that doesn’t smell minty at all to build our own. All we need is an Arduino or similar microcontroller, one or more potentiometers pots for short, some wires and some kind of enclosure. It doesn’t even need to be anything fancy. It just has to be big enough to hold the electronics but small enough to fit on your desk. This Altoids tin is a great choice for these rotary pots and an rp240 base board, while this shipping box that we stole from Colton has plenty of room for sliding pots and an Arduino Pro micro.
Now, before you even ask no, you do not need to know how to solder to make one of these. If You Pick Your Parts carefully, look at this using a small breadboard, some male to female jumper wires and a pro micro that came with the header, pins pre-attached. Anyone can do this now. For our part, we’ve got a Justin and a small army of 3D printers to try and keep busy.
So we got a little fancy and we whipped up this slick enclosure which we’re going to have the files for in the description, along with a link to the de project, where they go into way more detail about building your own. We’Re still going to give you the quickish version here, though, Hardware wise, it is surprisingly simple, simple: each of our potentiometers gets wired up to Common Ground and to a power pin and then that third connector, the wiper is going to be doing the bulk of our Heavy lifting now you might remember that a potentiometer is effectively a user adjustable resistor and the position of the wiper determines the resistance. So then, each of our wipers gets connected to an individual analog input on the controller and once everything’s wired up, we can close up our enclosure with the new LT Precision screwdriver and put on our knobs by the way sign up on LTT sore.com for an instock Notification – we are very excited about this thing. It’S also a delightful fidget toy. Speaking of so far, that’s all this does too. We need to program the controller in order for it to do something useful.
Thankfully, the de project has done almost all of the work for us, including providing a pre-written Arduino sketch file with that said, it’s not quite plug-in play and we’re going to need to tweak it depending on how many pots we’re using and which pins those pots are Connected to so in this case, we’ve got five pots using pins a0 through A3 and pin A7, compile that upload it to the controller, taking a second to note which com Port the controller is using. And now, if you open up the serial monitor in the Arduino IDE, you should see a stream of numbers flowing constantly and if you move a slider, the corresponding number should change using any text editor. At this point, even good oldfashioned notepad open up config do yaml. The first thing to do is change the comport down here to match what our controller is using. Then we get to decide what each one of our pots is going to control. Looking at this slider unor mapping, section each section can specify a single program, a list of programs, a device name or one of a few keywords that have special functions.
It’S documented pretty clearly in the comments at the top of the file. If you want to experiment the media players browsers Communications games, obviously guys. I can’t sit here for the next 12 hours with my camera crew watching me type in every game. I’Ve ever heard of, but thankfully de has us covered again keyword. De. unmapped tells this slider right here to control all apps that aren’t mapped to a different slider.
Then we wrap things up with another keyword Master on the last slider, giving us an overall volume control. Now we did find that the master keyword didn’t work as expected on all setups on a system with a pair of Steel series. Arctis Nova Pro headphones, for example, Master ended up. Adjusting the volume of system sounds rather than the main output, which we think is because those headphones have their own external volume control and just have no interest in their Windows volume setting being anything but 100 %. But I, aside from that little snag. This is flipping amazing, no more getting your ears blasted off when you fire up a new game for the first time or missing what your buddies are saying in Discord, because some jackass website is blasting an ad for skin cream.
That, oh D is and moisturizes sorry sorry um anyway. The Altoids tin version is 10 bucks and even our fancier one is still well under 20, and if you want to get even fancier, there are Forks of the D code based that adds, support for screens and buttons with this awesome gallery that shows Dej builds that Are done by folks around the world to give you some inspiration, we’re going to have all of that Linked In the video description um? What’S next ooh, this is cool. Are you on the go enough that you find yourself plugging your devices into random USB ports to charge? Do you feel a little sketched out when you do so well? The USB valve is, for you think of it kind of like a pocket STD test for USB ports that you can perform before you plug in something that you care about. It shows up to Windows as just a normal Kingston data traveler USB storage device, but in reality what it is is a monitoring device that outputs everything that’s happening over that USB port on this teeny tiny little screen. If the line starts with a plus, that means it is expected. So if the port is just providing power, all we should see is the the self test line.
If the port is connected to a harmless Windows PC, though you’ll see the PC read There, It Is the auto run file, but if a line starts with an exclamation point, that means something has happened that isn’t expected so uh who in this case it says the Pc has read the read me file now it is possible that something like that could be caused by an antivirus. That’S automatically scanning USB devices when they’re plugged in, but it’s also possible that something else running on that PC is reading the file. What would be even more, concerning, though, would be if, whatever we’ve plugged into tries to write to my device again you’ll get the exclamation point and the line will just say: writing don’t worry about it, damaging the USB valve, though it’s only pretending to be a USB Drive – and it will be reset at the end of your session, ready for the next and it gets even better if you build the DIY version with USB pass through. It can also monitor untrusted USB peripherals, so watch this I’m going to plug in a seemingly harmless USB drive and boom. The USB valve immediately recognizes it’s behaving as an HID device and is sending data to my computer turns out the USB valve caught a rubber duck. Key which the pen testing nerds out there are going to know, acts like an automatic keyboard typing in pre-programmed scripts.
That will do literally anything the attacker wants on the host machine. If we want to learn exactly what the rubber ducky is trying to do, the USB valve can even set itself up on a com Port so that you can connect into that port and see exactly what’s being typed on the virtual keyboard. Get hacked hackers to build your own. All you need is about 10 bucks worth of microcontroller in screen and then, if you’ve got another 10 bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you can get a custom PCB printed up for it like this one or you can just use a generic breadboard ooh one Other option, if you don’t feel like doing any of that is you can take advantage of their recently added support for the Pico watch platform, just load on the software and you’re good to go.
You’Ll find more information on their GitHub or, if you like, this form factor, but don’t want to build it yourself. The inventor is looking into creating a dedicated board so reach out, and let them know that you’re interested we love seeing community support for Grassroots tool. Creators like this man, we should have called this handy Tech under 50 bucks. Everything has been so affordable and freaking awesome.
As for the next thing, it honestly kind of blows, get it cuz, it blows air these USB rechargeable air dusters are nothing new. In fact, Luke – and I saw something similar in that all AliExpress cleaning product video hilarious by the way check it out, but this one really deserves to be in handy tech for less than 50 bucks, you get a 3-speed USB rechargeable handheld blower, a bunch of alternate Tips to help direct air flow in the way that is best for you and a handy carrying bag. This is really going to help us clean up the mess that we’ve made today and woo there’s even a light on it, and this onetime investment of 40 bucks could save you from wasting hundreds of dollars on canned air or, if you’re, a business, even thousands of Dollars which leaves us just with disclosure time, because our handy Tech videos are more of a you, should buy, buy this or you should build this. We like to give a little bit of extra disclosure about why we picked a product or project the Charo mtic was sent to us by the inventor for possible review.
We liked it. Not only are we covering it in our video, but we’re going to actually buy a few of them as a way to keep the countless batteries in our warehouse. Healthy, uh, Jordan, stumbled across the de product and had actually already bought all of the parts he need.
It when he pitched it in our weekly writers meeting, so the only difference is that we built a better one for him, instead of him actually using what he had planned to use. The USB valve showed up on hack a day and we thought it was worth checking out. So we reached out to the Creator who sent over a couple of assembled examples and custom pcbs to show you guys and finally, the USB blower was first bought for that cleaning supplies video and we have since bought a bunch more of them for our own use.
Just about every set in work area has one of these close at hand cuz. We absolutely love these things and with that, it’s time to hand things over to our sponsor rocket money. You and, and I both know, that you’re not using every streaming service that you’re subscribed to, and yet your bank account is still being drained every month and in this economy that really adds up well rocket. Money wants to help by making it simple to cancel unwanted subscriptions, no need to go digging around in a bank statement to solve the mystery of who, what and where your money is going. One click and just like that, you can cancel all of those services that are bogging down your finances, which means more money for your next rig upgrade h. On top of that, they could also assist with negotiating any bills that you may be overpaying and it’s easy to set up a smart savings system where they deposit a set amount of money into your account, as often as you’d. Like so start saving by downloading the app for free at Rocket money.com LT or by clicking the link down below, if you guys enjoyed this video, there’s a whole playlist full of Handy Tech and we’re going to link the latest one down below .