Day: February 23, 2016

Icestudio: An Open Source Graphical FPGA Tool

February 23, 2016 by 38 Comments

If you’ve ever worked with FPGAs, you’ve dealt with the massive IDEs provided by the vendors. Xilinx’s ISE takes about 6 gigabytes, and Altera’s Quartus clocks in at over 10 gigs. That’s a lot of downloading proprietary software just to make an LED blink.

[Jesús Arroyo]’s Icestudio is a new, graphical tool that lets you generate Verilog code from block diagrams and run it on the Lattice Semi iCEstick development board. A drag and drop interface lets you connect IOs, logic gates, dividers, and other elements. Once your block diagram is ready, a single button press downloads the code to the iCEstick.

Under the hood, Icestudio uses IceStorm, which we’ve discussed on HaD in the past, including this great talk by [Clifford], Icestorm’s lead. For the GUI, Icestudio uses nw.js, which spits out JSON based on the block diagram. This JSON is converted into a Verilog file and a PCF file. The Verilog is used to create the logic on the FPGA, and the PCF is used to define the pin configuration for the device. Clicking on selected modules reveals the generated Verilog if you want to know what’s actually going on.

It’s experimental, but this looks like a neat way to get started on FPGAs without learning a new language or downloading many gigs of toolchains. We’re hoping Icestudio continues to grow into a useful tool for education and FPGA development. A demo follows after the break.

[Thanks to Nils for the tip!]

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ARM Unveils New, High Efficency CPU

February 23, 2016 by 40 Comments

ARM has announced their latest IP core the Cortex A32. This 32-bit chip brings the benefits of the ARMv8-A architecture to low-power devices, ostensibly ones that will be the backbone of the Internet of Things.

For the last few years, the state of ARM CPUs has been firmly planted in the world of ARMv7 instructions. These chips, the Cortex A5, A7, A9, A15, and A17 are divided into ‘good, better, best’ segments, with the A7 pulling its weight as the processor in the Raspberry Pi 2, and a dual-core A15 finding its way into the latest BeagleBoard. While these CPUs are very capable, they don’t support the latest ARM architecture, ARMv8. For the last few years, the only ARM processors with the v8 architecture fell into the ‘better’ and ‘best’ segments. Although the A53, A57, and A72 chips are very capable, there hasn’t been a low power ARMv8 chip until this announcement.

So what does this announcement mean for the next generation of the Internet of Things, single board computers, and the wearable electronics of tomorrow? Absolutely nothing. Only the processor IP was released, and it will take at least a year for this core to make it into a chip. It will be 18 to 24 months until you can find this core in a consumer device. On the other hand, when these devices do appear, they will be significantly faster than current devices with a Cortex A5 and A7.

Anti-Cogging Algorithm Brings Out The Best In Your Hobby Brushless Motors

February 23, 2016 by 31 Comments

Cheap, brushless motors may be the workhorses behind our RC planes and quadcopters these days, but we’ve never seen them  in any application that requires low-speed precision. Why? Sadly, cheap brushless motors simply aren’t mechanically well-constructed enough to offer precise position control because they exhibit cogging torque, an unexpected motor characteristic that causes slight variations in the output torque that depend rotor position. Undaunted, [Matthew Piccoli] and the folks at UPenn’s ModLab have developed two approaches to compensate and minimize torque-ripple, essentially giving a cheap BLDC Motor comparable performance to it’s pricier cousins. What’s more, they’ve proven their algorithm works in hardware by building a doodling direct-drive robotic arm from brushless motors that can trace trajectories.

Cogging torque is a function of position. [Matthew’s] algorithm works by measuring the applied voltage (or current) needed to servo the rotor to each measurable encoder position in a full revolution. Cogging torque is directional, so this “motor fingerprint” needs to be taken in both directions. With these measured voltages (or currents) logged for all measurable positions, compensating for the cogging torque is just a matter of subtracting off that measured value at any given position while driving the motor. [Matthew] has graciously taken the trouble of detailing the subtleties in his paper (PDF), where he’s actually developed an additional acceleration-based method.

Hobby BLDC motors abound these days, and you might even have a few spares tucked away on the shelf. This algorithm, when applied on the motor controller electronics, can give us the chance to revisit those projects that mandate precise motor control with high torque–something we could only dream about if we could afford a few Maxon motors. If you’re new to BLDC Motor Control theory, check out a few projects of the past to get yourself up-and-running.

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Breaking SimpliSafe Security Systems With Software Defined Radio

February 23, 2016 by 49 Comments

The SimpliSafe home security system is two basic components, a keyboard and a base station. Sensors such as smoke detectors, switches, and motion sensors can be added to this system, all without a wired installation. Yes, this security system is completely wireless. Yes, you can still buy a software defined radio for ten dollars. Yes, the device has both “simple” and “safe” in its name. We all know where this is going, right?

Last week, [Andrew Zonenberg] at IOActive published a security vulnerability for the SimpliSafe wireless home security system. As you would expect from an off-the-shelf, wireless, DIY security system, the keypad and base station use standard 433 MHz and 315 MHz ISM band transmitters and receivers. [Dr. Zonenberg]’s attack on the system didn’t use SDR; instead, test points on the transmitters were tapped and messages between the keypad and base station were received in cleartext. When the correct PIN is entered in the keypad, the base station replies with a ‘PIN entered’ packet. Replaying this packet with a 433 MHz transmitter will disable the security system.

[Michael Ossmann] took this one step further with a software defined radio. [Ossmann] used a HackRF One to monitor the transmissions from the keypad and turned to a cheap USB SDR dongle to capture packets. Replaying keypad transmissions were easy, but with a little bit more work new attacks can be found. The system can be commanded to enter test mode even when the system is armed bypassing notifications to the owner.

It’s a hilarious failure of wireless security, especially given the fact that this exploit can be performed by anyone with $100 in equipment. With a little more effort, an attacker can execute a PIN replay from a mile away. Sadly, failures of security of this magnitude are becoming increasingly common. There will assuredly be more attacks of this kind in the future, at least until hardware manufacturers start taking the security (of their security products) seriously.

A Slew Of Open-Source Synthesizers

February 23, 2016 by 57 Comments

Hackaday reader [Jan Ostman] has been making microcontroller-based DIY synthesizers for quite a while now. Recently, he’s opened up the source for a lot of them so that you can play along at home. All of these virtual-analog synths and soundmakers can be realized on an Arduino or AVR ATmega328 if you happen to have one lying around.

Extra parts like a keyboard, some pushbuttons, or some potentiometer knobs to twiddle won’t hurt if you’d like to make something more permanent or more obviously playable, like [Jan] does. On the other hand, if you’d just like to get your feet wet, I’ve tweaked his code to be more immediately plug-and-play. The code is straightforward enough that it’s a good learning platform. So let’s take a quick tour through three drum machines and a string synth, each of which you can build on a breadboard in just a few minutes.

To install on an Arduino UNO, fetch the zip file from this GitHub repository, and move each subfolder to your Arduino sketch directory. You’re ready to play along.

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Sputnik’s Transmitter Beeps Again

February 23, 2016 by 35 Comments

Sputnik. The first artificial satellite, the launch of which precipitated the space race. Without the frenetic pace of technological advancement as the USA and the USSR vied with each other during the decade following its launch it is safe to say that we might not yet have many of the tools and components we take for granted as electronics enthusiasts and makers today.

[Frank Waarsenburg PA3CNO] has taken on the interesting task of recreating one of the Sputnik radio transmitters using a set of the original Russian tubes.

Sputnik itself was an astounding achievement for the team of engineers and scientists who put it into orbit, but the drive to beat the USA to the post within the 1957 International Geophysical Year meant that it was a surprisingly simple device. A sphere pressurised with nitrogen and with those iconic whip antennas mounted on its outside, containing a battery, 20 and 40 MHz tube radio transmitters, and a fan cooling system. Its design was a Soviet state secret, but in 2013 [Oleg, RV3GM] located the schematic used for the transmitter.

The tubes are slightly unusual, being a wire-ended design with all electrodes mounted on rods the length of the glass envelope. This design feature gave them a resistance to acceleration and vibration, making them suitable for use in aircraft, missiles, and rockets.

[Frank] faced one or two hurdles during his construction, including the development of a suitable power supply and finding an unfortunate bug in the Russian schematic. If you speak Dutch or are prepared to use a translation tool his full write-up can be found in the Dutch-language RAZzies magazine, December issue featuring the power supply (PDF, Dutch), and January issue featuring the transmitter (PDF, Dutch).

The Sputnik satellite has not appeared on its own in these pages before, but we have recently featured the early OSCAR amateur radio satellites and the revival of a piece of space-race-era Soviet rocket technology.

Via [Stefan, HB9TWS], whose English-language coverage of the transmitter was of great help.

Worlds Collide: Hot Rodders And Hackers

February 23, 2016 by 59 Comments

When we think of the average hot rodder, we think of guys and gals that love anything on four wheels. They’re good with hand tools, fabrication and know the ins and outs of the internal combustion engine. Their tools of the trade are welders, grinders and boxed-end wrenches. But their knowledge of electric circuits doesn’t go beyond wiring up a 12 volt DC tail light. On the surface, the role of a hot rodder would seem quite different from that of a hardware hacker. But if you abstract what they do, you find that they take machines and modify their design to make them do something more than they were originally designed to do. When viewed in this light, hot rodders are hackers.
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