Hackaday Links: July 30, 2017

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What are you doing next weekend? How about going to the Vintage Computer Festival West at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Hackaday is sponsoring, and there are always a ton of awesome builds. Last year, someone played Tron on a Commodore PET. Not a video game — the movie.

In case anyone forgot, I created the most desirable independent hardware badge this year at Def Con. It’s a hilarious joke, I got three from OSH Park, thirty more in different colors from Seeed, and something, somewhere, jumped a shark. [Drew Fustini] also shared these PCBs on OSH Park. There were four orders. This is hilarious.

‘Member Minecraft? Redstone was awesome, and people built computers out of red dust and torches. Now it’s not as cool with all the fancy redstone components, and simpler is always better. Here’s bitmap logic, or a complete computer made with pixels. There’s already an 8-bit computer for this thing.

Frag somebody and own their computer. [Justin] recently found an exploit in Valve’s Source engine (TF2, CSGO, Portal 2…) that allows for remote code execution on clients and servers by loading a custom ragdoll model.

High bandwith, low-power, and long range. If you’re doing RF, you may pick two. LoRa is the RF solution that picked low power and long range. There are quite a few companies behind it, but we really haven’t seen many products using LoRa here in the states yet (then again, products that would use LoRa shouldn’t be very visible…). Now there’s an Open Source LoRa backend server. This is somewhat significant; LoRa isn’t a completely Open protocol, and all licensing goes through Semtech and the LoRa Alliance.

13 thoughts on “Hackaday Links: July 30, 2017

      1. Try telling our governments that….
        They seem to think religion == race.

        That seems to rub off onto quite some citizens, they think:
        White == Christian
        brown == Islam
        Black == Rastafarian

        I ain’t seen someone bow down “to a different god” and change colour! (Dieing doesn’t count)

        None the less, a bad person is a bad person,
        a bad person that hides behind the security and cloak of religion or the cloak of, “Do good politics” is a, “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

  1. There has been an Free/Open Source LoRaWAN backend stack for quite a while, namely The Things Network (TTN). Their stack clocks at “only” 17 contributors at github, but is updated regularly, and they made the whole thing modular, so you can decide what parts of the Router–Broker–Handler chain you want to have hosted by the TTN community or yourself.

    We used TTN for setting up six Gateways throughout our city in southern Germany last year, and three more GWs have been set up by volunteer enthusiasts in the mean time, expanding coverage where it had been flaky before. I’ll keep my eyes on this new backend stack, but I doubt they will be able to attract as much of a community as TTN was able to do.

  2. There was a comment of questionable political correctness…
    I would of clicked Report Comment if it wern’t a Benchoff article…
    However I chose to reply to a reply of a reply in order to add valuable reasoning for misconceptions relating to said comment(s) as a backup to someones’ correction.

    Though the comments have gone far off comment by then…

    Just letting Brian know my intentions here…

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