Ah, the heady aroma of damp engineers! It’s raining in Silicon Valley, where the 2010 Embedded Systems Conference is getting off the ground at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center.

ESC is primarily an industry event. In the past there’s been some lighter fare such as Parallax, Inc. representing the hobbyist market and giant robot giraffes walking the expo. With the economy now turned sour, the show floor lately is just a bit smaller and the focus more businesslike. Still, nestled between components intended to sell by the millions and oscilloscopes costing more than some cars, one can still find a few nifty technology products well within the budget of most Hack a Day readers, along with a few good classic hacks and tech demos…

(Is that a promise or a threat?)

First order of business was to follow up on a couple of products we’ve covered in the recent past…

We reviewed NXP’s mbed prototyping platform in November of last year. While there’s no stunning new revision, the good news is that the mbed community is going strong and economies of scale have made it possible to trim the starter kit price from $99 back down to the original early adopter cost of $59.

Additionally, they’ve thrown together a project in just a few days to demonstrate the prototyping ease of the mbed platform. Reading like a checklist of Hack a Day clichés, the demo brings together Twitter, the Logo programming language, live web streaming, servos and an Etch-a-Sketch. You can read more on the mbed blog, or watch the live stream and participate during ESC show hours.

We also liked this little breakout board which adds the most essential interfaces to mbed: MicroSD, Ethernet and USB host & client. This was something quickly made for an mbed workshop, and while there are no plans to officially productize it, we’re told the unpopulated board might be available through SparkFun’s BatchPCB service in the future.

Many readers were put off by the web-centric development approach used by mbed, as well as the lack of a debugger. Another NXP entry-level evaluation product called the LPCXpresso provides an affordable ARM development kit from a more traditional angle.

The $30 LPCXpresso boards are available in Cortex-M0 or -M3 varieties and include an integrated JTAG debugger. The downloadable Windows development environment is based around the Eclipse IDE and GNU toolchain. With headers installed the LPCXpresso is breadboard-friendly and in fact shares the same pinout as mbed, so there’s an existing ecosystem of hardware to work from.

STMicroelectronics’ STM8S-Discovery made a huge impact when we mentioned this $7 kit in November, clearing out distributors in a matter of days. At ESC, ST was showing their new ultra-low-power 8- and 32-bit MCUs with demos powered by a cactus (a variation on the classic lemon battery), a cup of warm water sitting atop a Peltier junction, and a modest induction charger. (What, no wind power?)

A new version on the STM8S-Discovery based on the new lower-power chip should be available within a couple of months, and is expected to be similarly affordable.

(Left: the original STM8S kit that created the ruckus. Right: the forthcoming STM8L kit.)

At the Texas Instruments booth, the BeagleBoard XM was being demonstrated, which improves upon its predecessor in nearly every regard.

We’re told BeagleBoard XM stands for “extra MIPS,” “extra memory,” (and “extra money,” they joked). The XM does not replace the original BeagleBoard, but will be sold alongside it at a premium price of $179 when it ships in June. The XM includes a faster processor (1 GHz), more RAM (512 MB, and a 1GB model may be forthcoming), Ethernet, more USB ports and improved power protection. The NAND flash is gone, replaced by a MicroSD slot on the underside. The new board is slightly larger but retains the same mounting holes, so it may fit as an upgrade into some existing BeagleBoard projects.

Microchip’s iPod/iPhone accessory development boards that we mentioned last month were on display. Unfortunately it appears one must be signed on with Apple’s “Made for iPod” developer program before these kits can even be ordered from Microchip, which really puts a damper on the fun for anyone who might just want to tinker.

Drifting further from product specifics and more into hacks and eye candy…

Product teardowns have become a staple of tech culture. “Zero-day” and live blog teardowns of new products are particularly exciting. ESC’s gone one better, making a show of ripping into a product (if a rather esoteric one) months before its official release: a high-end Zircon AC wire detector built around a Microchip dsPIC and a bevy of e-field sensors. It’s like engineer pr0n!

National Instruments certainly had one of the most entertaining booths at the event. Rather than passively showing dry PowerPoint summaries and monitors running LabVIEW (their graphical programming environment for engineers and scientists), they instead presented physical demos and projects making use of the software. Some serious, others not-so-serious. Hacks!

Remember Waterloo Labs’ iPhone-controlled car hack? There it is! Rather, there it is minus the actual car, but with all the essential parts nicely laid out where we can observe the rig in action. At the other end of the booth, one can challenge “RockBot” to a round of Frets on Fire, not unlike prior hacks we’ve seen.

Hack a Day readers might be familiar with Digi International for their XBee wireless modules, such as used in Adafruit’s Tweet-a-Watt power monitor. Easily distracted by shiny things, we were initially smitten with this addressable LED matrix wrapped around their booth; not a product, just something to catch peoples’ interest:

As it turns out, there’s an added bonus hack behind the hack. Most of Digi’s booth displays could be controlled and monitored using their own custom web apps, so it was a simple matter of walking around with an iPod touch to run the show:

At the ARM pavilion, this “Speedcuber” was solving Rubik’s cubes in under half a minute. The camera and puzzle-solving logic comes from a Motorola Droid. Commands are issued over Bluetooth to a pair of LEGO Mindstorms NXT controllers to drive the motors that manipulate the cube.

Macraigor Systems produces a line of JTAG debuggers…but to be honest, we (and pretty much everyone else passing the booth) nearly missed that fact, as we were all so distracted by their demo application involving one spectacular and elegant Intel hexapod robot:

We similarly fanboyed over Cryptography Research’s German Enigma cipher machine, as it was our first time seeing one not under lock and key in a glass museum case:

ESC Silicon Valley runs through Thursday, April 29th, and last we checked one could still register for a free exhibits-only pass on the ESC web site.

At this year’s PICNIC conference [Neil Mendoza] and [Edwin Dertien] built a giant Etch-a-Sketch to help bring attendees together. The drawing area is a rear-projection screen, rather than a physical powder based setup, and is surrounded by the familiar red frame with vertical and horizontal control knob. Because the two knobs are too far apart for one person to use at the same time, two people must work together to move the stylus.

To help break the ice the device was designed to incorporate social networking. Each knob requires that an RFID (embedded in the conference badges) be scanned by the person controlling it. Both users are then connected as friends through a social network and when they’re done “making art”, the beauty of their creation is delivered to them via email.

We don’t know about you, but our etch-a-sketch attempts have always been crappy. There are some folks who can turn out a masterpiece on the thing, but this is really just meant to grab your interest for a minute or two and help you meet some people. One feature that should be noted, this giant device requires shaking to erase the image.

The 2009 edition of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas has just begun. The first interesting talk we saw was [Andrea Barisani] and [Daniele Bianco]‘s Sniff Keystrokes With Lasers/Voltmeters. They presented two methods for Tempest style eavesdropping of keyboards.

The first attack was against PS/2 keyboards. Inside the PS/2 cord, the data line isn’t shielded very well from the ground line, so all data could end up being transmitted back to the building’s electrical ground. The clock signal is also very slow compared to other signals generated by the computer. At about 10-16.7kHz, it should be easy to sample and filter out of the ground noise. They decided to monitor the ground line in an outlet 20meters from the keyboard in question. They used a ~150ohm resistor between the electrical ground and their reference ground. The reference ground was the building’s plumbing and is used to determine what’s actually noise in the electrical ground. They measured the voltage drop across the resistor and used finite impulse response to act as a bandpass filter for 1-20kHz. They were easily able to pick up the keyboard’s signal. It worked so well that they built a remote monitoring board that uses an AVR ATxmega128A1 to do the sampling and send the data over ethernet. In closing, they noted that USB uses differential signaling which should negate any leakage but the processor is more intensive and may end up being easy to pick up. They also stated that many ATMs are probably using PS/2 style keypads that leak this information.

For the second part of their talk, they covered using lasers to collect keystrokes. They pointed a laser at the back of a laptop lid and recorded the resulting vibrations just like a normal laser mic (closer to the hinge provided a cleaner signal). One of the first things they noticed was that the spacebar, being physically larger, created a very distinct signal that was much larger than all others. They used this information to determine where word breaks were. By comparing the captured waveforms to each other using dynamic time warping, they could determine the letter patterns. They then used these sequences with a dictionary to figure out what words had the same pattern and made sense in the same order. It worked quite well and they said it would go much faster if you can guess the context. They mentioned that logos on laptop lids were very reflective and worked well even in daylight and through glass.

You can find whitepapers and example code on their site.

Annual hacker conference LayerOne will be held May 23-24th in Anaheim, CA. They’ve completed the speaker lineup and have quite a few interesting talks. [David Bryan] Will be focusing on practical hacking with the GNU Radio. It’s a software defined radio that we’ve covered in the past for GSM cracking. [Datagram] will present lockpicking forensics. While lockingpicking isn’t as obvious as brute force entry, it still leaves behind evidence. He’s launched lockpickingforensics.com as a companion to this talk. LayerOne is definitely worth checking out if you’re in the Los Angeles area.

The massive hacker camp Hacking at Random 2009 has extended their early bird ticket sales until April 14th. At EUR150, they’ve already managed to sell 1000 tickets. Every two years the european hacker community gathers together to hold a multiday camp that covers topics from hacking to art and politics. 2007′s CCCamp was largely the inspiration for this year’s ToorCamp. HAR2009 is looking for people to submit presentations, workshops, and lectures as well. They’re looking for entries that are very technology focused. The call for papers deadline is May 1st. The team is hosting a field day April 18th to tour the grounds with the various hacker villages that will be setting up. The main even is August 13-16 near Vierhouten, Netherlands.

We’ve been watching and waiting intently as ToorCamp comes together. It’s a four day hacker conference that will be held in a Washington state missile silo July 2nd-5th. While we’re excited about this debut event, its success depends entirely on those presenting. The call for papers is currently open and they’ve got a number of formats available: 20 and 50 minute talks and 1 and 2 day workshops. They’re also looking for people to organize campsites and are offering discounts for groups. We’re encouraging you to submit your talk since we’d love to see more hardware talks. You can follow @ToorCamp announcements on Twitter.

Kenshoto, organizer of the official Defcon Capture the Flag contest for the last four years, has stepped down from the position, and thus Defcon is looking for a new organizer for the event. If you’re highly competent, and maybe a little crazy, this might be your chance to step in and run one of the most well-known and prestigious hacking contests in the world. Please understand that the staff is looking for someone who wants to take ownership of the contest and make something new, unique, and challenging, and that Kenshoto has left extremely huge shoes to fill. Merely offering to replicate the existing contest and keep things mostly unchanged isn’t going to cut it.

If you’re up to the challenge, check out Dark Tangent’s post on the Defcon forums (which, for some odd reason, sounds strikingly like his 2005 post calling for a CTF organizer), where he comprehensively lays out what the staff is looking for in a new event organizer. If it jives well with you, get in touch with the Defcon staff, and maybe we’ll be covering your contest later this year.

The 25C3 team has a post highlighting some of the hardware workshops that will be happening at Chaos Communication Congress this year. Our own [Jimmie Rodgers] will be in the microcontroller workshop area building kits with many others. The folks from mignon will be bringing several of their game kits for another workshop. We saw quite a few quadcopters at CCCamp and the team from Mikrokopter will be back to help you construct your own drone. They say it only takes five hours for the full build, but space is limited.

The team behind 25C3 has published the first draft of this year’s schedule. The annual Chaos Communication Congress is happening December 27th to 30th in Berlin, Germany. There are plenty of interesting talks already in place. We’re spotting things we want to attend already: The conference starts off with how to solar power your gear, which is followed by open source power line communication. A TOR-based VPN, an open source BIOS, rapid prototyping, holographic techniques, and running your own GSM network are on the bill too.

We’ll have at least three Hack a Day contributors in attendance. Last year featured two of our favorite conference talks: [Drew Endy]‘s Biohacking and the MiFare crypto1 RFID crack. We hope to see you there.

Notacon has just announced their first round of talk selections. The Cleveland, OH area hacker conference will be celebrating its sixth year April 16th-19th. When we attended this year we saw talks that ranged from circuit bending to the infamous TSA bagcam. Self-taught silicon designer [Jeri Ellsworth] presented on FPGA demoing. [Trixter] covered his demo archiving process. You can find a video archive of this year’s talks here.

We’re really looking forward to the conference. [SigFLUP] is already on the schedule to cover Sega Genesis development. Get your talk in soon though; they’re already handing out space to the knitters.

Hacking at Random, an international technology and security conference, has just announced the dates for their 2009 event. The four day outdoor technology camp will be held August 13-16 near Vierhouten, Netherlands. HAR2009 is brought to you by the same people who held What the Hack, which we covered in 2005. They’ve done this every four years for the last 20. We’ll be sure to attend. We loved CCCamp in Germany last year and plan on attending ToorCamp in Seattle this year too.

[photo: mark]

[nico] just received his credentials for an upcoming conference. On each badge, there’s a 2D barcode with the participant’s bio and contact info. These are meant to be scanned by vendors for future contact. [nico] isn’t so interested in that and plans on updating his personal info by generating a new barcode. To this end, he’s collected a number of links to help out barcode hackers. He used the SWIPE toolkit to identify the format and decode (it has an online component too). There are also several online encoders you can use, like this one from [Terry Burton]. If you’re wondering what sort of shenanigans you can get into faking barcodes, check out [fx]‘s presentation from 24C3.

[photo: seanbonner]

The EFF has just announce the creation of the Coders’ Rights Project website at the Black Hat conference. The sites’ main goal is to centralize legal information for coders, and to help protect important security work from legal actions that may be taken against them with the DMCA and other legal black holes. While this is in no way a fully comprehensive list of everything you need to know, it looks like a good place to start, and provides a few FAQs for suggestions on how to stay in the legal clear as much as possible. At numerous points the documents suggest you speak with a lawyer, if you have any deeper questions, which you absolutely should. This can be very helpful if a person or group finds a security risk, and wants to publish it, or just wants to start looking into possible security risks.

Now comes the fun part: What do you think the best use of this badge will be? Would Defcon be so cavalier as to equip everyone in the conference with a TV-B-Gone? I think our favorite possibility is if someone finds a security hole and manages to write an IR based worm to take over all the badges.

Defcon 14 introduced the first electronic badge which blinked in different patterns. Defcon 15 had a 95 LED scrolling marquee. [Joe Grand] will be posting more specific Defcon 16 badge details to his site after the opening ceremony. Check out more high resolution photos on Wired.

[Photo: Dave Bullock]