Hack a Day » windows

Do you know what you’re doing when integrating PC-side apps with USB microcontrollers?

Mike Szczys — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 22:01:17 +0000

The advent of integrated USB peripherals in microprocessors (PIC, AVR, etc.) has certainly taken a lot of the work out of developing USB devices, not to mention reducing the silicon parts in these designs. But do you know what you’re doing when it comes to controlling them with user-friendly applications? [Simon Inns] is lending a hand with this in his recent tutorial. He shows how to use USB capable AVR chips along with your own Windows applications.

After the break you can see the video from which the above screenshot was captured. That’s a development board of his own making which hosts an ATmega32U4, as well as a USB-B port, LEDs, potentiometer, and a few switches. Taking a closer look, we love the breadboard friendly headers he used on the bottom of the board to break out all of the pins.

His demo shows the Windows app turning LEDs on the board on and off, as well as ADC data displaying the current potentiometer position with the onscreen dial. His code package includes the hardware design, firmware, and app software needed to follow along with what he’s doing.

Filed under: Microcontrollers

Winterizing: keeping the drafts out of double-hung windows

Mike Szczys — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:01:14 +0000

[Rumplestiltskin] has had work done on his double-hung windows to help prevent drafts and keep them in good working order. But there are still a few that rattle, and let in the cold of winter. Not this year; he’s added a small feature to the jamb that will keep out the cold weather.

A pair of jointing blocks were added to each window. The small block seen above is attached to the window jam with a couple of all-purpose screws, and hosts a machine screw which points toward the window frame. Since there is weather stripping between the two window frames, and between the frame and the outer jamb, tightening this screw will snug the frames up to close any small gaps. This has the unintended consequence of prohibiting the window from being opened (unless you don’t mind scraping the paint as the machine screw slides across the wood). But if only used in the winter months this is a viable solution.

Filed under: green hacks, home hacks

GPU password cracking made easy

Mike Szczys — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:01:35 +0000

The power that a Graphics Processing Unit presents can be harnessed to do some dirty work when trying to crack passwords. [Vijay] took a look at some of the options out there for cracking passwords and found that utilizing the GPU produces the correct password in a fraction of the time. On a Windows machine he pitted the Cain password recovery tool which uses the CPU for its calculations against ighashgpu which uses ATI or Nvidia graphics cards to do the deed. Hands down ighashgpu is the fastest; with Cain taking about one year to crack an eight character password while ighashgpu can do it in under nineteen hours.

We were very interested to see how easy it is to use this package. We looked in on GPU cracking in September but didn’t focus on the software packages that are out there. Now that you know how easily your password can be unearthed perhaps you will get some use out of this article discussing the usability and security of longer passwords which we ran across over on Reddit.

Filed under: security hacks

BAMF2011: chipKIT is Arduino to the power of 32

Phil Burgess — Sat, 21 May 2011 22:00:58 +0000

If you’ve been hungry for more power for your microcontroller projects, but reluctant to dump your investment in Arduino shields or the libraries and community knowledge that go with them all, Digilent has you covered. Their new chipKIT boards are built around the Microchip PIC32 MCU…a powerful 32-bit chip that until recently was left out of the cross-platform scene. A majority of code and quite a number of Arduino shields will work “out of the box” with the chipKIT, and the familiar development tools are available for all three major operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux.

We first mentioned these a couple weeks ago, but the software was unavailable at the time. Seeing the development tools in action was quite unexpected…

What’s really fascinating with chipKIT is that the workflow is exactly Arduino-like. The serial bootloader works with avrdude, and you can program both “real” Arduinos and Digilent’s 32-bit work-alikes using the exact same IDE; there’s no need to run two different IDEs for two different boards, as has been the case with Leaf Labs’ 32-bit Maple. As a demonstration, they compiled and ran code for an Arduino Mega with SparkFun LCD shield…then popped the shield off and placed it on the Max32, selected the 32-bit board in the same IDE, and repeated the process. The exact code ran on the new board/shield combo, with stunning performance — all the standard Arduino libraries have been implemented natively for the PIC32; this is not emulation.

Because Digilent didn’t just adapt the Arduino IDE to their one specific board, but rather developed a system by which the IDE can be extended to new hardware, it’s their hope that their work (not an official Arduino project) might be rolled back into the mainline code, and that other developers might jump on the bandwagon to provide Arduino IDE support for their own boards, whether they be based on AVR, PIC32 or a completely different kind of microcontroller altogether. The groundwork has been laid.

The chipKIT comes in two versions: Uno32 and Max32, similar in form factor to the Arduino Uno and Mega 2560, respectively. These can be ordered directly from Digilent’s web site, and the IDE is freely downloadable as of today. We have evaluation hardware in-hand and expect to be providing a proper review in the near future.

Filed under: arduino hacks, Microcontrollers

Kinect to get Windows drivers months after open source drivers were developed

Mike Szczys — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:02:06 +0000

Microsoft is planning to release Windows drivers for the Kinect this spring, months after open source drivers were developed by a motivated hacking community. [Johnny Chung Lee], who worked with the Microsoft team when the hardware was developed, mentions that he had pushed for the giant to develop and release at least basic Windows drivers. That refusal led him to a position as top cheerleader and bounty contributor in Adafruit’s Open Kinect Contest which resulted (quickly we might add) in the availability of open source drivers. If you’ve been following Hackaday or any other tech blogs the last three months you’ll know that an explosion of projects using the Kinect followed, and [Johnny] figures Microsoft’s decision to release Windows drivers is an attempt to ride this wave on their own flagship OS rather than continue to watch from the sidelines.

Filed under: xbox hacks

PC monitor sleep mode using iPhone

Mike Szczys — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:00:33 +0000

[Mike Silverman] rigged up a way to make his monitor sleep from an iPhone. Working with a Windows system, he installed QuickPHP and NirCmd to add PHP and command line controls. Some quick PHP code writing and this has the effect of creating a sleep button toggled via a network address. He loads up the IP and port information in the Safari browser of his iPhone, creating a Home Screen short cut seen in the image above. Now he clicks on the button and puts the screen to sleep.

It’s not that we find this functionality useful since most monitors sleep after a few minutes of inactivity. But we like the methodology and you can bet we’re already planning uses for this. Any PHP server (like the copy of Apache running on this machine) will do as long as it’s on the same LAN as the iPhone’s WiFi connection.

Filed under: iphone hacks

C Sharp Development 101 – Part 2: Toolbox Controls

Greg R. Jacobs — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 19:00:36 +0000

In this tutorial we are going to start finding out more about the toolbox we utilized in the previous tutorial. The Controls available in the toolbox are quite extensive and allow users to simplify a variety of everyday tasks such as manually creating and instantiating a textbox on a windows form. At the end of this tutorial you should be comfortable finding Controls in the Visual Studio Toolbox, alter or produce code to link tools together using event handlers and ultimately get a better sense of Visual Studio, it’s layout and how to easily navigate it.

To start we are going to create a new Windows Forms Application project in a new solution that will be called ApplicantRegistration. After the project is created we need to change the name of the form from Form1 to main and change the name on the top of the form to Applicant Registration under text in the Properties tab. Then we can start adding in labels and changing Text and Name Properties for:

First Name (Text: First Name, Name: lblFirstName)
Last Name (Text: Last Name, Name: lblLastName)
Address (Text: Address, Name: lblAddress)
City (Text: City, Name: lblCity)
Zip Code (Text: Zip Code, Name: lblZipCode)
Email Address (Text: Email Address, Name: lblEmail)
Phone Number (Text: Phone Number, Name: lblPhone)

After the labels are completed, we need to add the text-boxes that are going to coincide with the labels. The textboxes are going to have to be altered to make the names of each textbox readable when we do decide to code some guts. The following are the textboxes that must be added to the form and the changes to the name property as well:

First Name (Name: txtFirstName)
Last Name (Name: txtLastName)
Address (Name: txtAddress)
City (Name: txtCity)
Zip Code (Name: txtZipCode)
Email Address (Name: txtEmail)
Phone Number (Name: txtPhone)

After this has been done the result should look like this after moving the labels and text boxes around the form:

We now want to add the button that we are going to utilize to enter the forms data into a storage container. We need to drag the button from the toolbox onto the form and change the Text to “Submit” and the name to btnSubmit. After this is done we can double click on the button which will take us to the code that will be utilized when the user clicks the button. To do this we are going to start out by clearing all of the form data so when the user presses submit the boxes clear and are ready for another entry. To do this our code will look like something along the lines of:

private void btnSubmit_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { txtFirstName.Text = ""; txtLastName.Text = ""; txtAddress.Text = ""; txtCity.Text = ""; txtZipCode.Text = ""; txtEmail.Text = ""; txtPhone.Text = ""; }

After the code for the button is made we want to extend the form to the right and add some controls for birth-date and gender. We will start by making labels for Birthday and Gender respectively. After we have created the two labels we are going to drag three combo boxes onto the form, one for the day, month and year. When renaming objects on forms I tend to shorten what the object is into a minimum of two letters and a maximum of four. The final result would be cbYear, cbMonth and cbDay respectively. We can now drag two radio buttons onto the form and rename the text of one to Male and the other to Female. After these have been positioned we can code the methods to populate the dates and tie the two radio buttons together.

The first item on the agenda will be the two radio buttons. We are going to tie them together so that the two cannot be both checked. To do this we need to check and see if the opposite radio button is checked. We will do this by utilizing the CheckedChanged event handler for both radio buttons and this code:

private void rbMale_CheckedChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
 if (rbMale.Checked == true)
 rbFemale.Checked = false;
 else
 rbFemale.Checked = true;
 }

 private void rbFemale_CheckedChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
 if (rbFemale.Checked == true)
 rbMale.Checked = false;
 else
 rbMale.Checked = true;
 }

Next we are going to populate the combo boxes we dragged onto the form earlier. To do this we are going to have to check which one is picked and populate the days for that particular month. Leap Years are an advanced function that will be implemented in the next tutorial but will be important to the final build. We are also going to code a for loop to add the years 1900 to 2010 dynamically on the forms startup. We can do both of these by utilizing main_Load and the cbMonth_SelectedValueChanged event handlers. The code will look something like this:

private void main_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 for (int i = 2010; i >= 1900; --i)
 cbYear.Items.Add(i);
}

private void cbMonth_SelectedValueChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
 cbDay.Items.Clear();
 if (cbMonth.Text == "September" || cbMonth.Text == "April" || cbMonth.Text == "June" || cbMonth.Text == "November")
 for (int i = 1; i <= 30; ++i)
 cbDay.Items.Add(i);
 else if (cbMonth.Text == "January" || cbMonth.Text == "March" || cbMonth.Text == "May" || cbMonth.Text == "July" || cbMonth.Text == "August" || cbMonth.Text == "October" || cbMonth.Text == "December")
 for (int i = 1; i <= 31; ++i)
 cbDay.Items.Add(i);Day.Items.Add(i);
 else
 for (int i = 1; i <= 28; ++i)
 cbDay.Items.Add(i);
 }

 private void rbMale_CheckedChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
 if (rbMale.Checked == true)
 rbFemale.Checked = false;
 else
 rbFemale.Checked = true;
 }

The final form should look something along the lines of this now:

The next logical step would be to include code to output this data to a text file or even a database. We will cover this in the next tutorial using both output methods. The first will be a text file as mentioned and the database of choice will be a mySQL database which we will go over installing in the next post. If you are eager you can acquire the program here and install it before the next tutorial. We could have used Microsoft’s Access database program but it is not free and the main objective of these tutorials is cheap development.

After this is done we can run the program by pressing F5 and enter in some test data. Once all of the data is entered we can press the submit button and the data – if done correctly – should disappear. If you can’t wait until the next tutorial, here is some reading on connection strings and reading and writing to a text file to get you up to speed. Until next tutorial, Happy Hacking!

Filed under: Software Development

PIC USB host shortcuts

Mike Szczys — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:00:00 +0000

[Simon Inns] is still hard at work making USB connectivity for PIC microcontrollers easier for the hobbiest. He’s released a framework for PIC based USB devices under Windows. It includes the firmware needed for USB compatible 18F PIC chips as well as a C# class library and example programs for the Windows side of things. This goes quite a bit further than his PIC-USB tutorial but with little added effort on your end of things.

We do our USB prototyping on a breadboard just like [Simon] did in this example. He’s got a nice little USB-B connector breakout that is easy to plug into the breadboard. If you prefer to have a more stable development area, check out the one he designed. It’s a single-sided PCB made for through-hole components with just a handful of jumper wires.

Filed under: misc hacks

ExoPC shows off some guts

Caleb Kraft — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:52:59 +0000

The folks over at Engadget have posted some pictures of the ExoPC’s insides. With the recent return of the tablet craze (remember xp tablet edition?) we’re seeing tablets everywhere. This one has some promise on the hardware side, sporting a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. Unfortunately we’ve heard using solely a tablet interface with windows7 is somewhat cumbersome even with the built in improvements. We’re not too worried though, a customized appliance style linux interface probably won’t be too far off.

The last couple times we mentioned tablet style computing, people have emailed us about the Touchbook. It also seems pretty cool, but seems like switching applications is visibly laggy in the demo video. Then again, a slimmed down interface might reduce some of that drag.

Filed under: pcs hacks

Arduino now controlling – the crop harvest?

Jacob Woj — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:00:15 +0000

We’ve seen the Arduino board in charge of some pretty unique tasks in the past. Harvesting locally grown soybeans was not one of them.

[Lance] rigged this beast up in order to automate the monotonous task of driving up and down the vast soybean fields of Iowa. The 15 ton farm combine’s hydraulic steering pump is at the mercy of a team of gadgets, including a GPS, Windows 7 PC, and the omnipresent Duemilanove (which acts as the output card, connecting the PC to the pump). So far, it is reported to be doing a great job, straying only about an inch and a half from its desired, GPS-programmed, path. Even if the Arduino decides to go totally berserk and drive the combine off course, speeding around at 5mph makes it pretty avoidable. A supervisor is also in the cabin at all times, looking out for errors. [Lance] eventually hopes to offload all steering-related calculations to the ATmega328P onboard.

Commenters are welcome to share heavier-duty uses for the Arduino (if they exist).

Posted in arduino hacks, gps hacks

Microsoft unveils Open Source multi core OS

Caleb Kraft — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:00:09 +0000

A new operating system, code named Barrelfish is being developed by Microsoft research labs and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. This operating system is being built with multi core operations foremost in priority. It is supposed to be extremely scalable and able to function on a very wide range of hardware. You can download the current snapshot of it on their site and dig into the source code, released under a 3-clause BSD style license. If you would like to learn the primary differences between this OS and Windows or Linux, you can read this PDF.

[via Engadget]

Posted in misc hacks, pcs hacks

Android app “tests” Windows vulnerability

Mike Szczys — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:30:26 +0000

An Android App for “testing” the Windows SMB2 vulnerability we covered last week has been released. For testing? Yeah right! The availability of this kind of software makes it ridiculously easy for anybody to go out and cause some havoc. Go right now and double check that your machines that run Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 are protected (see the “workarounds” section.)

[Thanks Tom101]

Posted in android hacks, pcs hacks, security hacks

Cain and Abel: Windows password recovery utility

Brett Haddock — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:00:57 +0000

As far as password recovery utilities go, Cain & Abel is by far one of the best out there. It’s designed to run on Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista but has methods to recover passwords for other systems. It is able to find passwords in the local cache, decode scrambled passwords, find wireless network keys or use brute-force and dictionary attacks. For recovering passwords on other systems Cain & Abel has the ability to sniff the local network for passwords transmitted via HTTP/HTTPS, POP3, IMAP, SMTP and much more. We think it is quite possibly one of the best utilities to have as a system administrator, and definitely a must have for your toolbox.

Posted in downloads hacks

Windows 7 and Vista crash via SMB exploit

Mike Szczys — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:14:38 +0000

[Laurent Gaffié] has discovered an exploit that affects Windows Vista, Windows 7, and possibly Windows Server 2008 (unconfirmed). This method attacks via the NEGOTIATE PROTOCOL REQUEST which is the first SMB query sent. The vulnerability is present only on Windows versions that include Server Message Block 2.0 and have the protocol enabled. A successful attack requires no local access to the machine and results in a Blue Screen of Death.

[Laurent] has a proof of concept available with his writeup in the form of a python script (please, white hat use only). There is no patch for this vulnerability but disabling the SMB protocol will protect your system until one is available.

Update: According to the Microsoft advisory this vulnerability could lead to code execution, making it a bit worse than we thought. On the bright side, they claim that the final version of Windows 7 is not open to this attack, only Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

[via Full Disclosure]

[picture: Inquirer]

Posted in news, pcs hacks, security hacks

Rename files en masse in Windows

Matt Schultz — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:29:19 +0000

Everybody hates it when they have to rename a fileset to fit a new naming scheme. Instead of doing it the hard way and writing a one-time script to go through and rename everything, check out Bulk Rename Utility from [Jim Willsher]. It provides you with a multitude of methods to take care of business and allows you do pick your favorite method, be it regular expressions, simple finding and replacing, prefix/suffix modification, or a combination of many more.

However, if the sheer amount of options available overwhelms you or if you just want an easier way to do things, check out A.F.5 from [Alex Fauland]. A.F.5 offers features like adding a counter to your filenames, change file attributes, and save your rename settings out to a file for repeat use.

Posted in downloads hacks