Fix Your Insecure Amazon Fire TV Stick
I recently spent a largely sleepless night at a hotel, and out of equal parts curiosity and boredom, decided to kill some time scanning the guest network to see what my fellow travelers might be up to. As you’d probably expect, I saw a veritable sea of Samsung and Apple devices. But buried among the seemingly endless number of smartphones charging next to their sleeping owners, I found something rather interesting. I was as picking up a number of Amazon-made devices, all of which had port 5555 open.
As a habitual Android tinkerer, this struck me as very odd. Port …read more
TensorFlow in your Browser
If you want to explore machine learning, you can now write applications that train and deploy TensorFlow in your browser using JavaScript. We know what you are thinking. That has to be slow. Surprisingly, it isn’t, since the libraries use Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) acceleration. Of course, that assumes your browser can use your GPU. There are several demos available, include one where you train a Pac Man game to respond to gestures in your webcam to control the game. If you try it and then disable accelerated graphics in your browser options, you’ll see just what a speed up …read more
Two-Cent Temperature Sensors
When they need to add temperature control to a project, many hackers reach for a K-type thermocouple for their high-temperature needs, or an integrated temperature-sensing IC when it doesn’t get that hot. The thermocouple relies on very small currents and extremely high gain, and you pretty much need a dedicated IC to read it, which can be expensive. The ICs aren’t as expensive, but they’re basically limited to boiling water. What do you do if you want to control a reflow oven?
There’s a cheaper way that spans a range between Antarctic winter and molten solder, and you’ve probably already …read more
Custom Built Vacuum Tube Cassette Player
As we’ve said many times here on Hackaday, it’s not our place to question why people make the things they make. There’s a legitimate need or utility for many of the projects we cover, no doubt about it. But there’s also a large number of them which are so convoluted that they border on absurd. Not that we love the crazy ones any less, in fact, we usually like those the best.
So when we saw this incredible modification to a Panasonic RN-404 microcassette recorder which replaces the audio hardware with a custom built vacuum tube amplifier, we didn’t bother …read more
Mechanisms: the Spring
Most people probably don’t think about springs until one kinks up or snaps, but most of the world’s springs are pretty crucial. The ones that aren’t go by the name Slinky.
We all use and encounter dozens of different types of springs every day without realizing it. Look inside the world of springs and you’ll find hundreds of variations on the theme of bounce. The principle of the spring is simple enough that it can be extended to almost any shape and size that can be imagined and machined. Because it can take so many forms, the spring as a …read more
