Month: November 2005

Simple MP3 Player

November 14, 2005 by 15 Comments

mp3

I’ve seen a lot of MP3 player projects, but this has to be one of the simplest designs yet. Control is from a PIC16LF877. Files are read from the compact flash card’s root directory in the order in which they were copied. This data is streamed byte by byte to the vs1001k decoder chip with a built in DAC.

If this project seems a little hard you might want to check out one of Raphael’s other projects: Alarm Clock of the Short Now [via MAKE]. It’s designed for people that don’t have a regular sleep schedule, like me.

[thanks iamdigitalman]

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Liquid Nitrogen Icecream

November 13, 2005 by 33 Comments

ice cream

While sitting in the heat at Defcon I wondered what the best activity for next year could be. I think liquid nitrogen ice cream has some great potential. It’s a pretty common freshman chemistry demo where you add liquid nitrogen to a standard ice cream recipe. As the -320degreeF nitrogen boils off it freezes the ice cream mixture resulting in one of the smoothest ice creams you’ll ever encounter. It is a simple task and you’ll see quite a few people that have tried it if you just google for it. Wear eye protection and heavy rubber gloves when working with liquid nitrogen. You’ll need at least a 5:1 ratio of N2 to ice cream. Mix it in a large metal container; a pressure cooker is probably your best bet. Most recommend mixing with a wooden spoon, but I think I’ll agree with DocBug “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with power tools“.

[thanks XyTec]

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All-weather WiFi Enclosure

November 12, 2005 by 22 Comments

all-weather housing

Reader [Krome] wanted a reliable, modular, weather proof WiFi bridge. The outer weather box was purchased for $50. The main radio is a proprietary Wi-Lan HP45-24. A lightning arrestor is included because this proprietary box was purchased before the WiFi band was official allocated and would be hard to replace. A Linksys WRT54G is used as the local access point and is connected to a Hyperlink 500mW amplifier. The Wi-Lan box and the amplifier have their antennas connected to panel connectors on the outside of the box. The WRT and Wi-Lan box are both powered by an ATX power supply while the amp is connected to the pass-through. Looks like a really solid setup and it should be easy to replace individual components if they fail.

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FUSE: Filesystem In Userspace

November 11, 2005 by 21 Comments

flickr

There has been a lot of buzz this week about Flickrfs the virtual filesystem for Flickr. Using Flickrfs you can interact with Flickr tags and photos just like your regular filesystem. A similar service is GmailFS which lets you mount a Gmail account as a large virtual filesystem. Both of these services are built on top of FUSE. FUSE makes it easy to build fully functional filesystems inside of a userspace program. Users can script and manipulate files just like their regular files. FUSE is now part of the main Linux kernel with release 2.6.14. Check out the list of other interesting filesystems built using FUSE. Of particular interest: WikipediaFS, SMB for FUSE is similar to Network Neighborhood, SSHFS, btslave to mount torrent files, and djmount is a UPnP AV client.

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PIC Based IPod Remote Control

November 10, 2005 by 15 Comments

ipod remote

I’d found plenty of documentation on the iPod’s dock pinout and serial based remote interface, but never a decent explanation of how to actually implement it. Finally I found BigCookie’s iPod to T&A remote control adapter tucked away in the iPod Linux wiki. He built the controller to receive remote signals from his T&A audio receiver and then translate them to control the iPod. He’s got schematics and code for a a PIC16F628 microcontroller. I’m guessing the code could be adapted to support almost any input method the PIC supports.

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Don’t Trust Your Hardware

November 9, 2005 by 35 Comments

flash drive

I wasn’t able to see David Maynor’s “You are the Trojan” (pdf) talk at Toorcon, but it’s a really interesting subject. With such a large emphasis being placed on tightening perimeter security with firewalls and IDS systems how do attacks keep getting through? The user: bringing laptops on site, connecting home systems through a VPN, or just sacrificing security for speed.

Peripherals can also be a major threat. USB and other computer components use Direct Memory Access (DMA) to bypass the processor. This allows for high performance data transfers. The CPU is completely oblivious to the DMA activity. There is a lot of trust involved in this situation. Here’s how this could be exploited: Like a diligent individual you’ve locked you Windows session. Someone walks in with their hacked USB key and plugs it into your computer. The USB key uses its DMA to kill the process locking your session. Voila! your terminal is now wide open and all they had to do was plug in their USB key, PSP, iPod

Hack-A-Day Extra

November 9, 2005 by 53 Comments

biquad dish

From the comments it sounds like people actually were reading the links posts. Well, the story is: We’re taking Hack-A-Day back to its original purpose, one hack a day. By popular demand though it looks like I’ll be putting up some random links posts from time to time.

If you are getting bored you can check out the Team Hack-A-Day Folding@HOME team forum which now has a memorable web address: http://teamhackaday.com The team should be hitting 3 million points this weekend. You could also hang out on our long standing IRC channel: #hackaday on EFnet.

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