Month: November 2008

Sonar Navigation Jacket

November 20, 2008 by 15 Comments

sonar_jacket

[Lynne] had this crazy idea to build a piece of clothing that would give you feedback about your surroundings using sonar. She started with a carefully selected thrift store jacket. She wanted something that looked good and also provided plenty of places to hide electronics. She used the LilyPad system, with a vibration pad and a sonar range finder. When the system detects an object within a certain distance directly in front of the wearer, it warns them with some vibration. Not only is it practical, it looks pretty cool too. Did we mention she designs clothing?

She notes, in the comments section, that while it can detect an obstacle, it cannot detect a void. How could she detect a drop in the floor or a step down?

“Interplanetary Internet” Passes First Test

November 20, 2008 by 12 Comments

NASA just completed the first deep-space test of what could one day become the interplanetary internet. Images of Mars and its moon Phobos were sent back and forth between computers on Earth and NASA’s Epoxi spacecraft. Instead of TCP/IP a new protocol, named “Disruption/Delay Tolerant Networking” (DTN) was used. Information is only sent once with DTN, and stored at each node until another node is available to receive the information.  To prevent hackers from interfering with the network, information that is transmitted over DTN is encrypted. The team at NASA is hoping to get the protocol accepted by the international community and setup a permanent node at the International Space Station next year.

[via Warren Ellis]

PSP 3000 Hacked

November 19, 2008 by 63 Comments

Peripheral manufacturer Datel has been hard at work attempting to crack the PSP 3000 since its release. They’ve developed the Lite Blue Tool battery to force the PSP into service mode so hackers can run any arbitrary code they want. According to MaxConsole, Datel performed a silicon level investigation of the PSP’s chips to determine how to break into service mode. This means they decapsulated the the chips and reverse engineered any cryptographic protections. We’d love to hear exactly what chips were being used since some are fundamentally flawed.

Silicon hacking has always been a favorite topic of ours and we suggest you check out [Chris Tarnovsky]’s decapsulation technique to learn more about it.

Iphone-dev Team 3G Soft Unlock Coming Soon

November 19, 2008 by 11 Comments

[vimeo 2291914]

The iphone-dev team has officially stated “all that remains is implementation“. They’ve developed all the pieces they need to perform a software unlock for the iPhone 3G, now it’s just a matter of putting them together in user friendly fashion. They’ve managed to run unsigned code on the baseband, developed custom AT tools, and are now showing injection of a background task. They will combine all of these techniques to override the carrier lock baseband code. As usual, they warn against performing any official firmware updates to the phone.

Augmented Reality In Flash

November 19, 2008 by 35 Comments

Digital Pictures Interactive has put together a great augmented reality demo. Unlike many others, it’s entirely Flash based, so there’s no install necessary. Print out the custom symbol and try it out for yourself in your browser. Augmented reality refers to any mashup that combines computer generated content with a live video stream. We see great potential for this technology and the large number of consumer webcams would certainly help consumer adoption. Video demo embedded below. Continue reading “Augmented Reality In Flash” →

How-to: The Bus Pirate, Universal Serial Interface

November 19, 2008 by 60 Comments

UPDATE: New firmware with JTAG and more

We’re always excited to get a new chip or SIM card to interface, but our enthusiasm is often dampened by the prototyping process. Interfacing any chip usually means breadboarding a circuit, writing code, and hauling out the programmer; maybe even a prototyping PCB.

A few years ago we built the first ‘Bus Pirate’, a universal bus interface that talks to most chips from a PC serial terminal. Several standard serial protocols are supported at 3.3-5volts, including I2C, SPI, and asynchronous serial. Additional ‘raw’ 2- and 3- wire libraries can interface almost any proprietary serial protocols. Since this has been such a useful tool for us, we cleaned up the code, documented the design, and released it here with specs, schematic, and source code.

Continue reading “How-to: The Bus Pirate, Universal Serial Interface” →