Year: 2011

Smartphone Hacking Without Risk – Plus, Broken Phones Needed

September 6, 2011 by 17 Comments

[Adam Outler] and [Rebellos] have been working feverishly to advance the world of mobile device hacking. They’re attacking on two fronts, making it easier for the common hacker to monkey with the phone’s firmware and OS with impunity, and by finding ways to make regular handsets into dev-hardware for low-level hacking.

The Hummingbird Interceptor Bootloader (HIBL) circumvents the chain of trust on smartphones running the Cortex-A8 family of processors. This opens a lot of doors, not the least of which is the ability to run any OS that you’re capable of porting to the hardware. We’re certain that Android builds will come first as they are open-source, but there’s talk of iOS or Windows Phone being run after some heavy assembly hacking.

But the two developers are trying to bring more people into the fold with their recent hacks. [Adam] has put out a call for your broken hardware. He needs your dead smartphone boards to reverse engineer the circuitry. Soldering one wire from the OM5 pin on the processor to the OM1 resistor will make the phones unbrickable (something we heard about back in July) and remove the need for soldering in a JTAG interface. With borked hardware in hand he pops off the processor and traces out this connection as well as the UART pins.

The soldering isn’t an easy process, but it’s a marked improvement that breaks down more barriers that keep people from hacking their coveted hardware. The clip after the break shows how easy it now is to recover your phone if something goes wrong while messing with the firmware or OS.

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Salvaging A Commercial-grade Pick And Place Machine

September 6, 2011 by 11 Comments

Why build a pick and place machine from the ground up when you can start with a full featured, but non-functional unit, and bring it back to life. That’s exactly what [Charliex] is doing with this Juki 360 rebuild.

A bit of background is in order here. [Charliex] is working alongside other hackers at Null Space Labs to restore this hardware. The Los Angeles based hackerspace sponsored the hardware badges at this year’s LayerOne, each of which was hand assembled. They’d like to avoid that tedium next year, which led to this project.

The seller of the used Juki 360 listed it in working condition, but it seems that they were polishing a turd since it is basically non-functional. The link at the top of this post is the second testimonial of their work so far. It covers the use of an Arduino board as a replacement interface, as well as a bunch of sensor repair, pneumatic testing, and motor driver firmware tweaking. If you’d like to see the initial teardown and hardware diagnostics don’t miss the first post in their adventure.

Playing Snake With A TV Remote

September 6, 2011 by 12 Comments

[vinod] sent in his replica of a Snake game, the game to play on old Nokia dumb phones.

The build is based on a PIC16F877 microcontroller just like previous Snake builds we’ve seen, but [vinod] didn’t use physical buttons in his build. Instead, he used a Philips infrared TV remote to control the game. The infrared controller only takes up one pin on the microcontroller, as opposed to the 4 pins of the easiest four button setup. [vinod] also threw in a simple one-transistor level converter so Snake can be played with a PC via RS-232. With the PIC code included in the build, it’s a great build that reminds us of a more civilized age.

The video of [vinod]’s snake game in action is posted after the break, but we noticed that the snake is allowed to ‘warp around’ the sides of the LED matrix. Some people might consider that cheating but that can be fixed by changing a few lines of code.

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Engine Hacks: Snow Chucking — Because Snow Blowing Is For Commoners

September 6, 2011 by 21 Comments

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Winter’s coming, and you don’t want to be outdone by your neighbor’s new snow blower. We think it’s pretty safe to say you’ll be the envy of gearheads throughout the neighborhood if you can build your own snow blower around a V8 engine. [Kai Grundt] is a metal fabricator by day and a horror movie prop yard implement builder by night. He pulled the engine out of his Chevy truck and then filled in parts around it to make this 412 HP snow blower.

The tank treads that it rides are each have their own dedicated hydraulic pump, making it easy to drive and steer this 800 pound whale. One of the first orders of business for the beast was to throw snow from two houses away, burying his buddy’s car. That’s the price you pay for laughing in a guy’s face when he describes his next project. It sounds like [Kai] was planning on selling kits so you could more easily replicate the build, but we couldn’t find any additional info on that. If you’ve got the details, please let us know by leaving a comment.

[Thanks Danman1453]

La Crosse Weather Station Wireless Data Acquisition

September 6, 2011 by 5 Comments

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Hackaday reader [equinoxefr] posted some images to our flickr pool showing off some modifications he made (Google Translation) to his La Crosse WS2305 weather station. Having built other router-based weather stations in the past, [equinoxefr] was looking for a better way to gather weather data after one of the routers gave up the ghost.

With a brand new La Crosse WS2305 in hand, his goal was to feed the Lacross’ data to his HTPC which runs XBMC. He pulled the weather station apart and probed around with an oscilloscope until he could find the TTL Tx and Rx pins required to retrieve data from the unit. He hooked the data pins to an XBee wireless transmitter, which he then tucked away in the station’s battery compartment.

Another XBee unit was connected to his computer via an XBee Explorer board, and he was reading data from his weather station in no time.

While his isn’t the first La Crosse weather station hack we’ve seen around here, we like how simple and clean it is. If you’re interested, be sure to check out his flickr stream to see more images of the hacking process.

Want To Learn Artificial Intelligence? Good.

September 5, 2011 by 39 Comments

In a little more than a month, tens of thousands of people around the world will attend a class on Artificial Intelligence at Stanford. Registration for this class is still open for both class ‘tracks’. The “basic” track is simply watching lectures and answering quizzes, or a slightly more advanced version of MIT OpenCourseware or Khan Academy. The “advanced” track is the full class, requires homework and exams, and aspires to Stanford difficulty.

With thousands of people taking this class, there’s bound to be a few study groups popping up around the web. The largest ones we’ve seen are /r/aiclass on Reddit and the stack overflow style aiqus. The most common reply to ‘what language should I learn from this class?’ is Python, although there’s an online code repo that has the text’s working code in Lisp, Java, C++ and C#.

If AI doesn’t float your boat, there are two more classes being taught from Stanford this fall: machine learning and introduction to databases. Any way you look at it, you’re getting to take a class from one of the preeminent instructors in the field for free. Do yourself a favor and sign up.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in. You can stop now.

Czech-ing Out The View From 31 Kilometers

September 5, 2011 by 19 Comments

The team at czANZO, the Czech Amateur Near-Space Object group, sent up one of the best high-altitude balloons we’ve ever seen last weekend and the resulting video is remarkable.

The team’s build blog (Google Translate link for everyone without Chrome) goes through the design and construction of their payload. Like every other balloon build we’ve seen, a styrofoam cooler is used for the enclosure, but there’s a lot of really neat additions that make this build special.

The team included a cut down device in the event the balloon gets caught in the jet stream. Without this cut-down device the balloon could end up hundreds of miles away from the launch point. That’s the reason for the cut-down device they’ve given, although we suspect it’s an excuse to play around with pyrotechnic rope cutting. The optical and audible alarm is something we haven’t seen on many high-altitude balloon launches, which is odd because it made ground recovery much easier.

The team has a lot of video from the flight that [Pavel Richter] dumped onto Vimeo. We really like the footage showing all of Prague, you can check that out after the break.

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