Project Sentinel — A Bipedal Walking Robot

July 6, 2014 by James Hobson 30 Comments

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[Ye Guan] has always been fascinated by walking robots — so he decided to build his own. It’s called Project Sentinel, and he’s loosely based the design off of the Sentinel Walker from Warhammer 40K, and the two-legged AT-AT walker from Star Wars.

Both of these robots are based off of a bird’s walking style. Scientifically this is called the digitgrade walking style, which means they stand and walk on their digits (toes) — this typically allows them to move more quickly and quietly than most other animals.

[Ye] has managed to achieve this for his project using 8 servo motors, balancing the center of mass directly above the feet. Think about it like a reverse pendulum, which is supported by the servos torque and balanced by a gyroscope. He plans to have it fully autonomous with sensor feedback.

It’s not done yet, but he’s already released all the CAD files and a nice build log for anyone to attempt it themselves — we’re excited to see the final product. Just take a look at it walking in place after the break!

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Hackaday Links: July 6, 2014

July 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 43 Comments

Power for your breadboards. It’s a USB connector, a 3.3V voltage regulator, and a few pins that plug into the rails of a breadboard.

“Have you seen those ‘Portable battery chargers for smartphones?’ Well the idea of the device is based on it , but the difference here is the internet part.” That’s a direct quote from this Indiegogo campaign. It’s funny because I don’t remember losing my damn mind recently. Wait. It’s $200. Yep. Yep. Definitely lost my mind there.

Putting the Internet on a USB stick not weird enough? Hair Highways. Yep, human hair. It’s just embedding human hair into resin, cutting everything up into plates, and assembling these plates into decorative objects. As a structural material, it’s probably only as strong as the resin itself, but with enough hair set in layers perpendicular to each other, it would be the same idea as fiberglass. Only made out of hair.

Tesla is building a $30,000 car and Harley is building an electric motorcycle. The marketing line for the bike will probably be something like, “living life on your own terms, 50 miles at a time”.

PixelClock? It’s a 64×64 array of red LEDs built to be a clock, and low-resolution display. It looks blindingly bright in the video, something that’s hard to do with red LEDs.

Mains Power Detector For A Thing For Internet

July 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

inductor The Internet of Things is fast approaching, and although no one can tell us what that actually is, we do know it has something to do with being able to control appliances and lights or something. Being able to control something is nice, but being able to tell if a mains-connected appliance is on or not is just as valuable. [Shane] has a really simple circuit he’s been working on to do just that: tell if something connected to mains is on or not, and relay that information over a wireless link.

There are two basic parts of [Shane]’s circuit – an RLC circuit that detects current flowing through a wire, This circuit is then fed into an instrumentation amplifier constructed from three op-amps. The output of this goes through a diode and straight to the ADC of a microcontroller, ready for transmission to whatever radio setup your local thingnet will have.

It’s an extremely simple circuit and something that could probably be made with less than a dollar’s worth of parts you could find in a component drawer. [Shane] has a great demo of this circuit connected to a microcontroller, you can check that out below.

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Piles Of Foam With A Hot Wire Slicer

July 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

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There are a million things you can do with foam, from some very impressive RC airplanes, all the way up to full-scale planes you can fly off into the wild blue yonder. Cutting foam, though, that’s a problem, and your best option is usually a hot wire foam cutter. [Darcy] put up some plans for a very nice bow cutter, but there’s also some experimentation for a foam slicer – a hot wire machine that takes a foam part and slices it like a smokehouse ham.

The bow-style cutter features laser cut parts, a pair of 1/4-20 bolts, a power supply, and about a foot of nichrome wire. It’s the bare minimum for cutting foam, but it seems to work really, really well.

The hot wire foam slicer is a much more interesting contraption, capable of making multiple thin sheets out of foam. Basically, it’s a laser cut tray with a bolt hole pattern running along the sides. Put two bolts along the side, loop some nichrome wire around the screw flights, and you have a way to cut foam in thicknesses of about 1/20th of an inch. Great if you’re trying to skin a model in very thin depron, or you just can’t find the right thickness of foam for your project.

Two Weeks To HOPE X, And We’re Going

July 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

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In a little less than two weeks, the biannual HOPE conference in NYC will be in full swing. Attendance is more than likely to put you on a list somewhere, so of course we’ll be setting up shop, enjoying the sights and sounds, and throwing swag at hundreds of attendees.

Highlights of HOPE X include a keynote from [Daniel Ellisburg], a video conference with [Edward Snowden], a Q&A with the EFF, a talk I’ll certainly be attending, and the always popular talk on social engineering headed up by [Emmanuel Goldstein].

As with all our extracurriculars, Hackaday will be giving out some swag (200+ tshirts, stickers, and THP goodies), and manning a vendor booth. Look for the eight foot Hackaday flag held up with duct tape. We’ll also be doing the usual video and blog thing from HOPE, for all of you who can’t attend thanks to your company’s security reviews, and some super secret things I can’t believe the overlords signed off on.

In other 2600 news, they ain’t doin too good, with tens of thousands of dollars of debt thanks to rather crappy legal stuff with their distributors. Buying a ticket would help the 2600 guys out, as would buying July’s issue (also on Kindle).

Stealing WiFi From LED Lightbulbs

July 6, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 13 Comments

Back in 2012, the LIFX light bulb launched on Kickstarter, and was quite successful. This wireless LED lightbulb uses a combination of WiFi and 6LoWPAN to create a network of lightbulbs within your house. Context Information Security took a look into these devices, and found some security issues.

The LIFX system has a master bulb. This is the only bulb which connects to WiFi, and it sends all commands out to the remaining bulbs over 6LoWPAN. To keep the network up, any bulb can become a master if required. This means the WiFi credentials need to be shared between all the bulbs.

Looking into the protocol, an encrypted binary blob containing WiFi credentials was found. This binary could easily be recovered using an AVR Raven evaluation kit, but was not readable since it was encrypted.

After cracking a bulb apart, they found JTAG headers on the main board. A BusBlaster and OpenOCD were used to communicate with the chip. This allowed the firmware to be dumped.

Using IDA Pro, they determined that AES was being used to encrypt the WiFi credentials. With a bit more work, the key and initialization vector was extracted. With this information, WiFi credentials sent over the air could be decrypted.

The good news is that LIFX fixed this issue. Now they generate an encryption key based on WiFi credentials, preventing a globally unique key from being used.

[via reddit]

C64 Emulator For The Arduino Due

July 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

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Almost a year ago, [miker00lz] started a thread on the Arduino forums telling everyone about a 6502 emulator and BASIC interpreter he wrote for an Arduino Uno. The chip inside the Uno isn’t a powerhouse by any means, and with only 2KB of RAM it’s far less capable than just about any computer from the 70s. Arduino works on a lot of different chips, though, and after a few months, [Jan] turned an Arduino Due into a Commodore 64 emulator.

[Jan]’s code isn’t limited to the DUE, and can be used with any chip with enough memory. If you’re feeling fancy, you can connect a TFT display for all the vintage goodness of PETSCII graphics, all while running a faster BASIC than the very stripped down EHBASIC.

Because the emulator is using software to talk to the outside world, it should be possible to use this project to interface with the cooler chips found in Commodore machines – SIDs for one, but also the cartridge port for some vintage Ethernet goodness. It’s not even limited to Commodore machines, either: the POKEY chips found in Atari 8-bit micros are seriously underutilized in the chiptune and demoscene, and having modern hardware to play with these chips couldn’t hurt in the slightest.

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