Quadrotor Pod Racing

October 6, 2014 by Elliot Williams 39 Comments

A group of multicopter enthusiasts from Argonay, France cordoned off a path through the forest and spent the day racing. The resulting video makes it look like a heck of a good time.

Twenty “drone” pilots all used first-person view (FPV) camera setups for complete immersion, racing at up to 50 kilometers per hour through a 150m course in the woods that was chosen for maximum thrills and spills. The track basically followed a footpath, but the pilots still had to be extremely alert to avoid natural obstacles (we call them “trees”). The narrator adds that the nearly random lighting and camera artifacts added an extra level of difficulty to the event.

After practicing a few times just to get around the track in one piece, they started racing each other in heats. On the final heat, at 3:40 in the video, five copters start off head-to-head and tear out into the woods. Of them, only two cross the finish line.

FPV drone crash scenes still make us wince a little bit. We wonder how many of the participants spent the next few nights in the repair bay.

Continue reading “Quadrotor Pod Racing” →

4 Axis CNC Foam Cutter Sports A Unistrut Frame

October 6, 2014 by Rich Bremer 29 Comments

CNC Foam Cutters are capable of cutting out some pretty cool shapes that would otherwise be extremely difficult to do. They do this by pulling a heated metal wire though a block of foam. Electrical current passing through the wire heats it up causing the foam to melt away, there is no dust and no mess to clean up. [batchelc] decided to make his own large-scale CNC Foam Cutter and took a lot of photos along the way.

Since machine is 4 axis, meaning both sides can move forward/back and up/down independently of each other, tapered shapes are possible. One example where this would be helpful is cutting wings that are swept or have different profiles at each end.

The main frame of the machine is made from Unistrut and measures a whopping 60 by 60 inches. Subtract the size of the mechanical components and the cutting area ends up being 48 by 42 and 22 inches high. The foam sits on an MDF bed, gravity is the only method of holding the foam down during cutting. The wire doesn’t actually touch the foam so there is no force applied to cause it to move. The hot wire moves slowly and melts the foam just a few thousands of an inch in front of the wire resulting in no contact between the two.

Both axes on each side are driven by 1/2-10″ lead screws supported by bearing blocks on both sides. The longitudinal axes smoothly traverse the length of the machine by means of skate bearings that ride on the Unistrut channel itself. The vertical axes have a plastic bushing that slides along a round shaft.

The control portion of the machine is a HobbyCC FoamPro kit that came with the 4 axis stepper motor control board and 4 NEMA 23 stepper motors. GMFC software is used to both generate the g-code and send the commands to the stepper motor control board.

Continue reading “4 Axis CNC Foam Cutter Sports A Unistrut Frame” →

Hackaday 10th Anniversary: [1o57] And The Art Of Encryption

October 6, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

[Ryan] a.k.a. [1o57] comes from an age before anyone could ask a question, pull out their smartphone, and instantly receive an answer from the great Google mind. He thinks there’s something we have lost with our new portable cybernetic brains – the opportunity to ask a question, think about it, review what we already know, and reason out a solution. There’s a lot to be said about solving a problem all by yourself, and there’s nothing to compare to the ‘ah-ha’ moment that comes with it.

[1o57] started his Mystery Challenges at DEFCON purely by accident; he had won the TCP/IP embedded device competition one year, and the next year was looking to claim his title again. The head of the TCP/IP embedded competition had resigned from his role, and through a few emails, [1o57] took on the role himself. There was a miscommunication, though, and [1o57] was scheduled to run the TCP/IP drinking competition. This eventually morphed into a not-totally-official ‘Mystery Challenge’ that caught fire in email threads and IRC channels. Everyone wanted to beat the mystery challenge, and it was up to [1o57] to pull something out of his bag of tricks.

The first Mystery Challenge was a mechanical device with three locks ready to be picked (one was already unlocked), magnets to grab ferrous picks, and only slightly bomb-like in appearance. The next few years featured similar devices with more locks, better puzzles, and were heavy enough to make a few security officials believe [1o57] was going to blow up the Hoover dam.

With a few years of practice, [1o57] is turning crypto puzzles into an art. His DEFCON 22 badge had different lanyards that needed to be arranged to spell out a code. To solve the puzzle, you’ll need to talk to other people, a great way to meet one of [1o57]’s goals of getting all the natural introverts working together.

Oh. This talk has its own crypto challenge, something [1o57] just can’t get out of his blood:

So far nobody has solved the @hackaday 10 year anniversary in-talk-mini-crypto-puzzle-of-doom…("it's only a model")

— LosT/李智上 (@1o57) October 5, 2014

We talked for a little bit, and 0x06 0x0a1 MFY YWXDWE MEOYOIB ASAE WBXLU BC S BLOQ ZTAO KUBDR HG SK YTTZSLBIMHB

Winning Game-App Contests With Computer Vision

October 6, 2014 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Gadget Addict] found out about a contest being held by a shoe seller. Their mobile app has a game very much like Bejeweled. The high scorer each month gets £500. His choices were to be better at the game than everyone else, or to be smarter. He chose the latter by writing a computer vision program to play the game.

There are two distinct parts of a hack like this one. The first is just figuring out a way to programmatically detect the game board and correctly identify each icon on it. This is an iPad game. [Gadget Addict] is mirroring the screen on his laptop, which gives him easy access to the game board and also allows for simulated swipes for automatic play. Above you can see two examples where black pixels may be counted in order to identify the icon. A set of secondary checks differentiates similar entries after the first filtering. The other part of the hack involves writing the algorithms to solve for the best move.

If you liked this one, check out a super-fast Bejeweled solver from several years back. We should also mention that this was just a proof of concept and [GA] never actually entered the contest.

CP/M Source Code Released

October 6, 2014 by Adam Fabio 51 Comments

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of CP/M, the Computer History Museum has released a package containing early source code for several versions of CP/M. Originally designed by [Gary Kildall] in 1973, Control Program for Microcomputers (CP/M) is an early operating system for microprocessor based computers. The OS was originally written for the Intel Intellec 8, an Intel 8008 based computer. Since it was on an Intel machine, CP/M was written in PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers), a language [Kildall] had previously developed for Intel .

CP/M pioneered the idea of a ROM based Basic Input Output/System (BIOS) for commonly used routines on a given computer. The use of BIOS made CP/M easy to port. Eventually it was ported to thousands of different machines and architectures, including the Altair, IMSAI 8080, C-64, and C-128 and Apple II systems.

Gary and his company Digital Research, were one of the top contenders for the operating system on IBM’s new personal computer. Ultimately, Microsoft got the job by purchasing 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. Somewhat ironically, 86-DOS itself was written based on the CP/M Application Programming interface (API).

The source itself is an amazing trip back in time. Included are portions of CP/M 1.1, 1.3, 1.4, and 2.0. Portions of CP/M have been released previously. As with the previous files, this version includes modifications performed by z80-pack author [Udo Munk] in 2007. Version 1.3 is especially interesting as it is primarily scanned copies of the CP/M source code.

If you’re into vintage computing, and know how important CP/M was to the early days of personal computers, check out the CP/M source. If you find any interesting or clever bits of code, be sure let us know about it in the comments.

[Image Source: CulturaInformatica]

Web Browser Pushes Arduino’s Limits

October 5, 2014 by Bryan Cockfield 21 Comments

Some projects that we build fulfill a genuine need for a new piece of hardware or software that will make life easier or fix a common problem. Other projects, on the other hand, we do just because it’s possible to do. [Gilchrist] has finished work on a project that fits squarely in the second category: a web browser that runs exclusively on an Arduino Uno with an ethernet shield.

The Arduino can serve plain-text web pages to an attached LCD and can follow hyperlinks. User input is handled by a small joystick, but the impressive part of the build is on the software side. The Arduino only has 2KB of RAM to handle web pages, and the required libraries take up 20KB of memory, leaving only about 12 KB for the HTML parser/renderer and the LCD renderer.

The Arduino browser is a work in progress, and [Gilchrist] mentions that goals for the project include more robustness to handle poor HTML (the Hackaday retro edition loads flawlessly though), a terminal, and WiFi capabilities. To that end, maybe a good solution would be using the new ESP8266 chip to keep things small and inexpensive?

BadUSB Means We’re All Screwed

October 5, 2014 by Mike Szczys 138 Comments

Does anyone else get the feeling that the frequency of rather horrible vulnerabilities coming to light is accelerating? Off the top of our head, there’s Heartbleed, Shellshock, and now this one. The BadUSB exploit attack stems from the “invisible” microcontroller in most USB devices.

We first heard about it when we were attending DEFCON in August. The exploit had been announced the same week at Blackhat but there wasn’t much information out yet. Now the talk has been posted and there’s a well-explained overview article at Big Mess o’ Wires.

Here’s how this one goes: all USB devices rely on a microcontroller to handle the peripheral-side of USB communications. The computer doesn’t care which microcontroller, nor does it have a way of knowing even if it wanted to. The uC is “invisible” in this situation, it’s the interface and data flowing through it that the computer cares about. BadUSB is an attack that adds malicious functionality to this microcontroller. To the computer it’s a perfectly normal and functional USB device, while all the bad stuff is happening on the peripheral’s controller where the computer can’t see it.

How deeply do you think about plugging each and every USB device? Check out what happens at 19:20 into the video below. The USB device enumerates and very quickly sets up a spoofed Ethernet connection. You can still load a webpage via WiFi but the fake connection is forwarding packets to a second server.

Once discovered, you can wipe the computer and this will stop happening; until you plug the same device again and reinfect. Worse yet, because the controller is invisible to the computer there’s almost no way to scan for infected devices. If you are smart enough to suspect BadUSB, how long will it take you to figure out if its your mouse, your keyboard, a thumb drive, a webcam, your scanner… you get the point.

Continue reading “BadUSB Means We’re All Screwed” →