NFC Ring Unlocks Your Phone

March 17, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 31 Comments

This little ring packs the guts of an NFC keyfob, allowing [Joe] to unlock his phone with a touch of his finger.

The NFC Ring was inspired by a Kickstarter project for a similar device. [Joe] backed that project, but then decided to build his own version. He took apart an NFC keyfob and desoldered the coil used for communication and power. Next, he wrapped a new coil around a tube that was matched to his ring size. With this assembly completed, epoxy was used to cast the ring shape.

After cutting the ring to size, and quite a bit of polishing, [Joe] ended up with a geeky piece of jewelry that’s actually functional. To take care of NFC unlocking, he installed NFC LockScreenOff. It uses Xposed, so a rooted Android device is required.

We’ll have to wait to see how [Joe]’s homemade solution compares to his Kickstarter ring. Until then, you can watch a quick video of unlocking a phone with the ring after the break.

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MRRF: ARM-Based CNC Controllers

March 17, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

8-bit microcontrollers are the standard for RepRap electronics, but eventually something better must come along. There has been a great deal of progress with ARM-based solutions, and of course a few of these made a showing at the Midwest RepRap Festival.

First up is [Mark Cooper], creator of Smoothieboard, the ultimate RepRap and CNC controller. It’s an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with Ethernet, SD card, and up to five stepper drivers. It had a Kickstarter late last year and has just finished shipping all the rewards to the backers. In our video interview, [Mark] goes over the functions of Smoothieboard and tells us about some upcoming projects: the upcoming Smoothiepanel will feature a graphic LCD, SD card, rotary encoder and buttons, all controlled over USB by the Smoothieboard.

Next up is [Charles] with a whole bunch of CNC capes for the Beaglebone. By far the most impressive board was a huge I/O expander, motor driver, and everything controller for a Beaglebone featuring – get this – three parallel port interfaces. This was a one-off board costing thousands of dollars, but [Charles] did show off a few smaller and more practical boards for Beaglebone CNC control. Here’s a link to [Charles]’ capes.

Videos below.

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Hacking Rolling Code Keyfobs

March 17, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 39 Comments

Most keyfobs out there that open cars, garage doors, and gates use a rolling code for security. This works by transmitting a different key every time you press the button. If the keys line up, the signal is considered legitimate and the door opens.

[Spencer] took a look into hacking rolling code keyfobs using low cost software-defined radio equipment. There’s two pars of this attack. The first involves jamming the frequency the keyfob transmits on while recording using a RTL-SDR dongle. The jamming signal prevents the receiver from acknowledging the request, but it can be filtered out using GNU Radio to recover the key.

Since the receiver hasn’t seen this key yet, it will still be valid. By replaying the key, the receiver can be tricked. To pull off the replay, GNU Radio was used to demodulate the amplitude shift keying (ASK) signal used by the transmitter. This was played out of a computer sound card into a ASK transmitter module, which sent out a valid key.

Clever Use Of PVC To Make A Standing Desk At Work

March 16, 2014 by James Hobson 35 Comments

[Daniel] and his coworker [Chris] were interested in the concept of standing desks — unfortunately, the company wasn’t about to buy them a new desk to test it out — so they decided to modify the tables themselves!

The IKEA tables they are using have three adjustable legs — just not that adjustable for standing. The challenge was to modify these tables in such a way that it can easily be reversed — they didn’t want the facilities department to get mad at them! Originally they wanted to use steel legs for structural stability, but discovered they’d have to do quite a bit of modification to the steel tubing with tools they didn’t have. So they chose PVC instead.

[Chris] had remembered seeing a hack here on heating up PVC pipe to make it malleable — try as we might we weren’t able to find what he was referring to, but a quick search on YouTube brings up lots of tutorials on how to do it.

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Hacking Window Blinds To Interface With Home Automation System

March 16, 2014 by James Hobson 8 Comments

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Home automation is great, but what happens when you start mixing different systems around the house together? Follow [Bithead’s] journey of interfacing with his motorized blinds!

After having his original blinds fall apart many times, [Bithead] and his wife decided to invest in some new, motorized blinds — but [Bithead] wanted to add it to his home automation setup… Unfortunately, commercial offerings for that are very expensive, so [Bithead] knew he’d have to figure out how to interface with the system manually.

The problem is, companies don’t typically advertise the kind of in depth information us hackers would love to know about products, so [Bithead] started checking out store showrooms. Salespeople didn’t quite understand his focused attention on the control boxes!

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Hackaday Links: March 16, 2014

March 16, 2014 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Tape decks are fertile hacking ground. In this offering from [Erich] the speed of the motor has been turned into a MIDI instrument. Drive it faster and the pitch rises, slower and it falls. There are all kinds of other magnetic tape hacks around here, this tape delay is a classic.

[Dbever] needed a reason to use a big 7-segment display module. He opened up the drill press at his Hackerspace, Pumping Station One, and added a sensor which shows the RPM of the drill on the display. Hackaday was lucky enough to be invited for a tour of the space last fall.

There’s a lot of hype about 3D printing… and rightly so since it’s the radest; which is even better than being “the most rad”. But if you don’t have access to one that shouldn’t stop you. Here’s an example of making robot parts using polymorph instead of 3D printing (or laser cutting) them.

If you’re living in the east-coast metroplex and are unable to travel to Maker Faire Bay Area this Spring you can still get in on some live hacking. Check out MassHack which takes place the same May weekend but in Boston instead of San Fran.

Blimps; not as cool as quadcopters but orders of magnitude less likely to go down in flames (as it were). Draw some inspiration for your own build from silent_runner. The graceful travel of these lighter-than-air-craft make for an interesting camera platform. Here’s a POV video inside of a church, and some shots from the ground while in the woods. [Thanks Oliver]

We try not to pimp crowd-funding campaigns just for the sake of getting them to the goal. But we hope you’ll agree that the Gamebuino we saw a few months back makes a strong argument for backers. Their Indiegogo for the Arduino-compatible handheld gaming rig is over half-way there after just a couple of days.

Developed On Hackaday: Security And Arduino Compatibility

March 16, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 56 Comments

Some of our readers noticed that the Hackaday community open-source offline password keeper (aka Mooltipass) has two incompatible characteristics: being secure and Arduino compatible.

Why is that? Arduino compatibility implies including a way to change the device firmware and accessing the microcontroller’s pins to connect shields. Therefore, some ill-intentioned individuals may replace the original firmware with one that would log all user’s inputs and passwords, or in another case simply sniff the uC’s signals. The ‘hackers’ would then later come to extract the recorded data. Consequently, we needed a secure tamper-proof Mooltipass version and an Arduino-compatible one, while allowing the former to become the latter.

Olivier’s design, though completely closed, will have several thinner surfaces directly above the Arduino headers. As a compromise, we therefore thought of sending a bootloader-free assembled version to the people only interested in the password keeper functionality, while sending a non-assembled version (with a pre-burnt bootloader) to the tinkerers. The Arduino enthusiasts would just need to cut the plastic at the strategic places (and perhaps solder headers to save costs). The main advantage of doing so is that the case would be the same for both versions. The drawback is that each board would have a different firmware depending on who it is intended for.

What do our reader think? For more detailed updates on the Mooltipass current status, you can always join the official Google group.