Passwords? Just Use Your Head!

April 25, 2016 by Al Williams 26 Comments

Biometrics–the technique of using something unique about your body as a security device–promises to improve safety while being more convenient than a password. Fingerprints, retinal scans, and voice identification have all found some use, although not without limitations.

Now researchers in Germany want you to use your head, literally. SkullConduct measures vibrations of your skull in response to a sonic signal. A small prototype was successful and is particularly well suited for something you are holding up to your head anyway, like a smartphone or a headset like a Google Glass.

There are some limitations, though. For one thing, background noise can be a factor. It stands to reason, also, that more testing is necessary.

This looks straightforward enough that you could try your own version of it. After all, scanning veins in your hand has been hacked. We’ve even seen a biometric safe.

Fail Of The Week: Don’t Tie Those Serial Lines High

April 25, 2016 by Jenny List 56 Comments

Fail Of The Week is a long-running series here at Hackaday. Over the years we’ve been treated to a succession of entertaining, edifying, and sometimes downright sad cock-ups from many corners of the technological and maker world.

You might think that we Hackaday writers merely document the Fails of others, laughing at others’ misfortunes like that annoying kid at school. But no, we’re just as prone to failure as anyone else, and it is only fair that we eat our own dog food and tell the world about our ignominious disasters when they happen.

And so we come to my week. I had a test process to automate for my contract customer. A few outputs to drive some relays, a few inputs from buttons and microswitches. Reach for an Arduino Uno and a prototyping shield, divide the 14 digital I/O lines on the right into 7 outputs and 7 inputs. Route 7 to 13 into a ULN2003 to drive my relays, tie 0 to 6 high with a SIL resistor pack so I can trigger them with switches to ground. Job done, and indeed this is substantially the hardware the test rig ended up using.

So off to the Arduino IDE to write my sketch. No rocket science involved, a fairly simple set of inputs, outputs, and timers. Upload it to the Arduino, and the LED on pin 13 flashes as expected. Go for a well-deserved lunch as a successful and competent engineer who can whip up a test rig in no time.

Back at the bench refreshed by the finest British pub grub, I started up the PC, plugged the shield into the Arduino, and applied the power. My sketch worked. But wait! There’s a slight bug! Back to the IDE, change a line or two and upload the sketch.

And here comes my fail. The sketch wouldn’t upload, the IDE reported a COM port error. “Damn’ Windows 10 handling of USB serial ports”, I thought, as I’m not a habitual Windows user on my own machines. Then followed something I’ve not done for quite a while; diving into the Windows control panel to chase the problem. Because it had to be a Windows problem, right?

The seasoned Arduinisti among you probably spotted my fail four paragraphs ago. We all know that pins 0 and 1 on an Arduino are shared with the serial port, but who gives it a second thought? I guess I’d always had the good fortune to drive those pins from lines which didn’t enforce a logic state, and had never ended up tying them high. Hold them to a logic 1, and the Arduino can’t do its serial thing so sketches stay firmly in the IDE.

I could have popped the shield off every time I wanted to upload a new sketch, but since in the event I didn’t need all those inputs I just lifted the links tying those pins high and shifted the other inputs up the line. And went home that evening a slightly less competent engineer whose ability to whip up a test rig in no time was a bit tarnished. Ho hum, at least the revised sketch worked and the test rig did its job exactly as it should.

So that’s my Fail Of The Week. What’s yours?

Header image: pighixxx.com, CC-BY-ND via MarkusJenkins

Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which celebrates failure as a learning tool. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your own failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.

Poopable Cameras

April 24, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 51 Comments

Pill cameras, devices for ‘capsule endoscopy’, or in much cruder terms, ‘poopable cameras’, are exceedingly cool technology. They’re astonishingly small, communicate through a gastrointestinal tract to the outside world, and have FDA certification. These three facts also mean pill cameras are incredible expensive, but that doesn’t mean a hardware hacker can’t build their own, and that’s exactly what [friarbayliff] is doing for his entry into The Hackaday Prize.

First things first: [friarbayliff] is not building one of these for human consumption. That’s a morass of regulatory requirements and ethical issues. This pill camera is only being built as an experiment, because it would be fun to build one. The pill cams swallowed by patients every day have millions of dollars in R&D behind them before human trials. That said, given a good food-safe enclosure, I’d down one of these as an experiment.

This pill camera will use a simple, off-the-shelf 2 megapixel image sensor that can be bought on eBay for less than five dollars. With a small 32-bit micro, these cameras are easy to drive and capture images from. Power is provided from a single silver oxide button cell battery and a boost converter. In total, [friarbayliff] estimates the total PCB area to be just under one square inch, making this a relatively inexpensive device to build. There will be a radio transceiver in there somewhere, but [friar] hasn’t figure that part out yet.

Pill cameras are some amazing technology, but relatively inaccessible unless you get a used one. Ew. [Mike Harrison] tore one of these pill cams apart a few years ago, and it really is an incredible device. Building one for fun – even if it won’t be used in a human – is a fantastic learning experience and a great entry for the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

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From Trash To TV

April 24, 2016 by Jenny List 49 Comments

In days gone by, when TVs had CRTs and still came in wooden cabinets, a dead TV in a dumpster was a common sight. Consumer grade electronic devices of the 1960s and ’70s were not entirely reliable, and the inside of a domestic TV set was not the place for them to be put under least stress. If you were electronic-savvy you could either harvest these sets as a source of free components, or with relative ease fix them for a free TV set.

With today’s LCDs, integrated electronics, and electronic waste regulations, the days of free electronics in every dumpster are largely behind us. Modern TVs are more reliable, and when they reach end-of-life we’re less likely to see them.

[Sidsingh] happened to find an LCD TV in a dumpster, and being curious as to whether he could fix it or salvage some components, cracked it open to take a look.

He found that somebody had already been into the set and that some components on the PSU and backlight boards showed evidence of magic smoke escaping, having been desoldered by the previous repairer. The signal board was intact though, a generic Chinese model based around a Mediatek MTK8227 SoC. Information was scarce on these boards, but some patient research yielded a schematic for a similar set.

Once he knew more about the circuit, he was able to identify the power lines and discovered that the 1.8v line to the SoC was faulty. This he traced to a switching regulator for which there was no equivalent in his junkbox, so he substituted a linear regulator to obtain the required voltage. The CFL backlight was then removed and replaced with LED strips, and as if by magic he had a working TV set.

This might seem a relatively mundane achievement on the scale of some of the projects we feature on these pages, but it is an important one. In these days of throwaway items it is still not impossible to repair dead electronic devices, indeed as [Sidsingh] found the power supply is most likely to be the culprit. If you score a dead LCD TV then don’t be afraid to crack it open yourself, you may be able to fix it.

As you might imagine, many repairs have made it onto Hackaday over the years. Of relevance to this one is this LCD that inexplicably worked when exposed to light, an LED backlight conversion, and this capacitor swap to return an LCD monitor to health.

Hackaday Links: April 24, 2016

April 24, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

The Internet Archive has a truck. Why? Because you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck filled with old manuals, books, audio recordings, films, and everything else the Internet Archive digitizes and hosts online. This truck also looks really, really badass. A good thing, too, because it was recently stolen. [Jason Scott] got the word out on Twitter and eagle-eyed spotters saw it driving to Bakersfield. The truck of awesome was recovered, and all is right with the world. The lesson we learned from all of this? Steal normal cars. Wait. Don’t steal cars, but if you do, steal normal cars.

In a completely unrelated note, does anyone know where to get a 99-01 Chevy Astro / GMC Safari cargo van with AWD, preferably with minimal rust?

[Star Simpson] is almost famous around these parts. She’s responsible for the TacoCopter among other such interesting endeavours. Now she’s working on a classic. [Forrest Mims]’ circuits, making the notebook version real. These Circuit Classics take the circuits found in [Forrest Mims]’ series of notebook workbooks, print them on FR4, and add a real, solderable implementation alongside.

Everyone needs more cheap Linux ARM boards, so here’s the Robin Core. It’s $15, has WiFi, and does 720p encoding. Weird, huh? It’s the same chip from an IP webcam. Oooohhhh. Now it makes sense.

Adafruit has some mechanical keyboard dorks on staff. [ladyada] famously uses a Dell AT101 with Alps Bigfoot switches, but she and [Collin Cunningham] spent three-quarters of an hour dorking out on mechanical keyboards. A music video was the result. Included in the video: vintage Alps on a NeXT keyboard and an Optimus Mini Three OLED keyboard.

A new Raspberry Pi! Get overenthusiastic hype! The Raspberry Pi Model A+ got an upgrade recently. It now has 512MB of RAM

We saw this delta 3D printer a month ago at the Midwest RepRap festival in Indiana. Now it’s a Kickstarter. Very big, and fairly cheap.

The Rigol DS1054Zed is one of the best oscilloscopes you can buy for the price. It’s also sort of loud. Here’s how you replace the fan to make it quieter.

Here’s some Crowdfunding drama for you. This project aims to bring the Commodore 64 back, in both a ‘home computer’ format and a portable gaming console. It’s not an FPGA implementation – it’s an ARM single board computer that also has support for, “multiple SIDs for stereo sound (6581 or 8580).” God only knows where they’re sourcing them from. Some tech journos complained that it’s, “just a Raspberry Pi running an emulator,” which it is not – apparently it’s a custom ARM board with a few sockets for SIDs, carts, and disk drives. I’ll be watching this one with interest.

DIY Spot Welder Doesn’t Look Like It Will Immediately Kill You

April 24, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 30 Comments

We love hacks that involve mains voltage, but most of the time, for safety’s sake, we secretly hope for that one macabre commenter that details every imaginable way the questionable design choices will result in death. This spot welder may still be dangerous, but it looks like they took some precautions to make it non-lethal, and that counts for a lot.

After their extremely questionable high speed belt sander, this one is, refreshingly, extremely well done. It starts of as a dead standard microwave spot welder build: take apart microwave, try not to die from large capacitor, remove coil, modify coil, and hook up.

After that, it gets to some nice heavy metal music fabrication. Aside from a slightly shocking number of fresh OSHA reportable hand injuries (wear gloves!) the build goes together well. A lot of planning obviously went into it, from the actively cooled transformer to what appears to be a resettable timer circuit for the weld duration, not to mention the way that it just fit together so well at the end. There were some neat ideas as far as home mechanics go that we’ll be using in some of our projects.

In the end, the proof is in the spot-weld. The timer is set, pedal gets pressed down, and when tested, the sheet metal breaks instead of the weld. Video after the break.

Continue reading “DIY Spot Welder Doesn’t Look Like It Will Immediately Kill You” →

Plexitube Owl Clock Watches You Sleep

April 24, 2016 by James Hobson 17 Comments

Wait, plexitube? Is that a typo? Surely we mean Nixie tubes!

For a Christmas project [Kurt] wanted to build some owl-inspired clocks — with bit of a retro feel. Given the complexities of finding and using actual Nixie tubes, he went with an alternative — a Plexitube.

lightguidescloseup — Closeup of Plexitube

Plexitubes look like futuristic Nixie tubes. They can have different stylized numbers. They’re crisp, they’re bright, and they are completely customizable. They’re made of edgelit acrylic! By laser etching the design onto pieces of acrylic and feeding LED light into the edge, very much like how a light-pipe works, it’s possible to have a neon-light effect — using nothing more than plastic and some LEDs.

He designed custom PCBs for the project, with SMD LEDs for the plexitubes. Making use of a laser cutter, he designed the actual owl to be made out of lightly formed wood cutouts — the entire thing looks absolutely fantastic.

As far as “Nixie tube” clocks this has gotta be one of the most aesthetically pleasing ones we’ve seen in a while, but if you’re looking for an all-out-Nixietube-extravaganza… take a look at this whopping thirteen tube clock.

[Thanks for the tip Lawrence!]