Solar-powered Weather Station Has The Complete Suite Of Sensors

August 17, 2016 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

There was a time when getting weather conditions was only as timely or as local as the six o’clock news from the nearest big-city TV station. Monitoring the weather now is much more granular thanks to the proliferation of personal weather stations. For the ultimate in personalized weather, though, you might want to build your own solar powered weather station.

It looks like [Brian Masney] went all out in designing his weather station. It supports a full stack of sensors – wind speed and direction, rain, temperature, pressure, and dew point. About the only other parameters not supported (yet) are solar radiation, UV, and soil moisture and temperature. The design looks friendly enough that adding those sensors should be a snap – if fact, the 3D models in his GitHub repo suggest that he’s already working on soil sensors. The wind and rain sensor boom is an off-the-shelf unit from Sparkfun, and the temperature and pressure sensors are housed in a very professional 3D printed screen enclosure. All the sensors talk to a Raspberry Pi living in a (hopefully) waterproof enclosure topped with a solar panel for charging the stations batteries. All in all it’s a comprehensive build; you can check out the conditions at [Brian]’s place on Weather Underground.

Weather stations are popular around these parts, as witnessed by this reverse-engineered sensor suite or even this squirrel-logic based station.

Universal Serial Abuse

August 17, 2016 by Jenny List 26 Comments

It’s probable that most Hackaday readers are aware of their own computer security even if they are not specialists. You’ll have some idea of which ports your machines expose to the world, what services they run, and you’ll know of a heap of possible attack vectors even if you may not know about every last one.

So as part of that awareness, it’s likely you’ll be wary of strange USB devices. If someone drops a Flash drive in the parking lot the chances of one of you blithely plugging it into your laptop is not high at all. USB ports are trusted by your computer and its operating system, and to have access to one is to be given the keys to the kingdom.

Our subject today is a DEF CON talk courtesy of [Dominic White] and [Rogan Dawes] entitled “Universal Serial aBUSe“, and it details a USB attack in which they create an innocuous USB stick that emulates a keyboard and mouse which is shared across a WiFi network via a VNC server. This gives an attacker (who can gain momentary physical access to a USB port to install the device) a way into the machine that completely bypasses all network and other security measures.

Their hardware features an AVR and an ESP8266, the former for USB and HID work and the latter to do the heavy lifting and provide WiFi. They started with a Cactus Micro Rev2, but graduated to their own compatible board to make the device more suitable to pose as a USB stick. Both hardware and software files can be found on their GitHub repository, with the software being a fork of esp-link. They go into significant detail of their development and debugging process, and their write-up should be an interesting read for anyone.

Below the break you can find a video description of the attack. It’s not a shock to know that USB ports have such little defense, but it is a sobering moment to realize how far attacks like this one have come into the realm of what is possible.

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Tips For Buying Your First Milling Machine

August 17, 2016 by Cameron Coward 99 Comments

If you’re interested in making things (and since you’re reading this, we’re going to assume you are), you’ve almost certainly felt a desire to make metal parts. 3D printers are great, but have a lot of drawbacks: limited material options, lack of precision, and long printing times. If you want metal parts that adhere to even moderately tight tolerances, a milling machine is your only practical option. There is, after all, a very good reason that they’re essential to manufacturing.

However, it can be difficult to know where to start for the hobbyist who doesn’t have machining experience. What kind of milling machine should you get? Should you buy new or used? What the heck is 3-phase power, and can you get it? These questions, among many others, can be positively overwhelming to the uninitiated. Luckily, we — your friends at Hackaday — are here to help give you some direction. So, if you’re ready to learn, then read on! Already an expert? Leave some tips of your own in the comments!

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Introducing The Teensy 3.5 And 3.6

August 17, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 80 Comments

Paul Stoffregen has built a new Teensy. The latest in the line of very powerful, USB-capable microcontrollers is the Teensy 3.5 and 3.6 development boards. It’s faster, more capable, and bigger putting even more pins on a solderless breadboard.

The first Teensy was one of the first Arduino compatible boards with native USB. The Teensy 2.0 was even better with support for USB keyboards, mice, and MIDI. Even today, the Teensy 2.0 is the de facto board to use if you want to build anything like a USB keyboard. The Teensy 2.0 was followed by the exceptionally powerful Teensy 3.0, the first 32-bit Arduino compatible board, and thanks to Paul’s contributions of a pile of Arduino libraries, doing cool stuff faster has never been easier. Since the launch of the Teensy 3.0, its successors, the 3.1 and 3.2 have launched. If you want the power of an ARM microcontroller with the deepest Arduino library support, there’s only one board you should consider.

Like the launch of the Teensy 3.0, Paul is Kickstarting the launch of the latest Teensys with a crowdfunding campaign. Let’s dig into everything these new boards have to offer.

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Nerd-Bait: ESP8266 + ILI9341 Screen

August 17, 2016 by Elliot Williams 43 Comments

In honor of my-own-damn-self, we’re going to call it Elliot’s Law: “When any two interesting parts get cheap enough on eBay, someone will make an interface PCB for them.”

And so it is with [Johan Kanflo]’s latest bit of work: a PCB that mounts an ESP8266 module onto the back of an ILI9341 color display, with user button, power supply, and an auxiliary MOSFET. Four bucks for the screen, four bucks for the ESP8266 module, and a few bucks here and there on parts and PCB, and you’ve got an Internet-enabled, full-color, 320×240 graphical display. That’s pretty awesome, and it’s entirely consistent with Elliot’s Law.

However, we almost can’t forgive [Johan] for the extreme geek-baiting. Posting the cuuuute little screen next to a Stormtrooper Lego figure is already hitting below the belt, but displaying a Commodore-64 startup screen, in what’s got to be exactly the right font and color combo, borders on being pathologically emotionally manipulative. You’re playing with our hearts, [Kanflo]!

We love projects like his ESP8266-and-RFM69 mashup and his gutted-Macintosh-planespotter-gizmo, so we’re inclined to forgive. And besides, we’re still on a high from naming our first law and we’re wondering which two eBay parts are up next.

Hackaday NYC Summer Party

August 17, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Hackaday is going to be back in NYC next week, and we’re having a meetup. This isn’t any meetup – it’s a meetup with skeeball. No, it does not get any better than this.

Next week, August 24, at 6:30pm, we’re pulling out all the stops at Ace Bar on the Lower East Side. This event is a bring-a-hack, and we want to see what you’re working on. Bring your current project, an oscilloscope demo, blinkey clothing, hacks, wearables, or just some cool, random junk. The last time we did this, someone brought a flight data recorder from a Pan Am 747. It had 74-series and 54-series logic chips in it, and no one could figure out why.

This event will be hosted by our lovely multi-function unicorn @SophiKravitz and our NYC community manager @Shayna. Bring your friends, and bring your projects, this isn’t an event to miss.

Google’s New OS Will Run On Your Raspberry Pi

August 17, 2016 by Cameron Coward 37 Comments

According to reports from Android Police and ZDNet, you may soon have a new operating system from Google to run on your Raspberry Pi. Details are still extremely sparse, the only description on the GitHub page is “Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)”. But, here’s what we do know:

The new OS, called Fuchsia, will be based on Magenta, which is in turn built on LittleKernel. That means that, surprisingly, Google will not be using a Linux kernel for the new OS but something more like an embedded RTOS. Although Google is targeting embedded systems, the possibility of being able to run it on a desktop has been mentioned, so it may not be too minimalistic.

Google’s Travis Geiselbrecht has named the Raspberry Pi 3 specifically as one system it will run on, and said that it’ll be available soon. But, it seems Google is aiming to make it run on a variety of ARM devices (both 32 bit and 64 bit), as well as 64 bit PCs. This is a direct effort to compete against other commercial embedded operating systems that are currently available, and especially on IoT devices.

If you’re eager to see what this is all about, you can follow Google’s quick start recipes and see what you can come up with, although details are still sketchy enough that we’re just going to wait a bit.