Around The Globe On World Create Day

April 25, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

Last weekend was great for science and technology. While thousands of people took to the streets to protest anti-intellectualism, a few members of the Hackaday community dug their heels in, turned on the soldering iron, and actually did something about it. This was World Create Day, a community effort to come together and build something that matters. What did these people build? So much awesome stuff.

The Nest I/O in Karachi, Pakistan

The folks at The Nest I/O hackerspace in Karachi, Pakistan had a rather large meetup for World Create Day featuring the finest in laser cut, googly-eyed fighting robots. [Nasir Aziz] hosted a meetup at his favorite hackerspace for people to get together, discuss, and build something for the Hackaday Prize.

The highlight of the meetup was a discussion from EjaadTech, an industrial design firm that graduated from The Nest I/O accelerator. Among the projects invented during World Create Day were a ‘shopping helper drone’ and miniature fighting robots. Useful projects on one hand, awesome projects on the other, just like we like it.

MakerBay in Hong Kong

MakerBay is a hackerspace located smack in the middle of Hong Kong. Like most hackerspaces, finding a place was a problem, but the folks at MakerBay found something spectacular. They’re zoned industrial, and only a five-minute walk from a train station.

There are quite a few projects sitting around MakerBay including a solar oven that would be pretty dangerous if it were outdoors on a sunny day. Also on deck are prototypes of small sailing vessels with a flexible hull designed to track and contain oil spills. Highlights of World Create Day include upcycled wood construction and a spontaneous piano interlude. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more hackerspaces with a piano; they’re effectively free if you have a truck and a place to store it.

BlenderLab in Lille

While the World Create Day event at the BlenderLab hackerspace in Lille, France didn’t set out to change the world with a project, they did manage to come up with a really neat digital hourglass. The body of this hourglass is made out of laser cut plywood, with the display made out of two LED matrices oriented at a 45-degree angle.

Hackaday NYC

[Zach Freedman] reveals his devious plot

While World Create Day is a challenge for hackerspaces around the globe to come together and create something that solves a problem, that doesn’t mean there aren’t slightly more official events around the globe. Hackaday set up our own events in New York City, LA, and San Francisco. The New York event was great thanks to our lovely East coast community manager [Shayna] and our hosts at Fat Cat Fab Lab.

[Zach Freedman], one of the regulars at our NYC meetups has an ulterior motive for getting the Fat Cat Fab Lab members to contribute their ideas to the Hackaday Prize: winning the Hackaday Prize would result in donating the winnings to the Fab Lab. It’s a brilliant and devious plot we very much recommend.

Tell us about your World Create Day

There were many more events going on around the globe last weekend, and we want to hear about how your World Create Day went. We’ll be covering more of the events of last weekend in the coming days, so make sure to add your pictures, stories, and links to the projects you started on your World Create Day event page on Hackaday.io. Event organizers are going to get some super awesome swag for making that effort.

An Analog Charge Pump Fabrication-Time Attack Compromises A Processor

April 25, 2017 by Jenny List 47 Comments

We will all be used to malicious software, computers and operating systems compromised by viruses, worms, or Trojans. It has become a fact of life, and a whole industry of virus checking software exists to help users defend against it.

Underlying our concerns about malicious software is an assumption that the hardware is inviolate, the computer itself can not be inherently compromised. It’s a false one though, as it is perfectly possible for a processor or other integrated circuit to have a malicious function included in its fabrication. You might think that such functions would not be included by a reputable chip manufacturer, and you’d be right. Unfortunately though because the high cost of chip fabrication means that the semiconductor industry is a web of third-party fabrication houses, there are many opportunities during which extra components can be inserted before the chips are manufactured. University of Michigan researchers have produced a paper on the subject (PDF) detailing a particularly clever attack on a processor that minimizes the number of components required through clever use of a FET gate in a capacitive charge pump.

On-chip backdoors have to be physically stealthy, difficult to trigger accidentally, and easy to trigger by those in the know. Their designers will find a line that changes logic state rarely, and enact a counter on it such that when they trigger it to change state a certain number of times that would never happen accidentally, the exploit is triggered. In the past these counters have been traditional logic circuitry, an effective approach but one that leaves a significant footprint of extra components on the chip for which space must be found, and which can become obvious when the chip is inspected through a microscope.

The University of Michigan backdoor is not a counter but an analog charge pump. Every time its input is toggled, a small amount of charge is stored on the capacitor formed by the gate of a transistor, and eventually its voltage reaches a logic level such that an attack circuit can be triggered. They attached it to the divide-by-zero flag line of an OR1200 open-source processor, from which they could easily trigger it by repeatedly dividing by zero. The beauty of this circuit is both that it uses very few components so can hide more easily, and that the charge leaks away with time so it can not persist in a state likely to be accidentally triggered.

The best hardware hacks are those that are simple, novel, and push a device into doing something it would not otherwise have done. This one has all that, for which we take our hats off to the Michigan team.

If this subject interests you, you might like to take a look at a previous Hackaday Prize finalist: ChipWhisperer.

[Thanks to our colleague Jack via Wired]

Different Differentials & The Pitfalls Of The Easy Swap

April 25, 2017 by Lewin Day 70 Comments

I dig cars, and I do car stuff. I started fairly late in life, though, and I’m only just starting to get into the whole modification thing. Now, as far as automobiles go, you can pretty much do anything you set your mind to – engine swaps, drivetrain conversions, you name it – it’s been done. But such jobs require a high level of fabrication skill, automotive knowledge, and often a fully stocked machine shop to match. Those of us new to the scene tend to start a little bit smaller.

So where does one begin? Well, there’s a huge realm of mods that can be done that are generally referred to as “bolt-ons”. This centers around the idea that the install process of the modification is as simple as following a basic set of instructions to unbolt the old hardware and bolt in the upgraded parts. Those that have tread this ground before me will be chuckling at this point – so rarely is a bolt-on ever just a bolt-on. As follows, the journey of my Mazda’s differential upgrade will bear this out.

The car in question, currently known as the “Junkbox MX-5” until it starts running well enough to earn a real name. It somehow looks passable here, but in person I promise you, it looks awful. Credit: Lewin Day

It all started when I bought the car, back in December 2016. I’d just started writing for Hackaday and my humble Daihatsu had, unbeknownst to me, just breathed its last. I’d recently come to the realisation that I wasn’t getting any younger, and despite being obsessed with cars, I’d never actually owned a sports car or driven one in anger. It was time to change. Continue reading “Different Differentials & The Pitfalls Of The Easy Swap” →

Papa Loves Mamba: Slithering Robot Is Reconfigurable

April 25, 2017 by Al Williams 6 Comments

It makes sense considering evolution, but nature comes up with lots of different ways to do things. Consider moving. Land animals walk on four feet or two, some jump, and some use peristalsis or otherwise slither. Oddly, though, mother nature never developed the wheel (although the mother-of-pearl moth’s caterpillar will form its entire body into a hoop and roll away from attackers). Human-developed robots which, on the other hand, most often use wheels. Even a tank track has wheels within. [Joesinstructables] latest robot still uses wheels, but it emulates the slithering motion of a snake, He calls it the Lake Erie Mamba.

The most interesting thing about the robot is that it can reconfigure and move in several different modalities. Like the caterpillar, it can even form a wheel like an ouroboros and roll. You can see that at the end of the video, below.

Continue reading “Papa Loves Mamba: Slithering Robot Is Reconfigurable” →

Model Sputnik Finds Its Voice After Decades Of Silence

April 25, 2017 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the human race becoming a spacefaring species, Sputnik nostalgia will no doubt be on the rise. And rightly so — even though Sputnik was remarkably primitive compared to today’s satellites, its 1957 launch was an inflection point in history and a huge achievement for humanity.

The Soviets, understandably proud of their accomplishment, created a series of commemorative models of Earth’s first artificial moon as gifts to other countries. How one came into possession of the Royal Society isn’t clear, but [Fran Blanche] found out about it through a circuitous route detailed in the video below, and undertook to reproduce the original electronics from the model that made the distinctive Sputnik beeps.

The Royal Society’s version of the model no longer works, but luckily it came with a schematic of the solid-state circuit used to emulate the original’s vacuum-tube guts. Intent on building the circuit as close to vintage as possible and armed with a bag of germanium transistors from the 60s, [Fran] worked through the schematic, correcting a few issues here and there, and eventually brought the voice of Sputnik back to life.

If you think we’ve covered Sputnik’s rebirth before, you may be thinking about our article on how some hams rebuilt Sputnik’s guts from a recently uncovered Soviet-era schematic. [Fran]’s project just reproduces the sound of Sputnik — no license required!

Continue reading “Model Sputnik Finds Its Voice After Decades Of Silence” →

ESP32’s Freedom Output Lets You Do Anything

April 24, 2017 by Elliot Williams 39 Comments

The ESP32 is Espressif’s new wonder-chip, and one of the most interesting aspects of its development has been the almost entirely open-source development strategy that they’re taking. But the “almost” in almost entirely open is important — there are still some binary blobs in the system, and some of them are exactly where a hacker wouldn’t want them to be. Case in point: the low-level WiFi firmware.

So that’s where [Jeija]’s reverse engineering work steps in. He’s managed to decode enough of a function called ieee80211_freedom_output to craft and send apparently arbitrary WiFi data and management frames, and to monitor them as well.

This ability is insanely useful for a WiFi device. With low-level access like this, one can implement custom protocols for mesh networking, low-bandwidth data transfers, or remove the requirement for handshaking entirely. One can also spam a system with so many fake SSIDs that it crashes, deauth everyone, or generally cause mayhem. Snoop on your neighbors, or build something new and cool: with great power comes great responsibility.

Anyway, we reported on [Jeija]’s long distance hack and the post may have read like it was all about the antenna, but that vastly underestimates the role played by this firmware reverse-engineering hack. Indeed, we’re so stoked about the hack that we thought it was worth reiterating: the ESP32 is now a WiFi hacker’s dream.

Hackaday Prize Entry: MCXY – Mini Laser Cut Aluminum 3D Printer

April 24, 2017 by Jenny List 11 Comments

With the easy availability of cheap and 3D printers from the usual Chinese websites, you might think that there could be little room for another home-made 3D printer project. fortunately, the community of 3D printer making enthusiasts doesn’t see it that way.

[Bobricius] has a rather nice 3D printer design in the works that we think you’ll like. It follows the MakerBot/Ultimaker style of construction in that it is a box rather than a gantry, and it is assembled from CNC-cut aluminum for a sturdy and pleasing effect. Whar sets it apart though is its size, at only 190x190x251mm and with an 80x80x80mm print volume, it’s tiny. You might wonder why that could be an asset, but when you consider that he already has a much larger printer it becomes obvious that something small and portable for quick tiny prints could be an asset.

Unusually for a home-made 3D printer, it has no 3D printed parts, instead, it is laser cut throughout. And also unusually all the CAD work was done in EAGLE, better known for PCB work. It’s a work in progress we’re featuring today because it’s a Hackaday Prize entry, but it looks as though the finished item will be something of a little gem.

Homemade 3D printers can be particularly impressive, for example, we’ve shown you this excellent SLA printer.