Year: 2017

Hackaday Prize Entry: USB GSM GPS 9DOF SD TinyTracker Has All The Acronyms

June 11, 2017 by 28 Comments

[Paul] has put together an insanely small yet powerful tracker for monitoring all the things. The USB TinyTracker is a device that packages a 48MHz processor, 2G modem, GPS receiver, 9DOF motion sensor, barometer, microphone, and micro-SD slot for data storage. He managed to get it all to fit into a USB thumb drive enclosure, meaning that you can program it however you want in the Arduino IDE, then plug it into any USB port and let it run. This enables things like remote monitoring, asset tracking, and all kinds of spy-like activity.

One of the most unusual aspects of his project, though, is this line: “Everything came together very nicely and the height of parts and PCBs is exactly as I planned.” [Paul] had picked out an enclosure that was only supposed to fit a single PCB, but with some careful calculations, and picky component selection, he managed to fit everything onto two 2-layer boards that snap together with a connector and fit inside the enclosure.

We’ve followed [Paul’s] progress on this project with an earlier iteration of his GSM GPS Tracker, which used a Teensy and fit snugly into a handlebar, but this one is much more versatile.

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The Oldest Known Surviving PC Operating System

June 11, 2017 by 67 Comments

You’ll all be familiar with the PC, the ubiquitous x86-powered workhorse of desktop and portable computing. All modern PCs are descendants of the original from IBM, the model 5150 which made its debut in August 1981. This 8088-CPU-driven machine was expensive and arguably not as accomplished as its competitors, yet became an instant commercial success.

The genesis of its principal operating system is famous in providing the foundation of Microsoft’s huge success. They had bought Seattle Computer Products’ 86-DOS, which they then fashioned into the first release version of IBM’s PC-DOS. And for those interested in these early PC operating systems there is a new insight to be found, in the form of a pre-release version of PC-DOS 1.0 that has found its way into the hands of OS/2 Museum.

Sadly they don’t show us the diskette itself, but we are told it is the single-sided 160K 5.25″ variety that would have been the standard on these early PCs. We say “the standard” rather than “standard” because a floppy drive was an optional extra on a 5150, the most basic model would have used cassette tape as a storage medium.

The disk is bootable, and indeed we can all have a play with its contents due to the magic of emulation. The dates on the files reveal a date of June 1981, so this is definitely a pre-release version and several months older than the previous oldest known PC-DOS version. They detail an array of differences between this disk and the DOS we might recognise, perhaps the most surprising of which is that even at this late stage it lacks support for .EXE executables.

You will probably never choose to run this DOS version on your PC, but it is an extremely interesting and important missing link between surviving 86-DOS and PC-DOS versions. It also has the interesting feature of being the oldest so-far-found operating system created specifically for the PC.

If you are interested in early PC hardware, take a look at this project using an AVR processor to emulate a PC’s 8088.

Header image: (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE).

SDR Sniffing Electric Gates

June 11, 2017 by 11 Comments

Most wireless OEM hardware traditionally use 433MHz OOK modules to exchange information. The encoding and encryption of this data stream is left as a task for the embedded software designer. In most cases, the system can be hacked using a replay attack where an RF packet is recorded and replayed to emulate a valid user. [Gilad Fride] hacked his parking gate using this technique but decided to go the extra mile of connecting it to the internet.

He used an RTL-SDR dongle and ook-decoder by [jimstudt] to sniff out the gate code and this code was tested using an Arduino. The final implementation was done around an Onion Omega which talks directly to the RF transmitter module using the fast-gpio binary. Internet connectivity was achieved using Onion Cloud API which is used to trigger the execution of code thereby sending the gate opening signal.

[Gilad Fride] uses the IFTTT Do button to provide a GUI and he demonstrates this in action using an iPhone in the video below. The project can be extended to open garage doors or turn off the lights of your room over the internet.

If you are looking to hack your home security system, look no further as SDRs have be used to communicate with wireless products effectively in the past. We are hoping manufacturers take a hint and start using better encryption.  Continue reading “SDR Sniffing Electric Gates” →

Scanning Electron Microscope Adds To Already Impressive Garage Lab

June 11, 2017 by 11 Comments

When you’re a high schooler who built a semiconductor fab in your garage, what’s next on your agenda? Why, adding a scanning electron microscope to your lab, naturally. How silly of you to ask.

When last we stumbled across the goings on in the most interesting garage in New Jersey, [Sam Zeloof] was giving a tour of his DIY semiconductor fabrication lab and showing off some of the devices he’s made there, including diodes and MOSFETs. As impressive as those components are, it’s the equipment he’s accumulated that really takes our breath away. So adding an eBay SEM to the mix only seems a natural progression, and a good reason to use some of the high vacuum gear he has. The video below shows [Sam] giving a tour of the 1990s-vintage instrument and shows images of various copper-sputtered samples, including a tick, which is apparently the state bird of New Jersey.

SEM hacks are by no means common around here, but they’re not unheard of. [Ben Krasnow] has used his to image cutting tools and phonograph records in action, and there are a few homebrew SEMs kicking around too. But our hats are off to [Sam] for yet another acquisition and a great tutorial to boot.

Continue reading “Scanning Electron Microscope Adds To Already Impressive Garage Lab” →

3D Printed Radiation Patterns

June 11, 2017 by 19 Comments

Radiation patterns for antennas can be utterly confusing, especially when presented in two dimensions, as they usually are. Fear not, [Hunter] has your back with 3D printed and color-coded radiation patterns.

In the field of antenna design, radiation patterns denote the relationship between the relative strength of radio waves emitted from antennas and the position of a receiver/transmitter in 3D space. In practice, probes can be used to transmit/receive from documented locations around an antenna while recording signal intensity, allowing researchers and engineers to determine the characteristics of arcane antennas. These measurements are normally expressed as two-dimensional slices of three-dimensional planes. Naturally, this sometimes (often) complex geometry is difficult for all but the most spatially inclined to mentally conceptualize with only the assistance of a 2D drawing. With computers came 3D models, but [Hunter] wasn’t satisfied with a model on a screen: they wanted something they could hold in their hands.

To that end, [Hunter] simulated several different antenna structures, cleaned up the models for 3D printing, and 3D printed them in color sandstone, and the end result is beautiful. By printing in colored sandstone through Shapeways, [Hunter] now has roughly walnut-sized color-coded radiation patterns they can hold in their hand. To save others the work, [Hunter] has posted his designs on Shapeways at Ye Olde Engineering Shoppe. So far, he has a horn antenna, dipole, inset fed patch antenna and a higher order mode of a patch antenna, all of which are under 15.00USD. Don’t see the antenna radiation pattern of your dreams? Fret not, [Hunter] is looking for requests, so post your ideas down in the comments!

Further, beyond the immediate cool factor, we can see many legitimate uses for [Hunter’s] models, especially in education. With more and more research promoting structural rather than procedural learning, [Hunter’s] designs could easily become a pedagogical mainstay of antenna theory classes in the future. [Hunter] is not the only one making the invisible visible, [Charles] is mapping WiFi signals in three dimensions.

Video after the break.

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The Internet Of Interactive Cats

June 10, 2017 by 17 Comments

[Tuco] is a cat who shares the space of [Micah Elizabeth Scott]. He is a large tabby tomcat, and he is polydactyl, which is to say he has a congenital excess of toes. He is an extremely active and engaging creature and enjoys playing and interacting with her. We covet [Tuco].

Sadly for the rest of us who love cats, of course, unless we know [Micah] personally we’ll never have the opportunity to play with [Tuco]. She appreciates the cat-shaped void that will leave in our lives, and to help us she’s building a telepresence robot to allow the rest of us to interact with him in real time.

Her idea is to make a flying robot equipped with a camera on a gimbal, and because to mounting it on a multirotor platform would be a hazard, instead she’s making something closer to the aerial cameras you might be familiar with from sporting fixtures, a motorised platform suspended from the corners of her roof space on a set of nylon ropes, that can move at will by adjusting the length of each tether. It is suggested that one day the device will be able to launch plastic bolts for [Tuco] to chase and to incorporate other interactive features to allow online users to engage with him.

We are shown progress so far in the video introducing the project that we’ve placed below the break, she has completed a prototype windlass mechanism and worked on reverse engineering the gimbal mechanism for serial control. We’ll probably never meet [Tuco] in person, but we can’t wait to interact with him online.

Continue reading “The Internet Of Interactive Cats” →

Quality Assurance Through FPGA

June 10, 2017 by 13 Comments

[Claire Chen] and [Mark Zhao], students in [Bruce Land]’s ECE5760 class at Cornell, created a project aimed at the manufacturing sector: quality-checking manufactured products automatically by visually scanning a bunch of them and processing the pixels one at a time. Ordinarily, the time when the widget comes off the line is when you have to bring in actual people to inspect. This project uses morphological image processing to like dilation and erosion to look for flaws.

[Claire] and [Mark] created a simulated manufacturing line with a servo-driven belt that brings a series of Spree candies into the range of a camera, which scans them. The SoC with a Cyclone V FPGA and ARM Cortex-9 then processes the raw images to establish the object’s color, while running it through a couple of algorithms to look for defects. The FPGA tracks how many Sprees that have passed by as well as their color, maintaining a 99% success rate with a rate of 5-10 frames per second. The FPGA also looks at each blob of color as a collection of pixels, establishing connectivity to help to distinguish multiple Sprees touching each other.

Also be sure to check out [Claire] and [Mark]’s bike sonar project from a previous semester.

Continue reading “Quality Assurance Through FPGA” →