Year: 2017

Soft-legged Robot Handles Rough Terrain With Ease

June 5, 2017 by 9 Comments

Whether it’s wheels, tracks, feet, or even a roly-poly body like BB-8, most robots have to deal with an essential problem: dirt and grit can get into the moving bits and cause problems. Some researchers from UCSD have come up with a clever way around this: pneumatically actuated soft-legged robots that adapt to rough terrain.

At a top speed of 20 mm per second, [Michael Tolley]’s squishy little robot won’t set any land speed records. But for applications like search and rescue or placing sensors in inhospitable or inaccessible locations, slow and steady might just win the race. The quadrupedal robot’s running gear can be completely 3D-printed on any commercial printer capable of using a soft filament. The legs each contain three parallel air chambers within a bellowed outer skin; alternating how the chambers are inflated controls how they move. The soft legs adapt to unstructured terrain and are completely sealed, eliminating intrusion problems. The video below shows how the bot gets around just fine over rocks and sand.

The legs remind us a little of our [Joshua Vazquez]’s tentacle mechanism, but with fewer parts. Right now, the soft robot is tethered to its air supply, but the team is working on a miniaturized pump to make the whole thing mobile. At which point we bet it’ll even be able to swim.

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Mitosis: Anatomy Of A Custom Keyboard

June 5, 2017 by 14 Comments

Ergonomic. Wireless. Low-latency. Minimalist. Efficient. How far do you go when you design your own open-source keyboard? Checking off these boxes and providing the means for others to do so, Redditor [reverse_bias] presents the Mitosis keyboard, and this thing is cool.

The custom, split– as the namesake implies — mechanical keyboard has 23 keys on each 10 cm x 10 cm half, and, naturally, a custom keymapping for optimal personal use.

Upper and lower PCBs host the keys and electronic circuits respectively, contributing to the sleek finished look. Key caps and mechanical switches were ripped from sacrificial boards: two Waveshare core51822 Bluetooth modules are used for communication, with a third module paired with a Pro Micro make up the receiver. Continue reading “Mitosis: Anatomy Of A Custom Keyboard” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: Sub Gigahertz RF

June 5, 2017 by 10 Comments

For all the press WiFi and Bluetooth-connected Internet of Things toasters get, there’s still a lot of fun to be had below one Gigahertz. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Adam] is working on an open source, extensible 915 and 433 MHz radio designed for robotics, drones, weather balloons, and all the other fun projects that sub-Gigaherts radio enables.

The design of this radio module is based around the ADF7023 RF transceiver, a very capable and very cheap chip that transmits in the usual ISM bands. The rest of the circuit is an STM32 ARM Cortex M0+, with USB, UART, and SPI connectivity, with support for a battery for those mobile projects.

Of course, you can just go out and buy an ISM radio, but that’s not really the point of this project. [Adam] has come up with an excellent board here, all designed in KiCad, all while flexing his RF muscle. There are RF shields here, too, so it’s far more than just a design challenge, this is an assembly and sourcing problem as well. It’s a great project, and an excellent example of what we’re looking for in The Hackaday Prize.

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Exposing Dinosaur Phone Insecurity With Software Defined Radio

June 5, 2017 by 74 Comments

Long before everyone had a smartphone or two, the implementation of a telephone was much stranger than today. Most telephones had real, physical buttons. Even more bizarrely, these phones were connected to other phones through physical wires. Weird, right? These were called “landlines”, a technology that shuffled off this mortal coil three or four years ago.

It gets even more bizarre. some phones were wireless — just like your smartphone — but they couldn’t get a signal more than a few hundred feet away from your house for some reason. These were ‘cordless telephones’. [Corrosive] has been working on deconstructing the security behind these cordless phones for a few years now and found these cordless phones aren’t secure at all.

The phone in question for this exploit is a standard 5.8 GHz cordless phone from Vtech. Conventional wisdom says these phones are reasonably secure — at least more so than the cordless phones from the 80s and 90s — because very few people have a duplex microwave transceiver sitting around. The HackRF is just that, and it only costs $300. This was bound to happen eventually.

This is really just an exploration of the radio system inside these cordless phones. After taking a HackRF to a cordless phone, [Corrosive] found the phone technically didn’t operate in the 5.8 GHz band. Control signals, such as pairing a handset to a base station, happened at 900 MHz. Here, a simple replay attack is enough to get the handset to ring. It gets worse: simply by looking at the 5.8 GHz band with a HackRF, [Corrosive] found an FM-modulated voice channel when the handset was on. That’s right: this phone transmits your voice without any encryption whatsoever.

This isn’t the first time [Corrosive] found a complete lack of security in cordless phones. A while ago, he was exploring the DECT 6.0 standard, a European cordless phone standard for PBX and VOIP. There was no security here, either. It would be chilling if landlines existed anymore.

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Designing Products With Injection Molding In Mind

June 5, 2017 by 18 Comments

3D printing is a technique we’ve all been using for ages at home, or via Shapeways, but if you are designing a product, 3D printing will only get you so far. It’s crude, slow, expensive, and has lots of limitations. While it’s great for the prototyping stage, ultimately products manufactured in volume will be manufactured using another method, and most likely it will be injection molding. Knowing how to design a part for injection molding means you can start prototyping with 3D printing, confident that you’ll be able to move to a mold without major changes to the design.

The 2017 Hackaday Prize includes a $30,000 prize for Best Product as we seek products that not only show a great idea, but are designed for manufacturing and have thought through what it takes to get them into the hands of the users. Some of the entries seem to be keenly aware of the challenges associated with moving from prototyping to production. Here are some examples of best practices when prototyping with future injection molding in mind.

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Formlabs Announces A Desktop SLS 3D Printer

June 5, 2017 by 30 Comments

Formlabs have just announced the Fuse 1 — a selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printer that creates parts out of nylon. Formlabs is best known for their Form series of resin-based SLA 3D printers, and this represents a very different direction.

SLS printers, which use a laser to sinter together models out of a powder-based material, are not new but have so far remained the domain of Serious Commercial Use. To our knowledge, this is the first time an actual SLS printer is being made available to the prosumer market. At just under 10k USD it’s definitely the upper end of the prosumer market, but it’s certainly cheaper than the alternatives.

The announcement is pretty light on details, but they are reserving units for a $1000 deposit. A few things we can throw in about the benefits of SLS: it’s powder which is nicer to clean up than resin printers, and parts should not require any kind of curing. The process also requires no support material as the uncured powder will support any layers being cured above it. The Fuse 1’s build chamber is 165 x 165 x 320 mm, and can be packed full of parts to make full use of the volume.

In the past we saw a detailed teardown of the Form 2 which revealed excellent workmanship and attention to detail. Let’s hope the same remains true of Formlabs’ newest offering.

DIY Grid Eye IR Camera

June 5, 2017 by 8 Comments

Tindie is a great place to find uncommon electronic components or weird/interesting boards. [Xose Pérez] periodically “stroll the isles” of Tindie to keep up on cool new components, and when he saw Panasonic’s Grid_EYE AMG88 infrared sensor, [Xose] knew that he had to build something with it. The awesome find is an 8×8 IR array sensor on a breakout board… the hack is all in what you do with it.

Already taken by “LED fever,” [Xose’s] mind immediately fixated on an 8×8 IR array with an 8×8 LED matrix display. With a vision, [Xose] threw together an IR sensor matrix, a LED matrix, a small microcontroller, a Li-Ion battery, a charger, and a step-up to power the LEDs. What did he end up with? A bulky but nice camera that looks fantastic.

While commercially available IR Cameras have thousands of pixels and can overlay a normal image over an IR image among other fancy stuff, they are sometimes prohibitively expensive and, to quote [Xose], “waaaaaay less fun to build”. Like any engineer, [Xose] still has ideas for how to improve his open source camera. From more color patterns to real time recording, [Xose] is only limited by the memory of his microcontroller.

Moreover, [Xose’s] camera is inspired by the Pibow cases made by Pimoroni and this is only one project in a series that uses a stack of laser cut pieces of MDF and acrylic for the project enclosure. What’s not to love: short fabrication times and a stunning result. Want more project enclosures? We’ve got plenty.