Brain-Computer Interfaces: Separating Fact From Fiction On Musk’s Brain Implant Claims

July 24, 2019 by Maya Posch 81 Comments

When it comes to something as futuristic-sounding as brain-computer interfaces (BCI), our collective minds tend to zip straight to scenes from countless movies, comics, and other works of science-fiction (including more dystopian scenarios). Our mind’s eye fills with everything from the Borg and neural interfaces of Star Trek, to the neural recording devices with parent-controlled blocking features from Black Mirror, and of course the enslavement of the human race by machines in The Matrix.

And now there’s this Elon Musk guy, proclaiming that he’ll be wiring up people’s brains to computers starting next year, as part of this other company of his: Neuralink. Here the promises and imaginings are truly straight from the realm of sci-fi, ranging from ‘reading and writing’ to the brain, curing brain diseases and merging human minds with artificial intelligence. How much of this is just investor speak? Please join us as we take a look at BCIs, neuroprosthetics and what we can expect of these technologies in the coming years.

Continue reading “Brain-Computer Interfaces: Separating Fact From Fiction On Musk’s Brain Implant Claims” →

Drone On Drone Warfare, With Jammers

July 24, 2019 by Pat Whetman 37 Comments

After the alleged drone attacks on London Gatwick airport in 2018 we’ve been on the look out for effective countermeasures against these rogue drone operators. An interesting solution has been created by [Ogün Levent] in Turkey and is briefly documented on in his Dronesense page on Crowdsupply. There’s a few gaps in the write up due to non-disclosure agreements, but we might well be able to make some good guesses as to the missing content.

Not one, but two LimeSDRs are sent off into the air onboard a custom made drone to track down other drones and knock them out by jamming their signals, which is generally much safer than trying to fire air to air guided missiles at them!

The drone hardware used by [Ogün Levent] and his team is a custom-made S600 frame with T-Motor U3 motors and a 40 A speed controller, with a takeoff weight of 5 kg. An Adventech single board computer is the master controller with a Pixhawk secondary and, most importantly, a honking great big 4 W, 2.4 GHz frequency jammer with a range of 1200 meters.

The big advantage of sending out a hunter drone with countermeasures rather than trying to do it on the ground is that, being closer to the drone, the power of the jammer can be reduced, thus creating less disturbance to other RF devices in the area – the rogue drone is specifically targeted.

One of the LimeSDRs runs a GNU radio flowgraph with a specially designed block for detecting the rogue drone’s frequency modulation signature with what seems to be a machine learning classification script. The other LimeSDR runs another *secret* flowgraph and a custom script running on the SBC combines the two flowgraphs together.

So now it’s the fun part, what does the second LimeSDR do? Some of the more obvious problems with the overall concept is that the drone will jam itself and the rogue drone might already have anti-jamming capabilities installed, in which case it will just return to home. Maybe the second SDR is there to track the drone as it returns home and thereby catch the human operator? Answers/suggestions in the comments below! Video after the break. Continue reading “Drone On Drone Warfare, With Jammers” →

Doing 10 Gigabit Networking At Home, The Cheap Way

July 24, 2019 by Lewin Day 55 Comments

For the vast majority of us, Gigabit Ethernet is more than enough for daily tasks. The occasional big network file transfer might drag a little, but it’s rare to fall short of bandwidth when you’re hooked up over Cat 6. [Brian] has a thirst for saturating network links, however, and decided only 10 Gigabit Ethernet would do.

Already being the owner of a Gigabit Ethernet network at home, [Brian] found that he was now regularly able to saturate the links with his existing hardware. With a desire to run intensive virtual machines on his existing NAS without causing bandwidth issues, it was time for an upgrade. Unfortunately, the cost of rewiring the existing home network to Cat 6 and procuring hardware that could run 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper twisted pair was prohibitively expensive.

Instead, [Brian] decided to reduce the scope to connecting just 3 machines. Switches were prohibitively expensive, so each computer was fitted with twin 10 Gigabit interfaces, such that it could talk to the two other computers. Rather than rely on twisted pair, the interfaces chosen use the SFP+ standard, in which the network cable accepts electrical signals from the interface, and contains a fiber optic transciever.

[Brian] was able to get the 3 computers networked for just $120, with parts sourced from eBay. It’s an approach that doesn’t scale well; larger setups would be much better served by using a switch and a less zany network topology. But for [Brian], it works just fine, and allows his NAS to outperform a 15,000 RPM server hard disk as far as read rates go.

If you’re curious about improving your own network performance, it might pay to look at your cables first – things are not always as they seem.