Now that November of 2019 has passed, it’s a shame that some of the predictions made in Blade Runner for this future haven’t yet come true. Oh sure, 109 million people living in Los Angeles would be fun and all, but until we get our flying cars, we’ll just have to console ourselves with the ability to “Enhance!” photographs. While the new service, AI Image Enlarger, can’t tease out three-dimensional information, the app is intended to sharpen enlargements of low-resolution images, improving the focus and bringing up details in the darker parts of the image. The marketing material claims that the app uses machine learning, and is looking for volunteers to upload high-resolution images to improve its training set.
We’ve been on a bit of a nano-satellite bender around here lately, with last week’s Hack Chat discussing simulators for CubeSats, and next week’s focusing on open-source thrusters for PocketQube satellites. So we appreciated the timing of a video announcing the launch of the first public LoRa relay satellite. The PocketCube-format satellite, dubbed FossaSat-1, went for a ride to space along with six other small payloads on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched from New Zealand. Andreas Spiess has a short video preview of the FossaSat-1 mission, which was designed to test the capabilities of a space-based IoT link that almost anyone can access with cheap and readily available parts; a ground station should only cost a couple of bucks, but you will need an amateur radio license to uplink.
We know GitHub has become the de facto standard for source control and has morphed into a collaboration and project management platform used by everybody who’s anybody in the hacking community. But have you ever wished for a collaboration platform that was a little more in tune with the needs of hardware designers? Then InventHub might be of interest to you. Currently in a limited beta – we tried to sign up for the early access program but seem to have been put on a waiting list – it seems like this will be a platform that brings versioning directly to the ECAD package of your choice. Through plugins to KiCad, Eagle, and all the major ECAD players you’ll be able to collaborate with other designers and see their changes marked up on the schematic — sort of a visual diff. It seems interesting, and we’ll be keeping an eye on developments.
Amazon is now offering a stripped-down version of their Echo smart speaker called Input, which teams up with speakers that you already own to satisfy all your privacy invasion needs on the super cheap — only $10. At that price, it’s hard to resist buying one just to pop it open, which is what Brian Dorey did with his. The teardown is pretty standard, and the innards are pretty much what you’d expect from a modern piece of surveillance apparatus, but the neat trick here involved the flash memory chip on the main board. Brian accidentally overheated it while trying to free up the metal shield over it, and the BGA chip came loose. So naturally, he looked up the pinout and soldered it to a micro-SD card adapter with fine magnet wire. He was able to slip it into a USB SD card reader and see the whole file system for the Input. It was a nice hack, and a good teardown.
Well I went ahead and bought one of the things without its own speaker. Fortunately I’ve got heaps of the things hanging around here waiting for input. As for a nanosatellite, there’s a quad of great books on that subject. Also the cubesat ones.
”The teardown is pretty standard, and the innards are pretty much what you’d expect from a modern piece of surveillance apparatus…”
Stamped made in Fort Meade, Maryland.
If those amazon surveillance devices sold for twice that, but were open and you could put your own code on them, they sell lke hotcakes..
“The marketing material claims that the app uses machine learning, and is looking for volunteers to upload high-resolution images to improve its training set.”
Oh yes, that’s a great use of my time and camera, contributing training data to a company in exchange for absolutely nothing!
As it is, we should be slashing the budgets of spy agencies worldwide because people now buy, install, and maintain their own equipment.
Not true, obviously it will lead to improving your life somehow, like all other smart devices.
“We have to pass^H^H^H^Hbuy it, to see what’s inside it.”
The visual diff looks nice. KiCAD files already work in git for versioning but looking at the diffs of the text isn’t very useful
Update: inventhub.io is live now :) no longer have to wait for access to the platform!
From the linked article “We don’t plan on doing anything with what we have found as we don’t have the knowledge or time to try modifying the contents of the drive”
Thanks for going 95% of the way to something that might be interesting just to drop it cause ‘don’t have time to even arse dumping a file” after painstaking hand soldering these stupid labor intensive connection method.”
Like, maybe I get it? – Is this the old school “do it yourself or STFU” but … I guess after the eMMC > SD Card revelation I was kinda expecting too much apparently?
you might have taken the conclusion they are more focused on hardware than software? I don’t even blink when I see that solder work, but I have no knowledge of some processor architecture beyond Arduino kind of stuff.
There could be a lot of legal problems if modified code or the Amazon operating system was posted online after changing it.
Just what we need more unsustainable garbage to fill up land fills with.
Thank You Amazon, now quietly go to Hell…
That AI Image Enlarger is actually very impressive. Here is a 4x example of how it can even get rid of JPEG artifacts: https://drive.google.com/file/d/106CbtH35TLFitd7oxpHtzbrlg21adFXd/view?usp=sharing