The Cheap Way To Glitch An STM8 Microcontroller

July 4, 2020 by Moritz v. Sivers 18 Comments

Reverse engineering or modifying a device often requires you to access the firmware stored on a microcontroller. Since companies are usually not fond of people who try to peek into their proprietary data, most commercial devices are readout protected. [rumpeltux] ran into this problem when he tried to dump the firmware on an HC-12 wireless serial communication module for yet undisclosed reasons. Hacking into the device was a challenge that he gladly accepted and in the end, he succeeded by building a low-cost setup for voltage glitching.

Voltage glitching is a form of fault injection that has, e.g., been successfully used to hack the Playstation Vita. It involves the injection of voltage spikes on the power line in order to force the bootloader to skip security checks. The hard thing is trying to find the right shape of the waveform and the best way to inject the signal.

While there are already open-source boards for fault injection like ChipWhisperer, [rumpeltux] chose to build his own setup around an FPGA. By using a cheap EPM240 board, some MOSFET, and a USB-to-Serial converter, the total costs of the glitching setup were under 20 Euros. [rumpeltux] then recorded a larger number of voltage traces on the VCC pin around the reset phase and analyzed the differences. This helped him to pinpoint the best time for injecting the signal and refine the search space. After some unsuccessful attempts to glitch the VCC and GND pins, he got lucky when using one of the voltage regulator pins instead.

Be sure not to miss Samy Kamkar’s talk at Supercon 2019 if you want to know more about hardware attacks or how to eavesdrop on people using a bag of potato chips.

A Reason To Code

July 4, 2020 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

My son is just getting to the age that puts him in the crosshairs of all of the learn-to-code toys. And admittedly, we’ve been looking at some of those Logo-like toys where you can instruct a turtle-bot to make a few moves, and then to repeat them. After all, if breaking down a problem into sub-problems and automating the repetition isn’t the essence of programming, I don’t know what is.

But here’s the deal: I think drawing ‘bots are cooler than he does. If you ask a kid “hey, do you want a car that can draw?” that’s actually pretty low on the robot list. I’m not saying he won’t get into it once he’s got a little bit more coding under his belt and he can start to make it do fun things, but by itself, drawing just isn’t all that impressive. He can draw just fine, thank-you-very-much.

Meanwhile, I was making a robot arm. Or rather, I started up on yet another never-to-be-completed robot arm. (Frankly, I don’t know what I would do with a robot arm.) But at least I started with the gripper and wrist. Now that’s pretty cool for a kid, but the programming is waaaay too complicated. So I pulled the brains out and hooked up the servos to an RC plane remote. Just wiggling the thing around, duct-taped to the table, got him hooked. And this weekend, we’re building a remote controlled cherry-picker arm to put on a pole, because cherries are in season. His idea!

So no coding. He’s a little too young anyway, IMO. But silly little projects like these, stored deep in his subconscious, will give him a reason to program in the future, will make it plainly obvious that knowing how to program is useful. Now all I need is a reason to finish up a robot arm project…

Travel Globe Spins You Around Memory Lane

July 4, 2020 by Sven Gregori 2 Comments

We all have our own preferences when it comes to travel souvenirs — that little something that brings back the memories and feelings of a past holiday every time we look at it, whether it’s the cliché fridge magnet, some local speciality, or just the collection of photos we took. But then there are those journeys that can’t be summarized into a single item and may require a bit more creativity. For [Jonathan], it was last year’s trip around the world that took him and [Maria] to locations all over Europe, Asia, and Oceania, and he found a great way to remember it: an interactive, laser-cut travel globe displaying all the places they went to.

Building a sphere is of course a bit tricky with a laser cutter, so [Jonathan] went for the icosahedron shaped Dymaxion map projection (think of a large d20 dice) and burnt the world onto it. Inside the globe is an ESP8266, an MPU-6050 IMU, and a bunch of LEDs to light up the travel locations using the WLED library. Taking the data from the IMU, he customized the WLED library to determine which way the globe is positioned, and highlights the top-facing location in a different color.

While that would already make a nice souvenir on its own, [Jonathan] didn’t stop here. Using Google’s My Maps service, which lets you create custom maps with own points of interest and have for example photos attached to them, the ESP8266 hosts the travel map also as a web page. Feeding the IMU data to the JavaScript code that’s handling the map API, the globe itself now doubles as an input device to control the virtual map. So whenever the globe is physically rotated to highlight a certain location, the web page’s map is focused to that same location and shows randomly the pictures they have taken there. Check out the video below to see it all in action.

This is a great way to reminisce about a memorable journey even years down the road, and while it may not be flexible to extend, it seems like the kind of trip that deserves a standalone device anyway. Plus, the Dymaxion map is definitely an interesting projection — so here’a a foldable one, just because. And If you like tracking things on a globe, here’s one that shows the location of the ISS.

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This Iron Man Suit Is A Hacker’s Dream Come True

July 4, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 9 Comments

[Techmaster], like probably a lot of us, was hugely inspired by the engineering wonder that is the Iron Man suit. So, like any good maker, he decided to build his own. [Techmaster’s] social media pages are filled with promotional videos that are sure to get you excited for your next Comic-Con (when you can go in-person of course).

It’s difficult to summarize all the work [Techmaster] has put into his suit in a single post, so we’ll let his social media pages do the talking. From the knuckle launcher to the repulsor and the beloved Arc rector, [Techmaster] is really putting together an impressive set. Now, we’ve seen our fair share of Iron Man-inspired projects here on Hackaday, but [Techmaster’s] designs might be the closest attempt to a full suit with the projectiles to match.

[Techmaster’s] goal is to develop the most realistic Iron Man suit ever, well..other than the original we suppose. Given the dynamic nature of his development process, there aren’t any DIY instructions for the rest of us to follow as of yet (though he does host live streams), so you’ll have to piece together design ideas from his promotional videos.

[Techmaster] might be living the dream a lot of us wish were our realities and we certainly can’t wait to see an official version 1 release. Feel free to support his development if you feel so inclined.

DJing Without The Truckload Of Equipment; Secret Ingredient Is Raspberry Pi

July 3, 2020 by Jenny List 7 Comments

There is a romance to notions of a byegone age of DJing — driving a pair of Technics 1200s dwarfed on either side by the stacks, pumping techno bass through the laser-tinged darkness into a hungry crowd. Even if the reality of early evening Saturday wedding parties playing inoffensive crooners for the 50-somethings didn’t really live up to it.

The trouble with DJing old-style was that it required extensive logistics to shift all that equipment not to mention a record collection, so the modern DJ for whom everything has gone digital is truly lucky in the scale of their operation. For some people even that is too much to carry, and [Dennisdebel] has minimised a DJ rig to the next level, by running the popular Mixxx DJing software on a Raspberry Pi hooked up to his DJ controller. You can see the result in the video below the break.

This is more of a HOWTO for installing a set of software packages on the Pi to achieve an aim rather than a special hardware hack, but as he points out the interest lies in regaining control of the process. The DJ space is dominated by commercial offerings increasingly laden with DRM and proprietary cloud offerings, so this represents a means of taking back control of the process. If it’s not hacky enough, you can always add a home-made DJ mixing station.

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IWings For The New Apple Power Adaptor

July 3, 2020 by Adil Malik 13 Comments

You might remember the old Apple MagSafe adaptor with the cute little fold out “wings” that served not only as a pragmatic cable management tool, but in our experience also expedited the inevitable and frayed end of your charger. Apple seems to have remedied the latter by opting for removable USB-C cables in latest designs, but the complete omission of a pop-out cable spooling contraption is problematic.

[Eric], an industrial designer, took it upon himself to design a 3D printed add on for the new generation of chargers. His video is certainty one of those satisfying accounts, where the whole process from conceptional sketch to a working Hack is neatly self-contained in a single video. The design is largely based off the original version, implemented in PLA together with piano wire serving as the hinge pin. We think this is a very good example of how 3D printers can be used to personalise and tweak commercial products to suite particular needs.

If you are looking for a more general 3D printed cable management tool, check out this geared cable winder we featured earlier.

Robotic Biped Walks On Inverse Kinematics

July 3, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 6 Comments

Robotics projects are always a favorite for hackers. Being able to almost literally bring your project to life evokes a special kind of joy that really drives our wildest imaginations. We imagine this is one of the inspirations for the boom in interactive technologies that are flooding the market these days. Well, [Technovation] had the same thought and decided to build a fully articulated robotic biped.

Each leg has pivot points at the foot, knee, and hip, mimicking the articulation of the human leg. To control the robot’s movements, [Technovation] uses inverse kinematics, a method of calculating join movements rather than explicitly programming them. The user inputs the end coordinates of each foot, as opposed to each individual joint angle, and a special function outputs the joint angles necessary to reach each end coordinate. This part of the software is well commented and worth your time to dig into.

In case you want to change the height of the robot or its stride length, [Technovation] provides a few global constants in the firmware that will automatically adjust the calculations to fit the new robot’s dimensions. Of all the various aspects of this project, the detailed write-up impressed us the most. The robot was designed in Fusion 360 and the parts were 3D printed allowing for maximum design flexibility for the next hacker.

Maybe [Technovation’s] biped will help resurrect the social robot craze. Until then, happy hacking.

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