Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys spin the wheel of hardware hacking brilliance. We’re enamored with the quest for a root shell on a Nissan Xterra infotainment system, and smitten with a scanning microscope that uses a laser beam and precision positioning from DVD drives. We speculate on the future of artificial intelligence in the culinary arts. And this week turned up a clever way to monitor utility usage while only changing the battery on your sensor once per year.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download (~65 MB)
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
Episode 104 Show Notes:
New This Week:
- Elliot’s working on a rover with mechanum wheels
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
- Nissan Gives Up Root Shell Thanks To Hacked USB Drive
- DVD Optics Power This Scanning Laser Microscope
- Youngster’s ESP32 Jukebox Uses RFID To Queue Tunes
- Giant DIY Mouse Sets The Ball Free
- Old Gas Meter Gets Smart With The ESP8266
- Logic Meter Aims To Make Hobby Electronics Troubleshooting Easier
Quick Hacks:
- Elliot’s Picks:
- Mike’s Picks:
Nope, the battery discharger did not bring the battery down to storage voltage, but to the minimum safe discharge voltage because they were using it for making empty batteries to test a battery charger.
You do not store a lithium battery at the minimum safe voltage, because it will self-discharge further and destroy itself over time.
So the claim — I don’t know first-hand if it’s right — is that you discharge down to the minimum at a high enough drain rate that it rebounds back up to storage when it’s pulled off the discharger.
Of course, you could just toss in a microcontroller with an ADC and a couple lines of code…
What a sad state of affairs when it’s pretty much assumed that there is at least one viable attack available for a “secure” device like a car. Kind of like headed out on the road assuming that at least one of the passengers will be killed along the way. Tell me again why you write in C.
Thomas Lange’s rock polishing, from the Madison Mini Maker Faire, that was mentioned in the podcast. (Includes couple of rock pics and short video of the polisher)
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5QYRUmAmu1/
What telnet server do you use on your MicroPython boards? I searched around and there wasn’t a clear solution.