Flipper Zero Mayhem Hat Adds Camera, More Radios

March 12, 2023 by Tom Nardi 28 Comments

For a device advertised as the “Multi-tool Device for Hackers”, the Flipper Zero already offers a considerable list of onboard capabilities. But some hard decisions had to be made to get the retail price down, so features like WiFi and Bluetooth had to be left off. Luckily, there’s an expansion interface along the top of the device which makes it possible to plug in additional hardware.

One of those expansions is the “Mayhem Hat” from [Erwin Ried]. This board adds many requested features to the Flipper Zero, as well as some that might not seem as obvious. The addition of an ESP32-CAM brings WiFi and Bluetooth to the party, while also unlocking access to the highly-capable ESP32Marauder firmware and the plethora of security research tools therein.

But the camera also enables some interesting features, such as motion detection and the ability to read QR codes. It even lets you use the Flipper as an impromptu digital camera, complete with an onscreen viewfinder reminiscent of the Game Boy Camera.

What’s more, the Mayhem Hat features its own expansion capabilities. There’s a spot to plug in either a CC1101 or NRF24l01 radio module, both of which are supported by community developed plugins that allow the user to sniff out and hijack signals. There are also extra pins for connecting your own sensors or hardware. In the demo video below you can see the device automatically detect the popular DHT11 environmental sensor and display the current temperature and humidity readings.

[Erwin] has the Mayhem Hat up for sale on Tindie, but as of this writing, is currently out of stock. Apparently, demand for the add-on boards is just as high as for the Flipper Zero itself — not a huge surprise, given the excitement we saw around this platform during its $4.8 million Kickstarter campaign.

Continue reading “Flipper Zero Mayhem Hat Adds Camera, More Radios” →

Efficient X86_64 Emulation With Box86

March 12, 2023 by Maya Posch 5 Comments

Running applications on a different architecture than the one for which they were compiled is a common occurrence, not in the least with Apple’s architectural migration every decade or so. It’s also commonly used with for example ARM, OpenRISC, and RISC-V systems to run applications that are only available for x86 or x86_64. While QEMU and kin are often used here, they’re pretty resource heavy, which is where an option like Box86 and its 64-bit sibling Box64 are attractive options. Unlike QEMU, both offer dynamic recompilation and redirection of dynamic library calls to native libraries, including those for SDL and OpenGL.

Both are available on GitHub under an MIT license, with Box64 probably the most interesting these days as applications and games have moved on to a 64-bit only world. The only hard requirement that Box64 has for a host system is that it is little-endian, which is a pretty easy requirement to meet. The most recent release was on March 10th, with Box86 0.3 and Box64 0.2.2. As essentially a translation layer, it does not offer full compatibility with every bit of software out there, but it’s already good enough to run Steam, GoG, and Epic Game Store clients and install and run Windows games via Wine for x86.

A simple set of benchmarks comparing it with QEMU and FEX (another emulator) shows it to run both more applications, and with significantly better performance.

Hackaday Links: March 12, 2023

March 12, 2023 by Dan Maloney 38 Comments

With a long history of nearly universal hate for their products, you’d think printer manufacturers would by now have found ways to back off from the policies that only seem to keep aggravating customers. But rather than make it a financially wiser decision to throw out a printer and buy a new one than to buy new ink cartridges or toners, manufacturers keep coming up with new and devious ways to piss customers off. Case in point: Hewlett-Packard now seems to be bricking printers with third-party ink cartridges. Reports from users say that a new error message has popped up on screens of printers with non-HP cartridges installed warning that further use of the printer has been blocked. Previously, printers just warned about potential quality issues from non-HP consumables, but now they’re essentially bricked until you cough up the money for legit HP cartridges. Users who have contacted HP support say that they were told the change occurred because of a recent firmware update sent to the printer, so that’s comforting.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 12, 2023” →

A Parts Bin Cyberdeck Built For Satellite Hacking

March 12, 2023 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

While there’s little in the way of hard rules dictating what constitutes a cyberdeck, one popular opinion is that it should be a piecemeal affair — a custom rig built up of whatever high-tech detritus the intrepid hacker can get their hands on, whether it be through trades or the time-honored tradition of dumpster diving. It should also be functional, and ideally, capable of some feats which would be difficult to accomplish with a garden variety laptop.

If you’re looking for an example that embraces these concepts to the fullest, look no further than the Spacedeck built by [saveitforparts]. Combining a touch screen all-in-one computer pulled from a police cruiser in the early 2000s, an RTL-SDR, and the contents of several parts bins, the rig is designed to work in conjunction with his growing collection of motorized satellite dishes to sniff out signals from space.

As you can see in the build video below, the design for this mobile satellite hacking station was originally very different, featuring considerably more modern hardware with all the buzzword interfaces and protocols you’d expect. But [saveitforparts] couldn’t get all the parts talking satisfactorily, so he went in the closet and dug out one of the surplus police terminals he’d picked up a while back.

He didn’t have the appropriate connector to power the machine up, but by cracking open the case and tracing out the wires, he figured out where he needed to inject the 12 V to get it spun up. From there he installed a new Mini PCI WiFi adapter, loaded up an era-appropriate build of Linux, and got the standard software-defined radio tools up and running.

What really sets this build apart are the two custom panels. The top one offers access to the various ports on the computer, as well as provides a sort of switchboard that connects the RTL-SDR to various onboard filters. The lower panel includes the hardware and controls necessary to aim different styles of motorized satellite dishes, as well as a USB hub and connector that leads into a commercial satellite meter tucked into the case.

At the end of the video [saveitforparts] demonstrates the various capabilities of the Spacedeck, such as the ability to pull in imagery from weather satellites. Considering the sort of satellite sniffing we’ve seen him pull off in the past, we have no doubt this machine is going to be listening in on some interesting transmissions before too long.

Continue reading “A Parts Bin Cyberdeck Built For Satellite Hacking” →

Building The Sanni Cartridge Reader To Back Up And Restore Games And Saves

March 12, 2023 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

Game cartridges are generally seen as a read-only medium with the contents as immutable as text chiseled into a granite slab, and with accompanying save files on the cartridge surviving for generations. The unfortunate truth is that as with any media storage, cartridges can and do fail, and save files are often just ethereal bits in battery-backed SRAM. This makes being able to copy not only the game data but also the save files off these cartridges essential. Projects like the Open Source Cartridge Reader by [sanni] make this something that everyone can do.

Intended to be a kind of Swiss Army knife of game cartridges, many game systems are supported directly, and many others via (user-created) adapters. A how-to-build tutorial is provided on the project wiki, though anyone interested in building such a system would do well to look at the expected price tag on the BOM page, which comes in at $134. A recent video by [Kytor Industries] (also included below) demonstrates how to assemble one of these systems, including some modding of the preassembled components.

The main components are the Arduino Mega 2560 Pro MCU module, a Makerbase assembly with LCD, control knob, and SD card slot, an SI5351-based clock generator, a PIC12F629 MCU (for snesCIC and handling SNES DRM) and a lot of pin headers and card edge connectors for specific cartridge types. The assembly is rounded off with a surface-mounted GBA card reader and an enclosure.

One important gotcha is that some of these cartridges run on 5V, while others use 3.3V. N64 cartridges require the dedicated voltage switch to be set to 3.3V, lest 5V gets sent into the unsuspecting cartridge. Once everything is configured properly, the firmware is flashed onto the Mega 2560 Pro module. The Sanni reader is then ready to run. You can use it to dump ROMs onto SD cards, along with dumping and restoring save files and loading ROMs onto new cartridges.

(Thanks to [Roman] for the tip)

Continue reading “Building The Sanni Cartridge Reader To Back Up And Restore Games And Saves” →

Large E-Paper Slow Movie Player Offers Great Docs

March 12, 2023 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen several iterations of the “slow movie player” concept, where a film is broken up into individual frames which are displayed on an e-paper display for a few minutes at a time. This turns your favorite movie into a constantly changing piece of long-term art. Unfortunately, due to the relatively high cost of e-paper panels, most of the examples we’ve seen have only been a few inches across.

Of course, technology tends to get cheaper with time, which has allowed [szantaii] to put together this beautiful 10.3-inch version. With a 1872 × 1404 Waveshare panel capable of displaying 16 shades of gray and a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W installed in a commercially purchased frame, the final product looks very professional. It certainly wouldn’t look out of place in a well-appointed living room.

It’s not just a large display that sets this project apart. [szantaii] has done a phenomenal job documenting both the hardware and software of this project, which includes the “Slow Movie Player service” Python software he’s written. Even if you aren’t using an identical hardware setup, his MIT-licensed code will absolutely get you going in the right direction.

We especially liked the several example configurations provided, as well as the explanation of how ImageMagick’s various grayscale conversion options impact the appearance of the final image.

All in all, this is not only a beautiful and well implemented version of the slow movie player concept — but it’s also the kind of project that helps elevate the entire community thanks to its transparency. We wouldn’t be surprised to see this latest iteration inspire more folks to pick up an e-paper panel and build one of their own. Could 2023 be the year of the slow movie player? We certainly hope so.

Immersive Virtual Reality From The Humble Webcam

March 12, 2023 by Joseph Long 12 Comments

[Russ Maschmeyer] and Spatial Commerce Projects developed WonkaVision to demonstrate how 3D eye tracking from a single webcam can support rendering a graphical virtual reality (VR) display with realistic depth and space. Spatial Commerce Projects is a Shopify lab working to provide concepts, prototypes, and tools to explore the crossroads of spatial computing and commerce.

The graphical output provides a real sense of depth and three-dimensional space using an optical illusion that reacts to the viewer’s eye position. The eye position is used to render view-dependent images. The computer screen is made to feel like a window into a realistic 3D virtual space where objects beyond the window appear to have depth and objects before the window appear to project out into the space in front of the screen. The resulting experience is like a 3D view into a virtual space. The downside is that the experience only works for one viewer.

Eye tracking is performed using Google’s MediaPipe Iris library, which relies on the fact that the iris diameter of the human eye is almost exactly 11.7 mm for most humans. Computer vision algorithms in the library use this geometrical fact to efficiently locate and track human irises with high accuracy.

Generation of view-dependent images based on tracking a viewer’s eye position was inspired by a classic hack from Johnny Lee to create a VR display using a Wiimote. Hopefully, these eye-tracking approaches will continue to evolve and provide improved motion-responsive views into immersive virtual spaces.