Harvesting Power From Microwave Popcorn

July 15, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

One of the challenges in this year’s Hackaday Prize is Power Harvesting where we’re asking everybody to create something that harvests energy from something. It could be solar, it could be harvesting energy from a falling weight. If you’d like to give a TED talk, it could be harvesting energy from sound waves. It could be harvesting energy from ambient RF, and where’s the best place to harvest ambient RF? That’s right, next to a microwave.

[Jurist]’s entry for the Power Harvesting Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize is a simple device that mounts to the front door of a microwave. The design uses a simple PCB antenna to harvest energy, an LTC3108 DC/DC converter that was lying around in a junk drawer, and a bunch of passives to suck down some photons escaping from a microwave. The idea for this whole device is to use the harvested power to send off a message over Bluetooth (or whatever) when the microwave is done. Really, though, this falls right into the ‘because I can’ category of weird builds.

So, does this power harvesting PCB work? The initial tests were iffy because there was no trimming of the antenna and no tuning of the circuit. However, after [Jurist] connected the board to a voltmeter and cooked some beans, he was seeing an entire volt across the circuit. It’s a start, and the beginning of a truly ‘smart’ microwave add-on. Really, though, it’s just cool to see a circuit harvest power from a leaking Faraday cage.

Charging USB-C Devices Off Of LiPo Battery Packs

July 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

When it was introduced in the late 90s, USB was the greatest achievement in all of computing. Gone were the PS/2 connectors for keyboards and mice, ADB ports, parallel ports, game ports, and serial ports. This was a Tower of Babel that would unite all ports under one standard universal bus.

Then more ports were introduced; micro, mini, that weird one that was a mini USB with more connectors off to the side. Then we started using phone chargers as power supplies. The Tower of Babel had crumbled. Now, though, there is a future. USB-C is everything stuffed into one port, and it can supply 100 Watts of power.

Delivering power over a USB-C connector is an interesting engineering challenge, and for his Hackaday Prize entry, [Chris Hamilton] is taking up the task. He’s building a USB-C battery charger, allowing him to charge standard R/C battery packs over USB.

There are two major components of the charger. The first, a Cypress CCG2 USB Power Delivery negotiator, handles all the logic of sending a command to the USB power supply and telling it to open up the pipes. It’s an off-the-shelf part and the implementation is well documented in app notes. The second major component is the battery management circuit built on a TI BQ40z60RHB. This includes the charger control logic and the ability to balance up to four cells. Battery connectors are XT-30, so all your drone battery packs can now be charged by a MacBook.

This Is Your Last Chance To Design The Greatest In Power Harvesting

July 13, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

This is your last weekend to get your project together for the Power Harvesting Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize. We’re looking for projects that harvest energy from the ether, and power electronics from solar, thermal, wind, light, or random electromagnetic fluctuations. Is it going to save the world? Maybe, but it’s a great excuse to build some really cool electronics. If you have an idea in mind, this is your last weekend to enter it in the Power Harvesting Challenge.

The Hackaday community has thrown itself full-force into the Hackaday Prize, and there are hundreds of projects entered in this year’s Prize. Next week, we’ll choose the top twenty projects entered during the Power Harvesting Challenge to advance to the finals. Each of those twenty projects will be awarded $1,000 and be in the running to win the Grand Prize of $50,000 and four other top cash prizes.

This is your last chance to get in on the Power Harvesting Challenge in this year’s Hackaday Prize. For this challenge, we’re looking for projects that harvest energy from any source. It could be a module, or as a distinct design easily incorporated into other builds. Don’t wait — start your entry now.

The Power Harvesting Challenge ends a 07:00 AM PDT on July 16th. Afterwards, we’ll be continuing on into Human-Computer Interface and Musical Instrument Challenges. This is your shot to get your project in the finals in the Hackaday Prize. Don’t miss out!

Friday Hack Chat: Hacking Voice Assistants

July 11, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

The future of consumer electronics is electronic voice assistants, at least that’s what the manufacturers are telling us. Everything from Alexas to Google Homes to Siris are invading our lives, and if predictions hold, your next new car might just have a voice assistant in it. It’s just a good thing we have enough samples of Majel Barrett’s voice for a quality virtual assistant.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about voice interfaces. There are hundreds of Alexa and Google Home hacks around, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. What else can we do with these neat pieces of computer hardware, and how do we get it to do that?

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be Nadine Lessio, a designer and technologist out of Toronto with a background in visual design and DIY peripherals. Nadine holds an MDes from OCADU where she spent her time investigating the Internet of Things through personal assistants. Currently, she’s working at OCADUs Adaptive Context Environments Lab where she’s researching how humans and devices work together.

During this Hack Chat, Nadine will be talking about voice assistants and answering questions like:

What languages can be used to program voice assistants
How do you use voice and hardware together?
What goes into the UX of a voice assistant?
How do these assistants interface with microcontrollers, Pis, and other electronics platforms?

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hack Chat Event Page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, July 13th. Need a countdown timer? Yes you do.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Teardown Of USB Fan Reveals Journalists’ Lack Of Opsec

July 11, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 109 Comments

Last month, Singapore hosted a summit between the leaders of North Korea and the United States. Accredited journalists invited to the event were given a press kit containing a bottle of water, various paper goods, and a fan that plugs into a USB port.

Understandably, the computer security crowd on Twitter had a great laugh. You shouldn’t plug random USB devices into a computer, especially if you’re a journalist, especially if you’re in a foreign country, and especially if you’re reporting on the highest profile international summit in recent memory. Doing so is just foolhardy.

This is not a story about a USB fan, the teardown thereof, or of spy agencies around the world hacking journalists’ computers. This a story of the need for higher awareness on what we plug into our computers. In this case nothing came of it — the majority of USB devices are merely that and nothing more. One of the fans was recently torn down (PDF) and the data lines are not even connected. (I’ll dive into that later on in this article). But the anecdote provides an opportunity to talk about USB security and how the compulsion to plug every USB device into a computer should be interrupted by a few seconds of thoughtfulness first.

Continue reading “Teardown Of USB Fan Reveals Journalists’ Lack Of Opsec” →

Hackaday Links: July 8, 2018

July 8, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

Software-defined radio has been around for years, but it’s only recently that it’s been accessible to those of us who don’t have tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in their lab. Here’s a new book from Analog Devices that gives you the lowdown on software-defined radio. It’s heavy on MATLAB and components from Analog, but it’s still a solid foundation for SDR.

Do you like cyberpunk? Do you like stories about rebellious people overthrowing the system? How about androids? Do you like androids? Here’s a Kickstarter that’s tying all of that together. Neptune Frost is (will be?) a movie about an e-waste village in Burundi that’s home to the ‘world’s most subversive hacking collective’, a coltan miner and an inter-sex runaway. It’s literally got everything.

Hey, this is cool, Hackaday has been cited in a journal article. The title of the article is An open-source approach to automation in organic synthesis: The flow chemical formation of benzamides using an inline liquid-liquid extraction system and a homemade 3-axis autosampling/product-collection device, and can be found in Tetrahedron Volume 74, Issue 25, 21 June 2018, Pages 3152-3157.

Asteroid day was a few days ago, and there’s a Kickstarter to go with it. The Planetary Society, headed up by Bill Nye (a science guy) is raising awareness about the threat of asteroid impacts. There’s hilarious swag that says ‘Kick Asteroid’, even though actually kicking an asteroid might be a bad idea; a gravity tractor would be the best method of nudging the orbit of an asteroid given enough time.

Last year, a company in the US trademarked the word ‘RetroPie’ and used that trademark to sell Raspberry Pis loaded up with (you guessed it) RetroPie software. This company also used the trademark to force anyone else doing the same to stop. Obviously, this didn’t sit well with the developers of RetroPie. After some generous legal help, the RetroPie trademark issue has been resolved. That’s a tip of the hat to Eckland & Blando who offered some pro bono legal work.

There’s A Computer In This Hard Drive

July 7, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

Throughout the history of personal computers, there are some unique form factors. The 3com Audrey was sold as a computing appliance, meant to sit on a kitchen counter, to display recipes or something. For some reason, Macs were cubes once, and it actually wasn’t a bad machine. At one point, you were supposed to put a monitor on top of your computer.

A few years ago, [glitch] read about an interesting system from the early 80s. The SIIG S286 was designed by the same people that made SCSI cards and external hard drives, and it shows: this is a complete 286-based system stuffed into what was probably an external enclosure for a 5 1/4 drive at some point. After finding one of these bad boys on an auction site a few months ago, he finally got it working. It’s weird, but it can get on a network, and you can read Hackaday with it.

The entire computer is stuffed into a case that’s about 5″ wide, 4″ tall, and 10″ long. There’s a motherboard with built-in VGA, ‘game port’, and a printer port. There’s a riser card for real 16-bit ISA cards, two serial ports, and a connector for a hard disk and floppy drive. Basically, it’s an entire 286 system wrapped up in a tiny box.

After acquiring this machine, [glitch] took it apart and found the usual damage. The CMOS battery leaked, but not too bad. This was replaced with a hermetically sealed lithium thionyl chloride battery. These are non-rechargable, but a quick swipe of the soldering iron disable the motherboard’s charging circuitry. The hard drive was replaced with a 128 MB Flash module, and an Ethernet card was installed.

With that, [glitch] has a complete system that can connect to the Internet. Of course, getting on the Internet with a 286 is a challenge, but we have a Hackaday Retro Edition for just the occasion. The browser is Arache, with the mTCP package. That’s about as low as you can go in Intel-land, and excellent proof that the computer will work for another 35 years or so.