Stretching The Definitions Of A Custom IC

May 20, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

Maker Faire is the nexus for all things new and exciting. At the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend, zGlue introduced a new platform that stretches the definition of custom ICs. Is this custom silicon? No, not at all. zGlue is a platform allowing anyone to take off-the-shelf ICs and package them into a single module, allowing you to build a smaller PCB with a shorter BOM.

The idea behind zGlue is to take all of the fun chips available today from accelerometers to tiny microcontrollers with integrated wireless and put them on a tiny, tiny board that is then encapsulated. At Maker Faire, the zGlue team was busy demonstrating their cloud-based platform that allows anyone to add off-the-shelf chips to the zGlue stack and assemble it into a custom module.

Of course, every new tech startup needs a demo, so zGlue has come up with zOrigin, a small fitness tracker that features a suite of chips crammed into one encapsulated package. The chips included in the zOrigin ZiP package are a Dialog DA14585 microcontroller with BLE, an Analog Devices heart rate monitor, a crystal, a bit of Flash, a power monitoring IC and an accelerometer. There are also thirty passives stuck in this single chip, and with a battery, some LEDs, and a vibration motor, this chip becomes a complete solution for wearable fitness trackers.

Shoving a bunch of chips into a single module is nothing new; most of wireless modules available on the market are just that. NextThingCo experimented with a Linux computer on a chip with the GR8 module, again, just a bunch of chips slathered in epoxy. The most visible benefit of custom modules is probably the Octavo System on a Chip that became the PocketBone.

While the ability to create custom modules from off-the-shelf chips is nothing new for manufacturers, the ability for anyone to create their own custom ICs has remained out of reach for the Average Joe hardware hacker. zGlue is the solution to this problem, and the prices seem fairly reasonable, starting at around $100 for the initial R&D.

Video Of The Arduino FPGA Board Demo At Maker Faire

May 20, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 98 Comments

This week, Arduino announced a lot of new hardware including an exceptionally interesting FPGA development board aimed at anyone wanting to dip their toes into the seas of VHDL and developing with programmable logic. We think it’s the most interesting bit of hardware Arduino has released since their original dev board, and everyone is wondering what the hardware actually is, and what it can do.

This weekend at Maker Faire Bay Area, Arduino was out giving demos for all their wares, and yes, the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 was on hand, being shown off in a working demo. We have a release date and a price. It’ll be out next month (June 2018) for about $60 USD.

But what about the hardware, and what can it do? From the original press releases, we couldn’t even tell how many LUTs this FPGA had. There were a lot of questions about the Mini PCIe connectors, and we didn’t know how this FPGA would be useful for high-performance computation like decoding video streams. Now we have the answers.

Maker:S,Date:2017-2-27,Ver:6,Lens:Kan03,Act:Lar02,E-Y

The FPGA on board the Arduino Vidor is an Altera Cyclone 10CL016. This chip has 16k logic elements, and 504 kB memory block. This is on the low end of Altera’s FPGA lineup, but it’s still no slouch. In the demo video below, it’s shown decoding video and identifying QR codes in real time. That’s pretty good for what is effectively a My First FPGA™ board.

Also on board the Vidor is a SAMD21 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller and a uBlox module housing an ESP-32 WiFi and Bluetooth module. This is a really great set of chips, and if you’re looking to get into FPGA development, this might just be the board for you. We haven’t yet seen the graphic editor that will be used to work with IP for the FPGA (for those who don’t care to write their own VHDL or Verilog), but we’re looking forward to the unveiling of that new software.

Autonomous Agribots For Agriculture

May 18, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [TegwynTwmffat] is going all-in on autonomous robotics. No, it’s not a self-driving car with highly advanced features such as cruise control with lane-keeping. This is an autonomous robot that’s capable of driving itself. It’s a robot built for agriculture, and relative to other autonomous robotics projects, this one is huge. It’s the size of a small tractor.

The goal [Tegwyn]’s project is to build a robot capable of roving fields of crops to weed, harvest, and possibly fertilize the land. This is a superset of the autonomous car problem: not only does [Tegwyn] need to build a chassis to roll around a field, he needs accurate sensors, some sort of connection to the Internet, and a fast processor on board. The mechanical part of this build comes in the form of a rolling chassis that’s a bit bigger than a golf cart, and electrically powered (although there is a small Honda generator strapped to the back). The electronics is where this gets really interesting, with a rather large board built to house all the sensor and wireless modules, with everything controlled by a TC275, a multicore, 32-bit microcontroller that also has the world record for solving a Rubik’s cube.

Already, [Tegwyn] has a chassis and motor set up, and is already running some code to allow for autonomous navigation. It’s not much now — just rolling down a garden path — but then again, if you’re building a robot for agriculture, it’s not that hard to roll around an open field. You can check out a video of the bot in action below.

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Arduino Just Introduced An FPGA Board, Announces Debugging And Better Software

May 18, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 139 Comments

Today ahead of the Bay Area Maker Faire, Arduino has announced a bevy of new boards that bring modern features and modern chips to the Arduino ecosystem.

Most ambitious of these new offerings is a board that combines a fast ARM microcontroller, WiFi, Bluetooth, and an FPGA. All this is wrapped in a package that provides Mini HDMI out and pins for a PCIe-Express slot. They’re calling it the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000.

Bringing an FPGA to the Arduino ecosystem is on the list of the most interesting advances in DIY electronics in recent memory, and there’s a lot to unpack here. FPGA development boards aren’t new. You can find crates of them hidden in the storage closet of any University’s electronics lab. If you want to buy an FPGA dev board, the Terasic DE10 is a good starter bundle, the iCEstick has an Open Source toolchain, and this one has pink soldermask. With the release of the MKR Vidor, the goal for Arduino isn’t just to release a board with an FPGA; the goal is to release a tool that allows anyone to use an FPGA.

The key to democratizing FPGA development is Arduino’s work with the Arduino Create ecosystem. Arduino Create is the company’s online IDE that gives everyone the ability to share projects and upload code with Over-the-Air updates. The MKR Vidor will launch with integration to the Arduino Create ecosystem that includes a visual editor to work with the pre-compiled IP for the FPGA. That’s not to say you can’t just plug your own VHDL into this board and get it working; that’s still possible. But Arduino would like to create a system where anyone can move blocks of IP around with a tool that’s easy for beginners.

A Facelift for the Uno WiFi

First up is the brand new Arduino Uno WiFi. While there have been other boards bearing the name ‘Arduino Uno WiFi’ over the years, a lot has changed in the world of tiny radio modules and 8-bit microcontrollers over the past few years. The new Arduino Uno WiFi is powered by a new 8-bit AVR, the ATMega4809. The ATMega4809 is a new part announced just a few months ago, and is just about what you would expect from the next-generation 8-bit Arduino; it runs at 20MHz, has 48 kB of Flash, 6 kB of SRAM, and it comes in a 48-pin package. The ATMega4809 is taking a few lattices of silicon out of Microchip’s playbook and adds Custom Configurable Logic. The CCL in the new ATMega is a peripheral that is kinda, sorta like a CPLD on chip. If you’ve ever had something that could be more easily done with logic gates than software, the CCL is the tool for the job.

But a new 8-bit microcontroller doesn’t make a WiFi-enabled Arduino. The wireless power behind the new Arduino comes from a custom ESP-32 based module from u-blox. There’s also a tiny crypto chip (Microchip’s ATECC508A) so the Uno WiFi will work with AWS. The Arduino Uno WiFi will be available this June.

But this isn’t the only announcement from the Arduino org today. They’ve been hard at work on some killer features for a while now, and now they’re finally ready for release. What’s the big news? Debuggers. Real debuggers for the Arduino that are easy to use. There are also new boards aimed at Arduino’s IoT strategy.

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PGP Vulnerability Pre-announced By Security Researcher

May 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

From the gaping maw of the infosec Twitterverse comes horrifying news. PGP is broken. How? We don’t know. When will there be any information on this vulnerability? Tomorrow. It’s the most important infosec story of the week, and it’s only Monday. Of course, this vulnerability already has a name. Everyone else is calling it eFail, but I’m calling it Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

Update: eFail site and paper now available. This was released ahead of Tuesday’s planned announcement when the news broke ahead of a press embargo.

Update 2: The report mentions two attacks. The Direct Exfiltration attack wraps the body of a PGP-encrypted email around an image tag. If a mail client automatically decrypts this email, the result will be a request to a URL containing the plaintext of the encrypted email. The second attack only works one-third of the time. Mitigation strategies are to not decrypt email in a client, disable HTML rendering, and in time, update the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards. This is not the end of PGP, it’s a vulnerability warranting attention from those with a very specific use case.

Update 3: Hackaday has published an in-depth explanation of how eFail works which details the scope of the vulnerability.

[Sebastian Schinzel] announced on Twitter today he will be announcing a critical vulnerability in PGP/GPG and S/MIME email encryption. This vulnerability may reveal the plaintext of encrypted emails. There are currently no fixes — but there’s no proof of concept, or any actual publication of this exploit either. The only thing that’s certain: somebody on Twitter said encrypted email is broken.

The EFF has chimed in on this exploit and advises everyone to immediately disable and uninstall tools that automatically decrypt PGP-encrypted email. It also looks like the EFF came up with a great little logo for eFail as well so kudos on that.

While there are no details whatsoever concerning eFail aside from a recommendation to not use PGP, a few members of the community have seen a pre-press of the eFail paper. [Werner Koch] of GnuPG says eFail is simply using HTML as a back channel. If this is true, PGP is still safe; you just shouldn’t use HTML emails. If you really need to read HTML emails, use a proper MIME parser and disallow access to external links. It should be noted that HTML in email is already an attack vector and has been for decades. You don’t need to bring PGP into this.

Should you worry about a vulnerability in PGP and email encryption? Literally no one knows. European security researchers are working on a publication release right now, but other experts in the field who have seen the paper think it’s not a big deal. There is no consensus from experts in the field, and there is no paper available right now. That last point will change in a few hours, but for now eFail just stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

This Weekend: Hackaday X Tindie Meetup At Bay Area Maker Faire.

May 14, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Maker Faire Bay Area is this weekend, and the Hackaday and Tindie crew are getting ready to jack some cupcake cars. The Bay Area Maker Faire is one of the greatest gatherings of all the cool people we know, and five years ago we started host a meetup. This Saturday, we’re blowing the roof off our favorite joint in San Mateo yet again. Join us at O’Neill’s Irish Pub for the 5th annual Hackaday x Tindie BAMF Meetup!

This meetup is a well established tradition — it’s all the cool kids at Maker Faire, hanging out in a bar. Well, all the cool 21+ kids that is. There will be blinky, there will be bring-a-hack, and there will be the people who build stuff and make things happen. This is the mixer for everyone who is passionate about hardware, and a refreshing escape from the heat and the five dollar bottles of water.

Want an idea of what’s in store for the Hackaday x Tindie Bay Area Meetup? Last year it spilled into the streets. We cajoled [Josef Prusa] to head out, we had tiny 3D printers in action, [Ben Heck] made an appearance, and someone brought a HoloLens. the MOnSter 6502 was there, slowly increasing its program counter. If you want to see the coolest DIY hardware without the dealing with the masses at Maker Faire, this is the event you want to hit up.

But wait, there’s more: HDDG is Thursday!

Are you heading to San Fransisco early? Awesome, because we’re also hosting the Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic on the Thursday before the Faire! The HDDG is our monthly expand-your-mind gathering for hardware developers in the Bay Area. We have some amazing guests that will be talking about the latest hardware they’ve been developing.

On deck for this installment of HDDG is [Tanya Fish] who has been working at Pimoroni for the past couple of years. She’ll be discussing the ‘invisible magic’ of electronics and how to explain electrons to the uninitiated. Also on board for HDDG is [Roy Jui Liang Hung], the founder of Perkūnas Studio, one of the most renowned 3D printing experts in Taiwan. He’ll be talking about 3D sculpture. Also on board is [Jason Kridner], co-founder of BeagleBone.org, who will be talking about simplifying hardware design with the BeagleBone On A Chip.

Hackaday Links: May 13, 2018

May 13, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 39 Comments

The dumbest thing this week is Uber’s flying car concept of the future. The braintrust at Uber envisions a world of skyports, on rooftops or on the ground that will handle 200 takeoffs and landings per hour. That is 4800 per day at a maximum. The record for the number of total takeoffs and landings for any airport was set last year at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji airport with 969 takeoffs and landings in a twenty-four hour period. Yes, Uber wants to put the world’s busiest airport in a parking lot or something. Just wait, it gets dumber. Uber’s ‘flying car’ looks like a standard quadcopter, but with stacked, non-contrarotating props, for safety. These aircraft will be powered electrically, although it’s not quite clear if this is a hybrid setup (which could actually be practical now, but without regulatory precedent) or something built around an enormous battery (impractical for anything bigger than a 152 in this decade).

This aircraft is just a render, and Uber expects it to be certified for commercial flight in two to five years. This is nearly impossible. Uber plans to fly these aircraft autonomously. This will never happen. Additionally, Uber will not manufacture or design the aircraft. Instead, they will partner with a company that has experience in aerospace — Bell or Embraer, for instance — making the render a moot point, because ultimately Uber is just going to go with whatever Bell or Embraer have on the drawing board. Uber’s entire business plan is “move fast and break laws”, which will not serve them well with the FAA. The mere mention of Uber’s self-flying car has lowered the level of public discourse and has made us all dumber.

Here’s a great example of how cheap TVs are getting. [tmv22] built a 55 inch, 4k digital photo frame for $400. The TV was one Walmart was blowing out for two hundred and sixty dollars. Add in an Odroid C2 and some various cables and hardware, and you have an absurd digital photo frame for a few benjamins.

Espressif is getting investment from Intel’s venture capital division. Espressif, is, of course, the company behind the incredibly popular ESP8266 and ESP32 chipsets designed for the Internet of Things. Before the ESP8266 module popped up for sale on SeeedStudios, no one had heard of Espressif. Intel, on the other hand, is the largest semiconductor company on the planet and recently exited the maker IoT space because of the complete and utter failure of the Curie, Joule, Edison, and Galileo product lines. I would bet a significant portion of Intel’s failure was due to their inability to release datasheets.

Awesome news for synth heads. Behringer is cloning just about every classic synth and drum machine. At Superbooth 2018, Behringer, manufacturers of the worst mixers on the planet, revealed their clone of the Roland SH-101 synthesizer. It’s called the MS-101, and yes, it has the keytar grip. Also announced is a clone of the TR-808, Odyssey One, the OB-Xa, Arp 2600, and M100 modules. Here’s some context for you: a good Detroit techno show consists of an SH-101, TB-303, TR-808 and TR-909, all made by Roland in the 80s. These vintage synths and drum machines, at current prices, would cost about $10,000, used. The prices for these clone synths haven’t been announced, but we’re looking at a Detroit techno show for $1000. That’s nuts. Here’s a video of the 808.