Shmoocon: Advanced Low Power Techniques And A Watch

January 25, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

Real quick question: how do you increase productivity at work? The greatest (highest paid) minds would just say: do agile or scrum or something. What’s scrum? That’s where you gather ’round every morning for a waste of time meeting that kills your every desire to be productive. A while back, [Travis Goodspeed] was stuck in some lesser circle of hell like this and in an effort to be polite by not looking at his phone too much, looked at his watch too much. This led to the creation of the Goodwatch, a new bit of hardware that replaces the guts of a Casio calculator watch with a hex editor, ISM-band radio, MSP430 disassembler, and of course an RPN calculator.

[Travis] has already introduced the GoodWatch to the world. We took a look back in December but haven’t heard anything since. His talk at Shmoocon 2018 put a little more light on how this project came to be.

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Friday Hack Chat: Becoming Cyborg

January 24, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

What is it like to be a cyborg? What does it mean to have augmented hearing, improved vision, and coprocessors for your brain that enhance your memory? We could ask people with hearing aids, glasses, and a smartphone strapped to their wrist, but that’s boring. We’re looking to the future and the cool type of cyborgation, and that’s what this week’s Hack Chat is all about.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be Lindy Wilkins, and they’re here to discuss what it takes to be a cyborg. Right now, they’re sporting a magnetic implant, an NFC implant and will soon have a North Sense, an exo-sensory device that tells your brain where North is.

Lindy is currently based in Toronto as a PhD student at the University of Toronto, and director at the Site 3 coLaboratory. They spend free time making robots, playing with lasers, and thinking about how body modification and where the intersection of bio-hacking and wearable technology will meet in the near future.

During this Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about what it means to be a cyborg. Is it simply a matter of wearing contacts, getting a replacement hip or heart valve, or is it something even cooler? Do RFID tags count? Do insulin pumps? We’re going to be digging deep into what it means to be a cyborg, and what future technologies will enable the human body to do. You are, of course, encouraged to ask your own questions; leave those on the Hack Chat event page.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat is going down Friday, January 26th at noon, Pacific time. Time Zones got you down? Here’s a handy countdown timer!

Click that speech bubble to the left, 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.

Shmoocon: Delightful Doppler Direction Finding With Software Defined Radio

January 23, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 37 Comments

When it comes to finding what direction a radio signal is coming from, the best and cheapest way to accomplish the task is usually a Yagi and getting dizzy. There are other methods, and at Shmoocon this last weekend, [Michael Ossmann] and [Schuyler St. Leger] demonstrated pseudo-doppler direction finding using cheap, off-the-shelf software defined radio hardware.

The hardware for this build is, of course, the HackRF, but this pseudo-doppler requires antenna switching. That means length-matched antennas, and switching antennas without interrupts or other CPU delays. This required an add-on board for the HackRF dubbed the Opera Cake. This board is effectively an eight-input antenna switcher using the state configurable timer found in the LPC43xx found on the HackRF.

The key technique for pseudo-doppler is basically switching between an array of antennas mounted in a circle. By switching through these antennas very, very quickly — on the order of hundreds of thousands of times per second — you can measure the Doppler shift of a transmitter.

However, teasing out a distinct signal from a bunch of antennas virtually whizzing about isn’t exactly easy. If you look at what the HackRF an Opera Cake receive on a waterfall display, you’ll find a big peak around where you expect, and copies of that signal trailing off, separated by whatever your antenna switching frequency is. This was initially a problem for [Schuyler] and [Ossmann]’s experiments. Spinning the antennas at 20 kHz meant there was only 20 kHz difference in these copies, resulting in a mess that can’t be decoded. The solution was to virtually spin these antennas much faster, resulting in more separation, and a clean signal.

There are significant challenges when it comes to finding the direction of modern radio targets. Internet of Things things sometimes have very short packet duration, modulation interferes with antenna rotation, and packet detection must maintain the phase. That said, is this technique actually able to find the direction of IoT garbage devices? Yes, the demo on stage was simply finding the direction of one of the wireless microphones for the talk. It mostly worked, but the guys have some ideas for the future that would make this technique work a little better. They’re going to try phase demodulation instead of only frequency-based demodulation. They’re also going to try asymmetric antenna arrays and pseudorandom antenna switching. With any luck, this is going to become an easy and cheap way to do pseudo-doppler direction finding, all enabled by a few dollars in hardware and a laser-cut jig to hold a few antennas.

Hackaday Links: January 21, 2018

January 21, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

You know what next week is? Sparklecon! What is it? Everybody hangs out at the 23b Hackerspace in Fullerton, California. Last year, people were transmuting the elements, playing Hammer Jenga, roasting marshmallows over hot resistors, and generally having a really great time. It’s the party for our sort of people, and there are talks on 3D projection mapping and a hebocon. I can’t recommend this one enough.

The STM32F7 is a very, very powerful ARM Cortex-M7 microcontroller with piles of RAM, oodles of Flash, DSP, and tons of I/O. It’s a relatively new part, so are there any breakout or dev boards for it? Sure thing. [satsha] used a desktop CNC mill to create what is probably the simplest possible breakout board for the STM32F7. There’s not much here — just some parts for power and a few LEDs — but this is all you need to get one of these powerful chips up and running.

It’s cold and dark and you can’t fly RC airplanes in January. It’s not because planes and quadcopters don’t work in the cold (they should work better, but I’d love to see a graph of battery temperature and density altitude), it’s that your hands don’t work in the cold. What’s the solution? Just strap some motorcycle handwarmer thingies onto your transmitter. With a 2200 battery strapped to the back, you’ll get about an hour of runtime for these handwarmers.

The BBC is reporting the latest advancement in Hyperloop technology. Is it a fundamentally different way of digging tunnels that isn’t simply scaling down the size of tunnel boring machines? No. Is it improvements in material science that would allow the seals on a 500-mile-long steel pressure chamber to exist? No. Does this latest advancement mitigate the ‘hillbillies with guns’ problem that would turn every Hyperloop car into a literal bullet screaming towards one of the most spectacular deaths possible? No. The chief executive of the Virgin Hyperloop project has something better in mind. A smartphone app, “that would connect future Hyperloop passengers with other modes of transport on arrival.”

Space Escape: Flying A Chair To Lunar Orbit

January 19, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 56 Comments

In the coming decades, mankind will walk on the moon once again. Right now, plans are being formulated for space stations orbiting around Lagrange points, surveys of lava tubes are being conducted, and slowly but surely plans are being formed to build the hardware that will become a small scientific outpost on our closest celestial neighbor.

This has all happened before, of course. In the early days of the Apollo program, there were plans to launch two Saturn V rockets for every moon landing, one topped with a command module and three astronauts, the other one containing an unmanned ‘LM Truck’. This second vehicle would land on the moon with all the supplies and shelter for a 14-day mission. There would be a pressurized lunar rover weighing thousands of pounds. This wouldn’t exactly be a Lunar colony, instead, it would be more like a small cabin in the Arctic used as a scientific outpost. Astronauts and scientists would land, spend two weeks researching and exploring, and return to Earth with hundreds of pounds of samples.

With this, as with all Apollo landings, came a risk. What would happen if the ascent engine didn’t light? Apart from a beautiful speech written by William Safire, there was nothing concrete for astronauts consigned to the deepest of the deep. Later in the Apollo program, there was a plan for real hardware to bring stranded astronauts home. This was the Lunar Escape System (LESS), basically two chairs mounted to a rocket engine.

While the LESS was never built, several studies were completed in late 1970 by North American Rockwell detailing the hardware that would return two astronauts from the surface of the moon. It involved siphoning fuel from a stricken Lunar Module, flying to orbit with no computer or really any instrumentation at all, and performing a rendezvous with an orbiting Command Module in less than one Lunar orbit.

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Solenoids And Servos For Self Actuated Switches

January 18, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 56 Comments

The new hotness in home automation is WiFi controlled light switches. Sure, we’ve had computer-controlled home lighting for literally forty years with X10 modules, but now we have VC money pouring into hardware, and someone needs to make a buck. A few years ago, [Alex] installed WiFi switches in a few devices in his house and discovered the one downside to the Internet of Light Switches — his light switches didn’t have a satisfying manual override. Instead of cursing the darkness for want of an Internet-connected candle, [Alex] did the only sensible thing. He installed electromagnets, solenoids, and servos behind the light switches in his house.

The exact problem [Alex] is trying to solve here is stateful wall switches. With an Internet-connected lamp socket, the wall switch no longer functions. Being able to turn on a light when your phone is out of charge is something we all take for granted, and the solution is, of course, to have Internet-connected switches.

Being able to read the state of a switch and send some data off to a server is easy. For this, [Alex] used a WeMos D1 mini, a simple ESP8266-based board. The trick here, though, is stateful switches that can toggle themselves on and off. This is a mechanical build, and although self-actuated switches that can flip up and down by computer command exist, they’re horrifically expensive. Instead, [Alex] went the DIY route, first installing electromagnets behind the switches, then moving to solenoids, and finally designing a solution around four cheap hobby servos. The entire confabulation stuffed into a 2-wide electrical box consists of two switches, four hobby servos, the D1 mini, and an Adafruit servo driver board.

The software stack for this entire setup includes a NodeJS server connected to Orvibo Smart Sockets over UDP. Also on this server is a WebSocket server for browser-based clients that want to turn the lights on and off, a FauXMo server to turn the lights on and off via an Amazon Echo via WeMo emulation, and an HTTP server for other clients like [Alex]’ Pebble Watch.

This is, without question, the most baroque method of turning a lamp on and off that we’ve ever seen. Despite this astonishing complexity, [Alex] has something that is also intuitive to use and, to borrow an applhorism, ‘Just Works’. With a setup like this, anyone can flick a switch and turn a lamp on or off over the Internet, or vice-versa. This is the best Home Automation build we’ve ever seen.

You can check out [Alex]’ video demo of his build below, or his GitHub for the entire project here.

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Improvising An EPROM Eraser

January 17, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 86 Comments

Back in the old days, when we were still twiddling bits with magnetized needles, changing the data on an EPROM wasn’t as simple as shoving it in a programmer. These memory chips were erased with UV light shining through a quartz window onto a silicon die. At the time, there were neat little blacklights in a box sold to erase these chips. There’s little need for these chip erasers now, so how do you erase and program a chip these days? Build your own chip eraser using components that would have blown minds back in the 70s.

[Charles] got his hands on an old 2764 EPROM for a project, but this chip had a problem — there was still data on it. Fortunately, old electronics are highly resistant to abuse, so he pulled out the obvious equipment to erase this chip, a 300 watt tanning lamp. This almost burnt down the house, and after a second round of erasing of six hours under the lamp, there were still unerased bits.

Our ability to generate UV light has improved dramatically over the last fifty years, and [Charles] remembered he had an assortment of LEDs, including a few tiny 5mW UV LEDs. Can five milliwatts do what three hundred watts couldn’t? Yes; the LED had the right frequency to flip a bit, and erasing an EPROM is a function of intensity and time. All you really need to do is shine a LED onto a chip for a few hours.

With this vintage chip erased, [Charles] slapped together an EPROM programmer — with a programming voltage of 21V — out of an ATMega and a bench power supply. It eventually worked, allowing [Charles]’ project, a vintage liquid crystal display, to have the right data using vintage-correct parts.