Author: Matt Terndrup

87 Articles

Welcome To The Garage Of The Future

September 6, 2014 by 32 Comments

Over the last several years, hackerspaces have cropped up all over the world. These places have become a home base for hackers, tinkerers, makers, designers, and engineers alike. One of the biggest problems associated with these creative environments is the hours that are typically available. A lot of the time you just can’t walk in at odd hours of the night and expect to do anything at all. Granted, the best hackerspaces give out 24 hour access keys to those that pay for it, but sometimes it just feels better to do the work from the comfort of one’s home. Also, if a person doesn’t have the privilege of having a hackerspace in the area, then transforming a garage into a work shop can provide a nice entry point into the continuation of the maker revolution.

A trend is emerging where garages are being turned into hackerspace-like workshops that are neatly packed away within ordinary neighborhoods. A great example is EdsJunk Home Shop. His two car garage was converted into a maker shop complete with 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC machines, and more tools than one can dream of. The key, as [Ed] states, to creating such a useful home shop is organizing everything strategically.

This project has been a 5 year venture so far and there is still plenty to do. Years of experience have taught [Ed] to coordinate the tools in out-of-the-box ways. His air compressor, for instance, is stored in the attic with a retractable hose descending from the roof down into the garage which helps to save space and reduce noise.

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Controlling A Hot Plate’s Temperature For The Lab

September 5, 2014 by 8 Comments

When you need precise heating — like for the acetone polishing shown above — the control hardware is everything. Buying a commercial, programmable, controller unit can cost a pretty penny. Instead of purchasing one, try creating one from scratch like [BrittLiv] did.

[BrittLiv] is a Chemical and Biological Engineer who wanted something that performs well enough to be relied upon as a lab tool. Her design utilizes a plain, old hot plate and with some temperature feedback to run custom temperature ramps from programs stored on an SD card.

The system she developed was dealing directly with temperatures up to 338°F. The heating element is driven from mains, using an SSR for control but there is also a mechanical switch in there if you need to manually kill the element for some reason. An ATmega328 monitors the heating process via an MAX6675 thermocouple interface board. This control circuitry is powered from a transformer and bridge rectifier inside the case (but populated on a different circuit board).

She didn’t stop after getting the circuit working. The project includes a nice case and user interface that will have visitors to your lab oohing and aahing.

Virtual Reality Expands Into The World Of Rollercoasters With ‘The Augmented Thrill Ride Project’

September 4, 2014 by 22 Comments

A rollercoaster company in Germany called Mack Rides joined forces with a team of virtual reality developers in the spring of 2014 to create an experience like no other.

The idea came from [Thomas], a professor at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern who was working in the department of Virtual Design at the time. The thought of extending a real rollercoaster ride with an Oculus Rift was an intriguing one, so he approached Mack Rides with the experiment, and the ground-breaking research began.

Hundreds of tests were done over the following weeks and months, which provided insight into how we perceive time and space while inside VR. This led to some interesting discoveries. For one, the VR track inside the Rift could be more complex than the real one. This meant that the directions could be contorted into different angles without the user feeling much of a difference. Knowing this, the developers were able to unfold/extend the track well beyond what was possible in real life.

Another epiphany had to do with the rails, which actually didn’t have to be present in VR at all. In fact, it was better if the tracks weren’t there because the experience was much more exciting not knowing which way the ride was suddenly going to take. This made things exponentially more surprising and compelling.

By far the most startling revelation was the reduction in dizziness and motion sickness during the tests. This was attributed to the complex synchronization that the mind goes through when melding together g-forces and the actual rollercoaster rides with the virtual ones displayed inside the Oculus Rift.

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Tricking Tinder With A 3D Printed Finger

September 3, 2014 by 19 Comments

Online matchmaking has taken the internet by storm as mobile dating applications like Tinder attempt to take the work out of locating a soul mate. As of mid-2014, Tinder is rumored to have around 10 million daily active users making it a prime target for automated spam bots. The real spammers surely use coded attacks, but this robot is a fun example of a hardware-based attack. [Andrew] built it to be an automatic heart-shaped, button presser.

The device began as a single finger robot-hand project that was inspired by ‘InMoov’, which as their website states is “the first life-size humanoid robot you can 3D print and animate.” An Arduino Uno and servo motor laid the foundation for the system. After which, the joints of the 3D printed finger were assembled in place so that a touchscreen stylus could be attached. Once coded, the little robot was able to ‘like’ a new profile every 4 seconds. This adds up to approximately 900 likes per hour.

The project is cute, and shows one way that fake profiles can be elevated on the Tinder platform. An article written on Symantec’s blog describes a few other instances of spammers flirting with you via the Android app. This post is a continuation of an article released a year prior, yet Tinder has not addressed the issues relating to fake profiles since then.

Let’s try to focus in on the good. With a bit of additional ingenuity, this device could be transformed into a love searching robot that could choose between people. Get a camera hooked up with a face-recognition program, and add some user preferences so that the robot isn’t just hitting ‘like’ over and over, and we might be able to get some interesting research done. Still, it feels like it would be better to go meet people face-to-face.

Check out the video of the bot in action after the break, then let us know what other silly things you could do by targeting different apps.

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Homemade Portable Gold Mining Trommel

September 2, 2014 by 28 Comments

[TheJogdredge] has been testing out his new gold washing machines that he made at home. By running dirt laced with rocks through this trommel, gold and precious materials can be filtered out. A video of the process can be seen embedded below.

The rig — which is meant to be easily lugged around from site to site — is powered by a Honda GX120 motor. No plastic parts were used in the system to help make it more durable. But foregoing the use of plastic means that this guy is heavy. The rig weighs about 240 pounds dry, and 265 when soaking wet with a sluice box attached. The rubber tires allow for the machine to be maneuvered from place to place without much hassle.

Although the parts are described on the website, no how-to instructions for this specific device can be found online. This is probably due to the fact that [TheJogdredge] is trying to sell his products and make some money. Releasing the instructions on how to build your own would most likely cut into the potential profits of his design. Regardless of which, this is portable gold mining trommel and perfect for those looking to step up their gold mining and prospecting game. The real question on our minds is: can you get more gold for less effort this way, or through electronic junk mining?

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Gaining Access To The Oculus Developer Database

September 1, 2014 by 23 Comments

One of the hackers over at Bitquark popped a shell on on the Oculus Developer Portal giving him full reign over the special admin panel inside. If he felt so inclined, this allowed him edit users, modify projects, add news articles, edit the dashboard, upload SDK files, and variety of other goodies.

The process started by using a SQL injector called BSQLi to test out parameters, cookies, and headers. Injecting into the header revealed that the Oculus team members were inserting X-Forwarded-For headers directly into the database without proper escape formatting. This got him in the door, and with a little assistance from sqlmap, the database was enumerated, and a pattern was recognized. Oculus passwords that were stored in the DB were heavily hashed. However, the user session variables remained unprotected. A SQL query was quickly built, the latest admin session was promptly extracted, and then the information was plugged in granting access to the portal. A bit more snooping around uncovered that the AJAX eval() preview script wasn’t secured by a CSRF token which could easily be exploited by a malicious hacker.

The findings were then turned into Facebook who paid the guy $15,000 for the first vulnerability plus the privilege escalation attack. $5,000 was then awarded for each subsequent SQL injection as the admin account takeover vulnerability that was found, giving the guy a nice payout for a week’s worth of work.

Homemade Activity Monitor

September 1, 2014 by 13 Comments

A group of developers have uploaded a tutorial on Instructables showing the steps needed to develop a homemade DIY fitness tracker. The design is the second iteration of an Arduino-based wearable smart watch project of theirs. This time around, they opted to focus more on the monitoring system rather than a visual display. It is called the ‘RetroBand’ and records steps taken and calories burned by the user.

The microcontroller used is an Arduino Pro mini 3.3v. Accelerometer and gyro sensors were integrated to capture the movement of the ‘RetroBand.’ A wireless bluetooth module connects to an Android phone which presents the data through a Play Store app complete with graphs included. An enclosure was 3D printed. Everything is powered by a one cell Lithum-Polymer battery. The code for the project can be found on Github, and additional information with a how-to manual is on their website (which is in Korean, but can easily be translated through the browser).