Author: Elliot Williams

1449 Articles

Bluetooth Turns 5

December 12, 2016 by 23 Comments

Last week, the latest and greatest member of the Bluetooth family of wireless specifications was announced to the world: Bluetooth 5! What main changes are in store? Read the FAQ (PDF), or dig into the full spec (bigger PDF) at 2,800 pages.

Their big-print selling points include “up to 4x the range, 2x the speed, and 8x the broadcasting message capacity” to power the Internet of Things. Etcetera. [Akiba] pointed out via Twitter that they get the fourfold increase in range by adding an extra zero to the “Maximum Output Power” spec, going from 10 mW maximum power to 100 mW. That would do it.

In less snarky news, they’re also allowing for a lower-bitrate mode that will also increase range without simply boosting the power. The spec is actually being changed to let the user work out their optimal blend of power, range, and bitrate. We’re down with that. But you’re not getting 4x the range and 2x the speed without paying the bandwidth piper. That’s just physics.

If you use the beacon mode in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), you’ll be happy to hear that they’re lengthening the beacon packet from 31 bytes to 255, so you can send a bunch more data without consuming too much power. That’s the “8x”. Bluetooth 5.0 is also backwards compatible with Bluetooth 4.2, so you don’t have to redo anything if you don’t want to take advantage of the newer features. Your current BLE beacons will keep working.

Finally, there’s some contention-detection and other bandwidth optimizing going on, which is welcome in our crowded 2.4 GHz office spectrum. Our guess is that’s where the “2x speed” is largely coming from, but there are about 2,750 pages that we haven’t read yet, so if you’re digging into the spec, let us know what you find in the comments.

Thanks to [Akiba] for tipping us off to this via Twitter. Go check out his great talk on getting hacker stuff in Shenzhen that was presented at the SuperCon.

[CNLohr] Reverses Vive, Valve Engineers Play Along

December 12, 2016 by 11 Comments

[CNLohr] needs no introduction around these parts. He’s pulled off a few really epic hacks. Recently, he’s set his sights on writing a simple, easy to extend library to work with the HTC Vive VR controller equipment, and in particular the Watchman controller.

There’s been a lot of previous work on the device, so [Charles] wasn’t starting from scratch, and he live-streamed his work, allowing others to play along. In the process, two engineers who actually worked on the hardware in question, [Alan Yates] and [Ben Jackson], stopped by and gave some oblique hints and “warmer-cooler” guidance. A much-condensed version is up on YouTube (and embedded below). In the links, you’ll find code and the live streams in their original glory, if you want to see what went down blow by blow. Code and more docs are in this Gist.

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Train Your Robot To Walk With A Neural Network

December 11, 2016 by 22 Comments

[Basti] was playing around with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), and decided that a lot of the “hello world” type programs just weren’t zingy enough to instill his love for the networks in others. So he juiced it up a little bit by applying a reasonably simple ANN to teach a four-legged robot to walk (in German, translated here).

While we think it’s awesome that postal systems the world over have been machine sorting mail based on similar algorithms for years now, watching a squirming quartet of servos come to forward-moving consensus is more viscerally inspiring. Job well done! Check out the video embedded below.

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The Nest: Album Release Hidden In A Rock

December 11, 2016 by 31 Comments

First there were vinyl records, then came cassettes, CDs, those failed audio-on-DVD formats, and then downloads. To quote the band, [Bateleur], “you can’t pay someone to take a CD these days.” So how do you release your new album? By hiding a Raspberry Pi in a semi-transparent fake rock on a mountainous cliff, and requiring a secret whistle to enable it, naturally.

Once activated, you’ll be able to plug into the USB port and download the album, or sit there on a remote hillside cliff overlooking the ocean and enjoy the new tunes. Because there’s a headphone jack in the rock, naturally. Besides being a cool hack, we think that putting people in the right physical and mental space for a serious listening is brilliant. Watch the video embedded below for an idea of the making of and a view from the site.

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Reverse Engineering An ST-Link Programmer

December 10, 2016 by 11 Comments

We’re not sure why [lujji] would want to hack ST’s ST-Link programmer firmware, but it’s definitely cool that he did, and his writeup is a great primer in hacking embedded devices in two parts: first he unpacks and decrypts the factory firmware and verifies that he can then upload his own encrypted firmware through the bootloader, and then he dumps the bootloader, figures out where it’s locking the firmware image, and sidesteps the protection.

[lujji]’s project was greatly helped out by having the firmware’s encryption keys from previous work by [Taylor Killian]. Once able to run his own code on an intact device, [lujji] wrote a quick routine that dumped the entire flash ROM contents out over the serial port. This gave him the bootloader binary, the missing piece in the two-part puzzle.

If you’ve ever broken copy protection of the mid-1990’s, you won’t be surprised what happened next. [lujji] located the routine where the bootloader adds in the read protection, and NOPped it out. After uploading firmware with this altered bootloader, [lujji] found that it wasn’t read-protected anymore. Game over!

We glossed over a couple useful tips and tricks along the way, so if you’re into reversing firmware, give [lujji]’s blog a look. If you just want a nice ARM programmer with UART capabilities, however, there’s no reason to go to these extremes. The Black Magic Probe project gives you equal functionality and it’s open source. Or given that the official ST-Link programmers are given away nearly free with every Nucleo board, just buying one is clearly the path of least resistance. But a nice hack like this is its own reward for those who want to take that path. Thanks, [lujji] for writing it up.

The 3D-Printed Mutoscope You’ve Always Wanted

December 10, 2016 by 10 Comments

[John] got his hands on a 3D printer, and did what any hacker with a new toy would, printed himself a Mutoscope. (A what?) A Mutoscope is an early flip-book based motion picture machine, and in this case it displays 24 frames from “A Clockwork Orange”. [John]’s 3D-printed machine is, not coincidentally we assume, printed in orange plastic.

The model for the frame is up on Thingiverse, but there’s not all that much to it, honestly. It’s a frame and a few wheels that hold some skewers in place. The rest of the work is making the flaps.

But getting to the end product wasn’t a straight walk. [John] describes all of the starts and stops in his blog, aptly named “Fail Try Again”. We like seeing the whole process rather than just the final, seventh, iteration of the device.

Where to take this project next? We want to see a design with a mounting bracket for a cheap stepper motor built in. We’ve always wanted our own custom signage, and there’s nothing cooler than the flap-flap-flap noise that flip book pages make when being switched. We must not be alone in thinking so, because we’ve seen two beautiful DIY builds in the last two years: this one done in multiples for advertising purposes and this one done just for the lulz. [John]’s project is a lot simpler, and thus a lot more accessible. We hope it inspires a few of you to make your own.

Retrotechtacular: The Incredible Machine

December 8, 2016 by 21 Comments

They just don’t write promotional film scripts like they used to: “These men are design engineers. They are about to engage a new breed of computer, called Graphic 1, in a dialogue that will test the ingenuity of both men and machine.”

This video (embedded below) from Bell Labs in 1968 demonstrates the state of the art in “computer graphics” as the narrator calls it, with obvious quotation marks in his inflection. The movie ranges from circuit layout, to animations, to voice synthesis, hitting the high points of the technology at the time. The soundtrack, produced on their computers, naturally, is pure Jetsons.

Highlights are the singing “Daisy Bell” at 9:05, which inspired Stanley Kubrick to play a glitchy version of the track as Dave is pulling Hal 9000’s brains out, symbolically regressing backwards through a history of computer voice synthesis which at that point in time was the present. (Whoah!)
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