Tetris Everywhere: Character LCD Edition

April 9, 2016 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

Cheap character LCD displays are more versatile than we give them credit for. Most of the cheapies have a 5×8 character display, which looks blocky but legible when you have an appropriate font. Where it gets fun is that most of the LCD displays also let you upload custom characters.

Taking this to the extreme, [numeric] abused the user-defined characters to write a tiny game of Tetris that would run in the 10×16 frame that you get when you combine four characters together. It’s tiny, it’s monochrome, and doesn’t play the Troika theme (which may be a good thing), but it’s playable. Check out the video below.

Continue reading “Tetris Everywhere: Character LCD Edition” →

Bistrobot: Make Me A Sandwich

April 8, 2016 by Elliot Williams 16 Comments

Reading this article in the San Francisco Chronicle sounds very familiar if you’ve owned a hand-built robot of any kind. “Bistrobot” is a pretty sweet sandwich-making robot. It toasts bread on the fly and applies peanut butter, jelly, honey, apple butter, and/or a few other gloopy dispensable delicacies at the behest of human customers. Watch the video below and we guarantee that you’ll want to toss a couple bucks into it, even if you don’t like toasted PB&J sandwiches.

The video makes everything look peachy, like a 3D printer on a good day. Check out the jelly nozzle zig-zagging across the half-sandwich — it’s very familiar. Indeed the whole machine seems like something we could build. But as we all know, continuous duty has a way of finding the flaws in our designs. The Chronicle article is part triumph, and part tale of woe, with the builder being called in to repair the Bistrobot for the “zillionth” time.

Continue reading “Bistrobot: Make Me A Sandwich” →

Reverse-Engineering DebugWire

April 7, 2016 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

Has this ever happened to you? You start out on a reverse-engineering project, start digging in, and then get stumped. Then you go looking on the Internet for help, and stumble across someone who’s already done exactly what you’re trying to do?

[Geekabit] wrote us with a version of this tale of woe. In his case, the protocol to be reversed was Atmel’s debugWire protocol for debugging on low-pin-count parts. There are a number of websites claiming it’s “secret” or whatever, but it actually looks like it’s just poorly documented. Anyway, [RikusW] seems to have captured all of the signals way back in 2011. Good job!

The best part of [geekabit]’s story is that he had created the Wikipedia page on debugWire himself to inspire collaboration on reverse-engineering the protocol, and someone linked in [RiskusW]’s work. When [geekabit] picked up the problem again a bit later, he did a bit of web research and found it solved — on the page that he started.

Maybe it’s not a tale of woe after all, but a tale of unintentional collaboration. Anyway, it serves as a reminder that if you’re interested in the destination more than the voyage of discovery, it never hurts to do your research beforehand. And now we all know about the low-level details of the debugWire protocol. Anyone written up a driver yet?

Thanks [geekabit] for the tip and the story! Image from ATmega32-AVR, which explains nicely how to use the Dragon in debugWire mode.

Automatic Pneumatic Harmonica

April 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

A wise man once said “If all you’ve got is a cute desktop compressor and some solenoid valves, everything looks like a robotic harmonica.” Or maybe we’re paraphrasing. Regardless, [Fabien-Chouteau] built a pneumatic, automatic harmonica music machine.

It’s actually an offshoot of his other project, a high-speed candy sorting machine. There, he’s trying to outdo the more common color-sensor-and-servo style contraptions by using computer vision for the color detection and a number of compressed-air jets to blow the candy off of a conveyor belt into the proper bins.

Continue reading “Automatic Pneumatic Harmonica” →

Makerville Knit: Industrial-Strength WiFi Breakout

April 5, 2016 by Elliot Williams 33 Comments

If you need an industrial-strength IoT product, you need an industrial-strength WiFi chipset. For our own household hacks, we’re totally happy with the ESP8266 chip. But if you need to connect to the big, scary Internet you’ll probably want state-of-the-art encryption. In particular, Amazon insists on TLS 1.2 for their Web Services (AWS), and we don’t know how to get that working on the ESP.

[Anuj] designed a breakout board called the knit which includes a Marvell MW300 WiFi SOC. This chip has an onboard ARM Cortex M4F running at 200 MHz, which means you’ve got a lot of everything to play with: flash memory, RAM, a floating-point unit, you name it. And Marvell’s got an SDK for using AWS that includes things like an operating system and peripheral support and other niceties. TLS 1.2 is included.

Best of all, a MW300 breakout is reasonably affordable (though more expensive than the mass-produced ESP8266 modules, naturally) and it’s an entirely open design. [Anuj] also seems to be setting up for a production run, if you don’t feel like making it yourself.

The MW300 is in all sorts of commercial IoT designs, and it’s a battle-tested go-to for interfacing with “the cloud” securely. The only hobbyist-friendly board that’s similar is the Adafruit WICED WiFi Feather, but it’s more expensive, less powerful, and out of stock at the moment, which just shows the demand for something like this.

Of course, if you need more integrated peripherals, you could just hack up a “Hello Barbie” toy which has the same chip as well as sweet audio codecs and a nice fat flash ROM.

We think it’s neat that [Anuj] would make and test a breakout for this powerful little WiFi SOC. We don’t need one for our projects right now — we’re running in entirely insecure mode — but it’s good to know what your options are. (We’re also looking into esp-open-rtos for the ESP8266 — we know they’ve been working on TLS 1.2 encryption, but we don’t know what their status is at the moment. Anyone?)

Hacking Flappy Bird By Playing Mario

April 3, 2016 by Elliot Williams 24 Comments

This is a hacking and gaming tour de force! [Seth Bling] executed a code injection hack in Super Mario World (SMW) that not only glitches the game, but re-programs it to play a stripped-down version of “Flappy Bird”. And he did this not with a set of JTAG probes, but by using the game’s own controller.

There are apparently a bunch of people working on hacking Super Mario World from within the game, and a number of these hacks use modified controllers to carry out the sequence of codes. The craziest thing about our hack here is that [Seth] did this entirely by hand. The complete notes are available here, but we’ll summarize the procedure for you. Or you can go watch the video below. It’s really incredible.

Continue reading “Hacking Flappy Bird By Playing Mario” →

Paper Enigma Machine

April 2, 2016 by Elliot Williams 6 Comments

It was high-tech encryption for an important period of time in the mid-1940s, so perhaps you can forgive us our obsession with the Enigma machine. But did you know that you can make your very own Enigma just using some cut out paper strips and a tube to wrap them around? Yeah, you probably did. But this one is historically accurate and looks good too!

If you just want to understand how the machine worked, having a bunch of paper rolls in your hands is a very intuitive approach. Alan Turing explained the way it worked with paper models too, so there’s no shame there. With this model, you can either make the simple version with fixed rotor codes, or cut out some extra slip rings and go all out.

What is it with Hackaday and the Enigma machine? Just last month, we covered two separate Enigma builds: one with a beautiful set of buttons and patch cables, and another in convenient wrist-watch format. In fact, one of our first posts was on a paper Enigma machine, but the links are sadly lost to bitrot. We figure it’s cool to repeat ourselves once every eleven years. (And this one’s in color!)