Camera Quadcopter Almost Hits Slalom Skiier

December 23, 2015 by Elliot Williams 107 Comments

During the World Cup slalom skiing championship on Wednesday, ski champion [Marcel Hirscher] was nearly hit by an out-of-control camera drone, that crashed just behind him while filming during a run. Watch the (scary) video embedded after the break.

According to this article in Heise.de (Google Translate link), the pilot was accredited and allowed to fly the quad, but only over a corridor where no spectators were present. After the first couple of runs, apparently the pilot went off course and quite obviously lost control of the copter.

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USB Proxy Rats Out Your Devices’ Secrets

December 23, 2015 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

If you need to reverse-engineer a USB protocol on a computer running Linux, your work is easy because you control everything on the target system — you can just look at the raw USB data. If you’d like to reverse-engineer a USB device that plugs into a game console, on the other hand, your work is a lot harder. Until now.

serialusb is a side-project by [Mathieu Laurendeau], alias [Matlo]. His main project, GIMX is aimed at gaming and lets you modify your gaming controller’s performance by passing it first through your PC and tweaking the USB data before forwarding it on to the target console. Want rapid fire? You got it. Alter the steering-wheel sensitivity curves? Sure.

GIMX is essentially a USB man-in-the-middle between your controller and your console, with the added ability to modify the data along the way. For hardware that’s not yet supported by GIMX, though, either [Matlo] would need to borrow your controller, or teach you to man-in-the-middle your own USB traffic. And that’s what serialusb does.

The hardware required is very modest: a USB-to-serial adapter and an ATmega32u4-based Arduino clone. Many of you could whip this together with parts on hand, and it’s the same hardware you’d need to run GIMX anyway. Data goes through your computer, is usbmon’ed and wireshark’ed, and then passed over serial to the ATmega which then converts it back into USB, plugged into the console. A very tidy little setup.

In case this seems familiar, we’ve covered a similar trick by [Matlo] before that used a BeagleBoard as the computer in the middle. That’s a sweet setup for sure, but if you don’t have a spare single-board computer lying around, now you can get it done for only around $5 in parts. Happy USB reversing!

God On The CB Radio

December 23, 2015 by Elliot Williams 37 Comments

Sometimes art pushes boundaries. We’ve covered a lot of tech art that blurs the lines between the craft of engineering and high-concept art theory. Praydio, by [Niklas Roy] and [Kati Hyyppä] leans easy on the tech, but pushes against viewers’ religious sensibilities.

Playing with the idea of talking directly to God, and with the use of altars as a focal point to do so, [Niklas] and [Kati] took the extremely literal route: embedding a CB radio into a dollar-store shrine. The result? If you’re lucky, someone will answer your prayers, although we’re not too hopeful that the intervention will be divine.

The art critic in us would say that this is a radical democratization of religious authority in that anyone who is tuned in can play the role of Jesus. Or maybe we’d say something about the perception of religious significance in the seemingly random events of our everyday life — maybe it’s not just chance that someone is tuning in at the time you’re asking for help?

Honestly, though, we think they’re just having a bit of fun. The video (below the break) shows someone asking Jesus for a coffee, and the artist on the other end laughs and fetches him one. It’s not high-tech, and it’s not even amateur radio the way we usually think of it, but something about the piece made us laugh, and then to think for a bit. Even if this art isn’t your style, check out [Niklas’] website — he’s got tons of fun projects written up, a few of which we’ve covered here before.

Muscle Wire Pen Dances To Duke Nukem

December 22, 2015 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

[serdef] is clearly just having a little bit of fun here. One never needs a whiteboard pen that’s syncronized by MIDI to dance along with the theme from Duke Nukem.

But if you had all of the parts on hand (a highly liquid MIDI-driven relay board that connects straight up to a soundcard, some muscle wire, tape, and a whiteboard pen, naturally) we’re pretty sure that you would. You can watch the dancing pen in a video below the break.

The project is really about documenting the properties of [serdef]’s muscle wire, and he found that it doesn’t really contract enough with a short piece to get the desired effect. So he added more wire. We’ve always meant to get around to playing with muscle wire, and we were surprised by how quickly it reacted to changing the voltage in [serdef]’s second video.

Now the dancing pen isn’t the most sophisticated muscle wire project we’ve ever seen. And that award also doesn’t go to this Nitinol-powered inchworm. Did you know that there’s muscle wire inside Microsoft’s Surface?

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Scratching Vinyl Straddles Physical And Digital Realms

December 21, 2015 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

The life of a modern DJ is hard. [Gergely] loves his apps, but the MIDI controller that works with the app feels wrong when he’s scratching, and the best physical interfaces for scratching only work with their dedicated machines. [Gergely]’s blog documents his adventures in building an interface to drive his iPad apps from a physical turntable. But be warned, there’s a lot here and your best bet is to start at the beginning of the blog (scroll down) and work your way up. Or just let us guide you through it.

In one of his earliest posts he lays out his ideal solution: a black box that interprets time-code vinyl records and emulates the MIDI output of the sub-par MIDI controller. Sounds easy, right? [Gergely] gets the MIDI side working fairly early on, because it’s comparatively simple to sniff USB traffic and emulate it. So now he’s got control over the MIDI-driven app, and the hard part of interfacing with the real world began.

After experimenting a lot with timecode vinyl, [Gergely] gives up on that and looks for an easier alternative. He also considers using an optical mouse, but that turns out to be a dead-end as well. Finally, [Gergely] settled on using a Tascam TT-M1, which is basically an optical encoder that sits on top of the record, and that makes the microcontroller’s job a lot easier. You can see the result in the video below the break.

And then in a surprise ending worthy of M. Night (“I see dead people”) Shyamalan he pulls timecode vinyl out of the grave, builds up a small hardware translator, and gets his original plan working. But we have the feeling that he’s not done yet: he also made a 3D printed optical-mouse holder.

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No Spectrum Analyser? No Problem!

December 20, 2015 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

In the Bad Old Days, a spectrum analyser was a big piece of expensive machinery that you’d have on your bench next to your oscilloscope. And while good ones still cost a ton of money, [rheslip] shows you how to turn your VISA-compatible scope into a decent spectrum analyser for the low, low price of nothing. Watch it in action in the video below the break.

If your scope is relatively recent, like this side of the late 1990s, it might support National Instrument’s VISA: virtual instrument software architecture. [rheslip]’s Rigol scope does, and he uses PyVisa, a Python wrapper for the NI-VISA libraries to download the raw samples from the ‘scope and then crunches the FFTs out on his laptop.

There are definitely drawbacks to this method. The sampling depth of the scope is eight bits, which limits his maximum signal-to-noise ratio, and the number-crunching and data transfer are slow, resulting in a 2 Hz refresh rate. But once the data has made it across to his laptop, [rheslip] can run the FFTs at whatever sample length he wants, resulting in very high frequency resolution.

Indeed, we’re thinking that there’s all sorts of custom filters and analysis that one could do with raw access to the oscilloscope’s data. Why haven’t we been doing this all along? Any of you out there have cool VISA tricks that you’d like to share?

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Tokyo Police Aim To Catch Drones In A Net

December 20, 2015 by Elliot Williams 39 Comments

A Japanese protester flew a quadcopter with a symbolic amount of soil from the contaminated Fukushima region onto the roof of the Prime Minister’s office in April. Although it was a gesture, it alerted the Tokyo police department to the potential need to be able to pull drones out of the air.

Simply shooting them down won’t do — think of the innocent bystanders on the ground subjected to a rain of quadcopter parts. The Tokyo police’s solution: catch them in a net, flown by another quadcopter, of course.

We can’t embed it here, but go click through to the video. It looks like the police are having a really good time. How long before we see drone-net sets under the Christmas tree, or quadcopter-tag leagues? We’re uncertain of how far the Battlebots in the Sky movement got.

We have no shortage of yahoos driving quadcopters in the States, of course. From interfering with fire-fighting aircraft to simply flying too close to commercial airplanes, people are doing things that they simply shouldn’t. We’ve been covering the US government’s response that finally culminated in the FAA making rules requiring medium-weight drones to be registered. Watch our front page for more on that next week. Fly safe, folks.

[via The Verge]