Author: Jenny List

3312 Articles

Drone Registration Tax Sought By UK’s CAA

May 1, 2019 by 54 Comments

As the UK’s aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority is tasked with “making aviation better for those who choose to fly and those who do not”. Their latest plan to further this mission comes in the form of a drone registration tax. The proposal, which is open to online responses until 7 June, seeks to pass on the cost of a drone registration system to those who register themselves.

Proposals for a drone registration scheme have been in the works for a while now, and if enacted it would go into effect on 1 November. Owners of craft weighing more than 250 g (0.55 lbs) would have to fork out £16.50 ($21.50) per year, ostensibly to pay for the administration of the scheme. The CAA are basing this rate on as many as 170,000 people registering. In the US, the FAA has a drone registration program in place that requires registration based on the same 250 g weight guideline, but only charges $5 (£3.82) for a 3-year license, about thirteen times less than the CAA proposal.

Long-time readers will be familiar with our ongoing coverage of the sometimes-farcical saga of drone sightings in British skies. Airports have been closed (and implausible excuses have been concocted), but one thing remains constant: no tangible proof of any drone has yet been produced. Faced with a problem it doesn’t fully understand, the British Government is looking to this registration program.

It goes without saying that people misusing drones and endangering public safety should be brought to justice as swiftly as possible. But our concern is that the scale of the problem has been vastly over-represented, and that this scheme will do little to address either the problem of bogus drone sightings or the very real problem of criminal misuse of drones for example to smuggle contraband into prisons. It’s difficult to think this measure will have an effect on the number of incidents blamed on drones, and the high cost included in the proposal is a troubling burden for enthusiasts who operate responsibly.

MIT Cryptographers Are No Match For A Determined Belgian

April 30, 2019 by 9 Comments

Twenty years ago, a cryptographic puzzle was included in the construction of a building on the MIT campus. The structure that houses what is now MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) includes a time capsule designed by the building’s architect, [Frank Gehry]. It contains artifacts related to the history of computing, and was meant to be opened whenever someone solved a cryptographic puzzle, or after 35 years had elapsed.

The puzzle was not expected to be solved early, but [Bernard Fabrot], a developer in Belgium, has managed it using not a supercomputer but a run-of-the-mill Intel i7 processor. The capsule will be opened later in May.

The famous cryptographer, [Ronald Rivest], put together what we now know is a deceptively simple challenge. It involves a successive squaring operation, and since it is inherently sequential there is no possibility of using parallel computing techniques to take any shortcuts. [Fabrot] used the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library in his code, and took over 3 years of computing time to solve it. Meanwhile another team is using an FPGA and are expecting a solution in months, though have been pipped to the post by the Belgian.

The original specification document is a fascinating read, for both the details of the puzzle itself and for [Rivest]’s predictions as to the then future direction of computing power. He expected the puzzle would take the full 35 years to solve and that there would be 10Ghz processors by 2012 when Moore’s Law would begin to tail off, but he is reported as saying that he underestimated the corresponding advances in software.

Header image: Ray and Maria Stata Center, Tafyrn (CC BY 3.0)

OpenGL Shaders And An LED Cube

April 30, 2019 by 8 Comments

Back in February at the Hacker Hotel camp in the Netherlands, among the many pieces of work around the venue was a rather attractive LED cube. Very pretty, but LED cubes have been done many times before.

If a casual attendee had taken the time to ask though, they might have found something a little more interesting, for while the cube in question might have had the same hardware as the others it certainy didn’t have the same software. [Polyfloyd] had equipped his LED cube with OpenGL shaders to map arbitrary images to the cube’s pixels in 3D space.

Hardware-wise it’s the same collection of AliExpress LED panels and Raspberry Pi driver board that the other cubes use, in this case mounted on a custom laser-cut frame. Driver software comes from an open-source library round which he’s put a wrapper allowing input through a UNIX pipe. This can take the RGB output of an OpenGL shader, of which he has created both 2D to 3D and spherical projection versions. The must-see demo is a global map of light pollution, and the result is a rather impressive piece of work.

If LED cubes are your thing, don’t forget this recent Hackaday Prize entry.

Reverse Engineering An Insulin Pump With An SDR And Decapping

April 29, 2019 by 31 Comments

Insulin pumps are a medical device used by people with diabetes to automatically deliver a measured dose of insulin into their bloodstream. Traditionally they have involved a canula and separate connected pump, but more recent models have taken the form of a patch with a pump mounted directly upon it. When [Pete Schwamb]’s daughter received  one of these pumps, an Omnipod, he responded to a bounty offer for reverse engineering its RF protocol. As one of the people who helped create Loop, an app framework for controlling insulin delivery systems, he was in a particularly good position to do the work.

The reverse engineering itself started with the familiar tale of using an SDR to eavesdrop on the device’s 433MHz communication between pump and control device. Interrogating the raw data was straightforward enough, but making sense of it was not. There was a problem with the CRC algorithm used by the device which had a bug involving a bitwise shift in the wrong direction, then they hit a brick wall in the encryption of the data. Hardware investigation revealed a custom chip in the device, and there they might have stalled.

But the international reverse engineering community is not without resources and expertise, and through the incredible work of a university researcher in the UK (whose paper incidentally includes a pump teardown) they were able with an arduous process supported by many people to have the firmware recovered through decapping the chip. Even once they had thus extracted the encryption code and produced their own software their problems were not over, because communication issues necessitated a much better antenna on the RileyLink Bluetooth bridge boards that translated Bluetooth from a mobile phone to 433 MHz for the device.

This precis doesn’t fully encapsulate the immense amount of work over several years by a large group of people with some very specialist skills that reverse engineering the Omnipod represents. To succeed in this task is an incredible feat, and makes for a fascinating write-up.

Thanks [Alex] for the tip.

Emulate A Paper Tape, To Be Life And Soul Of The Cyphercon Party

April 28, 2019 by No comments

The recent Cyphercon badge featured a very clever integrated paper tape reader, and had the hidden feature of a party mode in which all its lights would flash. When [Gigawatts] discovered this after the conference had ended, it was too late to find the tape to activate it. The solution? Build a tape emulator with a microcontroller hooked into the badge’s tape sensors to send the data directly into it.

It was a Tweet from [AND!XOR] that revealed the flashing hidden mode, and in case you missed it you can find all about the amazing badge in our review. The emulator takes a TI Stellaris LaunchPad LM4F120 and a set of jumper wires soldered directly to the jumper wires on the badge’s reverse. Hex values are created from a tape through an in-browser HTML page with a checkbox interface, a sketch converts the hex to tape, and the badge runs the code. The GitHub readme includes a description of the paper tape format as well as some sample tapes including a badge reset one for when you tire of party mode.

Most of us weren’t lucky enough to make it to Cyphercon and receive a badge. But we’re still impressed by the ingenuity of the badge’s designer, and by the complexity of the CTF game of which it formed a part.

A Retro Handheld Console As They Used To Be Made

April 28, 2019 by 4 Comments

Before there were Nintendo Switches, there were Game Boys. And before that there were all the successive generations of Game Boys and other consoles right back to the Game and Watch, and then those handheld Simon and Space Invaders games of the late 1970s. These devices typically packed a 4-bit microcontroller and an array of discrete LEDs, and movements in-game were simply created by alternate LEDs on the game field being flashed.

The TeleBall from [sv2002] is a handheld game in the vein of those early handheld games, in that it features a matrix of LEDs as a screen on which it can display simple games. So far it plays Breakout, and Tennis for Two, which might seem odd were it not for its built-in radio for two-person play with two consoles.

Inside the TeleBall is an Arduino Nano, a Maxim display driver for the LED matrix, and the familiar Nordic Semiconductor RF module. Control is via a potentiometer, and everything sits in a smart 3D-printed case. Everything is open-source, so should you wish to have your own you can head over to the project’s web site and grab all the files. You can watch it in action playing tennis with two consoles in the video below the break.

The original Tennis for Two created in 1958 was an oscilloscope game using an analogue computer, and is credited as the first video game created purely for entertainment purposes. If you’d like to see a recreation of it, we covered one over a decade ago.

Continue reading “A Retro Handheld Console As They Used To Be Made” →

FemtoBeacon Is A Tiny ESP32 Coin-Shaped Dev Board

April 28, 2019 by 21 Comments

Our single board microcontroller platforms have become smaller over the years, from the relatively large classic Arduino and Beagleboard form factors of a decade ago to the postage stamp sized Feather and ESP boards of today. But just how small can they go? With current components, [Femtoduino] think they’ve cracked it, delivering an ESP32-based board with WiFi and Bluetooth, and an LDO regulator for 5 V operation in a circular footprint that’s only 9 mm in diameter.

There are some compromises from such a paucity of real-estate, of which perhaps the most obvious is a lack of space to make I/O lines available. It has SPI, a UART, and a couple of I/O lines, and aside from an onboard RGB LED that’s it. But SPI is versatile well beyond its number of lines, and even with so little there is much that can be done. Another potential compromise comes from the antenna, a Molex surface-mount component, which is an inevitable consequence of a 9 mm circular board.

There has to come a point at which a microcontroller platform becomes so small as to be unusable, but it’s clear that there is a little further for this envelope to be pushed. We’d love to see what other designers do in response to this board.