Flipper Zero Blasts Past Funding Goal And Into Our Hearts

September 2, 2020 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

There’s never been a better time to be a hardware hacker: the tools are cheap, the information is free, and the possibilities are nearly endless. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. The Flipper Zero was developed to make the world of hardware hacking even more accessible, and as of this writing, has officially ended its Kickstarter campaign after raising a staggering $4.8 million. To say the community is excited about this little gadget is perhaps an understatement.

So what does the Flipper Zero do that’s gotten everyone so worked up? Well, for one, it’s not so much what it can do as how it does them. Taking inspiration from the already popular pwnagotchi project, the Flipper Zero gamifies the normally rather mundane tasks of sniffing for 433 MHz signals and flashing EEPROMs with the addition of an animated dolphin that’s sustained by your hacking. If you want the little fellow to grow and be happy, you need to keep poking and prodding around at any piece of hardware you come across.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive list of features, that’s a little harder to nail down. Partially because the device has picked up a number of new tricks (such as support for Bluetooth and NFC) thanks to the fact it made better than 8,000% of its original funding goal, but also because it can be expanded with additional hardware and software which obviously won’t get developed until the community gets their hands on the core device.

But even the core functionality, demonstrated in the video after the break, is quite compelling. The Flipper Zero’s CC1101 transceiver chip (anyone else thinking of the IM-ME right now?) allows it to record, analyze, and play back RF signals from 300 to 928 MHz, meaning you can instantly take over remote control systems that aren’t using a rolling code for authentication. It can also read and emulate many different RFID cards, record and transmit IR signals, emulate a USB HID device and run programmable payloads, and act as a USB to UART/SPI/I2C adapter. All contained in a sleek and pocket-sized enclosure that looks like a proper cyberpunk hacking gadget.

We’re extremely interested in seeing what the community can do with the Flipper Zero, especially now that the extra windfall has allowed the team to create a formal Developer Program for people who want to help work on the core platform or produce add-on modules. After banking nearly $5 million, this will be the yardstick by which all other crowd sourced hacking gadgets are measured for years to come; let’s hope they make it count.

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Building An Open Source ThinkPad Battery

September 2, 2020 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

If you own a laptop that’s got a few years on the clock, you’ve probably contemplated getting a replacement battery for it. Which means you also know how much legitimate OEM packs cost compared to the shady eBay clones. You can often get two or three of the knock-offs for the same price as a single real battery, but they never last as long as the originals. If they even work properly at all.

Which is why [Alexander Parent] decided to take the road less traveled and scratch built a custom battery for his ThinkPad T420. By reverse engineering how the battery pack communicated with the computer, he reasoned he would be able to come up with an open source firmware that worked at least as well as what the the third party ones are running. Which from the sounds of it, wasn’t a very high bar. From a more practical standpoint, it also meant he’d be able to create a higher capacity battery pack than what was commercially available should he chose to.

A logic analyzer wired in between one of the third party batteries and a spare T420 motherboard allowed [Alexander] to capture all the SMBus chatter between the two. From there he wrote some Arduino code that would mimic a battery as a proof of concept. He was slowed down a bit by an undocumented CRC check, but in the end he was able to come up with a fairly mature firmware that even allows you to provide a custom vendor name and model number for your pack.

The code was shifted over to an ATtiny85, with a voltage divider wired up to one of the pins so it can read the pack voltage. [Alexander] says his firmware still doesn’t do a great job of reporting the actual battery capacity remaining, but it’s close enough for his purposes. He came up with a simple PCB design to hold the MCU and support components, which eventually he plans on putting inside of a 3D printed case that actually plugs into the back of his T420.

This project is obviously still in a relatively early stage, but we’re very interested to see [Alexander] take it all the way. The ThinkPad has long been the hacker’s favorite laptop, and we can think of no machine more worthy of a fully open hardware and software battery pack.

This 3D Printed “Bladeless” Fan Gets It Done Cheap

September 1, 2020 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

Not long after Dyson unveiled their “bladeless” fan, a fairly steady stream of ever cheaper clones have been hitting the market. But this 3D printed version created by [Elite Worm] must surely be one of the most budget-friendly takes on the concept. If you’ve got a 3D printer, we’d wager you’ve already got most of the parts required to build your own.

To be clear, of course there’s a blade. They aren’t magic, obviously. The fan is just small, and hidden inside the base. Air is pulled from the sides and bottom, and into the ring mounted to the top of the unit. When the air eventually exits the thin slit in the ring, it “sticks” to the sides due to the Coandă effect and produces a low pressure zone in the center. That’s all a fancy way of saying that the air flow you get from one of these gadgets is several times greater than what the little dinky fan would be capable of under normal circumstances. That’s the theory, anyway.

We can’t promise that all the physics are working as they should in this 3D printed version, but in the video after the break it certainly appears to be moving a considerable amount of air. It’s also quite loud, but that’s to be expected given it’s using a brushless hobby motor. To get it spinning, [Elite Worm] is using a Digispark ATtiny85 connected to a standard RC electronic speed control (ESC). The MCU reads a potentiometer mounted to the side of the fan and converts that to a PWM signal required by the ESC.

Beyond the electronics, essentially every piece of this project has been printed on a standard desktop 3D printer. An impressive accomplishment, though we probably would have gone with a commercially available propeller for safety’s sake. On the other hand, the base of the fan should nicely contain the shrapnel created should it explode at several thousand RPM. Probably.

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A Cyclopic LCD Case For Your Raspberry Pi Server

September 1, 2020 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

If you’ve got a personal website that needs hosting or a few hundred gigabytes of files that could use a centralized storage location, the Raspberry Pi’s small size and extreme energy efficiency make it a compelling server choice compared to that curbside Pentium 4 box you’ve been trying to find a home for. All you need is something to put in.

Of course there’s no shortage of Pi case designs ready to be extruded from your 3D printer, but we recently found ourselves particularly taken with this unique one designed by [Ken Segler]. It’s not only small and sleek with a dash of futuristic flair, but it includes a front-mounted two inch 240 x 320 IPS display that connects to the Pi over SPI. At the minimum that gives you a way to see all those beautiful boot messages on startup, but with a little code, it could provide you with various system statics and status messages at a glance.

While the LCD is clearly the star of the show here, the case also has a few other nice features that make it worthy of your consideration. The magnetically attached fan filter on the the top, for one. The stacked layout that puts the Pi directly above the SSD also makes for a relatively compact final product.

One thing to note though is that [Ken] is using Power-over-Ethernet, meaning there’s no spot for a dedicated power jack on the case. It’s an easy enough feature to add into your own build, but naturally not everyone’s network is suitably equipped. In that case, beyond the normal annoyances of editing STL files, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to add one in without having to literally hack your way through the printed plastic.

A PIN Pad Blasting UV Sanitizer

August 30, 2020 by Tom Nardi 47 Comments

Retailers have instituted enhanced cleaning procedures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with an aim to keep frequently touched surfaces as clean as possible. Certainly one of the most commonly handled objects in the entire store is the payment terminal by the register, and the PIN pad specifically. Which is why [Josh Starnes] is working on a UV sterilizer that mounts onto a standard credit card terminal.

It’s a simple enough idea, but as is often the case, figuring out how to properly execute it is where things get tricky. [Josh] has already moved through several design iterations for his 3D printed enclosure in an attempt to make something that’s unobtrusive enough to be practical. The goal is to make something that the user won’t mistake for some kind of skimming device, which can certainly be tricky.

The skeptics in the audience will be happy to hear that [Josh] isn’t bothering with an LED UV source, either. We’ve all seen the pitfalls of trying to sanitize using UV LEDs, so this design goes old school with a small 12 volt UV bulb. That does mean it will need a dedicated power source however, which it seems like he’ll be addressing in the next phase of the project.

OCR Reads Old Newspapers So We Don’t Have To

August 30, 2020 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

Plenty of people don’t bother to read the current newspaper, let alone editions that were published over 100 years ago. But there’s a wealth of important historical information buried in these dusty old publications, assuming you can find a way to reliably digitize and index it all. You might think the solution is as simple as running images of the paper through optical character recognition (OCR) software, but as [John Scancella] explains, the problem is a bit more complicated than that.

Stretching the text vertically highlights the columns.

Ultimately, the issue largely comes down to formatting. The OCR software reasonably assumes all the text is in orderly horizontal lines, because in the vast majority of cases, it would be. That’s how you’re reading these words now. But as anyone who’s seen an old time newspaper knows, that’s not how things were necessarily written back then. Pages consisted of multiple narrow columns of stories separated by vertical lines; if the OCR tries to read the page from left to right, the resulting text is a mishmash of several unrelated topics.

The answer is to break all those articles into their own images, but doing that manually at any sort of scale simply isn’t an option. So [John] has been working on a system that uses OpenCV to identify the columns of text and isolate them. He details the multi-step process down in his write-up, and even provides the Python code should you want to give it a spin. But the short version is that the image is converted to grayscale and the OpenCV dilate function is used to stretch the text in the Y dimension. This produces big blobs of white that can easily be picked out with findContours() and snipped into individual images.

It’s not a perfect solution, and there are still a few pitfalls. For one, the name of the paper needs to be removed from the front page before the stretching operation happens. But it’s clearly a step in the right direction, and the results certainly look very promising. Anything that makes OCR more accurate or easier to implement is a win in our book, so we’re excited to see where [John] takes this concept.

Building A Heavy Duty Open Source Ventilator

August 28, 2020 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, we’ve seen several attempts to create homebrew ventilators designed to address the shortage of these lifesaving machines. Unfortunately, most hackers aren’t terribly experienced when it comes to designing practical medical equipment. So while many of the designs might have appeared functional on the workbench, there’s little chance they’d get used in any official capacity.

The open source DP Ventilator is still clearly the product of a couple plucky hackers, but we think it shows a level of design maturity that’s been missing in many of the earlier attempts. Made primarily with 3D printed components, this mechanical device is designed to operate a hand-held manual resuscitator; essentially standing in for a human operator. This makes the design far less complex than if it had to actually pump air itself, not to mention safer for the patient since the resuscitator (often referred to as an Ambu Bag) installed in it would be a sterile pre-packaged item.

In the video after the break, you can see just how much thought and effort has been put into the device’s touch screen interface. With a few quick taps the medical professional operating the DP Ventilator can dial in variables such as breathing rate, pressure, and volume to match the patient’s needs. While the Arduino Mega 2560 at the machine’s heart wouldn’t pass muster for any regulating body in charge of medical devices, we think with a few more tweaks, this design is getting close to something that might actually be able to save lives.

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