Take Control Of Your DSLR With PiXPi

July 28, 2019 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

If you’ve ever tried to take a picture of a fast moving object, you know how important timing is. You might only have one chance, and if you hit the shutter a bit too early or too late, the shot could be ruined. Past a certain point, no human camera operator can react quickly enough. Which is exactly why [Krzysztof Krześlak] created PiXPi.

In the past we’ve seen high-speed flashes designed to “freeze time” by illuminating the scene at the precise moment, and while PiXPi can technically do that, it also offers a few alternate methods of capturing that perfect moment. The idea here is to give the photographer the best chance of getting the shot they’re after by offering them as many tools as possible.

Essentially, PiXPi is a microcontroller that allows you to orchestrate your DSLR’s trigger, external flashes, and various other sensors and devices using an easy to use graphical programming interface from your smartphone. So for example, you could program the PiXPi to trigger your camera when it detected a loud enough noise.

But the device also allows you to be a bit more proactive. Rather than sitting back and waiting for a signal to fire off the camera, the PiXPi can directly take control of the action. As an example, [Krzysztof] has created an electronically triggered valve which can release a drop of liquid on command. Using PiXPi, the photographer can quickly put together a routine that triggers a drop, waits the few milliseconds it takes for it to hit the target, and then snaps a picture.

The goal of the 2019 Hackaday Prize is to develop a product fit for production, and naturally a huge part of that is having a well thought-out design. But if you’re ultimately looking to sell said product, it’s also very important to keep the needs of the end user in mind. To that end, we think [Krzysztof] has done a great job by not only making the system very flexible, but keeping it easy to use.

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Building A Safe ESP32 Home Energy Monitor

July 27, 2019 by Tom Nardi 45 Comments

The first step to reducing the energy consumption of your home is figuring out how much you actually use in the first place. After all, you need a baseline to compare against when you start making changes. But fiddling around with high voltage is something a lot of hackers will go out of their way to avoid. Luckily, as [Xavier Decuyper] explains, you can build a very robust DIY energy monitoring system without having to modify your AC wiring.

In the video after the break, [Xavier] goes over the theory of how it all works, but the short version is that you just need to use a Current Transformer (CT) sensor. These little devices clamp over an AC wire and detect how much current is passing through it via induction. In his case, he used a YHDC SCT-013-030 sensor that can measure up to 30 amps and costs about $12 USD. It outputs a voltage between 0 and 1 volts, which makes it extremely easy to read using the ADC of your favorite microcontroller.

Once you’ve got the CT sensor connected to your microcontroller, the rest really just depends on how far you want to take the software side of things. You could just log the current consumption to a plain text file if that’s your style, but [Xavier] wanted to challenge himself to develop a energy monitoring system that rivaled commercial offerings so he took the data and ran with it.

A good chunk of his write-up explains how the used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to process and ultimately display all the data he collects with his ESP32 energy monitor. Every 30 seconds, the hardware reports the current consumption to AWS through MQTT. The readings are stored in a database, and [Xavier] uses GraphQL and Dygraphs to generate visualizations. He even used Ionic to develop a cross-platform mobile application so he can fawn over his professional looking charts and graphs on the go.

We’ve already seen how carefully monitoring energy consumption can uncover some surprising trends, so if you want to go green and don’t have an optically coupled electricity meter, the CT sensor method might be just what you need.

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Jazzberry Bakes The Pi Into A Mechanical Keyboard

July 26, 2019 by Tom Nardi 17 Comments

If you hang around Hackaday long enough, pretty soon you’ll start to see some patterns emerging. As the nexus of all things awesome in the hacking world, our front page offers a unique vantage point by which you can see what’s getting folks excited this particular month, year, or decade. Right now we can tell you hackers love the Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, and perhaps above all, they can’t get enough mechanical keyboards.

So that makes the Jazzberry by [Mattis Folkestad] something of a perfect storm in the hacker world. The project uses a 3D printed enclosure to combine a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and an Ajazz AK33 mechanical keyboard into a single unit like the home computers of old. Honestly, we’re just glad he didn’t sneak an ESP8266 in there; as the resulting combination might have been enough to crash the site.

That being said, we can’t help but notice there’s a lot of open space inside the 3D printed enclosure. Right now there’s nothing inside but the Raspberry Pi, which only takes up a fraction of the internal volume. Adding a battery and hard drive would be the logical next steps, but it could also be outfitted with a suite of radios and various other hacking and security research accoutrements. We’ve seen an influx of such builds over the last few months, and the Jazzberry seems like it could make a very slick entry into this burgeoning category of mobile pentesting devices.

The STL files are designed specifically for the combination of hardware that [Mattis] used, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to modify them for your own purposes. Even if you stick with the same AK33 keyboard, an upgrade to the impressively powerful Raspberry Pi 4 would be more than worth the time fiddling with the STLs in your CAD tool of choice. If you really want to go all in, add a display and you’re well on the way to that cyberdeck you’ve always wanted.

Building A Smarter Smoke Alarm With The ESP8266

July 26, 2019 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

The modern hacker wields a number of tools that operate on the principle of heating things up to extremely high temperatures, so a smoke alarm is really a must-have piece of equipment. But in an era where it seems everything is getting smarter, some might wonder if even our safety gear could benefit from joining the Internet of Things. Interested in taking a crack at improving the classic smoke alarm, [Vivek Gupta] grabbed a NodeMCU and started writing some code.

Now before you jump down to the comments and start smashing that keyboard, let’s make our position on this abundantly clear. Do not try to build your own smoke alarm. Seriously. It takes a special kind of fool to trust their home and potentially their life to a $5 development board and some Arduino source code they copied and pasted from the Internet. That said, as a purely academic exercise it’s certainly worth examining how modern Internet-enabled microcontrollers can be used to add useful features to even the most mundane of household devices.

In this case, [Vivek] is experimenting with the idea of a smoke alarm that can be silenced through your home automation system in the event of a false alarm. He’s using Google Assistant and IFTTT, but the code could be adapted to whatever method you’re using internally to get all your gadgets on the same virtual page. On the hardware side of things, the test system is simply a NodeMCU connected to a buzzer and a MQ2 gas sensor.

So how does it work? If the detector goes off while [Vivek] is cooking, he can tell Google Assistant that he’s cooking and it’s a false alarm. That silences the buzzer, but not before the system responds with a message questioning his skills in the kitchen. It’s a simple quality of life improvement and it’s certainly not hard to imagine how the idea could be expanded upon to notify you of a possible situation even when you’re out of the home.

We’ve seen how a series of small problems can cascade into a life-threatening situation. If you’re going to perform similar experiments, make sure you’ve got a “dumb” smoke alarm as a backup.

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Tiny Game System Is An Experiment In Minimalism

July 25, 2019 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

Many people assumed the smartphone revolution would kill the dedicated handheld game system, and really, it’s not hard to see why. What’s the point of buying the latest Nintendo or Sony handheld when the phone you’re already carrying around with you is capable of high-definition 3D graphics and online connectivity? Software developers got the hint quickly, and as predicted, mobile gaming has absolutely exploded over the last few years.

But at the same time, we’ve noticed something of a return to the simplistic handheld systems of yore. Perhaps it’s little more than nostalgia, but small bare-bones systems like the one [Mislav Breka] has entered into the 2019 Hackaday Prize show that not everyone is satisfied with the direction modern gaming has gone in. His system is specifically designed as an experiment to build the most minimal gaming system possible.

In terms of the overall design, this ATMega328 powered system is similar to a scaled-down Arduboy. But while the visual similarities are obvious, the BOM that [Mislav] has provided seems to indicate a considerably more spartan device. Currently there doesn’t seem to be any provision for audio, nor is there a battery and the associated circuitry to charge it. As promised, there’s little here other than the bare essentials.

Unfortunately, the project is off to something of a rocky start. As [Mislav] explains in his writeup on Hackaday.io, there’s a mistake somewhere in either the board design or the component selection that’s keeping the device from accepting a firmware. He won’t have the equipment to debug the device until he returns to school, and is actively looking for volunteers who might be interested in helping him get the kinks worked out on the design.

An Open Hardware Rubber Ducky

July 24, 2019 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

No it’s not an open source version of Bert’s favorite bathtime toy (though seriously, let us know if you see one), the PocketAdmin by [Radik Bechmetov] is intended to be an alternative to the well-known “USB Rubber Ducky” penetration testing tool from Hak5. It might look like a standard USB flash drive, but underneath that black plastic enclosure is a whole lot of digital mischief waiting to spill out.

The general idea is that the PocketAdmin appears to the host computer as either a USB Human Interface Device (keyboard, mouse, etc) or a USB Mass Storage Device. In either event, the user has the ability to craft custom payloads which can exploit the operating system’s inherent trust in locally connected devices. The most common example is mimicking a USB keyboard that starts “typing” once connected to the computer.

You can even configure what vendor and product IDs the PocketAdmin advertises, allowing you to more accurately spoof various devices. [Radik] has included some other interesting features, such as the ability to launch different payloads depending on the detected operating system. That way it won’t waste time trying to bang out Windows commands when it’s connected to a Linux box.

The hardware is designed to be as easy and cheap to replicate as possible. The heavy lifting is done by a STM32F072C8T6 microcontroller, coupled with a W25Q256FVFG 32MiB flash chip to store the payloads. Beyond that, the BOM consists mainly of passives and a few obvious bits like the male USB connector. [Radik] has even provided a link to where you can buy the convincing looking USB “flash drive” enclosure.

We’ve seen low-cost DIY versions of the USB Rubber Ducky in the past, but PocketAdmin is interesting in that it seems like [Radik] is looking to break new ground with this project rather than just copy what’s already been done. This will definitely be one to watch as the 2019 Hackaday Prize heats up.

Printed It: Hand Cranked Photography Turntable

July 24, 2019 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

Even a relatively low-end desktop 3D printer will have no problems running off custom enclosures or parts for your latest project, and for many, that’s more than worth the cost of admission. But if you’re willing to put in the time and effort to become proficient with necessary CAD tools, even a basic 3D printer is capable of producing complex gadgets and mechanisms which would be extremely time consuming or difficult to produce with traditional manufacturing techniques.

Once you find yourself at this stage of your 3D printing career, there’s something of a fork in the road. The most common path is to design parts which are printed and then assembled with glue or standard fasteners. This is certainly the easiest way forward, and lets you use printed parts in a way that’s very familiar. It can also be advantageous if you’re looking to meld your own printed parts with existing hardware.

The other option is to fully embrace the unique capabilities of 3D printing. Forget about nuts and bolts, and instead design assemblies which snap-fit together. Start using more organic shapes and curves. Understand that objects are no longer limited to simple solids, and can have their own complex internal geometries. Does a hinge really need to be two separate pieces linked with a pin, or could you achieve the desired action by capturing one printed part inside of another?

If you’re willing to take this path less traveled, you may one day find yourself creating designs such as this fully 3D printed turntable by Brian Brocken. Intended for photographing or 3D scanning small objects without breaking the bank, the design doesn’t use ball bearings, screws, or even glue. Every single component is printed and fits together with either friction or integrated locking features. This is a functional device that can be printed and put to use anywhere, at any time. You could print one of these on the International Space Station and not have to wait on an order from McMaster-Carr to finish it.

With such a clever design, I couldn’t help but take a closer look at how it works, how it prints, and perhaps even some ways it could be adapted or refined going forward.

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