Phase Shift Pump Control? There’s An App For That.

July 6, 2019 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

The sort of pumps used in the filtration systems of fountains and swimming pools don’t take kindly to running dry. So putting such a pump on a simple timer to run while you’re away comes with a certain level of risk: if the pump runs out of water while you’re gone, you might come home to a melted mess. One possible solution is a float sensor to detect the water level in whatever you’re trying to pump, but that can get complicated when you’re talking about something as large as a pool.

For his entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, [Luc Brun] is working on controller that can detect when the pump is running dry by monitoring the phase shift between voltage and current. With an inductive load like a pump, the current should lag behind the AC voltage a bit under normal operation. But if they become too far out of phase with each other, that’s a sign that the pump is running in a no-load condition because there’s no water to slow it down.

As [Luc] explains in the project write-up, simply monitoring the pump’s peak current could work, but it would be less reliable. The problem is that different motors have different current consumptions, so unless you calibrated the controller to the specific load it’s protecting, you could get false readings. But the relationship between current and voltage should remain fairly consistent between different motors.

The controller is powered by a Arduino Nano and uses a ACS712 current sensor to take phase measurements. Since he had the ability to toggle the pump on and off with a relay attached to the Arduino, [Luc] decided to add in a few other features. The addition of a DS1307 Real Time Clock means the pump can be run on a schedule, and an HC-05 Bluetooth module lets him monitor the whole system from his smartphone with an Android application he developed.

Since the theme of this year’s Hackaday Prize is designing a product rather than a one-off build, judges will be looking for exactly the sort of forward thinking that [Luc] has demonstrated here. As the controller is currently a mass of individual modules held inside a waterproof enclosure, the next steps for this project will likely be the finalization of the hardware design and the production of a custom PCB.

An Arduino Sickbay Display Worthy Of The Enterprise

July 5, 2019 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

The various displays and interfaces in Star Trek, especially The Original Series, were intentionally designed to be obtuse and overly complex so they would appear futuristic to the audience. If you can figure out how Sulu was able to fly the Enterprise with an array of unlabeled buttons and rocker switches, we’d love to hear it. But one area of the ship where this abstract design aesthetic was backed off a bit was sickbay, as presumably they wanted the audience to be able to understand at a glance whether or not Kirk or Spock were going to pull through their latest brush with death (spoilers: they’re fine).

For his latest project, [XTronical] has recreated the classic displays from Dr McCoy’s sickbay with an Arduino Nano and a 2.8 inch LCD display. It even has a speaker and MP3 player module to recreate the “heartbeat” sound from the original show. The whole thing looks and sounds phenomenal, and would be a perfect desk toy for the classic Trek aficionado. But this isn’t just a toy, it’s a fully functional medical scanner.

Of course, this little gadget can’t tell you if you’ve come down with a nasty case of Rigellian fever, but it can read your vitals using a MAX30100 pulse oximeter module and DS18B20 thermometer. In fact, it actually has two DS18B20 sensors: one to measure ambient temperature, the other to measure skin temperature. With those two figures, [XTronical] says it can calculate your core body temperature. The only thing that’s made up is the blinking “Respiration” indicator, that one’s just an estimate.

So where do we go from here? This project is presented as merely the first step in building a complete prop, perhaps in the form of a medical tricorder. We’ve seen some phenomenal TOS tricorder builds over the years, and some have even used the Raspberry Pi to shoehorn a bit of functionality into them. [XTronical] says he’s working on getting the source code and a step-by-step build guide put together, so keep an eye out for that in the near future.

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Bringing FPGA Development To The Masses

July 5, 2019 by Tom Nardi 55 Comments

The Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is one of the most exciting tools in the modern hacker’s arsenal. If you can master the FPGA, you can create hardware devices that not only morph and change based on your current needs, but can power through repetitive tasks at phenomenal rates. The only problem is, working with FPGAs can be a bit intimidating for newbies. One could argue that the technology is waiting on its “Arduino” moment; the introduction of a cheap development board coupled with easy to use software that brings FPGA hacking into the mainstream.

If everything goes according to plan, the wait might soon be over. [Ryan Jacobs] believes his project WebFPGA is the easiest and fastest way to get your hands dirty with this incredible technology. Outwardly the hardware could pass for an Arduino Nano clone, with a bunch of GPIO pins and a couple of LEDs on a small breadboard-friendly PCB. Certainly a no-frills presentation. It’s the software side is where things get interesting: all you need to develop for this FPGA is a modern web browser.

Currently Chrome, Opera, and Edge are supported, even if they’re running on relatively low-end computers. [Ryan] says this makes it much easier and cheaper to roll out FPGA classes in schools, as students can do everything with their existing Chromebooks. As the video after the break shows, you can even get away with using a sufficiently powerful smartphone to do some FPGA hacking on the go.

So what’s the trick? Essentially the heavy-lifting is done remotely: all of the synthesis is performed in their cloud backend, with the final bitstream delivered to the user for installation through WebUSB. If you’re more comfortable on the command line, [Ryan] says they’re currently working on tools which will allow you to perform all the necessary interactions with their cloud service without the browser.

The more critical Hackaday reader will likely be concerned about lock-in. What happens if you buy one of these development boards without a license for the service, or worse, what happens if WebFPGA goes belly-up down the road? To that end, [Ryan] makes it clear that their hardware is completely compatible with existing offline FPGA development tools such as the open source IceStorm.

We’ve seen considerable interest in low-cost FPGA development platforms, with readers perhaps recalling the excitement surrounding the fire sale of the Pano Logic thin clients. Despite efforts to make developing for these systems even easier, it’s hard to imagine the bar getting much lower than what WebFPGA is shooting for. Their Kickstarter campaign is close to crossing the finish line, and we’re very interested to see where the product goes from here.

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Sprucing Up A Bell & Howell Model 34 Oscilloscope

July 4, 2019 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

We’ll admit it, in an era when you can get a four channel digital storage oscilloscope with protocol decoding for a few hundred bucks, it can be hard not to see the appeal of analog CRT scopes from decades past. Sure they’re heavy, harder to use, and less capable, but they just look so cool. Who could say no to having one of these classic pieces of gear on their bench?

[Cody Nybo] certainly couldn’t. Despite the fact that he already has a digital scope, he couldn’t pass up the chance to add a Bell & Howell Schools Model 34 from circa 1973 to his collection. It needed a bit of TLC before it could be brought back into service, but now it’s all fixed up and ready to put in some work. Not bad for a piece of gear with nearly a half-century on the clock.

The restoration of the Model 34 was aided by the fact that [Cody] got the original manual and schematics for the scope in the deal, which he was kind enough to scan and upload for the rest of the class to enjoy. Those of you who have worked on older electronics can already guess where the scope needed the most love: all the capacitors needed to be swapped out for fresh ones. He also found a few resistors that were out of spec, and the occasional bad solder joint here and there.

Even if you’re not looking to repair your own middle-aged oscilloscope, his pictures of the inside of Model 34 are fascinating. The scope was sold as a kit, so the construction is surprisingly simple and almost entirely point-to-point. Of course, there’s something of a trade-off at work: [Cody] says it won’t display much more than 2.5 MHz before things start getting wonky. But then again, that’s a more than reasonable frequency ceiling for audio work and most hobbyist projects.

Oscilloscopes have come a long way since the days when they had to draw out their readings on a piece of paper. While newer devices have all but buried the classic analog scope, a beauty like this would still have a place of honor in our lab.

A Briefcase Pentesting Rig For The Discerning Hacker

July 3, 2019 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

In the movies, the most-high tech stuff is always built into a briefcase. It doesn’t whether whether it’s some spy gear or the command and control system for a orbiting weapons platform; when an ordinary-looking briefcase is opened up and there’s an LCD display in the top half, you know things are about to get interesting. So is it any surprise that hackers in the real-world would emulate the classic trope?

As an example, take a look at the NightPi by [Sekhan]. This all-in-one mobile penetration testing rig has everything you need to peek and poke where you aren’t supposed to, all while maintaining the outward appearance of an regular briefcase. Well, admittedly a rather utilitarian aluminum briefcase…with antennas sticking out. OK, so it might not be up to 007’s fashion standards, but it’s still pretty good.

[Sekhan] has crammed a lot of gear into the NightPi beyond the eponymous Raspberry Pi 3B+. There’s an RFID reader, an RTL-SDR dongle, an external HDD, plus the 12V battery and 5V converter to power everything. All told, it cost about $500 USD to build, though that figure is going to vary considerably depending on what your parts bins look like.

To keep things cool, [Sekhan] has smartly added some vent holes along the side of the briefcase, and a couple of fans to get the air circulating. With these cooling considerations, we imagine you should be able to run the NightPi with the lid closed without any issue. That could let you hide it under a table while you interact with its suite of tools from your phone, making the whole thing much less conspicuous. The NightPi is running Kali Linux with a smattering of additional cools to do everything from gathering data from social media to trying to capture keystrokes from mechanical keyboards with the microphone; so there’s no shortage of things to play with.

If you like the idea of carrying around a Pi-powered security Swiss Army knife but aren’t too concerned with how suspicious you look, then the very impressive SIGINT tablet we covered recently might be more your speed. Not that we think you’d have any better chance making it through the TSA unscathed with this whirring briefcase full of wires, of course.

Amiga In The MiST Gets Online With An ESP8266

July 3, 2019 by Tom Nardi 9 Comments

While he couldn’t quite come up with the cash to buy one in their hayday, [Bruno Antunes] has always been fascinated with the Amiga. When PCs got fast enough he used emulators like UAE to get a taste of the experience, but it was never quite the same thing. Not until he found the MiST anyway, which uses an FPGA to implement several retro computers such as the Apple II, Atari, and of course his beloved Amiga.

The only downside for [Bruno] was that the MiST has no network interfaces. To get onto the Internet, he had to install an ESP8266 inside the device and spend some quality time tweaking various software settings to get everything talking to each other. The end result is a BBS hosted on an Amiga 1200, that’s running on an FPGA, that’s connected to WiFi via an ESP8266. What a time to be alive.

Adding the ESP8266 to the MiST was actually quite straightforward, as there’s an unpopulated serial port header right on the board. Though [Bruno] cautions this header has been removed as of version 1.4 of the device, so if you’re in the market for an FPGA retro box and might want to get it online at some point, that may be a detail to keep in mind. The ESP is running a firmware which implements Serial Line IP (SLIP); which allows you to use TCP/IP over a serial port, albeit very slowly.

The hardware implant went well enough, but unfortunately [Bruno] found the ESP8266 was unable to communicate through the thick metal case of the MiST. He enlisted his girlfriend to make a new papercraft enclosure for the MiST that the ESP could talk though, and it even has the added benefit of glowing thanks to the internal LEDs. We probably would have just got one of the ESP modules that includes an external antenna, but to each their own.

With the hardware taken care of, the rest of the considerable write-up details how he got the Amiga operating system to talk to the Internet through the SLIP connection. He goes over everything from setting the system time with NTP to getting a Telnet daemon installed. As you might expect, this involves installing a number of additional software packages, but [Bruno] is kind enough to provide links for everything you’ll need.

We’ve seen the ESP8266 used to get other retro computers onto the modern Internet before, but it’s usually through the use of an external device. This internal modification is very clean, and seems like a no-brainer for anyone who owns a MiST and a soldering iron.

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School’s In Session With Arduboy Curriculum

July 1, 2019 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

It’s hard not to be impressed by the Arduboy. In just a few short years, [Kevin Bates] went from proof of concept to a successful commercial product without compromising on his original open source goals. Today, anyone can develop a game for the Arduboy and have it distributed to owners all over the world for free. If you’ve ever dreamt of being a game developer, the Arduboy community is for you.

Realizing the low-cost hardware and open source software of the Arduboy makes it an excellent way to learn programming, [Kevin] is now trying to turn his creation into a legitimate teaching tool. He’s kicking off this new chapter in the Arduboy’s life with a generous offer: giving out free hardware to educators all over the world. Anyone who wants to be considered for the program just needs to write-up a few paragraphs on how they’d utilize the handheld game system in their class.

[Kevin] already knows the Arduboy has been used to teach programming, but those have all been one-off endeavours. They relied on a teacher that was passionate enough about the Arduboy to put in their own time and effort to create a lesson plan around it. So one of the main goals right now is getting an official curriculum put together so educators won’t have to start from scratch. The community has already developed 16 free lessons, but they’re looking for help in creating more and translating them into other languages.

While the details are still up in the air, [Kevin] also plans to travel to schools personally and help them get their Arduboy classes off the ground. He’s especially interested in developing countries and other areas that are disadvantaged educationally. Believing that the Arduboy is as much a way to teach effective leadership and teambuilding as it is programming, he thinks this program can truly make a difference.

Since [Kevin] first Rickrolled us with his prototype in 2014, we’ve seen the Arduboy project spread like wildfire through the hacker community. From figuring out how to play its games on other gadgets to developing an expansion cartridge for the real thing, the Arduboy has already done its fair share of inspiring. Here’s hoping it has just as much of an impact on the next generation of hackers once they get their hands on it.