A smartphone with a robot vacuum in the background

Hacking A Robot Vacuum To Write A Replacement App

September 16, 2021 by 18 Comments

While internet-connected devices can be very useful around the house, and it is pretty cool to be able to monitor your dishwasher from half a world away, it’s important to be mindful of privacy and security issues. For instance, the Cecotec Conga 1490 robot vacuum [Rastersoft] bought came with an Android app, which upon installation asked for near-total access to the user’s phone. Not content with such an invasion of privacy, let alone the potential security implications, [Rastersoft] set to work trying to reverse engineer the robot’s communications (translated) to find out what exactly it was doing when online. He did this by configuring a Raspberry Pi as an access point, letting the vacuum connect to it, and logging all the data flowing through.

As it turned out, the robot phoned home to its manufacturer, reporting its serial number and some configuration settings. The server then passed control to the mobile app, but not without routing all subsequent commands through the remote server. Not only is this creepy, it also means that if the manufacturer were to shut down the server, the app would stop working entirely. [Rastersoft] therefore got the idea to write custom software to control the robot. He began by reconfiguring the Pi’s network setup to fool the vacuum into thinking it was connecting to its manufacturer’s server, and then wrote some Python code to emulate the server’s response. He was now in control of all data flowing back and forth.

After a lot of experimentation and data analysis, [Rastersoft] managed to decipher the commands sent by the app, enabling him to write a complete replacement app seen in the video after the break that includes control of all the vacuum’s standard actions, but also a new feature to manually control the vacuum’s movement. All code is available on GitHub for those who would like to hack their Congas too.

We think this is a great example of software hacking to future-proof devices that you own, while also mitigating many of the dangers to your security and privacy posed by the default software. The fact that the commands you send from your phone to your vacuum go all the way around the world, potentially being stored and read by others, is rather ridiculous in the first place. After all, we’ve already seen how robot vacuums could spy on you.

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Powering Up With USB: Untangling The USB Power Delivery Standards

September 16, 2021 by 37 Comments

Powering external devices directly from a PC’s I/O ports has been a thing long before USB was even a twinkle in an engineer’s eye. Some of us may remember the all too common PS/2 pass-through leads that’d tap into the 275 mA that is available via these ports. When USB was first released, it initially provided a maximum of 500 mA which USB 3.0 increased to 900 mA.

For the longest time, this provided power was meant only to provide a way for peripherals like keyboards, mice and similar trivial devices to be powered rather than require each of these to come with its own power adapter. As the number of  computer-connected gadgets increased USB would become the primary way to not only power small devices directly, but to also charge battery-powered devices and ultimately deliver power more generally.

Which brings us to the USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) protocol. Confusingly, USB-PD encompasses a number of different standards, ranging from fixed voltage charging to Programmable Power Supply and Adjustable Voltage Supply. What are the exact differences between these modes, and how does one go about using them? Continue reading “Powering Up With USB: Untangling The USB Power Delivery Standards” →

Continuous Resin Printer Shows The Speed

September 16, 2021 by 11 Comments

Redditor [No-Championship-8520] aka [Eric Potempa] has come up with an interesting DIY take on the Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) process currently owned and developed by Carbon Inc.

The usual resin 3D printer you may be familiar with is quite a simple machine. The machine has only one axis, which is the vertically moving build platform. A light exposes a photosensitive resin that cures on and is then pulled up off of a transparent window, before the next layer is exposed.

Typical resin printer setup

CLIP is a continuous resin printing process that speeds up printing by removing this peeling process. It utilises a bottom membrane that is permeable to oxygen. This tiny amount of oxygen right at the boundary prevents the solidified resin from sticking to the bottom, allowing the Z axis to be moved up continuously, speeding up printing significantly.

The method [Eric] is using is based around a continuously rotating bath to keep the resin moving, replenishing the resin in the active polymerisation zone. The bottom of the bath is made from a rigid PDMS surface, which is continuously wiped with a squeegee to replenish the oxygen layer. He notes the issues Carbon are still having with getting enough oxygen into the build layer, which he reckons is why they only show prints of smaller or latticed structures. His method should fix that issue. The build platform is moved up slowly, with the part appearing in one long, continuous movement. He reports the printing speed as 280 mm/hour which is quite rapid to say the least. More details are very scarce, and the embedded video a little unclear, but as one commentator said “I think we just saw resin printing evolve!” the next snarky comment changed the “evolve” to “revolve” which made us giggle.

Now, we all know that 3D printing is not at all new, and only the expiration of patents and the timely work by [Adrian Bowyer] and the reprap team kickstarted the current explosion of FDM printers. Resin printers will likely be hampered by the same issues until something completely new kickstarts the next evolution. Maybe this is that evolution? We really hope that [Eric] decides to write up his project with some details, and we will be sitting tight waiting to pore over all the gory details. Fingers crossed!

Ask Hackaday: What’s The Best Way To Heat A Tent With A Laptop?

September 16, 2021 by 49 Comments

For Europeans, August is usually a month of blistering heatwaves, day after day of cloudless skies and burning sun that ripens fruit and turns we locals a variety of shades of pink. Hacker camps during this month are lazy days of cool projects and hot nights of lasers, Club-Mate, and techno music, with tents being warm enough under the night sky to dispense with a sleeping bag altogether.

Sometimes though, the whims of the global weather patterns smile less upon us hackers, and our balmy summer break becomes a little more frigid. At BornHack 2021 for example we packed for a heatwave and were met with a Denmark under the grip of the Northern air mass. How’s a hacker to keep warm?

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Netscape Navigator 1.0

So, Why Are Hyperlinks Blue, Anyway?

September 16, 2021 by 44 Comments

You’ve no doubt noticed by now that while some links are gold and/or bold, most links out there are blue, especially on web pages of yore. But why? the TL;DR answer is that the Mosaic browser, released in early 1993 used blue links, and since the browser was widely distributed, blue just became the norm. Okay, fine. But why did they choose blue? That’s a question that requires a deep dive into technology through the ages as the Web and personal computing developed in tandem.

It’s important to remember that the idea of hyperlinks predates the invention of color monitors, which thickens the plot a bit. But the pivotal point seems to be Windows 3.1, released April 6th, 1992, when hyperlink blue becomes a navigational and interactive color. A year later, the April 12, 1993 release notes for Mosaic include a bullet that becomes the point of origin for blue hyperlinks:

Changed default anchor representations: blue and single solid underline for unvisited, dark purple and single dashed underline for visited.Mosaic release notes

Around the same time, the Cello browser was developed at Cornell Law, which also used blue hyperlinks. So the blue hyperlink concept was arguably browser-agnostic even before Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer came along.

The writer speculates that blue was chosen to stand out against black and white once color monitors took over, and that seems legit to us. Can you imagine blue hyperlinks on Hackaday, though? Ouch.

Speaking of important questions in computing history — who invented the mouse?

An RF Remote Is No Match For A Logic Analyser!

September 16, 2021 by 7 Comments

The Neewer NL660-2.4 Video Keylight has a handy remote control, which for [Tom Clement] has a major flaw in that it can’t restore the light to the state it had during its last power-on. He’s thus taken the trouble to reverse engineer it and create his own remote using a suitably-equipped Arduino clone.

The write-up is a step through primer for the would-be RF remote hacker, identifying the brains as an STM8 and the radio as an NRF24 clone before attempting to dump the firmware of the STM8. As might be expected the STM is protected, which only leaves the option of sniffing the connection between the two chips. The SPI pins are duly probed with a logic analyser, and the codes used by Neweer are extracted. As luck would have it there is a handy board called the RF Nano which is an Arduino Nano and an NRF24 in an Arduino Nano form factor, so a proof of concept remote could be written on an all-in-one module. You can find the result as a GitHub Gist, should you be curious.

We’ve seen Tom a few times before, particularly in his European BadgeLife work, as part of which he’s put a lot of effort into bringing browser-based WebUSB and WebSerial development to his work.

Ferranti’s Ghost Tours The Chip Factory That Made The ULA

September 15, 2021 by 32 Comments

Former Ferranti Electric engineer [Martin Mallinson] recently posted a 1980s documentary on YouTube (see the video below the break). It shows in some detail the semiconductor plant at Gem Mill outside of Manchester UK, as seen through the eyes of the ghost of founder Dr. Sebastian Ferranti. This dramatic device seems a little silly at times, but the documentary still provides a very interesting look at the industry at the time.

The Gem Mill plant was one of the first semiconductor facilities, having begun operations in the 1950s by Ferranti. In 1959 they made the first European silicon diode, and went on to commercialize Uncommitted Logic Arrays (ULA) in the early 1980s. Most famously, Ferranti ULAs were used in many home computers of the day, such as the Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, Acorn Electron, and the BBC Micro. Much of the factory tour in this documentary is depicting the ULA process, and they hint at an even more advanced technology being developed by the (unnamed) competition — an FPGA? CPLD?

In a series of events worthy of a mystery novel, Ferranti finally closed its doors in 1993 after acquiring a company that was involved with clandestine agencies and illegal arms sales (see Ferranti on Wikipedia). But through a series of acquisitions over the years, many of their products outlived the company and were available under the labels of future owners Plessey, Zetex, and finally Diodes, Inc. The Gem Mill facility was decommissioned in 2004 and in 2008 it was demolished and replaced by a housing estate.

Thanks to [Cogidubnus Rex] for bringing this video to our attention. A couple of other Ferranti documentaries of the same era are also included down below the break.

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