G-35 Circuit Board Porn

November 29, 2011 by 13 Comments

[Todd Harrison] took a slew of pictures in his quest to loose all the secrets of the G-35 Christmas Lights. These are a string of 50 plastic bulbs which house individually addressable RGB LEDs. We’ve seen a ton of projects that use them, starting about a year ago with the original reverse engineering and most recently used to make a 7×7 LED matrix. But most of the time the original control board is immediately ditched for a replacement. It’s become so common that you can now buy a drop-in board, no hacking needed. We enjoy the hard look that [Todd] took at the electronics.

The stock controller uses a single layer, single sided board. There’s a resin-blob chip, but also an SOP-20 microcontroller. Since [Todd’s] using several strings of lights on his house, he wondered if it would be possible to improve on the controller in order to synchronize the strands. His investigation showed that the board was designed to host a crystal oscillator but it is unpopulated. Unfortunately you can’t just add those parts to improve the timing of the chip (firmware changes would also be requires). He found that there’s a spot for a push-button. Quickly shorting the pads cycles through the effects, shorting them for a longer time turns off the string of lights. There is wireless control, but it seems that the only functionality it provides is the same as the unpopulated switch.

We enjoyed the close-up circuit board photos, and we like the spacing jig he used to attach the lights to his fascia boards. We’ve embedded a lengthy video about his exploits after the break. Continue reading “G-35 Circuit Board Porn” →

G-35 Christmas Lights Do Make A Great LED Matrix

November 7, 2011 by 16 Comments

This fully-addressable RGB LED matrix was built by [John Graham-Cummings]. He didn’t start from scratch, but wisely repurposed a strand of GE Color Effect lights and built a pleasant looking case in which to mount the G-35 hardware.

We’ve seen this hardware used in a similar way before. Because each ‘bulb’ has its own microcontroller, color data is shifted in via a serial bus. Orient the modules in any pattern you choose and account for that layout in software.

Since the strings have 50 bulbs, [John] simply cut off the one on the end to form his 7×7 matrix with the remaining 49 units. A square of plywood with a grid of holes holds each in place. Cord mess is not a problem as the extra was cut out and the remainders were soldered together again. [John] uses an Arduino Pro to feed in the data, which you can see for yourself in the clip after the break.

Continue reading “G-35 Christmas Lights Do Make A Great LED Matrix” →

Airline Seats Are For Dummies

September 18, 2024 by 9 Comments

You normally don’t think a lot would go into the construction of a chair. However, when that chair is attached to a commercial jet plane, there’s a lot of technology that goes into making sure they are safe. According to a recent BBC article, testing involves crash dummies and robot arms.

Admittedly, these are first-class and business-class seats. Robots do repetitive mundane tasks like opening and closing the tray table many, many times. They also shoot the seats with crash dummies aboard at up to 16 Gs of acceleration. Just to put  that into perspective, a jet pilot ejecting gets about the same amount of force. A MiG-35 pilot might experience 10 G.

We didn’t realize how big the airline seat industry is in Northern Ireland. Thompson, the company that has the lab in question, is only one of the companies in the country that builds seats. Apparently, the industry suffered from the global travel slowdown during the pandemic but is now bouncing back.

While people worry about robots taking jobs, we can’t imagine anyone wanting to spend all day returning their tray table to the upright and locked position repeatedly. We certainly don’t want to be 16 G crash dummies, either.

Crash dummies have a long history, of course. Be glad airliners don’t feature ejector seats.

CAN Bus Wireless Hacking / Dev Board

July 11, 2021 by 5 Comments

[Voltlog] has been hacking away at the CAN bus console of his VW Golf for quite some time now. Presumably, for his projects, the available CAN bus interface boards are lacking in some ways, either technically and/or price. So [Voltlog] designed his own wireless CAN bus hacking and development module called the ESP32 CanLite (see the video below the break). The board was tailored to meet the needs of his project and he claims it is not a universal tool. Nevertheless we think many folks will find the features he selected for this module will be a good fit for their projects as well.

In his introduction of the design, he walks through the various design decisions he faced. As the project name suggests, he’s using the ESP32 as the main controller due to it’s wireless radios and built-in CAN controller. The board is powered from the car’s +12V power, so it uses a wide input range ( 4 to 40 V ) switching regulator. One feature he added was the ability to switch automotive accessories using the ST VN750PC, a nifty high-side driver in an SO-8 package with integrated safety provisions.

The project is published as open source and the files can be pulled from his GitHub repository. We noticed the debug connector labeled VOLTLINK on the schematic, and found his description of this custom interface interesting. Basically, he was not satisfied with the quality and performance of the various USB-to-serial adapters on the market and decided to make his own. Could this be a common theme among [Voltlog]’s projects?

A word of warning if you want to build the ESP32 CanLite yourself. While [Voltlog] had intentionally selected parts that were common and easy to purchase when the project began, several key chips have since become nearly impossible to obtain these days due to the global parts shortage issue (it’s even out of stock on his Tindie page).

If you want to dig deeper into CAN bus hacking, check out this talk that we wrote about back in 2016. Do you have any favorite CAN bus development boards and/or tools? Let us know in the comments below.

Continue reading “CAN Bus Wireless Hacking / Dev Board” →

This Week In Security: Zeroconf Strikes Again, Lastpass Leaks Your Last Password, And All Your Data Is Belong To Us

September 20, 2019 by 18 Comments

VoIP cameras, DVRs, and other devices running the Web Services Dynamic Discovery (WSDD) protocol are being used in a new type of DDoS attack. This isn’t the first time a zeroconf service has been hijacked as part of a DDoS, as UPnP has also been abused in similar ways.

Feel like alphabet soup yet? A Denial of Service attack is one where the target is simply made unavailable, rather than actually compromised. The classic example of this is the SYN flood, where an attacker would open hundreds of connections to a web server at once, exhausting the server’s resources and interrupting legitimate use of that server. As mitigations for these attacks were developed (SYN Cookies, for example), DoS attacks were replaced by Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. Rather than attack a weakness on the target machine, like available RAM or CPU cycles, a DDoS generally targets available network bandwidth by hitting the target website from many, many locations at once. No clever software tricks can help when your Internet connection is fully saturated with junk traffic. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Zeroconf Strikes Again, Lastpass Leaks Your Last Password, And All Your Data Is Belong To Us” →

Syncing Two Strands Of G35 Christmas Lights

December 4, 2012 by 6 Comments

Lights

For a few years now, the set of Christmas lights most wanted by hackers and makers the world over is the GE G35 color changing set. With 50 individual RGB LEDs controlled by a microcontroller, these light strings can display any pattern of lights with the help of something as simple as an Arduino. The stock light sequences are a little problematic, especially if you’re running more than one string.

[Todd] picked up two G35 strings, and even when they’re turned on at the same time the light sequences slowly go out of sync after a half hour or so. He came up with a great way to make sure these lights stay in sync that requires only a slight modification. To make two light strings stay in sync, it’s simply a matter of disconnecting the data line from one string’s controllers and bridging that connection with the other string.

It’s a very easy modification, but it won’t give you twice as many individually controllable LEDs – for that, you’ll have to use either multiple Arduinos or buy a longer RGB LED strip. Still, having two identical 7×7 LED panels is better than a single panel, so we’ll have to tip our hat to [Todd] for this one.

CheerLights: Synchronizing Christmas Lights Around The Globe

December 17, 2011 by 7 Comments

cheerlights-synchronized-christmas-lights

They say that the holidays are a time to gather with others, which usually translates into spending time with friends and family. The folks at ioBridge Labs thought that while friends and family certainly are a big part of the holidays, it would be pretty cool to gather together flocks of strangers by using the Internet to synchronize their Christmas lights.

Participation in CheerLights is pretty easy, requiring little more than an Internet connection, some GE G-35 Color Effects lights, an Arduino, and an ioBridge. While those are the recommended components, an Arduino Ethernet shield will handle networking just as well. There really are no restrictions when it comes to hardware, so if you are so inclined, it should be relatively easy to roll your own display using simple RGB LEDs and a µC of your choosing.

The colors are dictated by the group’s Twitter feed, which can be found at http://twitter.com/#!/@cheerlights. Whenever a message is sent to @cheerlights along with a color, all of the light displays listening in will change simultaneously.

We really like the idea, and think it would be pretty cool to see this sort of program rolled out on a neighborhood or street-wide level, so you could see dozens of strings changing colors all at once.

If you’re interested in checking out CheerLights’ current color, be sure to take a gander at their live stream here.

[via BuildLounge]