This week Jonathan chats with Francois Proulx about SmokedMeat! That’s the third in a trio of Open Source security tools from Boost Security, and this one is the red team tool to demonstrate vulnerabilities. Why are Continuous Integration vulnerabilities such a persistent problem, and what’s on the horizon that may help? Watch to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 877: RCE As A Service”
At the Hackaday Europe conference in Italy earlier in the year, we were shown a rather interesting device. The work of [Alun Morris], it was an ESP32-powered Cheap Black Display board, and it was running a web browser. Definitely an achievement.
Lest you imagine that it was sporting the latest and greatest in browser technology, we must disappoint you. The browser in question is a very basic text mode device, but it did happily retrieve Hackaday, which should be the only test a browser should need to pass.
Under the hood it’s running FreeRTOS, with separate HTML retrieval and tokenizing, and UI processes. It can fetch web pages directly, but there’s also a server-side proxy for difficult sites, and for creating image thumbnails.
An ESP32 is a powerful microcontroller, but it’s fair to say it’s not in the league of running a web browser and as far as we can remember this is the first one we’ve seen. We’re sure it’s a field with further progress to be made though, particularly with the more powerful recent chips in the series. This project however is a good start, and more importantly it can be yours for a few dollars on Ali to buy a dev board. What are you waiting for?
I recently found myself in the market for a few IP cameras to keep an eye on my Prusa 3D printers, and quickly found that the options on the market weren’t exactly ideal. Prusa does offer up an official camera, but the price for a pair of them was a bit more than I wanted to spend on the project. Conversely, there’s no shortage of cheap network-connected cameras available online, but they come with expenses of a different sort, namely proprietary software and cloud services I didn’t want or need.
Somewhere in the deep and dark recesses of this particular rabbit hole, I came across a Reddit post mentioning how a camera running the community-developed Thingino firmware could be plugged into Prusa’s remote printer monitoring scheme. It wasn’t a project I’d heard of previously, and sure enough, a search of the Hackaday back catalog showed we’d never come across it before.
My interest was already piqued, but the discovery that I already owned a supported camera sealed the deal. It was time to explore a new entry in one of my absolute favorite project categories: an open source replacement firmware that turns a cheap consumer device into something more than the sum of its parts.
Continue reading “Thingino Teaches Cheap IP Cameras New Tricks”
[Kevin Kelm] created something wondrous: Halcyon Dawn, an utterly unique and desperately challenging game that is equal parts intricate starship simulator, imposing hardware console, video game, and love letter to John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War book series. Grab a beverage for this one, because it’s chock-full of detail.
First, how is it played? The simulator represents the ship Halcyon Dawn, a stolen and renamed vessel, and the player representing its sole crew member. The ship’s new mission is to establish a home for its payload of genetically-engineered unfortunates, escaping a cruel sort of indentured military servitude. The former masters of course have a very different view of the whole situation, throwing around terms like “treason” and “theft” and in general preferring the version of the desperate protagonist they had the most control over.
As the player is meant to be operating the ship on their own, the cockpit is imposing. All 152 controls and six screens are meaningful and will be needed to pilot the Halcyon Dawn, survive hostile actions, repel boarding attempts, mine and refine vast amounts of raw materials, and in general keep the ship running and intact until an autofactory can be deployed in orbit of a suitable planet to create a new home.
All easier said than done. It’s one thing to pilot and tweak a temperamental ship, but doing so while also performing damage control and thwarting a boarding attempt by manipulating life support is quite another. Want more details? Gameplay is documented here and the physical controls have their own library.
The product of a year of focused work, [Kevin] – now retired – pointed his decades of hardware and software experience at Halcyon Dawn after realizing one night that everything he needed to create it already existed. How this whole project came to be is also a tribute to the amazing tools and equipment that hobbyists and hackers of all kinds now have to turn an idea into something that actually exists in the world. Even so, it was a load of work he is not keen to repeat. Don’t miss the technical deep-dive and photo gallery of the build.
While the game itself — being a fan-made derivative of Scalzi’s work (and useless without the custom-made hardware console) — isn’t being released, [Kevin] has shared the underlying hardware framework it is built on. Enigma is an ESP32-based set of input and output PCBs made for integrating switches, knobs, displays, relays, and more with a Python library to make them easy to work with.
Starship simulators are a wonderful subset of projects, and every one is different from the last. Something about physical builds really works for them, and while we’ve seen a camper trailer converted to starship simulator [Kevin]’s project focuses the whole experience beautifully into the single-person console you see here. Watch a video of Halcyon Dawn running in an arcade-like “attract” mode embedded just below.
Continue reading “Behold The Most Beautifully Ambitious Starship Simulator Yet”
If you run a large meteorology bureau, then you probably have access to a wonderful weather radar for scrying the heavens. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. If you find yourself bereft of such hardware, though, you could build your own, taking your lead from [Koakno]’s fine example.
The build uses a satellite dome salvaged from an old RV that [Koakno] scored for just $5. Specifically, a Winegard Carryout Anser GM-5000. The motorized parabolic dish was designed to track TV satellites, but here it’s been repurposed into a scanning radar antenna for X-band signals. It’s paired with a cheap SDR—you can use several on the market—which injects an 850 MHz signal, which is up-converted to 10.4 GHz by the low-noise block (LNB) in the GM-5000 and sprayed out towards the weather.
Echoes come back from rain, hail, and debris, and get down-converted by the LNB back into an 850 MHz signal that the SDR can capture. The echoes are then plotted on a Plan Position Indicator (PPI) display, showing what’s going on in the atmosphere around the dome. [Koakno] reckons detection ranges span out to 40 km for things like heavy rain, while a supercell hail core could be spotted at up to 60 km in the right conditions.
It’s worth noting something important, though. [Koakno] explains that this system is currently in violation of FCC regulations (and probably others around the world), and shouldn’t be used without the proper licenses to access given spectrum. It’s a useful study of how to build a weather radar, but perhaps not something you can just wire together and fire up without getting in a spot of bother.
If you’re a die-hard tornado chaser or you’ve just always longed to stare meaningfully at a PPI display, this could be the build for you. We’ve featured other DIY radars before, too. We’d also like to see yours, so when it’s done and written up, fire us a note on the tipsline!
Regular expressions (regexes) are an amazingly powerful way to perform operations on collections of e.g. text. Regexss can also be considered to be a programming language, even a Turing complete one. Ergo it’s perfectly acceptable to thus design a way to use regexes to run and play a game of DOOM, as [Artem Lytkin] recently did.
The GitHub project page can be found here, containing the Python-based code that allows the demonstration to run, as well as the other components, including the C runtime and the 96.6 MB text string that defines a CPU’s registers, RAM, a framebuffer, the DOOM engine compiled to this custom CPU’s instruction set and the WAD file for the game itself.
The C-based driver applies the fixed, ordered list of find-and-replace rules to this string, which after more than ten-thousand of such substitutions later results in a single frame of the game. At about 80,000 substitutions per second on the given test system, that gets you to a sort-of playable framerate, even.
Naturally, the practical value of playing DOOM like this is pretty low, but as a demonstration of why regexes are awesome it’s hard to beat.
It’s been said for centuries that you cannot think on an empty stomach, and that love goes through the stomach. Although these may seem like merely cute jabs at the simplicity of human nature, recent research in rat models by [Logan Tierno Lauer] et al. indicates that the gut may be more influential in something as fundamental as memory formation and cognitive function than previously assumed.
Key to the gut-brain connection is the vagus nerve, an essential part of the autonomic nervous system that wires the brain into the body’s organs, including the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. It provides both sensory and motor fibers, so that the brain can literally sense the state of said GI tract, with various triggers as result. One of these is – as demonstrated in the paper – the release of acetylcholine (aCh) an important neurotransmitters in the CNS for cognitive functions including attention, memory and motivation.
Using in vivo fiber photometry it was found that during eating medial septum neurons released aCh, with various ways to impair this mechanism along the vagus nerve leading to this response disappearing. This also confirms earlier research that points the finger at a so-called early life Western Diet (WD) causing impaired memory and overall cognitive function, likely due this high fat and high sugar diet causing dysfunction in this aCh regulation mechanism.
Beyond once again reinforcing the need to eat healthily, this research also provides further insights in condition with declining cognitive function, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.
