Converting A Sigma Lens To Canon, Digital Functionality Included

July 1, 2022 by 8 Comments

These days, camera lenses aren’t just simple bits of glass in sliding metal or plastic housings. They’ve often got a whole bunch of electronics built in as well. [Dan K] had just such a lens from Sigma, but wanted to get it working fully with a camera using the Canon EF lens fitting. Hacking ensued.

The lens in question was a Sigma 15-30mm f/3.5-4.5 EX DG, built to work with a Sigma camera using the SA mount. As it turns out, the SA mount is actually based on the Canon EF mount, using the same communications methods and having a similar contact block. However, it uses a mechanically different mounting bayonet, making the two incompatible.

[Dan] sourced a damaged EF lens to provide its mount, and modified it on a lathe to suit the Sigma lens. A short length of ribbon cable was then used to connect the lens’s PCB to the EF mount’s contacts. When carefully put back together, the lens worked perfectly, with functional auto-focus and all.

It goes to show that a little research can reveal possibilities for hacking that we might otherwise have missed. [Dan] was able to get his lens up and running on a new camera, and has taken many wonderful pictures with it since.

We’ve seen some great lens hacks over the years, from 3D printed adapters to anamorphic adapters that create beautiful results. If you’ve got your own mad camera hacks brewing up, drop us a line!

Hackaday Prize 2022: MasterPi Is A Capable Robot With Fancy Wheels

July 1, 2022 by 2 Comments

When it comes to building a mobile robot, often maneuverability is more important than outright speed. The MasterPi robot demonstrates this well, using fancy wheels to help it slide and skate in any direction needed.

Four DC gear-motors are fitted to a metal chassis, each one driving a mecanum wheel. These are special wheels with rollers fitted around their circumference at an angle that allows the robot to move in all directions and rotate in various ways depending on how each wheel is driven.

On top of this highly maneuverable chassis is placed a 5-degree-of-freedom robotic arm. The robot also gets a ultrasonic sensor for avoiding objects, as well as a camera for line-following duties. The camera also allows the robot to pick up blocks and identify their color, and it can then sort them into boxes. It’s all powered by a Raspberry Pi, running a bunch of Python code to make everything happen.

It’s a neat project that shows off just how capable a robot can be with some smart design choices and modern computing hardware on board. We’ve seen some other smart block sorters before, too. Continue reading “Hackaday Prize 2022: MasterPi Is A Capable Robot With Fancy Wheels” →

Unraveling The Hackaday Podcast Hidden Message

July 1, 2022 by 7 Comments

When Elliot and I record the raw audio for the weekly podcast, it’s not unusual for us to spend the better part of two hours meandering from topic to topic. During one of these extended gab sessions, we wondered if it would be possible to embed a digital signal into the podcast in such a way that it could be decoded by the listener. Of course, storing and transmitting data via sound is nothing new — but the podcast format itself introduced some level of uncertainty.

Would the encoded sound survive the compression into MP3? Would the syndication service that distributes the file, or the various clients listeners will use to play it back, muddy the waters even further? Was it possible that the whole episode would get flagged somewhere along the line as malicious? After a bit of wild speculation, the conversation moved on to some other topic, and the idea was left to stew on one of our infinite number of back burners.

That is, until Elliot went on vacation a couple weeks back. In place of a regular episode, we agreed that I’d try my hand at putting together a special edition that consisted of pre-recorded segments from several of the Hackaday contributors. We reasoned this simplified approach would make it easier for me to edit, or to look at it another way, harder for me to screw up. For the first time, this gave me the chance to personally oversee the recording, production, and distribution of an episode. That, and the fact that my boss was out of town, made it the perfect opportunity to try and craft a hidden message for the Hackaday community to discover.

I’m now happy to announce that, eleven days after the EMF Camp Special Edition episode was released, ferryman became the first to figure out all the steps and get to the final message. As you read this, a coveted Hackaday Podcast t-shirt is already being dispatched to their location.

As there’s no longer any competition to see who gets there first, I thought it would be a good time to go over how the message was prepared, and document some interesting observations I made during the experiment.

Continue reading “Unraveling The Hackaday Podcast Hidden Message” →

Hackaday Podcast 175: Moonrocks And Cockroach Chyme, A Raspberry Pi IPad, And A Retro-Respectful Tape Deck

July 1, 2022 by No comments

Join Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos as we cuss and discuss all the gnarliest hacks from the past week. We kick off this episode with a gentle reminder that the Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest ends this Monday, July 4th, at 8:30 AM PDT. We’ve seen a ton of cool entries so far, including a new version of [Peter Lyons]’ Squeezebox keyboard that we’re itching to write up for the blog.

In other contest news, the Round 2 winners of the Reuse, Recycle, Revamp challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize have been announced. Elliot is super stoked about [Jason Knight]’s open-source recycled skateboard deck-making apparatus, and Kristina wishes she had the time and money to build some of the fundamental Precious Plastic machines.

Elliot managed to stump Kristina with this week’s What’s That Sound, though she probably should have made a semi-educated guess. From there, it’s on to missing moon rocks and the word of the day before we get into a handful of contest entries, including a mechanical keyboard to end all mechanical keyboards.

This really just scratches the surface of this week’s show, which includes some new hardware stuffed into old, as well as modern implementations of old technology. And in case you didn’t get enough of Kristina’s childhood memoirs, she goes a bit deeper into the teddy bears and telephones rooms of her memory palace.

Direct download, record it to tape, and play it on your boombox.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 175: Moonrocks And Cockroach Chyme, A Raspberry Pi IPad, And A Retro-Respectful Tape Deck” →

PlayStation 2 Gets A Seamless Media Center Makeover

July 1, 2022 by 13 Comments

We often see Raspberry Pi boards of various flavors stuck inside vintage computers and the like. [El Gato Guiri] has instead installed one inside a PlayStation 2 Slim, and rather artfully at that. The result is a tidy little media center device.

Pretty tidy, right? All those ports work! Okay, not the memory card slots. But everything else!

The PlayStation 2 was gutted, with a Raspberry Pi 3B installed inside. The original ports on the back, including the USB and Ethernet port, were then wired up to the Pi to make them fully functional. A slot was then cut into the back to allow the HDMI port to be hooked up. The front USB ports work, too, and the optical drive was removed to make way for a 2 TB Toshiba external drive. Adapters are used to make the controller ports work, as well. Finally, a Noctua fan was installed atop the Pi to make sure it never gets too hot.

Whether it’s for watching movies or playing emulated games with the PS2 controllers, the little media center build is sure to do well.

We’ve seen Raspberry Pis stuck in everything from laptops to monitors, as well as plenty of retro hardware too. When a piece of hardware is dead and gone, a Raspberry Pi can be a great way to breathe new life into an attractive old case!

This Week In Security: Zimbra RCE, Routers Under Attack, And Old Tricks In WebAssembly

July 1, 2022 by 8 Comments

There’s a problem in the unrar utility, and as a result, the Zimbra mail server was vulnerable to Remote Code Execution by simply sending an email. So first, unrar is a source-available command-line application made by RarLab, the same folks behind WinRAR. CVE-2022-30333 is the vulnerability there, and it’s a classic path traversal on archive extraction. One of the ways this attack is normally pulled off is by extracting a symlink to the intended destination, which then points to a location that should be restricted. unrar has code hardening against this attack, but is sabotaged by its cross-platform support. On a Unix machine, the archive is checked for any symbolic links containing the ../ pattern. After this check is completed, a function runs to convert any Windows paths to Unix notation. As such, the simply bypass is to include symlinks using ..\ traversal, which don’t get caught by the check, and then are converted to working directories.

That was bad enough, but Zimbra made it worse by automatically extracting .rar attachments on incoming emails, in order to run a virus and spam check. That extraction isn’t sandboxed, so an attacker’s files are written anywhere on the filesystem the zimbra user can write. It’s not hard to imagine how this turns into a full RCE very quickly. If you have an unrar binary based on RarLab code, check for version 6.1.7 or 6.12 of their binary release. While Zimbra was the application specifically called out, there are likely to be other cases where this could be used for exploitation.
Continue reading “This Week In Security: Zimbra RCE, Routers Under Attack, And Old Tricks In WebAssembly” →

render of the MNT Pocket Reform on a desk

MNT Reform Goodness, Now Even Smaller With Pocket Reform

July 1, 2022 by 12 Comments

You might have already seen the pretty pictures in pastel colors online — a small netbook-like computer with a full-size keyboard. This, while a render, is what the MNT Pocket Reform is going to look like. Reminiscent of the netbook aesthetic in all the right ways, it’s a small device with a mechanical keyboard taking as much space as possible, trackball for navigation, and we assume, exactly the kind of screen that’d be comfortable to use.

We’ve reviewed the MNT Reform a year ago, and this device inherits a lot of its good parts. The motherboard’s connectivity is likely subject to change, but on the motherboard renders, we can spot three USB-C ports, a Micro HDMI port, a microSD card slot, ix Industrial Ethernet, and M.2 B-key and M-key slots for WWAN and SSD cards respectively.

If you expected computational specs, there isn’t really a specific CPU+RAM configuration announced – for a good reason. The Pocket Reform takes advantage of the CPU card concept designed into the MNT Reform – able to take a card with an NXP i.MX8M CPU, Raspberry Pi CM4, Pine SOQuartz, a Kintex-7 FPGA, or any of the cards yet to be developed. The design files are open-source, the prototype motherboards have been ordered, mechanical usability aspects have been worked through. This is a very compelling project, and we can’t wait to see it bear fruit!