I recently had the chance to visit Belgrade and take part in the Hackaday | Belgrade conference. Whenever I travel, I like to make some extra field trips to explore the area. This Serbian trip included a tour of electronics manufacturing, some excellent museums, and a startup that is weaving FPGAs into servers and PCIe cards.
Continue reading “Belgrade Experience: MikroElektronika, Museums, And FPGA Computing”
Revolv, the bright red smart home hub famous for its abundance of radio modules, has finally been declared dead by its founders. After a series of acquisitions, Google’s parent company Alphabet has gained control over Revolv’s cloud service – and they are shutting it down.
Customers who bought into Revolv’s vision of a truly connected and automated smart home hub featuring 7 different physical radio modules to connect all their devices will soon become owners of significantly less useful, red bricks due to the complete shutdown of the service on May 15, 2016.
Continue reading “Red Bricks: Alphabet To Turn Off Revolv’s Lights”
Welcome to the 100th Hacklet! This has been a huge week for Hackaday, as we launched The 2016 Hackaday Prize. We’ve invited you to change the world. Hackers, makers, and engineers have already answered the call, with nearly 200 entered projects! What better way to celebrate our 100th Hacklet than taking a look at a few of these early entrants?
We start with [Patrick Joyce] and Raimi’s Arm – Bionic Arm for Kids. Raimi was born with an arm which ends just below the elbow. She’s still a kid – and growing, which means she will quickly grow out of any prosthetic. This has placed bionic arms out of her reach. [Patrick] saw a plea from Raimi’s father for help. 3D printed arms for the disabled are a thing, but [Patrick] couldn’t find one which fit the bill for Raimi. So he’s set out to design one himself. This will be an open source project which anyone with the proper tools can replicate. [Patrick] has already created several test rigs, and is well on the way to building an arm for Raimi and others!
Next up is [castvee8] who has entered the 2016 Hackaday Prize with Building Simplified Machinery. Over the years, [Castvee8] has built a few 3D printers and CNC machines. These projects always start with buying the same parts over and over: ground rods, linear bearings, stepper motors, drivers, etc. [Castvee8] is trying to build 3D printed machines which use as few of these vitamins as possible, yet are still strong enough to work in wood, plastic, wax, foam, and other light maker-friendly materials. So far the simple, modular components and electronics have led to a mini mill, mini lathe, and a drill press for things like printed circuit boards. Keeping things low-cost will make these tools accessible to everyone.
[Keegan Reilly] entered Everyman’s turbomolecular pump. Vacuum pumps are great, but everyone knows the real fun starts around 10^-7 Torr. Pulling things down this low requires a specialized pump. Two common designs are oil diffusion pumps and Turbomolecular pumps. Oil diffusion is cheap, but not everyone wants a hot vat of oil bubbling away in their vacuum chamber. Turbomolecular pumps are much cleaner, but very expensive. [Keegan] is attempting to design a low-cost version of a turbomolecular pump. He’s trying to use Tesla’s bladeless turbine design rather than the traditional bladed turbines used in commercial pumps. So far tests using a Dremel tool and paper discs have been promising – nothing has exploded yet!
Finally, we have [Samuel Bowman] with Seamless IoT Protocol Translation: Common Ground. Love it or hate it, the Internet of Things is going to be here for a while. Every device seems to speak a different language though . Z-wave, Zigbee, LoRa, WiFi, and a host of other protocols, all on different frequencies. Some are frequency hopping, some use mesh networks. [Samuel] is trying to design one device to translate between any of the emerging standards. Common Ground started as a science fair project connecting MQTT to Phillips Hue devices. Once [Samuel] achieved that goal, he realized how much potential there is in a universal translator box. We’re hoping [Samuel] achieves his goals quickly – it seems like new IoT standards are being introduced every day.
New projects are entering the 2016 Hackaday Prize every hour! You can see the full list right here. That’s it for the 100th Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!
Another week’s news, another single board computer aimed at Internet of Things applications is launched. This time it’s Samsung’s Artik 5, a platform they’ve been talking about for a while now but which you can now buy as a dev board from Digi-Key for $99.99. For that you get Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee connectivity, a dual-core ARM Cortex A7 running at 1GHz, 512MB of memory, and 4GB of eMMC storage. There are the usual plethora of interfaces: GPIO, I2C, SPI, UART, SDIO, USB 2.0, JTAG, and analogue.
The single board computer marketplace is starting to look rather crowded, and with so many competitors to choose from at more reasonable prices you might ask yourself why the ARTIK could be of interest to a maker. And given that Samsung are positioning it in their literature on its increased security for use in commercial applications such as IoT hubs, IP cameras and industrial and commercial lighting systems, you’d probably be on to something. If you were to make a very rough analogy with the Raspberry Pi range this has more in common with the Compute Module when it comes to intended marketplace than it does with the Pi Zero.
One answer to that question though could be that it is one of the first devices to support the Thread networking protocol for IoT devices. Thread is a collaboration between Google and a range of other interested parties that has been designed to deliver reliable and secure mesh networking for IoT devices in connected homes. As with all new connectivity protocols only time will tell whether Thread is the Next Big Thing, but it is interesting to note in this board nevertheless.
The ARTIK hasn’t made many waves as yet, though we covered the story when it was announced last year. It is worth mentioning that the ARTIK 5 is only the first of three platforms, the ARTIK 1 will be a tiny board with Bluetooth LE aimed at portable and wearable applications while the ARTIK 10 will be an octo-core powerhouse aimed at mulitmedia processing and network storage applications.
The ESP-8266 packs a lot of networking power into a small package. Some would say too small, which is why they often come on a slightly larger carrier PCB. The PCB is usually little more than a breakout with an optional 3.3V regulator. [Frazer Barnes] went one step further: he put an equally tiny USB to serial bridge, an oscillator, and some power management on an ESP-8266 breakout board.
You can program the ESP-8266 via the serial port, so having a built-in USB port is handy. Of course, you might not need it in the final product, but with the board being 25x30mm, you can probably cram it into most projects. [Frazer] posted a bit about the project on Hackaday.io, and has a GitHub project, although right now the upload of the design files is pending.
There’s no shortage of ESP-8266 projects. We saw a small Zigbee to ESP8266 board last year, and also the antidote for a tiny carrier board that includes an LCD, switches, and more. We also have tons of breakouts on Hackaday.io: here’s one with all the bells and whistles, and a similar, stripped-down version. All open-everything, and ready to go.
It has been over 2 years since we last mentioned the Weightless SIG and their claims of an IoT open standard chip with a 10 year battery life and 10km wireless range, all at a jaw dropping price of $2 per chip. There was a planned production run of the 3rd gen chips which I would suspect went to beta testers or didn’t make it into production since we didn’t hear anything else, for years.
Recently, a company called nwave began producing dev-kits using the Weightless Technology which you can see in the banner image up top. Although the hardware exists it is a very small run and only available to members of the development team. If you happen to have been on the Weightless mailing list when the Weightless-N SDK was announced there was an offer to get a “free” development board to the first 100 development members. I use bunny ears on free because in order to become a member of the developer team you have to pay a yearly fee of £900. Don’t abrasively “pffffft” just yet, if you happened to be one first 100 there was an offer for developers that came up with a product and submitted it back for certification to get their £900 refunded to them. It’s not the best deal going, but the incentive to follow through with a product is an interesting take.
Continue reading “Weightless IoT Hardware Virtually Unavailable”
The 900-pound gorilla in the corner of the Internet of Things (IoT) hype that everyone is trying to ignore is interoperability. In the Internet of Internets (IoI) everything works on a few standards that are widely accepted: IP and HTML. The discrepancies are in the details and the standards wars are in the past. Websites are largely interoperable. Not so in the wild-west ethos of the IoT.
Philips makes a line of ZigBee-enabled RGB lightbulbs that took the enthusiast community by storm. And initially, Philips was very friendly to other devices — it makes a ZigBee-to-WiFi bridge that would let you control all of your ZigBee-based lights, regardless of their manufacturer, from your phone. Until now.
Philips has just rolled out a “Friends of Hue” certification process, and has since pushed out a firmware update where their Hue bridges stop interoperating with non-certified devices. You can read Philips’ version of the story here.
The short version is that, ZigBee standards be damned, your future non-Philips lights won’t be allowed to associate with the Philips bridge. Your GE and Osram bulbs aren’t Friends of Hue. DIY RGB strips in your lighting mix? Not Friends of Hue. In fact, you won’t be surprised to know who the “Friends of Hue” are: other Philips products, and Apple. That’s it. If you were used to running a mixed lighting system, those days are over. If you’re not on the friends list, you are an Enemy of Hue.
Their claim is that third party products may display buggy behavior on a Philips network, and that this loads up their customer-response hotlines and makes people think that Philips is responsible. Of course, they could simply tell people to disable the “other” devices and see how it works, putting the blame where it belongs. Or they could open up a “developer mode” that made it clear that the user was doing something “innovative”. But neither of these strategies prevent consumers from buying other firms’ bulbs, which cost only 30-50% of Philips’ Hue line.
While Philips is very careful to not couch it as such, the Friends of Hue program really looks like an attempt to shut out their competitors; Philips got an early lead in the RGB LED game and has a large share of the market. As they say themselves in their own press release “Today these 3rd party bulbs represent a minimal fraction of the total product connected to our bridges so the percentage of our users affected is minimal.” And they’d like to keep it that way, even though the people they’re hurting are probably their most vocal and dedicated customers.
This Techdirt response to the situation is positively apoplectic, and there’s been the predictable flood of tirades in the comments on Slashdot. [Joel Ward], who in January was celebrating the ability to afford enough colored lights to appease his son is not so happy anymore.
And while we, with our manual light switches, laugh comfortably at the first-world problems of Hue consumers, we have to ask ourselves whether we’re next. Today they come for our RGB lightbulbs, but tomorrow it might be our networked toasters. A chilling thought!
Snark aside, the IoT brings two of the saddest realities of the software world into your home appliances: Where there’s code, there’s vulnerabilities, and when you can’t control the code yourself you aren’t really in control. You may own the lightbulb, but you’re merely licensing the firmware that runs it. The manufacturer can change the rules of the game, or go out of the product line entirely, and you’re high and dry. What can you do? Pull out your JTAG debugger.
Of course it’s insane to suggest that everyone needs to become an embedded-device firmware hacker just to keep their fridge running. As we’ve written before, we need to come up with some solution that puts a little more control in the hands of the ostensible owners of the devices, while at the same time keeping the baddies out. We suggest a press-to-revert-firmware button, for instance. When Philips pushes a non-consumer-friendly upgrade, you could vote with your fingertips — but then you’d miss out on bug fixes as well. Maybe it’s better to just give in an learn to love Windows 10.
There are no easy solutions and no perfect software. The industry is still young and we’ll see a lot of companies staking out their turf as with any new technology. It seems to us that IoT devices leave consumers with even less choice and control than in the past, because they are driven by firmware that’s supposed to be invisible. It’s just a lightbulb, right?
What do you think? Any ideas about how to put the power back in the hands of the “owner” of the device without everyone’s refrigerators becoming botnet zombies? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks [djxfade] for the tip!
Edit: Shortly after we ran this piece, Philips backed down:
“We underestimated the impact this would have upon the small number of our customers who currently use uncertified lights from other brands in the Philips Hue system. We have decided to continue to enable our customers who wish to integrate these uncertified products within their Philips Hue system.”
