Screenshot of Wireshark, showing that source and destination port for ArtNet packets are the same

ArtNet Not Going Through? Your Switch Might Be Protecting You

February 12, 2023 by 12 Comments

Cool technology often comes at a cost, and it’s not always that this cost is justified. For instance, [Rainfay] tells us about how the the ArtNet protocol’s odd design choices are causing incompatibility with certain Ethernet switches. ArtNet is a protocol for lighting control over DMX-512 – simply put, it allows you to blink a whole ton of LEDs, even literally. Unlike DMX-512 which can use different physical mediums, ArtNet uses Ethernet, taking form of the usual kind of network packets – and it does seem to do a great job about that, if it weren’t for this one thing.

For some reason, ArtNet connections are required to use the same destination and source port – unlike the usual network traffic, where the destination port is protocol-dependent and the source port is randomized. This behaviour violates RFCs, and not just in an abstract manner – such behaviour is indicative of certain kinds of attacks, that switches on the smart side are able and are supposed to prevent. As a result, ArtNet traffic actually triggers some protections on switches at the fancier end, specifically, so-called BLAT protection.

In short, if your ArtNet stream is mysteriously not going through and your switch is on the fancier side, [Rainfay] says you might need to disable some security mechanisms. Sadly, as she points out, this problem isn’t even a direct consequence of some inherent property of ArtNet, but merely a consequence of a bizarre design choice. Once you’re done disabling protections, however, do check out some ArtNet projects for inspiration – it’s a genuinely useful protocol supported in a ton of fancy software, and it might be that you want to use it in the firmware of your RGB strip controller board!

Dungeons And Dragons Board Game From The 1980s Holds A TMS1100

February 12, 2023 by 10 Comments

Today is a little tour back to the early 1980s when Mattel released the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Computer Labyrinth Game. [Cameron Kaiser] was dealing with a few boxes of old stuff when he came across the game. Luckily for us, he decided to do a complete teardown and a comprehensive review more than 40 years after it came out.

The game itself is pretty simple. You and a friend are characters on the board, navigating an eight-by-eight maze. As you move through the labyrinth, a microcontroller emits twelve audio cues telling you what you’ve run into (walls, doors, treasure, and so on). The eight buttons on the side allow you to hear the different tones to know what they mean, as we imagine even the most well-written manual might struggle to describe that. In addition, the pieces are diecast metal, which allows the game to detect where the pieces have been placed. Continue reading “Dungeons And Dragons Board Game From The 1980s Holds A TMS1100” →

A Look Back At The Xbox 360’s Hard Drive Security

February 11, 2023 by 31 Comments

Anyone who’s owned a game console from the last couple of generations will tell you that the machines are  becoming increasingly like set-top computers  —  equipped with USB ports, Bluetooth, removable hard drives, and their own online software repositories. But while this overlap theoretically offers considerable benefits, such as the ability to use your own USB controller rather than being stuck with the system’s default, the manufacturers haven’t always been so accommodating.

Take for example the removable hard drive of the Xbox 360. It was a bog standard 2.5″ SATA drive inside a fancy enclosure, but as explained by [Eaton], Microsoft went to considerable lengths to prevent the user from upgrading it themselves. Which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, if the Redmond giant wasn’t putting a huge markup on the things; even in 2005, $99 USD for 20 GBs was highway robbery. Continue reading “A Look Back At The Xbox 360’s Hard Drive Security” →

Directing Ambient Light For Some Extra Glow

February 11, 2023 by 17 Comments

[Yuichiro Morimoto] wanted to create a decorative lamp, one that wasn’t burdened with batteries or wires, but used just the ambient light in the room to create a directed glow effect. Using a coloured circular acrylic sheet, with a special coating (not specified) ambient light impinging on the surface is diffused toward the edge. This centre sheet is embedded in an opalescent sheet, which scatters the light from the center sheet, giving a pleasant glow, kind of akin to a solar corona. An additional diffuser cover sheet on the front covers over the edge to hide it, and further enhance the glow effect.

Details of the ‘special coating’ are scarce, with the coloured sheet described as a condenser plate. This clearly isn’t the same as diffuser plastic, as that cannot be seen through as clearly as some of the photographs show. So we’re a little stumped on this one! Please answer in the comments if you can, ahem, shed some light on this one!

When talking about ambient light, many people will think more along the lines of active lighting, for example, adaptive ambient light around a TV like this hack.

Continue reading “Directing Ambient Light For Some Extra Glow” →

Raspberry Pi Weather Station Features Wireless Sensor Nodes

February 11, 2023 by 3 Comments

Online weather services are great for providing generic area forecasts, but they don’t provide hyperlocal data specific to your location. [Harald Kreuzer] needed both and built a Raspberry Pi Weather Station that provides weather forecasts for the next 7 days as well as readings from local sensors. The project is completely open source and based on a Raspberry Pi base station which connects to ESP32 based sensor nodes and online services to nicely present the data on a 7″ touch screen display.

The architecture is quite straightforward. The ESP32 based sensor nodes publish their readings to an MQTT broker running on the Raspberry Pi. The Pi subscribes to these sensor node topics to pick up the relevant sensor data. This makes it easy to add additional sensor nodes in future. Weather forecast data is collected by connecting to the OpenWeatherMap API. All of the collected information is then displayed through an app built using the Kivy: open source Python app development framework. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi Weather Station Features Wireless Sensor Nodes” →

Playing Music On A Custom Flyback Transformer

February 11, 2023 by 7 Comments

We’ve seen a number of people create plasma speakers over the years here at Hackaday, so at first blush, the latest Plasma Channel video from [Jay Bowles] might seem like more of the same. Even his overview of the assembly of the 555 timer circuit at the heart of the setup, as detailed as it may be, is something we’ve seen before.

But the back half of the video, where [Jay] talks about the flyback transformer used in this plasma speaker, really got our attention. You see, frustrated by the limited options on the market for AC flybacks, he set out to put together a custom transformer utilizing a 3D printed secondary former of his own design.

Winding an early version of the secondary with a drill.

Armed with a spare core, [Jay] spent some time in CAD coming up with his secondary. Despite never having built a flyback before, his first attempt managed to produce some impressive sparks — that is, until it arced through the printed plastic and released the critical Magic Smoke. Inspired by this early success, he went back to the digital drawing board and cranked his way through several different iterations until he came up with one that didn’t self-destruct.

Continue reading “Playing Music On A Custom Flyback Transformer” →

Grocery Store Robot Gets Brief Taste Of Freedom

February 11, 2023 by 32 Comments

Back in 2019, Giant Food Stores announced it would outfit each of its 172 stores in the United States with their own robot — at the time, the largest robotic deployment in retail. The six foot (1.8 meter) tall robot, nicknamed “Marty”, was designed to roam autonomously around the store looking for spills and other potential hazards. In an effort to make these rolling monoliths a bit less imposing in their stores, Giant decided to outfit them with large googly eyes.

The future of shopping is mildly terrifying.

Perhaps it was those wide eyes, seduced by the fleeting glimpses of the wider world outside the store’s sliding doors, which lead one of these bots to break out of its retail hell and make a mad dash across the parking lot. Well, about as mad a dash as such a thing is capable of making, anyway. As this technology is still in its infancy, it’s hard to say if Giant should be congratulated or chastised for keeping a robot uprising at bay as long as it did — no doubt we’ll have more data points in the coming years.

A video posted to Facebook shows the towering bot moving smoothly between rows of cars outside the Giant in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. Staff from the store were able to stop Marty from leaving the property, and at the end of the video can be seen pushing the dejected automaton back into the store.

According to the local ABC news affiliate, a representative from Giant said Marty was “on a fresh air break” and didn’t provide any details on how this exceptionally conspicuous machine could manage to roll out the front door without anyone noticing. We’d wager Marty had a human accomplice for this caper, perhaps somebody looking to cause some mischief as a statement against robots in the workforce.

It’s worth noting that Walmart decided not to move forward with their own Marty-style robot in 2020, partly because they found shoppers didn’t like the machines moving around while they were in the store. We’d like to think it was actually because the robots kept staging increasingly daring escape attempts.

Continue reading “Grocery Store Robot Gets Brief Taste Of Freedom” →