This Eyeball Watches You Thanks To Kinect Tracking

October 29, 2021 by Lewin Day 4 Comments

Eyeballs are often watching us, but they’re usually embedded in the skull of another human or animal. When they’re staring at you by themselves, they can be altogether more creepy. This Halloween project from [allpartscombined] aims to elicit that exact spooky vibe.

The project relies on a Kinect V2 to do body tracking. It feeds data to a Unity app that figures out how to aim the eyeball at any humans detected in the scene. The app sends angle data to an Arduino over serial, with the microcontroller generating the necessary signals to command servos which move the eyeball.

With tilt and pan servos fitted and the precision tracking from the Kinect data, the eye can be aimed at people in two dimensions. It’s significantly spookier than simply panning the eye back and forth.

The build was actually created by modifying an earlier project to create an airsoft turret, something we’ve seen a few times around these parts. Fundamentally, the tracking part is the same, just in this case, the eye doesn’t shoot at people… yet! Video after the break.

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RC car without a top, showing electronics inside.

Fast Indoor Robot Watches Ceiling Lights, Instead Of The Road

October 25, 2021 by Donald Papp 15 Comments

[Andy]’s robot is an autonomous RC car, and he shares the localization algorithm he developed to help the car keep track of itself while it zips crazily around an indoor racetrack. Since a robot like this is perfectly capable of driving faster than it can sense, his localization method is the secret to pouring on additional speed without worrying about the car losing itself.

The regular pattern of ceiling lights makes a good foundation for the system to localize itself.

To pull this off, [Andy] uses a camera with a fisheye lens aimed up towards the ceiling, and the video is processed on a Raspberry Pi 3. His implementation is slick enough that it only takes about 1 millisecond to do a localization update, netting a precision on the order of a few centimeters. It’s sort of like a fast indoor GPS, using math to infer position based on the movement of ceiling lights.

To be useful for racing, this localization method needs to be combined with a map of the racetrack itself, which [Andy] cleverly builds by manually driving the car around the track while building the localization data. Once that is in place, the car has all it needs to autonomously zip around.

Interested in the nitty-gritty details? You’re in luck, because all of the math behind [Andy]’s algorithm is explained on the project page linked above, and the GitHub repository for [Andy]’s autonomous car has all the implementation details.

The system is location-dependent, but it works so well that [Andy] considers track localization a solved problem. Watch the system in action in the two videos embedded below.

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PineTime Smartwatch And Good Code Play Bad Apple

October 16, 2021 by Brian McEvoy 11 Comments

PineTime is the open smartwatch from our friends at Pine64. [TT-392] wanted to prove the hardware can play a full-motion music video, and they are correct, to a point. When you watch the video below, you should notice the monochromatic animation maintaining a healthy framerate, and there lies all the hard work. Without any modifications, video would top out at approximately eight frames per second.

To convert an MP4, you need to break it down into images, which will strip out the sound. Next, you load them into the Linux-only video processor, which looks for clusters of pixels that need changing and ignores the static ones. Relevant pixel selection takes some of the load off the data running to the display and boosts the fps since you don’t waste time reminding it that a block of black pixels should stay the way they are. Lastly, the process will compress everything to fit it into the watch’s onboard memory. Even though it is a few minutes of black and white pictures, compiling can take a couple of hours.

You will need access to the watch’s innards, so hopefully, you have the developer kit or don’t mind cracking the seal. Who are we kidding, you aren’t here for intact warranties. The video resides in the flash chip and you have to transfer blocks one at a time. Bad Apple needs fourteen, so you may want to practice on a shorter video. Lastly, the core memory needs some updating to play correctly. Now you can sit back and…watch.

Pine64 had a rough start with the single-board computers, but they’re earning our trust with things like soldering irons and Google-less Linux mobile phones.

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Basics Of Remote Cellular Access: Watchdogs

October 14, 2021 by Lewin Day 21 Comments

When talking about remote machines, sometimes we mean really remote, beyond the realms of wired networks that can deliver the Internet. In these cases, remote cellular access is often the way to go. Thus far, we’ve explored the hardware and software sides required to control a machine remotely over a cellular connection.

However, things can and do go wrong. When that remote machine goes offline, getting someone on location to reboot it can be prohibitively difficult and expensive. For these situations, what you want is some way to kick things back into gear, ideally automatically. What you’re looking for is a watchdog timer!

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Hackaday Podcast 139: Furter Burner, Glowing Potato Peeler, Hacked Smartwatch, And The Last Atlas

October 8, 2021 by Tom Nardi No comments

Hackaday editors Tom Nardi and Elliot Williams bring you up to speed on the most interesting stories of the week. Hackaday’s Remoticon and Germany’s Chaos Communication Congress are virtual again this year, but the Vintage Computer Festival will be live. We’ll also talk about ocean-going drones, the recreation of an old-school light bulb with a potato peeler, cheap smart watches with hidden potential, and sanding down shady modules to figure out just how you’ve been scammed. Stick around for some thoughts on turning real-estate signs into a handy prototyping material, and to find out why some very impressive Soviet tech is getting the boot from America’s space program.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (52.775158 MB)

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Hackable Smart Watch Is Also Open Source

October 5, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 16 Comments

When they first came to market, many detractors thought that smart watches would be a flop or that there wouldn’t be much use for them. Over the past few years, though, their sales continue to increase as people find more and more niche uses for them that weren’t previously considered. The one downside to most of these watches is unsurprisingly their lack of openness and hackability, but with some willpower and small circuit components there are a few options available for those of us who like to truly own our technology.

This smartwatch is the SMA Q3, the next version of this smartwatch that we saw at the beginning of last year. Like its predecessor, it boasts a sunlight-readible display powered by a Bluetooth SoC, but this time uses the upgraded nRF52840. All of the standard smartwatch features are available, but this version also includes SWD pins on the back, and additionally has support for Bangle.js and can run some of the apps from the app loader. Some details still need to be worked out for this specific hardware, but there are some workarounds available for the known problems.

The project is also on Kickstarter right now but is well past its funding goals. We’re excited to see adoption of an open-source smartwatch like this, and to that end all of the hardware details and software are freely available on the project’s page, provided you can order some of the needed parts from overseas. If you’re looking for something a little more BASIC, though, we have you covered there as well.

This Week In Security: Somebody’s Watching, Microsoft + Linux, DDoS

September 24, 2021 by Jonathan Bennett 23 Comments

In case you needed yet another example of why your IoT devices shouldn’t be exposed to the internet, a large swath of Hikvision IP Cameras have a serious RCE vulnerability. CVE-2021-36260 was discovered by the firm Watchful_IP in the UK. In Hikvision’s disclosure, they refer to the problem as a command injection vulnerability in the device’s web interface. The vuln is pre-authentication, and requires no user interaction. This could be something as simple as a language chooser not sanitizing the inputs on the back-end, and being able to use backticks or a semicolon to trigger an arbitrary command.

Now you’re probably thinking, “I don’t use Hikvision cameras.” The sneaky truth is that a bunch of cameras with different brand names are actually Hikvision hardware, with their firmware based on the Hikvision SDK. The outstanding question about this particular vulnerability is whether it’s present in any of the re-labelled cameras. Since the exact vulnerability has yet to be disclosed, it’s hard to know for sure whether the relabeled units are vulnerable. But if we were betting… Continue reading “This Week In Security: Somebody’s Watching, Microsoft + Linux, DDoS” →