A photo of a white dog with curly fur riding a black skateboard with grey motors under the front deck. There are blue squares on the top of the deck that she is standing on to steer the board.

An Electric Skateboard For The Dogs

September 6, 2024 by 1 Comment

What’s a dog to do if they want to do some accessible skateboarding? [Simone Giertz]’s three-legged pup, [Scraps], got the chance to try a LEGO Technic board for her thrills.

This electric LEGO skateboard features six motors and paw pedals to let [Scraps] steer while [Giertz] remotely controls the speed of the board. While it’s not a particularly fast ride, it does let [Scraps] live out her dreams of being a YouTube dog skateboard celebrity.

A video from [Giertz] wouldn’t be complete without a life lesson, and this time it was the importance of rest to the creative process. Sometimes when a solution eludes you, it’s just time to take a break. The steering mechanism, in particular, was giving her trouble but became simple the next morning. We’re also treated to an adorable shot of [Scraps] napping when the initial shoot of her riding the board wasn’t going as planned.

Want to try your hand at making your own skateboard? How about a deck from recycled plastic, tank treads instead of wheels, or is a rocket-powered skateboard more your speed?

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This Week In Security: EUCLEAK, Revival Hijack, And More

September 6, 2024 by 5 Comments

[Thomas Roche] of NinjaLab is out with EUCLEAK, (pdf) a physical attack against Infineon security microcontrollers, and the security tokens that contain them. The name is a portmanteau of Euclidean and leak. And no surprise, it’s a data leak in some implementations of the Extended Euclidean Algorithm (EEA), a component of an Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA).

OK, time to step back. Infineon microcontrollers are the digital smart parts inside popular security tokens like the Yubikey 5, some Java smart cards, and even the Infineon TPMs. These devices all serve a similar purpose. They store one or more secret keys, and are guaranteed to never disclose those keys. Instead, they use their secret keys to do cryptographic functions, like ECDSA signatures, and output the result. There’s even a special set of tests, the Common Criteria, that are intended to backstop these guarantees. What’s interesting is that an otherwise excellent product like the Yubikey 5, that passes all these auditing and certification processes, is still vulnerable.

The actual attack is to perform ECDSA signatures while monitoring the physical chip with an electromagnetic probe. This tiny directional antenna can pick up on EM noise generated by the microprocessor. That EM noise leaks timing information about the internal state of the cryptography, and the secret key can be derived as a result.

This process does require physical access to the token for several minutes. To get useful readings, the plastic case around the security token does need to be disassembled to get the probe close enough to pick up signals. From there it’s at least an hour of post-processing to actually get the key. And most of these security tokens intentionally make the disassembly process rather difficult. The point isn’t that it’s impossible to open up, but that it’s impossible not to notice that your token has been tampered with. Continue reading “This Week In Security: EUCLEAK, Revival Hijack, And More” →

3D Print Yourself These Mini Workshop Tools

September 6, 2024 by 27 Comments

Kitting out a full workshop can be expensive, but if you’re only working on small things, it can also be overkill. Indeed, if your machining tends towards the miniature, consider building yourself a series of tiny machines like [KendinYap] did. In the video below, you can see the miniature electric sander, table saw, drill press, and cut-off saw put through their paces.

Just because the machines are small, doesn’t mean they’re not useful. In fact, they’re kind of great for doing smaller jobs without destroying what you’re working on. The tiny belt sander in particular appeals in this case, but the same applies to the drill press as well. [KendinYap] also shows off a tiny table and circular saw. The machines are straightforward in their design, relying largely on 3D printed components. They’re all powered by basic DC brushed motors which are enough to get the job done on the small scale.

They look particularly good if tiny scale model-making is your passion.

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A light-dependent resistor detects cacti in the Google Chrome Offline Dinosaur game.

Jump Cacti With An LDR And A Pico

September 6, 2024 by 6 Comments

By now, probably everyone is familiar with the “You’re Offline” dinosaur that stars in Google’s T. Rex game. You know — jump cacti, avoid pterodactyls. Repeat until you lose, or, we suppose, make the leaderboard. Well, what if you theoretically couldn’t lose? That’s kind of the idea behind [Bas BotBerg]’s cactus detection-and-avoidance scheme (translated from Dutch).

Like many of us, [Bas] firmly believes that repetitive tasks should be automated, and that includes the controls of the famous T. Rex. Since the cacti are always dark gray and appear along the same plane, it’s easy to register the difference between cacti and screen electronically. In order to accomplish this, [Bas] is using a light-dependent resistor and a pull-up resistor to create a resistance bridge, which is then connected to an analog input pin on a Raspberry Pi Pico.

But [Bas] didn’t do this just to cheat at Offline Dinosaur. Really! It’s for educational purposes, to get people comfortable with embedded processing, sensors, and interfaces between different devices. Check it out in brief action after the break.

Once they get familiar with these concepts, maybe introduce the ESP32 version of Offline Dinosaur.

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Build Yourself A Beautiful Interactive Light Toy

September 5, 2024 by 7 Comments

Sometimes, we build things with LEDs as indicator lamps or to illuminate something important. Sometimes, we build things with LEDs purely to glow and be beautiful. This interactive light toy from [Jens] falls into the latter category.

The build uses a 16×16 addressable LED matrix.  [Jens] then ported some “Bouncy Bubbles” Processing code from Keith Peters to the Arduino Mega, and set it up to display on the matrix. An accelerometer was used to control the bouncing ball animations, while a second Arduino was then tapped to act as a musical synthesizer to add more vibes. The whole kit was then built into a 3D-printed housing with a nice hazy diffuser to give the LEDs a smoother, even look. [Jens] steps through how he got the diffuser just right, including a support structure that made all the difference to the aesthetic of the finished product. Getting diffusion right is key to making a nice LED project, and [Jens] got it very right here.

It’s a nice little art piece that looks kind of relaxing to play with in a dark room. We love a good glowable project here at Hackaday, so if you’ve built your own—don’t hesitate to let us know! Video after the break.

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Build A Super Cheap RC Trainer Plane With Foam

September 5, 2024 by 20 Comments

Once upon a time, RC planes were expensive models that took months to build and big money to equip with electronics. Since the 20th century though, powerful batteries have become cheap, as have servos and radio controllers. Combine them with a bit of old packing material and you can get a little RC trainer up and running for peanuts, as [Samm Sheperd] demonstrates.

[Samm] started referring to this as the “$5 trainer,” though he admits that it will cost more than that if you don’t have some bits and pieces laying around. He demonstrates how to cut cheap foamboard with a hot guitar string, and how to form it into a viable wing. That’s the most crucial part, with the fuselage and tail surfaces relatively simple by comparison. With that complete, it’s as simple as bolting on a motor, some servos, and control horns, and you’re up and running. You can even whip up a landing gear if you’re so inclined! Then, figure out your center of gravity, get it right, and then you’re pretty much ready to fly.

It’s a great primer on how to build a basic RC model, and if you do it right, it should have pretty forgiving handling, too. Plus, it’s so cheap that it should be easy to repair if you crash. Happy modelling! Video after the break.

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It’s Spreadsheets All The Way Down For This 80s Handheld

September 5, 2024 by 9 Comments

Unlike the today’s consumer computer market, the 1980s were the wild west in comparison. There were all kinds of different, incompatible operating systems, hardware, and programs, all competing against one another, and with essentially no networking to tie everything together. Some of these products were incredibly niche as well, only running one program or having a limited use case to keep costs down. Such was the Convergent WorkSlate, a computer that ran only a spreadsheet with any programs also needing to be built into a spreadsheet.

Upon booting the device, the user is presented with a fairly recognizable blank spreadsheet, albeit with a now-dated LCD display (lacking a backlight) and a bespoke keyboard and cursor that wouldn’t have allowed for easy touch typing. The spreadsheet itself is quite usable though, complete with formatting tools and the capability to use formulas like a modern spreadsheet program would. It also hosted a tape deck for audio and data storage, a modem for communicating with other devices, and an optional plotter-style printer. The modem port is how [Old VCR] eventually interfaces with the machine, although as one can imagine is quite a task for a piece of small-batch technology from the 80s like this. After learning how to send and receive information, a small game is programmed into the machine and then a Gopher interface is built to give the device limited Internet connectivity.

The investigation that [Old VCR] goes into on this project to get this obsolete yet unique piece of hardware running and programmed to do other tasks is impressive, and worth taking a look at especially because spreadsheets like this aren’t Turing-complete, leading to a few interesting phenomenon that most of us wouldn’t come across in the modern computing world. Since only around 60,000 units were ever made it’s difficult to come across these machines, but if you want to take a look at the spreadsheet world of the 80s without original hardware you can still run Lotus 1-2-3 natively in Linux today.

Thanks to [Cameron] for the tip!