The Most Impractical Bluetooth Speaker Of 2016

October 24, 2016 by 16 Comments

Ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of usable surface area in your house? Ever wish that your Bluetooth speaker was fluffier? Do you ever long for a future in which all your music is accompanied by perfectly timed light flashes. Is the gentle passing of a cumulus cloud across a bright blue sky the only thing that will keep the voices at bay? We might have the speaker for you.

Joking aside the effect is pretty cool. It’s a standard levitation doohickey at it core. While we don’t know what the inside looks like exactly, we can take our guesses. The cloud has some magnets and a coil for receiving power. Inside is a hacked apart Bluetooth speaker, a microcontroller, and some LEDs. It’s all surrounded by fluffy white pillow stuffing and hot glue.

The base has a power supply and a rechargeable battery. We’re not sure why, we suppose it’s a pain to reset the floaty cloud. It’s certainly not portable. If you’d like one, it can probably be replicated with a few challenging weekends of work. The other option is to wait, as they claim to be pursuing a commercial something or another. Which these days means they’re gonna file for a patent on something everyone and their grandmother has done and then sell it as a six thousand dollar desk ornament. Still! Pretty cool. Video after the break.

Continue reading “The Most Impractical Bluetooth Speaker Of 2016” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Open Bluetooth Switch Interface

October 12, 2016 by 3 Comments

The theme of the last Hackaday Prize challenge was Assistive Technologies, and there is perhaps no assistive technology as desperately needed as a device to help people who can’t use common input devices. Using a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen can be hard, but this Hackaday Prize project turns all these problems into a simple Bluetooth-enabled switch.

The BOSI – the Bluetooth Open Source Switch Interface – is, at its heart, just a big Bluetooth button inside a 3D-printed enclosure designed in Solidworks. These enclosures house a button connected to an Adafruit Bluefruit EZ-Key. Add a battery and a charging circuit, and you have a button that can be pressed by anyone, that connects to any device, and can do anything.

The real trick to a system like this is the software stack, and for this, BOSI can be used with iOS and OS X using the Switch Control interface. Android works, too, and the entire device is exceptionally usable for anyone that can’t use a normal input device. A great entry for the Hackaday Prize.

The HackadayPrize2016 is Sponsored by:

Web Bluetooth: The New Hotness And Its Dangers

September 23, 2016 by 29 Comments

Google’s most recent Chrome browser, version 53, includes trial support for Web Bluetooth, and it’s like the Wild West! JavaScript code, served to your browser, can now connect directly to your Bluetooth LE (BTLE) devices, with a whole bunch of caveats that we’ll make clear below.

On the one hand, this is awesome functionality. The browser is the most ubiquitous cross-platform operating system that the world has ever seen. You can serve a website to users running Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, or MacOS and run code on their machines without having to know if it’s a cellphone, a desktop, or a virtual machine in the Matrix. Combining this ubiquity with the ability to control Bluetooth devices is going to be fun. It’s a missing piece of the IoT puzzle.

On the other hand, it’s a security nightmare. It’s bad enough when malicious websites can extract information from files that reside on your computer, but when they connect directly to your lightbulbs, your FitBits, or your BTLE-enhanced pacemaker, it opens up new possibilities for mischief. The good news is that the developers of Web Bluetooth seem to be aware of the risks and are intent on minimizing them, but there are still real concerns. How does security come out in the balance? Read on.

Continue reading “Web Bluetooth: The New Hotness And Its Dangers” →

Panel Meter-To-Bluetooth Hack Hijacks The Display Segments

September 21, 2016 by 23 Comments

There are a proliferation of cheap digital meter modules available online for pocket money prices. Current, voltage, frequency, or combinations thereof can all be yours for just a few dollars and a wait for shipping. Unfortunately though these meters are all self-contained units. They do not have a serial port or other interface through which you can log their readings.

This failing was not an obstacle for [Scott Harden], though. He simply added a Bluetooth interface to his combined voltage and current meter module by using an ATmega328 microcontroller to capture the signals sent to the module’s display LEDs and interpret them into readings for his Bluetooth module. He details the process of reverse engineering the meter, and his build. The result is an intriguing mess of wires with a DIP ATmega hanging on their ends. But it performs the task requested of it admirably and when mounted in a project box you would not know what lurks within.

He has made his code for the project available in his GitHub repository, we can see that this could be a valuable technique for use with other similar displays. In the video below the break he gives us a full run-down, as if his comprehensive write-up was not enough.

Continue reading “Panel Meter-To-Bluetooth Hack Hijacks The Display Segments” →

Hacking A Dollar Store Bluetooth Device

September 14, 2016 by 62 Comments

Hardware hackers are always looking for devices to tear apart and scavenge from. It’s hardly a secret that purchasing components individually is significantly more expensive than the minuscule cost per unit that goes along with mass manufacturing. Bluetooth devices are no exception. Sure, they’re not exactly a luxury purchase anymore, but they’re still not dirt cheap either.

Luckily for [Troy Denton], it seems dollar stores have started carrying a Bluetooth camera shutter for just a few dollars (it was three bucks, perhaps the dollar store actually means divisible-by). The device is designed to pair with a smart phone, and has two buttons allowing you to control the camera from afar. The fact that it works at all at that price is a small miracle, but the device also has potential for hacking that adds to its appeal. Continue reading “Hacking A Dollar Store Bluetooth Device” →

Convert Any USB Keyboard To Bluetooth

September 4, 2016 by 40 Comments

[DastardlyLabs] saw a video about converting a PS/2 keyboard to Bluetooth and realized he didn’t have any PS/2 keyboards anymore. So he pulled the same trick with a USB keyboard. Along the way, he made three videos explaining how it all works.

The project uses a stock DuinoFun USB mini host shield with a modification to allow it to work on 5V. An Arduino mini pro provides the brains. A FT-232 USB to serial board is used to program the Arduino. A standard Bluetooth module has to have HID firmware installed. [Dastardly] makes a homemade daughterboard–er, shield–to connect it to the Arduino.

The result is a nice little sandwich with a USB plug, a Bluetooth antenna, and some pins for reprogramming if necessary. Resist the urge to solder the Bluetooth board in–since it talks on the same port as the Arduino uses for programming, you’ll have to remove it before uploading new code.

If you need help reprogramming the HC-05 Bluetooth module, we’ve covered that before. This project drew inspiration from [Evan’s] similar project for PS/2 keyboards.

Continue reading “Convert Any USB Keyboard To Bluetooth” →

Bluetooth HID Gamepad And HC-05 Serial Hack

August 10, 2016 by 20 Comments

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Don’t bother us with stupid questions, they both co-evolved into the forms that we now serve up in tasty sandwiches or omelets, respectively. “Which came first, the HC-05 serial-flash-hack, or the wireless Bluetooth Gamepad?” Our guess is that [mitxela] wanted to play around with the dirt-cheap Bluetooth modules, and that building the wireless controller was an afterthought. But for that, it’s a well-done afterthought! (Video below the break.)

It all starts with the HC-05 Bluetooth module, which is meant to transfer serial data, but which can be converted into a general-purpose device costing ten times as much with a simple Flash ROM replacement. The usual way around this requires bit-banging over a parallel port, but hackers have worked out a way to do the same thing in bit-bang mode using a normal USB/Serial adapter. The first part of [mitxela]’s post describes this odyssey.

Continue reading “Bluetooth HID Gamepad And HC-05 Serial Hack” →