Detecting Surveillance Cameras With The ESP32

September 26, 2025 by 34 Comments

These days, surveillance cameras are all around us, and they’re smarter than ever. In particular, many of them are running advanced algorithms to recognize faces and scan license plates, compiling ever-greater databases on the movements and lives of individuals. Flock You is a project that aims to, at the very least, catalogue this part of the surveillance state, by detecting these cameras out in the wild.

The system is most specifically set up to detect surveillance cameras from Flock Safety, though it’s worth noting a wide range of companies produce plate-reading cameras and associated surveillance systems these days. The device uses an ESP32 microcontroller to detect these devices, relying on the in-built wireless hardware to do the job. The project can be built on a Oui-Spy device from Colonel Panic, or just by using a standard Xiao ESP32 S3 if so desired. By looking at Wi-Fi probe requests and beacon frames, as well as Bluetooth advertisements, it’s possible for the device to pick up telltale transmissions from a range of these cameras, with various pattern-matching techniques and MAC addresses used to filter results in this regard. When the device finds a camera, it sounds a buzzer notifying the user of this fact.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in just how prevalent plate-reading cameras really are, you might also find deflock.me interesting. It’s a map of ALPR camera locations all over the world,  and you can submit your own findings if so desired. The techniques used by in the Flock You project are based on learnings from the DeFlock project. Meanwhile, if you want to join the surveillance state on your own terms, you can always build your own license plate reader instead!

[Thanks to Eric for the tip!]

Robot Bartender Is The Life Of The Party

September 26, 2025 by 9 Comments

As the old saying goes, when the only tool you have is a 6 DOF industrial robotic arm, every problem looks like an opportunity to make it serve up adult beverages. [benkokes] found himself in this familiar predicament and did what any of us would do, but his process wasn’t without a few party fouls as well as a few head-scratchers.

One of the common problems that people who suddenly find themselves with an old industrial robot have is that there’s usually no documentation or instructions. This was true here with the added hiccup of the robot’s UI being set to Chinese. Luckily no one had changed the root password, and eventually he was able to get the robot up and working.

Getting it to make drinks was a different matter altogether. [benkokes] needed a custom tool to hold the cup as well as shake it, and 3D printed a claw-style end effector with a lid. Out of his multi-colored pack of party cups, however, the orange cups were different enough in dimension to cause problems for the shaking lid which was discovered when the robot spilled a drink all over the table.

Eventually, though, the robot was successfully serving drinks at a party. One of [benkokes]’s friends happened to be a puppet maker and was able to outfit it with a tailored tuxedo for the party as well, and he also programmed it to dance in between serving drinks, completing the AI revolution we have all been hoping for. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a common project for people who suddenly come to posses a large general-purpose industrial robot, while others build robots specifically for this task alone.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 339: The Vape Episode, A Flying DeLorean, And DIY Science

September 26, 2025 by 7 Comments

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with an update on the rapidly approaching 2025 Supercon in Pasadena, California. From there they’ll talk about the surprisingly high-tech world of vapes, a flying DeLorean several years in the making, non-contact pulse monitoring, and the potential of backyard radio telescopes to do real astronomy. You’ll hear about a dodecahedron speaker, a page turning peripheral, and 3D printed tools for unfolding boxes. They’ll wrap things up by taking a look at the latest generation of wearable smart glasses, and wonder if putting a bank of batteries in your home is really with the hassle.

Check out 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 in DRM-free MP3.

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Set Phone To… Hyperspectral

September 26, 2025 by 24 Comments

While our eyes are miraculous little devices, they aren’t very sensitive outside of the normal old red, green, and blue spectra. The camera in your phone is far more sensitive, and scientists want to use those sensors in place of expensive hyperspectral ones. Researchers at Purdue have a cunning plan: use a calibration card.

The idea is to take a snap of the special card and use it to understand the camera’s exact response to different colors in the current lighting conditions. Once calibrated to the card, they can detect differences as small as 1.6 nanometers in light wavelengths. That’s on par with commercial hyperspectral sensors, according to the post.

You may wonder why you would care. Sensors like this are useful for medical diagnostic equipment, analysis of artwork, monitoring air quality, and more. Apparently, high-end whisky has a distinctive color profile, so you can now use your phone to tell if you are getting the cheap stuff or not.

We also imagine you might find a use for this in phone-based spectrometers. There is plenty to see in the hyperspectral world.

This Week In Security: Randomness Is Hard, SNMP Shouldn’t Be Public, And GitHub Malware Delivery

September 26, 2025 by 3 Comments

Randomness is hard. To be precise, without dedicated hardware, randomness is impossible for a computer. This is actually important to keep in mind when writing software. When there’s not hardware providing true randomness, most rnd implementations use a seed value and a pseudo random number generator (PRNG). A PRNG is a function that takes a seed value, and turns it into a seemingly random value, and also produces a new seed for the next time a random value is needed. This could be as simple as a SHA256 sum, where the hash output is split to become the next seed and the random value.

The PRNG approach does still have a challenge. Where does the initial seed come from? There are a few common, if flawed, approaches, and one of the most common is to use the system clock. It’s not a bulletproof solution, but using the microsecond counter since the last system boot is often good enough, because there are a lot of them to choose from — the entropy is high. With that brief background in mind, let’s talk about what happens in VBScript. The Randomize call is used to seed that initial value, but Randomize has some quirks.

The first is a great feature: calling Randomize a second time with the same seed doesn’t reset the PRNG engine back to the same initial state. And second, when called without a value, Randomize uses the number of system ticks since midnight as the PRNG seed. There are 64 ticks per second, giving five-and-a-half million possible seeds, or 22 bits of entropy. This isn’t great on its own, but Randomize internally typecasts that number of ticks into a narrower value, with a maximum possible of time-based seeds set at 65,536, which is a lot easier to brute-force.

We don’t know the exact application where the researchers at Doyensec found VBScript generating secure tokens, but in their Proof of Concept (PoC) test run, the generated token could be found in four guesses. It’s a terrible security fail for basically any use, and it’s a deceptively easy mistake to make.

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Steamboat Willie Still Tests Copyright

September 26, 2025 by 18 Comments

If you know anything about Mickey Mouse, you’ll be able to tell us that his first outing was in 1928’s Steamboat Willie — an animated short that sees our hero as the hapless pilot of a riverboat battling an assortment of animals and his captain. It entered the public domain last year, meaning that it and the 1928 incarnation of Mickey are now free of any copyright obligation to the media giant.

There’s an interesting development from Florida on that front though as it seems Disney may have been testing this through legal means, and now a law firm wants to see them in court over their proposed use of the film in an advert.

Of course here at Hackaday we don’t cover the dry subject of Florida legal news as a rule, but we are interested in the world of copyright as it applies to many other things that do come under our eye. As we understand it the law firm is requesting the judge assert their protection from trademark claims over the use of Disney’s 1928 Willie, given that there have been claims from the entertainment giant against others doing the same thing.

It’s hardly surprising that a large corporation might seek to use legal muscle and trademark law to de facto extend the term of Mickey’s protection beyond the defined copyright expiration date, so for once it’s refreshing to see them come up against someone unafraid of a courtroom.

We hope that common sense will prevail, and this undermining of a cherished right (not to mention prior case law) is not allowed to succeed. Meanwhile if you’d like a 1928 Mickey that Disney have shied away from coming after, look no further than the EFF.

A Ham-Adjacent Portable Radio Repeater

September 26, 2025 by 45 Comments

Although ham radio offers a wide array of bands to transmit on, not to mention plenty of modes to communicate with, not everyone wants or needs to use all of this capability. For those needing simple two-way communication services like FRS or GMRS are available (in North America) with much less stringent licensing requirements, and GMRS even allows repeaters to be used to extend their range beyond the typical mile or so. [Dave] aka [N8DAV] has built an off-grid simplex repeater that can travel around with him wherever he goes.

The repeater itself is based on a pre-built simplex repeater module, which means that it has to record an incoming signal and then play it back on the same frequency. Compared to a split frequency repeater which uses different frequencies for transmit and receive this can be a bit cumbersome but simplifies the design and the use. A Baofeng UV-5R is used to perform the actual radio duties paired to a 40 watt amplifier to extend the range as much as possible. It’s all packed into a Pelican-like case and set up with a large battery that could power it for a number of days, making it useful for camping, rescue, or other off-grid activities.

For those wondering why [Dave] is using his ham call sign instead of his GMRS one, all of the equipment in this build will work in either the UHF ham bands or the channels reserved for GMRS with minor adjustments, so it’s perfectly possible to use the setup for one’s preferred license. And, for those in other parts of the world without GMRS there’s a similar class of radio called UHF CB which might be able to support similar builds, but be sure to check your local jurisdiction’s laws before hooking something like this up. For an even longer-range radio repeater using similar equipment we’d recommend looking to the skies.

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