Supplyframe Design Lab Opens Its Doors

June 23, 2016 by 22 Comments

Today marks the opening of the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena, California. The Design Lab bills itself as the “leading edge creative center built to foster new ideas in technology and design”. Supplyframe had the vision to acquire Hackaday a few years ago, launched the Hackaday.io Community site which now has more than 150,000 members, and established The Hackaday Prize to spark engineering projects that benefit humanity. Pay attention to the Design Lab; looking back on this day you’re going to be able to say that you remember when it all started.

Othermills lined up and ready to go
SeeMeCNC Rostock Max V2 and Deezmaker Bukito 3D Printers
Shopbot, Tormach, and Woodworking Tools

The equipment enshrined in the new space is spectacular. Name your material, and there are tools to work with it. Working with electronics? Mill your prototypes on a number of OtherMills available. Custom enclosure? Take your pick of milling it on the Tormach, PolyJet printing it on the Statasys, or FDM printing with a number of different high-end 3D printers. Need design software and beefy boxes to run it on? They have that too. Working in wood? A shopbot awaits you, as do traditional tools like a tablesaw, routers, sanders, etc. It’s a wonderland for making the imaginable real. If there ever was a time to quit your job and spend three months launching that dream product, this is it. The Design Lab has a residency program.

Supplyframe is all about enabling hardware creation. This is what sites like Parts.io and Findchips.com do: provide powerful tools for hardware engineers to better use their design skills. Founding a space like the Design Lab is a natural extension of this. Providing a work area, mentorships, and funding residencies breaks down the barriers that can prevent new hardware seeing the light of day. The Design Lab solves the issues of tools, materials, and hands-on experience that plague many a new hardware company.

Residencies will start on July 1st. Each runs for three months in which residents have unfettered access to the space and its tools, as well as financial support of $2000 per month. Each resident will self-identify into the product-track (you’re on your way to market with new hardware) or the art-track (you have a calling for an ambitious project and need to make it a reality). So far the Design Lab page lists three residents; a network of low-cost air quality sensors called Scintilla, a music synthesizer based around Teensy 3 called NanoEgg, and a mixed-reality public arts initiative called Perceptoscope. The Design Lab is still accepting applications for new residencies this summer and beyond — one of these residencies will also be offered to the Grand Prize winner of the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

16 Megapixel Outdoor Security Camera On The Cheap

May 23, 2016 by 61 Comments

Looking for a high quality security camera? Despite digital cameras continually getting better, and less expensive, security cameras haven’t seemed to follow the same path. So? Better make your own.

[donothingloop] was looking for an outdoor, network capable camera of high resolution. He Some people might have thought about using the Raspberry Pi camera module, but let’s be honest — it’s not great. Instead, he found a pair of used Nikon Coolpix L31 cameras, and he only paid $15 for the both of them.

Now the Nikon Coolpix L31 isn’t exactly the sports edition, so to make this an outdoor security camera, it’s going to need an enclosure. An outdoor halogen work lamp enclosure fit the bill perfectly. It’s rugged, already has the glass built into it, and at $12 the cost of this project wasn’t going anywhere!

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YAGDO – Yet Another Garage Door Opener

March 25, 2016 by 19 Comments

It seems like every few months we cover another garage door opener, and the concept is quickly becoming the “Hello World” of DIY home automation. In this installment, reader [ray] made his own garage door opener and chose the ESP8266 as the wireless interface of choice, but spiced the application up with an ultrasonic sensor that detects whether the car is in the garage and a web app that shows history, plus integration with Blynk for remote access. For posterity, he made the project open source as well.

The video is well produced with lots of details and instructions, and the circuit board and assembly are refined and clean. It may be a “Hello World”, but it’s done right.

Some of the other garage door hacks we’ve covered in the last year include the fingerprint scanner opener, the IM-ME opener, the motion-based security opener, the cat-enabled opener, the OpenCV Pi opener, and a Bluetooth Low Energy opener.

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Aquarium Light Mimics The Outdoor Sky

March 24, 2016 by 5 Comments

[OlegZero] has some pet fish in his basement, and decided to work on a little project for them — an aquarium light that mimics the outdoors. He calls it the FishLight project.

His goal was to create a light panel that could imitate the color of the outdoor sky (approximately) using an RGB LED strip. During normal operation, the LEDs cycle through the colors of day, from dusk to dawn using an ATmega88 microcontroller. After his girlfriend saw what it could do, she quickly came up with the idea to add a cityscape to the background to turn it into a piece of attractive decor for their home.

Still fail to see the point of going to this much effort for a few fish? Well, besides it turning into a rather nice artistic light for their basement, the concept can be applied to other animals as well. Like encouraging chickens to produce more eggs by making the days “longer” with artificial light. As it turns out chickens produce less eggs when the days get shorter — an easy fix with something like this!

Fingerprint Garage Door Won’t Open Every Time A Neighbor Microwaves A Burrito

March 16, 2016 by 18 Comments

With three kids, including himself, [Dave] faced the very real likelihood of someone absent-mindedly leaving the garage door open and being robbed blind. Rather than installing some plebeian solution, he compiled a feature list. And what a feature list it is!

The garage door needed to notify him of its status with strategically placed LEDs around the house, and give him full control on his devices. He wanted to open and close it using his existing key-code entry system. Lastly, it would be extra-cool if he could add some biometrics to it; in this case, a fingerprint sensor.

The core hardware is the staple Arduino augmented with a fingerprint module, a touch screen, some vitamins, and a WiFi break-out. He also worked up some casings in tinkercad: one for the indoor hardware, another with a flip cover for the outdoor fingerprint scanner.

We think [Dave] has accomplished what he set out to. We can just picture the would-be-thief staring at the finger print scanner and moving their operation one house over where the world is simpler. Video after the break.

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Robotic Pets Test An Automatic Pet Door

March 11, 2016 by 9 Comments

Lots of people get a pet and then hack solutions that help them care for their new friend, like an automatic door to provide access to the great outdoors. Then again, some people build the pet door first and then build the pets to test it.

It’s actually not quite as weird as it sounds. [Amir Avni] and his wife attended a recent GeekCon and entered the GeekCon Pets event. GeekCon is a cooperative rather than competitive hackathon that encourages useless builds as a means to foster community and to just have some fun. [Amir] and his wife wanted to build a full-featured automatic pet door, and succeeded – with NFC and an ESP8266, the stepper-powered door worked exactly as planned. But without any actual animal companions to test the system, they had to hack up a few volunteers. They came up with a 3D-printed dog and cat perched atop wireless cars, and with NFC tags dangling from their collars, the door was able to differentiate between the wandering ersatz animals. The video below the break shows the adorable plastic pals in action.

It’s clear from all the pet doors and automatic waterers and feeders we’ve seen that hackers love their pets, but we’re pretty sure this is the first time the pet itself was replaced by a robot. That’s fine for the test environment, but we’d recommend the real thing for production.

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Password Extraction Via Front Doorbell

February 28, 2016 by 52 Comments

Not a day goes by without another IoT security hack. If you’re wondering why you don’t want your front doorbell connected to the Internet, this hack should convince you.

The hack is unfathomably stupid. You press the button on the back of the unit that pairs the doorbell with your home WiFi network, and it transmits the password in the clear. Sigh. It’s since been fixed, and we suppose that’s a good thing, but we can’t resist thinking for a moment about an alternative implementation.

Imagine, like all previous non-IoT wireless doorbells, that the doorbell transmitted a not-very coded signal over an open frequency like 433 MHz to a receiver inside your home. Do the same with the video stream. Now the receiver can be connected to the Internet, and can be significantly more secure because it’s behind your locked front door. The attack surface presented to the outside world by the doorbell itself is small, and limited to faking a doorbell press or showing you pictures you don’t want to see. Yawn.

But because the outside doorbell unit could be connected to a network, it was. Now the attack surface extends into your home’s network, and if you’re like most people, the WiFi router was your only real defense.

Now we love the IoT, in principle. There are tons of interesting applications that need the sort of bandwidth or remote availability that the Internet provides. We’re just not convinced yet that a doorbell, or a fridge for that matter, meet the criteria. But it does add a hundred bucks to the price tag, so that’s good, right? What do you think? When does the risk of IoT justify the reward?

Thanks [Dielectric] for the tip!