Computers! They’re in everything these days. Everything from thermostats to fridges and even window blinds are now on the Internet, and that makes them all ripe for hacking.
Electric vehicle chargers are becoming a part of regular life. They too are connected devices, and thus pose a security risk if not designed and maintained properly. As with so many other devices on the Internet of Things, the truth is anything but.
Continue reading “EV Chargers Could Be A Serious Target For Hackers”
It is an annoyance for some members of our community, that it has become almost impossible to buy a TV that’s not a so-called “smart” TV. These units contain a computer as well as the display, and it boots into a locked-down OS with a user interface and a load of streaming apps. Can anything be done with them other than what their manufacturers intended? [Nina Kalinina] has managed it, taking the mainboard from a discarded LCD TV and liberating the ARM Linux board within.
On the board are all the inputs you’d expect from a TV, along with Ethernet, and a couple of extra USB ports hidden in the WiFi interface. There’s a UART available on the SCART connector, and accessing the U-boot menu is achieved by the unusual means of sending a character to the infrared port using a Palm Pilot. Surprisingly the device tree in the Flash was editable, so with the Linux OS accessed, the board was revealed as having a dual-core Novatek SoC.
This is reminiscent of the days when the new hotness was dragging a Linux box out of a home router, and just as those were quickly eclipsed by inexpensive boards such as the Raspberry Pi, so might these TV boards meet the same fate. If, however, they can be made to drive a screen with something more useful than the TV interface then that might change, as who wouldn’t want to make an old smart TV a bit more useful?
Last time, I’ve explained everything you could want to know if you wanted to put an M.2 socket onto your board. Today, let’s build M.2 cards! There’s a myriad of M.2 sockets out there that are just asking for a special card to be inserted into it, and perhaps, it’s going to be your creation that fits.
Laptops and other x86 mainboards often come with M.2 slots. Do you have a free B-key slot? You can put a RP2040 and bunch of sensors on a B-key PCB as an experimental platform carried safely inside your laptop. Would you like to do some more advanced FPGA experiments? Here’s a miniscule FPGA board that fits inside your laptop and lets you play with PCIe on this same laptop – the entire setup having a super low footprint. Are you looking for an extra PCIe link because you’re reusing your laptop as a home server? Again, your WiFi slot will provide you with that. Want to get some PCIe out of a SteamDeck? Building a M-key 2230 card seems to be your only hope! Continue reading “M.2 For Hackers – Cards”
![Infrastructure diagram of [Stefan]'s network at the end of his fiber optics journey](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/hadimg_homefiber_feat.png?w=600&h=450)
These days, if you wire your house with anything less than gigabit, you might end up throttling your Internet connection. If you wired things up using two pairs per device back in 100BASE-T days, however, you’ll want to redo your cabling before you buy new switches. Now, some of us are already starting to equip ourselves with 2.5G hardware — which may require new cabling once again. Would you like to opt out of the Ethernet cabling upgrade rat race, at least for a while? Do like [Stefan Schüller] did, and use fiber optics for your home networking needs!
[Stefan] walks you through everything you’d need to know if you ever choose to look into fiber for your networking needs, and explains the design decisions he’s made — from splicing fiber optics himself, to building a PC to do routing instead of getting a hardware Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) equipped router. He also describes pitfalls, like SFP modules requiring reconfiguration to work with different router brands, and having to buy a fiber splicer with an eye-watering pricetag.
In the end, he shows a cost breakdown, and says he’s quite happy with the upgrade. While the costs might seem prohibitive compared to running Ethernet, upgrading to fiber will have your equipment function at top speed whenever you need it – who knows, perhaps in a few years time, 2.5G will no longer suffice for new advancements in home technology needs, and we’ll see more SFP modules in hackers’ hands. After all, modern TVs already use fiber optics for video data transfer.
Continue reading “Say No To Obsolescence, Wire Up Your House With Fiber”
When it comes to networking these days, the vast majority of our devices are connected wirelessly. Beyond that, we’re all familiar with the Cat 5 and Cat 6 cables that form the high-capacity Ethernet networks in our homes, schools, and offices.
It’s only if you go back to the very dawn of Ethernet that coaxial cables are relevant… right? Wrong! MoCA networking is all about coaxial cables, designed to hook up devices over cable TV infrastructure!
Continue reading “MoCA Networking Is A Niche Solution For Coax Lovers”
A decade ago, I was learning Linux through building projects for my own needs. One of the projects was a DIY CCTV system based on a Linux box – specifically, a user-friendly all-in-one package for someone willing to pay for it. I stumbled upon Zoneminder, and those in the know, already can tell what happened – I’ll put it this way, I spent days trying to make it work, and my Linux skills at the time were not nearly enough. Cool software like Motion was available back then, but I wasn’t up to the task of rolling an entire system around it. That said, it wouldn’t be impossible, now, would it?
Five years later, I joined a hackerspace, and eventually found out that its CCTV cameras, while being quite visually prominent, stopped functioning a long time ago. At that point, I was in a position to do something about it, and I built an entire CCTV network around a software package called MotionEye. There’s a lot of value in having working CCTV cameras at a hackerspace – not only does a functioning system solve the “who made the mess that nobody admits to” problem, over the years it also helped us with things like locating safety interlock keys to a lasercutter that were removed during a reorganization, with their temporary location promptly forgotten.
Being able to use MotionEye to quickly create security cameras became quite handy very soon – when I needed it, I could make a simple camera to monitor my bicycle, verify that my neighbours didn’t forget to feed my pets as promised while I was away, and in a certain situation, I could even ensure mine and others’ physical safety with its help. How do you build a useful always-recording camera network in your house, hackerspace or other property? Here’s a simple and powerful software package I’d like to show you today, and it’s called MotionEye.
Continue reading “Make Your Pi Moonlight As A Security Camera”
Building an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) is always a challenge, and making it waterproof is often a major hurdle. [Filip Buława] and [Piotr Domanowski] have spent four years and 14 prototypes iterating to create the CPS 5, a 3D printed ROV that can potentially reach a depth of 85 m.
FDM 3D prints are notoriously difficult to waterproof, thanks to all the microscopic holes between the layers. There are ways to mitigate this, but they all have limits. Instead of trying to make the printed exterior of the CPS 5 waterproof, the electronics and camera are housed in a pair of sealed acrylic tubes. The end caps are still 3D printed, but are effectively just thin-walled containers filled with epoxy resin. Passages for wiring are also sealed with epoxy, but [Filip] and [Piotr] learned the hard way that insulated wire can also act as a tube for water to ingress. They solved the problem by adding an open solder joint for each wire in the epoxy-filled passages.
For propulsion, attitude, and depth control, the CPS 5 has five brushless drone motors with 3D printed propellers, which are inherently unaffected by water as long as you seal the connectors. The control electronics consist of a PixHawk flight controller and a Raspberry Pi 4 for handling communication and the video stream to a laptop. An IMU and water pressure sensor also enable auto-leveling and depth hold underwater. Like most ROVs, it uses a tether for communication, which in this case is an Ethernet cable with waterproof connectors.
Acrylic tubing is a popular electronics container for ROVs, as we’ve seen with an RC Subnautica sub, LEGO submarine, and the Hackaday Prize-winning Underwater Glider.
Continue reading “3D Printed ROV Is The Result Of Many Lessons Learned”
