Smart Toilet Paper Holder Keeps Track Of White Gold

June 26, 2020 by Lewin Day 24 Comments

As we all woke up in 2020 on New Year’s Day, few of us would have predicted how terrible everything would get in just a few short months. Worldwide shortages of toilet paper were just the tip of the iceberg, making everyone more keenly aware of their stocks at home. This was something [thepenguinmaster] decided to take a stab at managing in the cloud. Enter the Smart Toilet Paper Roll.

The device consists of a 3D printed toilet roll holder, outfitted with sensors to track usage of the precious material. A magnetic rotary encoder is used to monitor rotation of the roll, with a LIDAR device used to sense when a user’s hand is in close proximity. Data is trucked to the cloud by an Avnet Azure Sphere MT3620. The link with Azure allows for the automatic generation of graphs and access from anywhere over the Internet.

The project goes to show that just about anything around the house can be monitored over the Internet. We’d love to see the tracker go even further, measuring usage on a per-sheet basis and automatically ordering more when supplies get low. We’ve seen similar work before, too.

Smart Thermometer Can Tell Flu From Cold

June 26, 2020 by Moritz v. Sivers 20 Comments

Before the outbreak of coronavirus, the seasonal flu was one of the most dangerous infectious diseases, but a lot of people have trouble telling the difference between a flu and a cold by their symptoms alone. This gave [M. Bindhammer] the idea to design a smart thermometer that can distinguish between flu and cold.

Automated medical diagnostics is certainly an important technology of the future. [M. Bindhammer]’s project, named F°LUEX, is the second version of his iF°EVE thermometer. After taking the body temperature it asks the patient a set of questions about his symptoms and then calculates the probability of whether it is more likely to be a flu or a cold. [M. Bindhammer] uses a method commonly used in medical diagnostics based on Bayesian statistics which assigns a probability score to both hypotheses. It takes into account how often a certain symptom occurs when you have a common cold or flu as well as the overall probability of catching one or the other.

The hardware of the project is based on a custom PCB that includes a medical-grade MLX90614 infrared thermometer with an accuracy of ±0.2˚C around the human body temperature. The sensor is being read out by a Teensy 3.2 and information is displayed on a small OLED screen. Everything is housed in a 3D printed enclosure that received a nice finishing by painting with primer and acrylic spray paint. Unfortunately, [M. Bindhammer] project also got delayed by the corona crisis as his order for the temperature sensor got canceled due to the current high demand. But that does make us wonder how useful this could be to discriminate between cold, flu, and COVID-19.

An IR thermometer is something useful to have around not only for medical applications and can also be built without a custom PCB and minimal parts.

Ask Hackaday: What Can Be Done With Your Bootlooping Blu-Ray?

June 26, 2020 by Lewin Day 159 Comments

Last Friday, thousands of owners of Samsung Blu Ray players found that their home entertainment devices would no longer boot up. While devices getting stuck in a power-cycling loop is not uncommon, this case stands out as it affected a huge range of devices all at the same time. Samsung’s support forum paints a bleak picture, with one thread on the issue stretching to 177 pages in just a week.

So what is going on, and what can be done to fix the problem? There’s a lot of conflicting information on that. Some people’s gear has started working again, others have not and there are reports of customers being told to seek in-person repair service. Let’s dive in with some wild speculation on the problem and circle back by commiserating about the woes of web-connected appliances.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: What Can Be Done With Your Bootlooping Blu-Ray?” →

Hackaday Podcast 073: Betrayal By Clipboard, Scratching 4K, Flaming Solder Joints, And Electric Paper

June 26, 2020 by Mike Szczys No comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams review a great week in the hacking world. There’s an incredible 4k projector build that started from a broken cellphone, a hand-cranked player (MIDI) piano, and a woeful story of clipboard vulnerabilities found in numerous browsers and browser-based apps. Plus you’ll love the field-ready solder splice that works like a strike-on box match (reminiscent of using thermite to weld railroad rail) and we spend some time marveling at the problem of finding power cuts on massive grid systems.

Take a look at 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 (60 MB or so.)

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 073: Betrayal By Clipboard, Scratching 4K, Flaming Solder Joints, And Electric Paper” →

Get The Party Started With A Mesh WiFi Light Show

June 26, 2020 by Sven Gregori 1 Comment

Wildly blinking LEDs may not be the ideal lighting for the average office environment, but they’ll surely spice up any party. And since a party without music is just a meeting, having both synced up is a great way to set the mood. Sure, you could simply roll out your standard LED strip instead, but that gets a bit boring, and also a bit tricky if you want to light up several places the same way. [Gerrit] might have built the perfect solution though, with his (mu)sic (R)eactive (Li)ghts, or muRLi, which are a set of individual lights that synchronize a programmable pattern over WiFi.

The system consists of muRLi itself as the base station that defines and sends the light pattern through WebSockets, and several muRLi Nodes that house a set of WS2812B LEDs to receive and display it. Both are built around a Wemos D1 Mini configured to set up a WiFi mesh network, and depending what’s in reach, the nodes connect either to the base station or other nodes, giving the system definitely enough reach for any location size. The music is picked up by a MAX4466-amplified microphone inside the base station — adding some more flexibility to positioning the system — and analyzed for volume and audio spectrum, which is also shown on an OLED.

The best part however is how the light patterns are programmed. Instead of hard-coding it into the firmware, [Gerrit] went for a modular approach with little ROM cartridges to plug into the muRLi base station. The cartridge itself contains just an I2C EEPROM, storing JavaScript code that is interpreted by the firmware using mJS. The scripts have access to the analyzed audio data and amount of LEDs within the network, and can dynamically generate the patterns as needed that way. Everything is neatly housed in 3D-printed enclosures, with all the design and source files available on the project’s GitHub page — but see for yourself in the video after the break.

If you don’t care about the wireless part but enjoy light synced up with music, have a look at a plain MIDI solution for that. As for [Gerrit], we’re definitely looking forward to seeing his next endeavor one day, since we also enjoyed his last one.

Continue reading “Get The Party Started With A Mesh WiFi Light Show” →

This Week In Security: Bitdefender, Ripple20, Starbucks, And Pwned Passwords

June 26, 2020 by Jonathan Bennett 13 Comments

[Wladimir Palant] seems to be on a one man crusade against security problems in security software. The name may not be immediately recognizable, but among his other infamies is originating Adblock Plus, which we have a love-hate relationship with. (Look, surf the net with an adblocker, but disable it for sites you trust and want to support, like HaD).

This week, he announced a rather serious flaw in the Bitdefender. The disclosure starts off with high praise for the Bitdefender: “security-wise Bitdefender Antivirus is one of the best antivirus products I’ve seen so far….” Even with that said, the vulnerability he found is a serious one. A malicious website can trigger the execution of arbitrary applications. The problem was fixed in an update released on the 22nd.

The vulnerability is interesting. First, Bitdefender uses an API that was added to web browsers specifically to enable security software to work without performing man-in-the-middle decryption of HTTPS connections. When a problem is detected, Bitdefender replaces the potentially malicious page with it’s own error message.

Because of the way this is implemented, the browser sees this error message as being the legitimate contents of the requested site. Were this a static page, it wouldn’t be a problem. However, Bitdefender provides an option to load the requested page anyway, and does this by embedding tokens in that error page. When a user pushes the button to load the page, Bitdefender sees the matching tokens in the outgoing request, and allows the page. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Bitdefender, Ripple20, Starbucks, And Pwned Passwords” →

Double The RAM Of A Dreamcast Console For A Cool 32 MB

June 26, 2020 by Jenny List 32 Comments

The Sega Dreamcast is the forgotten orphan of the console wars, an extremely capable machine never able to escape the shadow of its PlayStation rivals and because it marked the end of Sega’s console line, never redeemed in reputation by a more popular successor. It retains a significant following a couple of decades after its heyday though, and still sees hardware hacks such as [Tsowell]’s doubling of its available RAM to 32 MB.

The console shipped with 16 MB of memory in two banks, but while the SH4 processor can address twice that figure the designers at Sega never brought the required address line out from under the BGA. So it should be impossible to give it a memory expansion, but when hardware hackers are at work nothing should be ruled out. The hack involves manipulation of the bank switching addressing, and took several careful readings for us to fully understand. The new RAM chips have two address lines tied together and wired to another, a job for some fine but ultimately not impossible soldering. To take advantage of the extra RAM there are a set of patched BIOS images.

So, if you either have a spare Dreamcast you care little enough about to risk, or you consider your console hacking skills to be so advanced that it will be a piece of cake, you can now double the platform’s RAM. Extra points if you also make it portable.

Thanks [John Little] for the tip.

Header: Evan-Amos / CC BY-SA 3.0