The PewPew Console Is Coming To EuroPython 2019

June 21, 2019 by 6 Comments

EuroPython is a community-run developer conference, which began back in Belgium in 2002. In 2019, it’s happening in Basel, Switzerland from July 8 to 14, and there’s a special surprise in store for attendees this year. Conference attendees with be provided with a PewPew console for their hacking pleasure!

An earlier version of the PewPew handheld. There have been many and varied revisions of the hardware.

We’ve featured the project before on these hallowed pages; the earlier PewPew Featherwing console was a finalist in the 2017 Hackaday Prize Best Product Competition. At EuroPython, attendees will get to tinker with a special conference edition, which is the latest version of a long line of development versions. It runs the same microcontroller – ATSAMD21E18A – as the Adafruit Trinket M0, and is programmable with CircuitPython. The conference edition comes with a large 60 mm x 60 mm LED matrix, as well as an orange PCB with blue buttons to match the color scheme of the event.

We wager that conference attendees will enjoy hacking on the handheld console, and it makes a great platform for anyone who is new to embedded development with the Python language. Similar to badges, it makes a great pack-in for patrons, and the conference should be all the more enjoyable for it!

This Week In Security: SACK Of Death, Rambleed, HIBP For Sale, And Oracle Weblogic — Again!

June 21, 2019 by 13 Comments

Netflix isn’t the first name to come to mind when considering security research firms, but they make heavy use of FreeBSD in their content delivery system and do security research as a result. Their first security bulletin of the year, not surprisingly, covers a FreeBSD vulnerability that happens to also affect Linux kernels from the last 10 years. This vulnerability uses SACKs and odd MSS values to crash a server kernel.

To understand Selective ACKs, we need to step back and look at how TCP connections work. TCP connections provide guaranteed delivery, implemented in the from of ACKnowledgement (ACK) packets. We think of a TCP connection as having a dedicated ACK packet for every data packet. In reality, the Operating System makes great effort to avoid sending “naked” ACK packets, and combines multiple ACKs in a single packet. An ACK is simply a flag in a packet header combined with a running total of bytes received, and can be included in a normal data packet. As much as is possible, the ACK for data received is sent along with data packets flowing in the opposite direction. Continue reading “This Week In Security: SACK Of Death, Rambleed, HIBP For Sale, And Oracle Weblogic — Again!” →

Booting The Game Boy Advance Into Bluetooth

June 21, 2019 by 8 Comments

While it might not be quite as revered as its predecessor, the Game Boy Advance is arguably the peak of “classic” handheld gaming, before things got all 3D and dual screen on us. One of its best features is the so-called multiboot mode, which allows the GBA to download a program from its link port. Officially this feature was introduced so you could play multiplayer with your friends even if they didn’t have the game cartridge, but naturally it didn’t take long for hackers to realize you can use it to run arbitrary code on an unmodified system.

[Shyri Villar] has put this capability to excellent use with a plug-in board that allows a stock GBA to be used as a general purpose Bluetooth HID controller. Now you can emulate GBA games on your computer while using the real thing as your input device. Or if that’s a bit too redundant for you, then any 2D game you think could benefit from the classic Game Boy control layout.

An ATmega328P on the board initiates the multiboot sequence when the system powers up, and feeds it the GBA program that’s stored on a W25Q32 chip. Once the code is running on the GBA, it communicates with a common HC-05 Bluetooth module through the same link port. To perform this handoff, [Shyri] uses a HCF4066 switch IC to literally change the pin assignments in the connector from the SPI used to upload the ROM to the UART lines of the Bluetooth module.

With everything powered from the 3.3 V provided by the GBA’s link port, and some software niceties like the ability to store Bluetooth pairing information for subsequent device connections, this is actually a very practical gadget. The fact that you can do this on a completely stock GBA is very compelling, especially considering some of the previous Bluetooth Game Boy modifications we’ve seen. Granted the market might be somewhat limited, but with a custom PCB and a 3D printed enclosure, we could see this potentially being a popular accessory for the classic handheld. It’s not like it can be any more niche than using the GBA as a remote display for your multimeter.

Grate Design On This Cutting Edge Raspberry Pi Case

June 21, 2019 by 36 Comments

Love ’em or hate ’em, you’ve got to hand it to Apple: they really know how to push people’s buttons with design. Their industrial designers can make a product so irresistible – and their marketing team can cannonball the hype train sufficiently – that people will stand in line for days to buy a new product, and shell out unfathomable amounts of money for the privilege.

But what if you’re a poor college student without the budget for such treasures of industrial design? Simple – you take matters into your own hands and stuff a Raspberry Pi into a cheese grater. That’s what a group of engineering students from the University of Aveiro in Portugal called [NeRD-AETTUA] did, in obvious homage to the world’s most expensive cheese grater. The video below for the aptly named RasPro is somewhat less slick that Apple’s promos for the Mac Pro, but it still gets the basics across. Like the painstakingly machined brushed aluminum housing on the Mac, the IKEA cheese grater on the RasPro is just a skin. It covers a 3D-printed chassis that houses a beefy power supply and fan to go along with the Raspberry Pi 3. There’s also a speaker for blasting the tunes, which seems to be the primary use for the RasPro.

All things considered, the cheese grater design isn’t really that bad a form factor for a Pi case. If that doesn’t appeal, though, take your pick: laser-cut plywood, an Altoids tin, or even inside your PC.

Continue reading “Grate Design On This Cutting Edge Raspberry Pi Case” →

Pi Zero Streams Video From “Fake” Security Camera

June 20, 2019 by 39 Comments

Fake security cameras are advertised as a cheap way to deter anyone who might be up to no good. This isn’t a crime and punishment blog, so we’re not really in a position to say how accurate that claim actually is, but we see enough of these things for sale that somebody out there must believe they’re worth having. Though if it were us, we’d take this tip from [Daniel Andrade] and convert our “fake” camera into a real one with the Raspberry Pi and WebRTC.

There are an untold number of makes and models of these fake cameras out there, but it seems that many of them share a fairly common design in that the enclosure they use is actually pretty useful for putting your own hardware in. They’re hollow, relatively well protected from the elements, and as most of them use a blinking LED or some other feature to make them look more authentic, they already have a functional battery compartment.

As it turns out, the one that [Daniel] picked up for $9 USD is pretty much perfect for the Raspberry Pi Zero and its camera module. He even wired the blinking LED up to the Pi’s GPIO pins so it will still look the part, though replacing it with an RGB LED and appropriate scripts to drive it would be a nice way to get some visual feedback on what the system is doing.

The software side of things is done with Balena, a suite of tools for setting up and managing Linux Internet of Things devices. They provide everything from the SD card image that runs on the Pi itself to the cloud infrastructure that pulls all the data together. [Daniel] dove a little deeper into the software stack when he created his Bitcoin traffic light last year.

For any readers who may feel a sense of déjà vu looking at this project, you aren’t going crazy. We recently saw a similar project that used an ESP8266 and a PIR sensor to add motion sensing capabilities to one of these fake cameras. Now all we need is somebody to put an Arduino in one of them, and we’ll have the Holy Trinity represented.

The OS/2 Operating System Didn’t Die… It Went Underground

June 20, 2019 by 71 Comments

One problem with building things using state-of-the-art techniques is that sometimes those that look like they will be “the next big thing” turn out to be dead ends. Next thing you know, that hot new part or piece of software is hard to get or unmaintained. This is especially true if you are building something with a long life span. A case in point is the New York City subway system. Back in the 1990s the transit authority decided to adopt IBM’s new OS/2 operating system. Why not? It was robust and we used to always say “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

There was one problem. OS/2 was completely eclipsed by other operating systems, notably Windows and — mostly — has sunk from the public view. [Andrew Egan’s] post covers just how the conversion to a card-based system pushed OS/2 underground all over the Big Apple, and it is an interesting read.

Continue reading “The OS/2 Operating System Didn’t Die… It Went Underground” →

Electric Wheelchair Makes A Great Base For A Big Robot

June 20, 2019 by 33 Comments
Wiring into the joystick is a quick and easy way to hack in custom control to a wheelchair.

Building robots can be fun, and remains a popular pastime among many in the hacker and maker set. However the hardware side of things can be daunting. This is particularly the case for those attempting to build something on a larger scale. A great shortcut is to start with a robust mechanical platform from the outset – and using an electric wheelchair is a great way to do so.

[Nikita] started this project way back in 2009, after finding a broken electric wheelchair at a flea market. It was no longer in fit condition for use as a wheelchair, so [Nikita] was able to score it for the low price of just $50. That’s a great price for a package which includes a robust chassis, wheels, motors and the required controllers to drive it all. With the platform in hand, it was time to get hacking.

Thus far, [Nikita] has gone so far as to strip the wheelchair of all extraneous parts, leaving it as a motorized carriage. Radio control has been implemented with the help of an Arduino, and a couple of “eyes” have been added to give it a little personality. It can also still be driven with the original joystick, which has been relocated on the chassis. Future plans involve adding a level of autonomy to allow the ‘bot to navigate waypoints and recognise faces, both tasks which should be significantly easier with 2019 technology. We’re eager to see where it goes next; we’ve seen great applications of wheelchair hardware before, after all. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Electric Wheelchair Makes A Great Base For A Big Robot” →