What To Do When The Botnet Comes Knocking

March 21, 2019 by 34 Comments

“It was a cold and windy night, but the breeze of ill omen blowing across the ‘net was colder. The regular trickle of login attempts suddenly became a torrent of IP addresses, all trying to break into the back-end of the Joomla site I host. I poured another cup of joe, it was gonna be a long night.”

Tech noir aside, there was something odd going on. I get an email from that web-site each time there is a failed login. The occasional login attempt isn’t surprising, but this was multiple attempts per minute, all from different IP addresses. Looking at the logs, I got the feeling they were pulling usernames and passwords from one of the various database dumps, probably also randomly seeding information from the Whois database on my domain.

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Let Your Pi Make A Pie Chart For Your Pie

March 21, 2019 by 16 Comments

March 14th is “Pi Day”, for reasons which should be obvious to our more mathematically inclined readers. As you are not reading this post on March 14th, that must mean we’re either fashionably late to Pi Day 2019, or exceptionally early for Pi Day 2020. But in either event, we’ve got a hack for you that celebrates the day using two things we have it on good authority most hackers overindulge in: food and needless complexity.

This project comes from [Mike MacHenry], and it’s just as straightforward as it looks. Put simply, he’s using a load cell connected to the Raspberry Pi to weigh an actual pie and monitor its change over time. As the pie is consumed by hungry hackers, a pie graph (what else?) is rendered on the attached screen to show you how much of the dessert is left.

One might say that this project takes a three dimensional pie and converts it to a two dimensional facsimile, but perhaps that’s over-analyzing it. In reality, it was a fun little hack [Mike] put together just because he thought it would be fun. Which is certainly enough of a motive for us. More practically though, if you’re looking for a good example for how to get a load cell talking to your non-edible Raspberry Pi, you could do worse than checking this out.

We’ve also got to give [Mike] extra credit for including the recipe and procedure for actually baking the apple pie used in the project. While we’re not 100% sure the MIT license [Mike] used is actually valid for foodstuffs, but believe it or not this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Git used in the production of baked goods.

Library Makes ESP Over The Air Updates Easy

March 21, 2019 by 19 Comments

Potentially, one of the great things about having a device connected to the network is that you can update it remotely. However, how do you make that happen? If you use the Arduino setup for the ESP8266 or ESP32, you might try [scottchiefbaker’s] library which promises to make the process easy.

Adding it looks to be simple. You’ll need an include, of course. If you don’t mind using port 8080 and the path /webota, you only need to call handle_webota() from your main loop. If you want to change the defaults, you’ll need to add an extra call in your setup. You also need to set up a few global variables to specify your network parameters.

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Dancing Arrows To Break Your Brain

March 20, 2019 by 8 Comments

Last year, mathematician and professional optical illusionist [Kokichi Sugihara] came up with an arrow that only points one way. Technically, it’s ‘anomalous mirror symmetry’, but if you print this arrow and look at it juuuussst right, it appears this arrow only points one way.

[Ali] had the idea to turn this arrow illusion into something motorized, and for that he turned to 3D printing. The models for the illusion arrows were already available, but there had to be a way to turn a single arrow into an art installation. For that, you just need a few 9g servos. [Ali] slightly modified his servos so they would turn a full 180 degrees, and designed a magnetic mount to allow easy swap-out of these arrows.

The servos are attached to a 3D printed frame with heat-staked threaded inserts, and driven by a Pololu servo driver. The effect is great, with multiple arrows twisting and turning but still only appearing to point to the right. [Ali] put together two videos of this arrow illusion, one that’s effectively a build guide, and of course all the STLs are available in a link in the description.

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Maritime Analog Computer From 1503 Is The Oldest Remaining

March 20, 2019 by 19 Comments

We might not think of analog computers as having existed in the 1500s, but in fact the astrolabe first appeared around 220 BC. However, as you might expect only a few very old ones still exist. Early astrolabes were often wooden and were difficult to use aboard ships, however brass astrolabes with special features were more accurate on the deck of a ship underway. A recent archeological find from one of Vasco da Gama’s ships that sunk in the Arabian Sea has brought the number of known archeologically-significant instruments to 104, and also is one of the few nautical versions to employ a solid disk. As of now, it is the oldest known maritime astrolabe found so far — the ship sunk in 1503. You might wonder how the 104th astrolabe became number 108, but the catalog includes a few pieces or fragments of astrolabes. If you count those, there are 108 items in the catalog.

If you think archeology is about men in fedoras carrying whips, or stuffy old men wandering around tombs, you should have a look at the article about this find. In addition to divers recovering the piece from the shipwreck (see the video, below), the science involved in restoring it and analyzing it includes chemistry, lasers, X-rays, and energy-dispersive spectroscopy.

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An FPGA Drives This Antique LCD Screen

March 20, 2019 by 7 Comments

If you’re reading this article on a desktop or laptop computer, you’re probably staring at millions of pixels on a TFT LCD display. TFT became a dominant technology due to its picture quality and fast response times, but it’s not the only way to build an LCD. There are cheaper technologies, such as STN and its color variant, CSTN. They’re rarely used nowadays, but [Wenting Zhang] had one lying around and wanted to take a crack at driving it.

Still scenes aren’t bad, but motion blur is readily apparent on any moving content.

The screen in question came courtesy of a 20th century laptop. It’s a Hitachi SX21V001-Z4, with a resolution of 640×480 pixels. Driver boards for CSTN screens were once readily available, however now such things are difficult to come by.

[Wenting] instead grabbed an FPGA and got to work. Driving displays can be taxing for small microcontrollers, so an FPGA is always a great choice when working on such projects. They’re easily capable of generating whatever weird and wacky signals are required, and can generate many such signals in parallel without breaking a sweat.

[Wenting] successfully got the screen up and running, and hooked up to a VGA input. Image quality is surprisingly passable for still images, though things absolutely go to pieces when motion is introduced. [Wenting]’s demo shows off the screen playing Breath of the Wild, and it’s a great showcase of how far technology has come since the mid-90s.

Driving strange LCDs is a hacker rite of passage, and we see plenty of efforts around these parts. Video after the break.

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An ESP8266 Sundial For Your Wall

March 20, 2019 by 9 Comments

Hackers absolutely love building clocks. Seriously, there are few other devices for which we’ve seen such an incredible number of variations. But while the clocks that hackers build might blink out the time in binary, or write it out in words, they generally don’t feature hands. Apparently in 2019 it’s more reasonable to read binary than know which way the “little hand” is supposed to be pointing.

This ESP8266 powered “shadow clock” from [Dheera Venkatraman] technically keeps that tradition intact, but only just. His clock doesn’t feature physical hands, but it does use a strip of RGB LEDs to cast multi-colored shadows which serve the same function. With his clock, you don’t even have to try and figure out which hand is the big one, since they’re all the same length. Now that’s what we call progress.

Probably the biggest surprise about this clock, beyond how legitimately good it looks hanging on the wall, is how little work it takes to build your own version. That’s because [Dheera] specifically set out to design something that was cheaper and easier to build than what he’d seen previously, and we think he delivered on that goal in a big way. All you need are the 3D printed components, an ESP8266 board, and a strip of 144 WS2812B LEDs.

The software side of the project is similarly simplistic, and all you need to do is plug in your WiFi network credentials to have the ESP pull the current time from NTP. If you were so inclined, his source code would be an excellent base on which to implement additional features such as animations at the top of the hour.

Compared to something like the Bulbdial clock from 2009, it’s incredible how simple some of these projects have become in the last decade. With the tools and components available to hackers and makers today, there’s truly never been a better time to build something amazing.