34C3: Roll Your Own Network Driver In Four Simple Steps

January 1, 2018 by 7 Comments

Writing your own drivers is a special discipline. Drivers on the one hand work closely with external hardware and at the same time are deeply ingrained into the operating system. That’s two kinds of specialization in one problem. In recent years a lot of dedicated networking hardware is being replaced by software. [Paul Emmerich] is a researcher who works on improving the performance of these systems.

Making software act like network hardware requires drivers that can swiftly handle a lot of small packets, something that the standard APIs where not designed for. In his talk at this year’s Chaos Commnication Congress [Paul] dissects the different approaches to writing this special flavor of drivers and explains the shortcomings of each.

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How The Hero Droid BB-8 Rolls

January 1, 2018 by 10 Comments

By now we’ve come to expect a bountiful harvest of licensed merchandise to follow every Star Wars film. This year’s crop included many flavors of BB-8 so every fan can find something to suit their taste. At the top of this food chain is a mobile interactive “Hero Droid BB-8”. For those who want to see how it works, [TheMikeSenna] cracked open his unit to feed our curiosity.

Also called “Spin Master BB-8” for the manufacturer, this toy is impressively sophisticated for its price point. The video surveyed the mechanical components inside the ball. Showing how the droid travels, and how the head articulates.

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Much Assembly Required: Game Your Way To Assembly Guru Status

January 1, 2018 by 18 Comments

It can be hard these days to find an excuse to create something for learning purposes. Want a microcontroller board? Why make one when you can buy an Arduino or a Blue Pill for nearly nothing? Want to control a 3D printer? Why write the code when you can just download something that works well like Marlin or Repetier? If you want to learn assembly language, then, it can be hard to figure out something you want to do that isn’t so silly that it demotivates you. If that sounds like you, then you should check out Much Assembly Required.

This is a multi-player game that runs in your Web browser. But before you click close, consider this: the game has you control an autonomous robot using an x86-like assembly language. Your robots have to find resources and build structures so it is sort of a mash up of Minecraft and one of the many modern Hammurabi-inspired games like Civilization.

The robots have a variety of peripherals including: drills, lasers, LiDar, legs, a hologram projector, solar-charged batteries, clocks, and more mundane things such as clocks, floppy drives, and a random number generator. The virtual world simulates day and night, so plan your power management accordingly.

You might wonder if you should even bother learning assembly. While it is true it isn’t as necessary as it once was,  understanding what the computer is doing in a very basic way can help form your thinking in surprising ways. There are also those times when you need to optimize something in assembly and that’s the difference between working and not working.

If you want to do something more practical, we’ve looked at options before. Of course, you can always slip your C compiler some assembly, too.

34C3: Microphone Bugs

January 1, 2018 by 32 Comments

Inspiration can come from many places. When [Veronica Valeros] and [Sebastian Garcia] from the MatesLab Hackerspace in Argentina learned that it took [Ai Weiwei] four years to discover his home had been bugged, they decided to have a closer look into some standard audio surveillance devices. Feeling there’s a shortage of research on the subject inside the community, they took matters in their own hands, and presented the outcome in their Spy vs. Spy: A modern study of microphone bugs operation and detection talk at 34C3. You can find the slides here, and their white paper here.

Focusing their research primarily on FM radio transmitter devices, [Veronica] and [Sebastian] start off with some historical examples, and the development of such devices — nowadays available off-the-shelf for little money. While these devices may be shrugged off as a relic of Soviet era spy fiction and tools of analog times, the easy availability and usage still keeps them relevant today. They conclude their research with a game of Hide and Seek as real life experiment, using regular store-bought transmitters.

An undertaking like this would not be complete without the RTL-SDR dongle, so [Sebastian] developed the Salamandra Spy Microphone Detection Tool as alternative for ready-made detection devices. Using the dongle’s power levels, Salamandra detects and locates the presence of potential transmitters, keeping track of all findings. If you’re interested in some of the earliest and most technologically fascinating covert listening devices, there is no better example than Theremin’s bug.

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How Hackerspaces Spend Money

January 1, 2018 by 13 Comments

Running a hackerspace is no easy task. One of the biggest issues is money — how to collect in dues and donations, managing it, and how to spend it. Everyone has different interests and would like to see the budget go to their favorite project or resource. Milwaukee Makerspace has come up with a novel way to handle this. Members pay $40 a month in dues. $35 of that goes into the general budget. The member themselves can pick where the last $5 goes.

Using the hackerspace’s software, members chose where their $5 goes each month. It can all be spent in one area or split up among different resources at the hackerspace. Members choose from many different interests like the 3D printing area, the laser lab, the forge, or specific projects like the power racing series. This results in a budget for each area which can be used for materials and parts. It also gives the hackerspace board of directors information on which resources people are interested in, and which they aren’t.

In the current budget, no one is supporting the anodizing area, but lots of people are supporting the laser lab. This is just the sort of information the board could use when planning. Perhaps they could store the anodizing tools and expand the laser lab. Click through to the link above and see how this year’s cash voting panned out.

Of course, all this only works if you have a hackerspace with plenty of active members. In Milwaukee’s case, they have about 300 members. Would this work for your hackerspace? Let us know down in the comments!

Flowing Light Art Inspired By Plankton

January 1, 2018 by 9 Comments

With today’s technology, art can be taken in directions that have never before been possible. Taking advantage of this, [teamlab] — an art collective from Japan — have unveiled an art installation that integrates the attendee into the spectacle. In the dark room of the piece ‘Moving Creates Vortices and Vortices Create Movement,‘ you are the brush that paints the flowing display.

Inspired by the movement of ocean plankton, this borrows your movement to create tapestries of light with mirrored walls to aggrandize the effect. As attendees walk about the room, their movements are tracked and translated into flowing patterns projected onto the ground. The faster the people move, the greater the resultant flow. Even those who have stopped to take in the scene are themselves still part of it; their idle forms mimic boulders in a river — as eddies would churn about the obstacle, so too does the light flow around the attendee.

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Why Is Donald Duck On The Radio? Math Behind Single Sideband Explained

January 1, 2018 by 20 Comments

AM, or amplitude modulation, was the earliest way of sending voice over radio waves. That makes sense because it is easy to modulate a signal and easy to demodulate it, as well. A carbon microphone is sufficient to crudely modulate an AM signal and diode — even a piece of natural crystal — will suffice to demodulate it. Outside of broadcast radio, most AM users migrated to single side band or SSB. On an AM receiver that sounds like Donald Duck, but with a little work, it will sound almost as good as AM, and in many cases better. If you want a better understanding of how SSB carries audio, have a look at [Radio Physics and Electronics] video on the subject.

The video covers the math of what you probably already know: AM has a carrier and two identical side bands. SSB suppresses the carrier and one redundant side band. But the math behind it is elegant, although you probably ought to know some trigonometry. Don’t worry though. At the end of the video, there’s a practical demonstration that will help even if you are math challenged.

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