Battery Backup Conceals A Pentesting Pi

May 1, 2018 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

Over the last few years one thing has become abundantly clear: hackers love cramming the Raspberry Pi into stuff. From classic game systems to mirrors, there’s few places that haven’t been invaded by everyone’s favorite Linux SBC. From the inspired to the bizarre, we’ve brought such projects to your attention with minimal editorialization. As we’ve said before: it’s not the job of Hackaday to ask why, we’re here to examine how.

That said, some builds do stand out from the crowd. One such project is the “Pentesting BBU Dropbox” which [b1tbang3r] has recently posted to Hackaday.io. Noticing the battery bay in a cheap Cyberpower 350VA battery backup was just about the same size as the Raspberry Pi, he decided to convert it into a covert penetration testing device. Of course the illusion isn’t perfect as the battery backup function itself doesn’t work anymore. But if you hid this thing in an office or server room, there’s very little chance anyone would ever suspect it didn’t belong.

The key to the final device’s plausibility is that from stock it had dual RJ-11 jacks for analog modem surge protection. Swapping those jacks out for RJ-45 network connectors gives the BBU Dropbox an excuse to be plugged into the network. At a cursory glance, at least. Internally there is a TRENDnet Ethernet switch which allows the Pi to get on the network when an Ethernet cable is plugged into the battery backup.

We especially like the little details [b1tbang3r] put in to make the final device look as real as possible. The “Reset” button and “Wiring Fault” LED have been connected to the GPIO pins of the Pi, allowing for an exceptionally discrete user interface. For instance the LED could be setup to blink when a scan is complete, or the button could be used to wipe the device in an emergency.

This build reminds us of the Power Pwn released back in 2012 by Pwnie Express. That device was based around a relatively bulky power strip, and the only “feature” it looks like this DIY build is missing from the professional version is the $1,300 price.

Comparing Making To Buying A Lithium Ion Battery Pack

May 1, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 31 Comments

At Hackaday we’re all about DIY. However, projects can have many components, and so there’s sometimes a choice between making something or buying it. In this case, [GreatScott!] wondered if it would be cheaper to make or buy a lithium-ion battery pack for his new eBike kit. To find out, he decided to make one.

After some calculations, he found he’d need thirteen 18650 cells in series but decided to double the capacity by connecting another thirteen in parallel. That gave him a 5 Ah capacity battery pack with a nominal voltage of 48.1 V and one capable of supplying a constant current of 40 A. Rather than connect them by soldering the nickel strips, he purchased a kWeld battery spot welder, adding to the cost of the build. He charged his new battery pack using his bench power supply but being concerned about uneven charging of the cells over the battery pack’s lifetime, he added a Battery Management System (BMS). The resulting battery pack powers his eBike motor just fine.

After adding up all the costs, he found it was only a tiny bit cheaper than prices for comparable battery packs on eBay, which were €24.4 per Ah (US$29.5 per Ah). The only way it would be cheaper is if he made multiple packs, spreading out the one-time cost of the battery spot welder. So that means it’s really up to your preference. See his video below to judge for yourself if you’d rather do it the DIY way. And then let us know what you’d do in the comments below.

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Playing Pong With Micro:bits!

April 30, 2018 by James Hobson No comments

Where would the world be today without Pong, perhaps a lot less fun? For people like [Linker3000] the game is an inspiration toward teaching the next generation of hackers to build and play their own version using Micro:bits as controllers!

Aiming for doing all manner of diligence, [Linker3000] says the code can simply be uploaded to an Arduino — foregoing throwing together a circuit of your own — if you want to jump right into things. For the workshop environment, this setup uses composite video outputs — but this shouldn’t be an issue as most TVs still retain these inputs.

Once built — or sketch uploaded — the Micro:bit paddles can be connected to the ATmega328p and played like an old-school controller, but [Linker3000] has enabled Bluetooth control of the paddles’ A and B buttons via the Bitty app. Additionally — if wires really aren’t your thing and Bluetooth is too new-school for such an old game — a second Micro:bit can control the wired paddle using their built-in radio, provided they’re configured accordingly.

On top of Pong, there are also squash and soccer game modes! Check out the demo after the break.

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Game-Ception: Pokemon Red Playable Inside Minecraft

April 30, 2018 by James Hobson 24 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to take a dive into and visualize a game’s code, this could be a seminal example in a literal sense. After twenty-one months of effort, the entire Pokemon Red game is now playable inside Minecraft.

[Mr. Squishy] is the mad genius behind this project, laboriously re-coding the game literally block by block. A texture pack is needed for the specific sprites, but otherwise it is playable without mods. It’s not immediately apparent when loading in to the level, but chip your way through the floor of the stadium and you are confronted by something awe-inspiring: sprawling constructions, like great soaring cliffs, comprising approximately 357,000 command blocks — equating to the same in lines of code. Every animation, tracked stat, attack and their effects, the various pokemon and their properties, and so on are rendered in the game’s physical space for you to wander through.

Beneath that are levels of maps, positional data, properties of those areas, NPCs, and a clever glitch that [Mr. Squishy] used to keep everything loaded at once.

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Training The Squirrel Terminator

April 30, 2018 by Tom Nardi 31 Comments

Depending on which hemisphere of the Earth you’re currently reading this from, summer is finally starting to fight its way to the surface. For the more “green” of our readers, that can mean it’s time to start making plans for summer gardening. But as anyone who’s ever planted something edible can tell you, garden pests such as squirrels are fantastically effective at turning all your hard work into a wasteland. Finding ways to keep them away from your crops can be a full-time job, but luckily it’s a job nobody will mind if automation steals from humans.

[Peter Quinn] writes in to tell us about the elaborate lengths he is going to keep bushy-tailed marauders away from his tomatoes this year. Long term he plans on setting up a non-lethal sentry gun to scare them away, but before he can get to that point he needs to perfect the science of automatically targeting his prey. At the same time, he wants to train the system well enough that it won’t fire on humans or other animals such as cats and birds which might visit his garden.

A Raspberry Pi 3 with a cheap webcam is used to surveil the garden and detect motion. When frames containing motion are detected, they are forwarded to a laptop which has enough horsepower to handle the squirrel detection through Darknet YOLO. [Peter] recognizes this isn’t an ideal architecture for real-time targeting of a sentry turret, but it’s good enough for training the system.

Which incidentally is what [Peter] spends the most time explaining on the project’s Hackaday.io page. From the saga of getting the software environment up and running to determining how many pictures of squirrels in his yard he should provide the software for training, it’s an excellent case study in rolling your own image recognition system. After approximately 18 hours of training, he now has a system which is able to pick squirrels out from the foliage. The next step is hooking up the turret.

We’ve covered other automated turrets here on Hackaday, and we’ve seen automated devices for terrifying squirrels before, but this is the first time we’ve seen the concepts mixed.

This Dust Collector Will Blow You Away.

April 30, 2018 by James Hobson 7 Comments

As [Marius Hornberger] was working in his woodshop, a thunderous bang suddenly rocked the space. A brief search revealed the blower for the dust collector had shifted several inches despite being stoutly fastened down. Turns out, the blower had blown itself up when one of the impeller fins came loose. Time to revise and build a bigger, better dust collector!

[Hornberger] is thorough in describing his process, the video series chronicles where he went astray in his original design and how he’s gone about improving on those elements. For instance, the original impeller had six fins which meant fewer points to bear the operating stresses as well as producing an occasionally uncomfortable drone. MDF wasn’t an ideal material choice here either, contributing to the failure of the part.

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Universal Quick-Release Bar Clamps

April 30, 2018 by Anool Mahidharia 8 Comments

The typical hacker can never say no to more tools. And when it comes to clamps, one just can’t have enough of them. From holding small PCB’s to clamping together large sheets of plywood, you need a variety of sizes and quantities. So it would be pretty neat if we could just 3D print them whenever needed. [Mgx3d] has done that by designing 3D printable bar clamp jaws with a quick release mechanism that can be used with standard T-slot aluminum extrusion. This allows you to create ad-hoc bar clamps of any size and length quickly.

The design consists of two pieces – the jaw and its quick release lever, and does not require any additional parts or fasteners for assembly. Both pieces can be easily 3D printed without supports. The quick release lever is a simple eccentric cam design which locks the jaw in place by pushing down on the extrusion. The design is parametric and can be easily customized for different sizes, either in OpenSCAD or via the online customizer. The online customizer supports Misumi 15 mm and 20 mm extrusion, 1″ 1010-S and 20 mm 20-2020 from 80/20 Inc., 15 mm from OpenBeam and 10 mm from MicroRax. But it ought to be easy to create fresh designs in OpenSCAD. Check out the video after the break to see the bar-clamps in action.

If you’d like to start equipping your shop with more 3D printed tools, look no further. We’ve featured many types over the years, such as the StickVise and its Gooseneck System, this 3D printed rubber band PCB Vise, and even a 3D printed Mini-Lathe.

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