Review: IoT Data Logging Services With MQTT

October 31, 2017 by 11 Comments

For the last few months, I had been using Sparkfun’s Phant server as a data logger for a small science project. Unfortunately, they’ve had some serious technical issues and have discontinued the service. Phant was good while it lasted: it was easy to use, free, and allowed me to download the data in a CSV format. It shared data with analog.io, which at the time was a good solution for data visualization.

While I could continue using Phant since it is an open-source project and Sparkfun kindly releases the source code for the server on Github, I thought it might be better to do some research, see what’s out there. I decided to write a minimal implementation for each platform as an interesting way to get a feel for each. To that end, I connected a DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor to a NodeMCU board to act as a simple data source.

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10 Year Old Bug Crushed By Hacker On A Mission

October 31, 2017 by 11 Comments

PCI pass through is the ability of a virtualized guest system to directly access PCI hardware. Pass through for dedicated GPUs has just recently been added to the Linux kernel-based virtual machine. Soon afterward, users began to find that switching on nested page tables (NPT), a technology intended to provide hardware acceleration for virtual machines, had the opposite effect on AMD platforms and slowed frame rate down to a crawl.

Annoyed by this [gnif] set out to to fix the problem. His first step was to run graphics benchmarks to isolate the source of the problem. Having identified the culprit in the GPU, [gnif] began to read up on the involved technology stack. Three days of wrapping his head around technical docs allowed [gnif] to find the single line of code that resulted in a faulty memory set up and to implement a basic fix. He then passed the work on to [Paolo Bonzini] at patchwork.kernel.org, who released a more refined patch.

The bug affecting PCI pass through had been around for ten years and had received little attention from the manufacturer. It gained prominence when graphics cards were affected. In the end it took one very dedicated user three days to fix it, and then another day to roll out a patch for Open Source operating systems. In his notes [gnif] points out how helpful AMDs documentation was. With the right to repair in debate, DRMed technical docs and standards locked behind paywalls, [gnif]’s story is a reminder of the importance of accessible quality documentation.

Hoverboard Reborn For Electric Rollerblading

October 31, 2017 by 8 Comments

Rollerblading is fun, but who needs all that pesky exercise? Wouldn’t strapping on the blades be so much more tempting if you had an electric pusher motor to propel you along your way?

We have to admit that we raised a wary eyebrow as we first watched [MakerMan]’s video below. We thought it was going to be just another hoverboard hack at first, but as we watched, there were some pretty impressive fabrication skills on display. Yes, the project does start with tearing into a defunct hoverboard for parts, primarily one wheel motor and the battery pack. But after that, [MakerMan] took off on a metalworking tear. Parts of the hoverboard chassis were attached to a frame built from solid bar stock — we’ll admit never having seen curves fabricated in quite that way before. The dead 18650 in the battery pack was identified and replaced, and a controller from an e-bike was wired up. Fitted with a thumb throttle and with a bit of padding on the crossbar, it’s almost a ride-upon but not quite. It seems to move along at quite a clip, even making allowances for the time-compression on the video.

We’ve seen lots of transportation hacks before, from collapsible longboards to steam-powered bicycles, but this one is pretty unique.

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An Amstrad PCW For The 21st Century

October 30, 2017 by 12 Comments

If you were a computer-mad teen in the late 1980s, you were probably in the process of graduating from an 8-bit machine to a 16-bit one, maybe an Amiga, or an Atari ST. For the first time though you might not have been the only computer owner in your house, because there was every chance your parents might have joined the fun with a word processor. Maybe American home offices during this period might have had PC clones, but for Brits there was every chance that the parental powerhouse would have been an Amstrad PCW.

Amstrad were the masters of packaging up slightly outdated technology for electronic consumers on a budget, and the PCW was thus a 1970s CP/M machine for the 1980s whose main attraction was that it came with monitor and printer included in the price. [James Ots]’ parents had one that interested him enough that  he has returned to the platform and is documenting his work bringing it up to date.

It was the most recent progress in booting into CP/M from an SD card by hijacking the printer ROM that caught our eye, but reading all the build logs that is only the tip of the iceberg. He’s connected another monitor, made a joystick port and a soundcard, and added a memory upgrade to his PCW. Most of these machines would have only been used with the bundled word processor, so those are real enhancements.

We’ve featured quite a few projects involving Amstrad’s CPC home computers, such as this one with a floppy emulator. Amstrad are an interesting company for followers of consumer electronics of the ’70s and ’80s, they never had the out-there tech wackiness of their great rival Sinclair but their logo could be found on an astonishing variety of appliances. The “AMS” in Amstrad are the initials of the company founder [Alan Sugar], who is rather better known in 2017 as the British host of The Apprentice. It is not known whether he intends to lead the country.

Quick And Easy Solar Hot Air Balloon

October 30, 2017 by 63 Comments

[Becky Stern] likes to harness the power of the Sun. Most of us will immediately think of solar cells and other exotic solar energy techniques. But [Becky] shows how to make a hot air balloon using nothing but tape and garbage bags.

The idea is quite simple. You form a large envelope from black trash bags and fill it with air. Becky does that by just running with it, tying it off, and topping off with a little manual blowing. Once the sun heats the black bag, it floats.

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Scratchbuilt Cryptex Would Make Da Vinci Weep

October 30, 2017 by 8 Comments

Here’s a fun fact, the kind of thing that you might (but we definitely did not) find out when writing a blog post: Dan Brown actually made up the cryptex for his book, The Da Vinci Code. We therefore have Mr Brown, with a bit of help from the filmmakers over at Sony, to thank every time we see somebody make their own version. To follow that line of logic to its conclusion, we believe you’ll agree that the following is without question the greatest thing Dan Brown has ever done in his life.

Created by [Stephen Peduto] as a ring box for an exceptionally lucky young lady, it required an estimated 127 hours to complete over the course of two months. From the incredible job [Stephen] did photographing and documenting the build, we don’t doubt it for a second. Expertly combing milled aluminum and lathe-turned bocote wood, this has got to be the most gorgeous ring “box” ever made.

Frankly, it’s hard to do justice to what [Stephen] has created in so short a space, and you really should browse through the 140+ images in his gallery. But the short version is that after some furious white board sketching, [Stephen] moved over to AutoCAD and then SolidWorks to design all the parts which would eventually get machined out of aluminum. As a very clever touch, he wisely added 17° slop in the locking mechanism so that the recipient wouldn’t fumble too much at the big moment.

When the machining was all said and done, [Stephen] then switched over to the woodworking part of the project. Rather than numbers or letters for a combination, this cryptex uses the grain pattern in the turned piece of wood. This gives the final product a more organic feel, while at the same time avoiding the head-scratching problem of getting the characters printed or engraved into the wheels.

Towards the end of construction there was a worrying moment when the newly made wooding rings warped so badly that the aluminum inserts would no longer fit. As a last resort, the rings were placed in a box with a humidifier for a week and slowly worked back into shape. [Stephen] says he’s still surprised it worked.

Even if some may argue that a cryptex is nothing but a prettied-up bike lock, people sure do love them. We’re no stranger to high quality cryptex builds here, though even mere mortals can play along if they’ve got a well calibrated 3D printer.

Pull Passwords Out Of Silicon

October 30, 2017 by 15 Comments

[q3k] got tipped off to a very cool problem in the ongoing Pwn2Win capture-the-flag, and he blew it out of the water by decoding the metal interconnect layers that encode a password in a VLSI IC. And not one to rent someone else’s netlist extraction code, he did it by writing his own.

The problem in the Pwn2Win CTF came in the form of the design files for a hypothetical rocket launch code. The custom IC takes an ASCII string as input, and flips a pin high if it matches. Probably the simplest way to do this in logic is to implement a shift register that’s long enough for the code string’s bits, and then hard-wire some combinatorial logic that only reads true when all of the individual bits are correct.

(No, you don’t want to implement a password-checker this way — it means that you could simply brute-force the password far too easily — but such implementations have been seen in the wild.)

Anyway, back to our story. After reversing the netlist, [q3k] located 320 flip-flops in a chain, suggesting a 40-byte ASCII code string. Working backward in the circuit from the “unlocked” pin to the flip-flops, he found a network of NOR and NAND gates, which were converted into a logic notation and then tossed into Z3 to solve. Some cycles later, he had pulled the password straight out of the silicon!

This looks like a really fun challenge if you’re into logic design or hardware reverse engineering. You don’t have to write your own tools to do this, of course, but [q3k] would say that it was worth it.

Thanks [Victor] for the great tip!
Featured image by David Carron, via Wikipedia.