Christine Sunu Proves The Effect Of Being Alive On Hardware Design

December 1, 2017 by 21 Comments

Modeling machines off of biological patterns is the dry definition of biomimicry. For most people, this means the structure of robots and how they move, but Christine Sunu makes the argument that we should be thinking a lot more about how biomimicry has the power to make us feel something. Her talk at the 2017 Hackaday Superconference looks at what makes robots more than cold metal automatons. There is great power in designing to complement natural emotional reactions in humans — to make machines that feel alive.

We live in a world that is being filled with robots and increasingly these are breaking out of the confines of industrial automation to take a place side by side with humans. The key to making this work is to make robots that are recognizable as machines, yet intuitively accepted as being lifelike. It’s the buy-in that these robots are more than appliances, and Christine has boiled down the keys to unlocking these emotional reactions.

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Statistics And Hacking: An Introduction To Hypothesis Testing

December 1, 2017 by 20 Comments

In the early 20th century, Guinness breweries in Dublin had a policy of hiring the best graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to improve their industrial processes. At the time, it was considered a trade secret that they were using statistical methods to improve their process and product.

One problem they were having was that the z-test (a commonly used test at the time) required large sample sizes, and sufficient data was often unavailable. By studying the properties of small sample sizes, William Sealy Gosset developed a statistical test that required fewer samples to produce a reasonable result. As the story goes though, chemists at Guinness were forbidden from publishing their findings.

So he did what many of us would do: realizing the finding was important to disseminate, he adopted a pseudonym (‘Student’) and published it. Even though we now know who developed the test, it’s still called “Student’s t-test” and it remains widely used across scientific disciplines.

It’s a cute little story of math, anonymity, and beer… but what can we do with it? As it turns out, it’s something we could probably all be using more often, given the number of Internet-connected sensors we’ve been playing with. Today our goal is to cover hypothesis testing and the basic z-test, as these are fundamental to understanding how the t-test works. We’ll return to the t-test soon — with real data. Continue reading “Statistics And Hacking: An Introduction To Hypothesis Testing” →

Calculating Like It’s 1962

December 1, 2017 by 29 Comments

We sometimes forget that the things we think of as trivial today were yesterday’s feats of extreme engineering. Consider the humble pocket calculator, these days so cheap and easy to construct that they’re essentially disposable. But building a simple “four-banger” calculator in 1962 was anything but a simple task, and it’s worth looking at what one of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand today accomplished with practically nothing.

If there’s anything that [Cliff Stoll]’s enthusiasm can’t make interesting, we don’t know what it would be, and he certainly does the job with this teardown and analysis of a vintage electronic calculator. You’ll remember [Cliff] from his book The Cuckoo’s Egg, documenting his mid-80s computer sleuthing that exposed a gang of black-hat hackers working for the KGB. [Cliff] came upon a pair of Friden EC-132 electronic calculators, and with the help of [Bob Ragen], the engineer who designed them in 1962, got one working. With a rack of PC boards, cleverly hinged to save space and stuffed with germanium transistors, a CRT display, and an acoustic delay-line memory, the calculators look ridiculous by today’s standards. But when you take a moment to ponder just how much work went into such a thing, it really makes you wonder how the old timers ever brought a product to market.

As a side note, it’s great to see the [Cliff] is still so energetic after all these years. Watching him jump about with such excitement and passion really gets us charged up.

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We Need To Have A Chat About Something Important

December 1, 2017 by 247 Comments
Yes, I really did print this the day before the story broke.
Yes, I really did print this the day before the story broke.

With hindsight, I picked the wrong day to 3D print a Cap’n Crunch whistle downloaded from Thingiverse. I was covering the hackspace textile evening, so I set the Ultimaker going and headed off to spend my evening making a laptop pouch. My whistle, a reasonable reproduction of the famous cereal packet novelty whose 2600 Hz tone allowed special access to American telephone networks, was ready for me to take away as I headed home.

The next day, there it was. The legendary phreaker [John Draper], also known as [Captain Crunch] after his use of that free whistle, was exposed as having a history of inappropriate conduct towards teenage boys and young men who he encountered in his tours of the hacker community as a celebrity speaker.

My whistle will no longer go on a lanyard as a piece of cool ephemera, it’s sitting forlornly on my bench. The constant procession of harassment allegations that have been in the news of late have arrived at our doorstep. Continue reading “We Need To Have A Chat About Something Important” →

A Teardown Of Something You Should Not Own

December 1, 2017 by 67 Comments

GPS jammers are easily available on the Internet. No, we’re not linking to them. Nevertheless, GPS jammers are frequently used by truck drivers and other people with a company car that don’t want their employer tracking their every movement. Do these devices work? Are they worth the $25 it costs to buy one? That’s what [phasenoise] wanted to find out.

These tiny little self-contained boxes spew RF at around 1575.42 MHz, the same frequency used by GPS satellites in high Earth orbit. Those signals coming from GPS satellites are very, very weak, and it’s relatively easy to overpower them with noise. That’s pretty much the block diagram for these cheap GPS jammers — put some noise on the right frequency, and your phone or your boss’s GPS tracker simply won’t function. Note that this is a very low-tech attack; far more sophisticated GPS jamming and spoofing techniques can theoretically land a drone safely.

[phasenoise]’s teardown of the GPS jammer he found on unmentionable websites shows the device is incredibly simple. There are a few 555s in there creating low-frequency noise. This feeds a VCO with a range of between 1466-1590 MHz. The output of the VCO is then sent to a big ‘ol RF transistor for amplification and out through a quarter wave antenna. It may be RF wizardry, but this is a very simple circuit.

The output of this circuit was measured, and to the surprise of many, there were no spurious emissions or harmonics — this jammer will not disable your cellphone or your WiFi, only your GPS. The range of this device is estimated at 15-30 meters in the open, which is good enough if you’re a trucker. In the canyons of skyscrapers, this range could extend to hundreds of meters.

It should be said again that you should not buy or use a GPS jammer. Just don’t do it. If you need to build one, though, they’re pretty easy to design as [phasenoise]’s teardown demonstrates.

Arduino Saves Game Boy Camera

December 1, 2017 by 7 Comments

[Brian Khuu] bought a few Game Boy cameras on the Internet and found that they still had pictures on them from the previous owners. The memory in the camera has a backup battery and if that battery dies, the pictures are history, so he decided to mount a rescue operation.

He knew the protocol for how the Game Boy talked to the companion pocket printer was available, so he used an Arduino and a Web browser to extract the photos. The resulting code is on GitHub if you want to save your pictures. Although [Brian] didn’t have to crack the protocol, he does offer a good explanation of it. There’s even some sniffed displays. The Arduino does all the communications and fools the game into thinking it is the companion printer. However, it simply streams the data out and a Javascript decoder handles the actual decoding. In fact, in the blog post, you can enter data, click a button, and see the resulting Game Boy picture.

It works, but [Brian] did run into a few problems. For one thing, the devices don’t seem to use any flow control so he had no choice but to keep up with the Game Boy. Also, there is a CRC he could not correctly decode. However, the pictures look good — well, as good as Game Boy pictures look, at least. So he did get results.

We’ve seen this done with a PC before. If you are more interested in the reverse, by the way, you can use a real Game Boy printer to print from an Arduino.

Pi Replaces Keiko-chan

November 30, 2017 by 20 Comments

[Tobias Kuhn] and a handful of colleagues at his workplace built Crystal Signal Pi, a Raspberry Pi based low-cost alternative for a notification device that provides visual, audio and network warnings about server problems. [Tobias] works for a Japanese company where it is critical for their servers to keep humming nicely all the time. Any emergencies or error conditions must be broadcast immediately so the technicians can fix it ASAP. Network enabled warning light stalks are used to provide these alerts. A local company produces a series of indicator and hazard warning lights which are colloquially called as Keiko-chan. These are similar to the hazard warning tower lights commonly fixed on machines on factory floors or many kinds of vehicles such as fork lifts. The Kieko-chans add a few bells and whistles making them more suitable for use in the server data centre — a Gigabit LAN port for wired networks and a USB port for WiFi modules. So, besides visual and audio warnings, it can also transmit messages over the network to alert the maintenance folks. Using this commercial solution should not have been a problem were it not for their rather hefty price tag of almost $500 per pop.

So [Tobias] decided to build his own warning lights based around the Raspberry Pi. After two rounds of prototypes, a simple HAT was designed that could be plugged in to a Pi. Details of the hardware are sketchy, but it’s simple enough to figure out. The part list consists of a PLCC-6 style RGB LED, three transistors to drive the three LED pins, a voltage regulator with a couple of electrolytic capacitors and a large push button. A simple acrylic case, and an acrylic cylinder mounted on top of the RGB LED creates a nice edge lit effect for the indicator.

The code for the Crystal Pi is hosted on Github, and includes handy scripts to make installation easy. Once installed, the Crystal Pi can be accessed and controlled either through a web-based GUI or via the API. There are some more interesting features already implemented or scheduled for later, so do check out the blog and the repository for more. Check out the video below to see the Crystal Pi in action.

Continue reading “Pi Replaces Keiko-chan” →