Automate The Freight: Medical Deliveries By Drone

May 12, 2017 by 26 Comments

Being a cop’s kid leaves you with a lot of vivid memories. My dad was a Connecticut State Trooper for over twenty years, and because of the small size of the state, he was essentially on duty at all times. His cruiser was very much the family vehicle, and like all police vehicles, it was loaded with the tools of the trade. Chief among them was the VHF two-way radio, which I’d listen to during long car rides, hearing troopers dispatched to this accident or calling in that traffic stop.

One very common call was the blood relay — Greenwich Hospital might have had an urgent need for Type B+ blood, but the nearest supply was perhaps at Yale-New Haven Hospital. The State Police would be called, a trooper would pick up the blood in a cooler, drive like hell down I-95, and hand deliver the blood to waiting OR personnel. On a good day, a sufficiently motivated and skilled trooper could cover that 45-mile stretch in about half an hour. On a bad day, the trooper might end up in an accident and in need of blood himself.

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HP Laptops Turn Up Keylogger Where You Wouldn’t Expect It

May 12, 2017 by 58 Comments

Keyloggers are nasty little things that have the potential to steal the credit card numbers of you and everyone you care about. Usernames and passwords can be easily stolen this way, so they’re a useful tool for the black hats out there. One would generally expect to find a keylogger in a dodgy movie torrent or perhaps a keygen for pirated software, but this week a keylogger was found in an audio driver for an HP laptop.

The logger was found by Swiss security researchers modzero. The Conexant HD Audio Driver Package version 1.0.0.46 and earlier apparently logs keystrokes in order to monitor things like the laptop’s volume up and down keys. The real killer here is that it feels the need to log all keystrokes detected to a readily accessible file, for reasons we can’t possibly fathom. It’s a huge security risk, but it doesn’t stop there – the driver also exposes the keystrokes through an API as well, creating an even wider attack surface for malicious actors. One can in principle access the keystroke log remotely.

There’s no word from the company yet, but we really want to know – why save the keystrokes to a file at all? Code left over from debugging, perhaps? Speculate in the comments.

Cheap Helping Hands: Just Add Time

May 12, 2017 by 34 Comments

We think of helping hands as those little alligator clips on a metal stand. They are cheap and fall over, so we tend to buy them and don’t use them. However, if you are willing to put $35 or $40 into it, you can get the newer kind that have–well–tentacles–on a heavy base.  [Archie_slap] didn’t want that kind of investment, so he made his own for about $10. We think that’s Australian dollars, so that’s even less in the United States.

What’s better is he documented every step in meticulous detail and with great pictures. You probably won’t directly duplicate his project because you will probably pick up a slightly different base, but that’s not hard to figure out. The arms are actually coolant hose, [Archie_slap] picked up almost everything but the base plate on eBay.

It’s obvious [Archie] is a frugal guy, based on his drill press. It gets the job done, though. The build is attractive and looks like a much more expensive commercial product. Some of us around the Hackaday lab are old enough to wish there was a magnifying glass attached, but maybe that’s version two.

We’ve looked at a lot of different helpers recently. We couldn’t help but think about a somewhat similar Gorillapod holder we covered last year.

Vintage Plotter Handles Chaos With Ease

May 11, 2017 by 23 Comments

No lab in almost any discipline was complete in the 70s and 80s without an X-Y plotter. The height of data acquisition chic, these simple devices were connected to almost anything that produced an analog output worth saving. Digital data acquisition pushed these devices to the curb, but they’re easily found, cheap, and it’s worth a look under the hood to see what made these things tick.

The HP-7044A that [Kerry Wong] scored off eBay is in remarkably good shape four decades after leaving the factory. While the accessory pack that came with it shows its age with dried up pens and disintegrating foam, the plotter betrays itself only by the yellowish cast to its original beige case. Inside, the plotter looks pristine. Completely analog with the only chips being some op-amps in TO-5 cans, everything is in great shape, even the high-voltage power supply used to electrostatically hold the paper to the plotter’s bed. Anyone hoping for at least a re-capping will be disappointed; H-P built things to last back in the day.

[Kerry] puts the plotter through its paces by programming an Arduino to generate a Lorenz attractor, a set of differential equations with chaotic solutions that’s perfect for an X-Y plotter. The video below shows the mesmerizing butterfly taking shape. Given the plotter’s similarity to an oscilloscope, we wonder if some SDR-based Lissajous patterns might be a fun test as well, or how it would handle musical mushrooms.

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Templates Speed Up Arduino I/O

May 11, 2017 by 25 Comments

It is easy to forget, but the Arduino does use C++. Typically, the C++ part is in the libraries and the framework and most people just tend to code their main programs using a C-style just using the library objects like C-language extensions. [Fredllll] recently created a template library to speed up Arduino I/O and he shared it on GitHub.

If you’ve ever done anything serious with the Arduino, you probably know that while digitalWrite is handy, it does a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure the pin is setup and this adds overhead to every call. [Fredllll’s] template versions can switch a pin’s state in two cycles. You can cut that in half if you don’t mind bothering the state of other pins on the same port.

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Get Into Biohacking On The Cheap With This Electrophoresis Rig

May 11, 2017 by 31 Comments

If you want to get into electronics, it’s pretty straightforward: read up a little, buy a breadboard and some parts, and go to town. Getting into molecular biology as a hobby, however, presents some challenges. The knowledge is all out there, true, but finding the equipment can be a problem, and what’s out there tends to be fiendishly expensive.

So many would-be biohackers end up making their own equipment, like this DIY gel electrophoresis rig. Electrophoresis sorts macromolecules like DNA or proteins by size using an electric field. For DNA, a slab of agarose gel is immersed in a buffer solution and a current through the tank moves the DNA through the gel. The shorter the DNA fragment, the easier it can wiggle through the pores in the gel, and the faster it migrates down the gel. [abizar]’s first attempt at a DIY gel rig involved a lot of plastic cutting and solvent welding, so he simplified the process by using the little plastic drawers from an old parts cabinet. With nichrome and platinum wires for electrodes for the modified ATX power supply, it’s just the right size and shape for the gel, which is cast in a separate mold. The video below shows the whole build, and while [abizar] doesn’t offer much detail on recipes or techniques, there are plenty of videos online to guide you.

Need more apparatus to deck out your lab? We’ve got you covered there too.

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Translate Color To Smell With Bouquet

May 11, 2017 by 7 Comments

Hope springs eternal for Smell-O-Vision. [Niklas Roy] recently taught a workshop called Communication Devices at ÉCAL in Lausanne, Switzerland. Four of his Media & Interaction Design students built a scanner that detects colors and emits a corresponding scent.

The project consists of an Arduino connected to a color sensor as well as a SparkFun EasyDriver. The EasyDriver controls a stepper motor which rotates a disc of scent swatches so you sniff the swatch corresponding with the color. The students chose strawberry for red, and blue ended up being “ocean”-scented room spray.

With design students involved it’s no surprise the project looked good. Bouquet’s creators [Erika Marthins], [Arthur Moscatelli], [Pietro Alberti] and [Andrea Ramìrez Aburto] gave the device an intriguingly featureless look, and the “olfactory graphic design” posters they created to demonstrate it look great as well.

[Niklas Roy]’s excellent projects have graced the pages of Hackaday many times before. Be sure to check out his RC Beer Crate, his Music Construction Machine, and his Thermal Imaging Rig if you haven’t already.

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