Badgelife image by @catmurd0ck

All The Hardware Badges Of DEF CON 25

August 4, 2017 by 22 Comments

Hardware is the future. There is no better proof of this than the hardware clans that have grown up around DEF CON, which in recent years has become known as Badgelife. I was first drawn to the custom hardware badges of the Whiskey Pirates at DC22 back in 2014. Hardware badges were being made by several groups at that time but that was mainly happening in isolation while this year the badge makers are in constant contact with each other.

A slack channel just for those working on their own DEF CON badges sprung up. This served as tech support, social hour, and feature brainstorming for all on the channel. In the past badges were developed without much info getting out during the design process. This year, there was a huge leap forward thanks to a unified badgelife API: the badge makers colluded with each on a unified communcations protocol. In the multitude of images below you frequently see Rigado modules used. These, and some others using different hardware, adopted a unified API for command and control, both through makers’ “god mode” badges, and for wireless gaming between participant badges.

I was able to get into the badge makers meetup on Thursday of DEF CON. What follows is the result of a frantic few hours trying to get through the sheer volume of badges and people to share with you all the custom hardware on display. One thing is for sure — there were literally thousands of custom badges built and sold/distributed during DEF CON. I can’t wait to see what the artisanal hardware industry will look like in five years time.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Six Axis Robotic Arm With Fingertip Control

August 4, 2017 by 3 Comments

If you were a child of the 1980s whose fascination extended to the contents of your local Radio Shack store, you may remember the Armatron robot arm as a particular object of desire. It was a table top robot arm operated not by motors or a microcontroller, but by a clever set of gears directed manually from a pair of joysticks. If you took a look at it with an eye to control from your 8-bit home computer you were likely to be disappointed, but nevertheless it was an excellent toy.

The Armatron may be long gone, but if you hanker for a similar device you should take a look at [3D Meister]’s finger controlled six axis arm. This is an arm similar to the Armatron in size, but with far more capabilities. Control is via cable loops to sliders at the arm’s base, and in addition to the usual arm movements there is an extra loop which can be used to operate any of a selection of tools including a gripper, a magnet, and a clipper. The video below the break shows the arm in action, and for the faint-hearted it should be noted that it contains the gratuitous death of some innocent plants.

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Hack Your Memory

August 4, 2017 by 78 Comments

Imagine a fire hydrant being lifted high into the air by a large helium balloon. It goes higher and higher, but suddenly gas starts to leak out of the nozzle, which makes it sound like it’s trying to talk… but with a distinct lisp. A colorful bumblebee then lands on the balloon, licks it, and says “really yum!”  Then the bee takes out its stinger and bores on to the balloon. It pops, causing the fire hydrant to come crashing down. It smashes into a military jeep causing a massive explosion… as if it had been destroyed by a car bomb. Fortunately, the owner of the jeep, a general, was out on his rowing boat at the time. He likes to row his boat at night, and is known as the “night-rowing general” around the base. He was rowing with a bit more exertion than usual, and had to don an oxygen mask to help him breath. But the mask was full of fluoride, which turned his teeth bright neon colors.

You’re probably wondering what the hell you just read. Maybe you’re thinking the author had a stroke. Has the site been hacked? Maybe it’s a prank? What if I told you that you’ve just memorized the first 10 elements of the periodic table.

The Night-Rowing-General via Memorize Academy
  • Fire hydrant – Hydrogen
  • Helium balloon – Helium
  • Lisp – Lithium
  • Bee says “really yum” – Beryllium
  • Bee “Bores on” – Boron
  • Car bomb – Carbon
  • The night-rowing-general – Nitrogen
  • Oxygen mask – Oxygen
  • Fluoride – Florine
  • Neon teeth – Neon

Much of your memory is stored in the form of associations. Encoding things you need to remember into a silly story takes advantage of this fact. The memory of a ‘night-rowing-general’ is already in your head. You can see him in the theater of your mind… rowing his boat under a black sky… the silver stars on his green hat reflecting the moonlight. Associating this visual representation of the night-rowing-general with the term ‘Nitrogen’ is very easy for your brain to do.

You’re probably already familiar with this type of learning. Does “Bad Boys Run Over Yellow Gardenias Behind Victory Garden Walls” ring a bell?  It’s nothing new. In fact, storing memories in the form of mental images was the preferred memorization method of the scholars in ancient times. Today, it has allowed people to perform staggering feats of memorization. Want to know how [Akira Haraguchi] was able to memorize 111,700 digits of Pi?

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Neural Nets In The Browser: Why Not?

August 4, 2017 by 16 Comments

We keep seeing more and more Tensor Flow neural network projects. We also keep seeing more and more things running in the browser. You don’t have to be Mr. Spock to see this one coming. TensorFire runs neural networks in the browser and claims that WebGL allows it to run as quickly as it would on the user’s desktop computer. The main page is a demo that stylizes images, but if you want more detail you’ll probably want to visit the project page, instead. You might also enjoy the video from one of the creators, [Kevin Kwok], below.

TensorFire has two parts: a low-level language for writing massively parallel WebGL shaders that operate on 4D tensors and a high-level library for importing models from Keras or TensorFlow. The authors claim it will work on any GPU and–in some cases–will be actually faster than running native TensorFlow.

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Pogo Pin Serial Adapter Thing

August 4, 2017 by 37 Comments

A few weeks ago, I was working on a small project of mine, and I faced a rather large problem. I had to program nearly five hundred badges in a week. I needed a small programming adapter that would allow me to stab a few pads on a badge with six pogo pins, press a button, and move onto the next badge.

While not true for all things in life, sometimes you need to trade quality for expediency. This is how I built a terrible but completely functional USB to serial adapter to program hundreds of badges in just a few hours.

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Simple 3D-Printed Circuitry

August 4, 2017 by 12 Comments

One of the problems encountered thus far with 3D-printing circuits with conductive filament is that it doesn’t really bond to anything, let alone solder, so how does one use it?

[mikey77] wrote an Instructable showing how to print circuit boards and create simple circuits, using shape of the plastic as a way to control the circuit. We like how he used using the flexible nature of the filament to make buttons, with two layers of conductive material coming together with the press of a finger.

He also created a linear potentiometer with a 3D-printed wiper that increases the ohms of the connection the farther it’s pushed. The filament doesn’t have the same conductivity as copper so [mikey] was able make resistors by stringing pieces of conductive plastic between two leads. There are also some hexagonal touch pads that turned out very nice.

We’ve published a lot of posts about DIY circuitry, including a previous effort of [mikey]’s, 3D-printed solderless circuits, plus another post about printing point-to-point circuits on a 3D printer.

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OpenCV Turret Tracks Motion, Busts Airsoft Pellets

August 4, 2017 by 7 Comments

In the eternal struggle for office dominance, the motion-tracking Airsoft/Nerf/whatever, the autonomous turret seems to be the nuclear option. [Aaron] and [Davis] built a motion-tracking turret that uses openCV to detect movement, before hitting a relay to trigger the gun.

There’s a Raspberry Pi controlling a Logitech C210 Pi-compatible webcam, with a stepper hat for the Pi controlling two NEMA steppers that aim the gun. The design is simple but elegant, with a rotating base and an assembly that raises and lowers the weapon.

The openCV intrigues us. We want to see a openCV-powered turret with color detection, so your own team doesn’t get blasted along with your hapless enemies. Or if guarding your cubicle, how about a little openCV facial recognition?

If you want to take a stab at your own, [Aaron] and [Davis] show how they built their project in their Hackaday.io page and their Python script can be found on GitHub.  Otherwise, check out the Counter Strike Airsoft robot, the Airsoft sentry gun, and the Nerf turret powered by Slack we published previously. Continue reading “OpenCV Turret Tracks Motion, Busts Airsoft Pellets” →