Adding MIDI Out To The Casio PX410R

December 28, 2016 by 12 Comments

Since the 1980s, MIDI has been a great way to send data between electronic musical instruments. Beginning as a modified serial interface running through optoisolaters and DIN sockets, these days, your hardware is more likely to carry its MIDI data over USB instead. This is great if you want to hook up to a computer without a cumbersome interface, but not so great when you want to connect a bunch of instruments to each other.

The Roland Integra 7 is a rack mount synthesizer with classic MIDI ports. [adriangin] wanted to control the synthesizer over MIDI, but their Casio keyboard only had MIDI over USB available. To get around this, [adriangin] set out to add a standard MIDI Out port to the Casio PX410R.

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33C3: Breaking IoT Locks

December 28, 2016 by 16 Comments

Fast-forward to the end of the talk, and you’ll hear someone in the audience ask [Ray] “Are there any Bluetooth locks that you can recommend?” and he gets to answer “nope, not really.” (If this counts as a spoiler for a talk about the security of three IoT locks at a hacker conference, you need to get out more.)

btle_lockUnlocking a padlock with your cellphone isn’t as crazy as it sounds. The promise of Internet-enabled locks is that they can allow people one-time use or limited access to physical spaces, as easily as sending them an e-mail. Unfortunately, it also opens up additional attack surfaces. Lock making goes from being a skill that involves clever mechanical design and metallurgy, to encryption and secure protocols.

master_jtagIn this fun talk, [Ray] looks at three “IoT” locks. One, he throws out on mechanical grounds once he’s gotten it open — it’s a $100 lock that’s as easily shimmable as that $4 padlock on your gym locker. The other, a Master lock, has a new version of a 2012 vulnerability that [Ray] pointed out to Master: if you move a magnet around the outside the lock, it actuates the motor within, unlocking it. The third, made by Kickstarter company Noke, was at least physically secure, but fell prey to an insecure key exchange protocol.

Along the way, you’ll get some advice on how to quickly and easily audit your own IoT devices. That’s worth the price of admission even if you like your keys made out of metal instead of bits. And one of the more refreshing points, given the hype of some IoT security talks these days, was the nuanced approach that [Ray] took toward what counts as a security problem because it’s exploitable by someone else, rather than vectors that are only “exploitable” by the device’s owner. We like to think of those as customization options.

Open Source Art Encourages Society To Think Inclusively

December 28, 2016 by 56 Comments

Kate Reed has a vision for elevating the less talked about parts of ourselves, and of society. Through her art, she wants people to think about a part of themselves that makes them feel invisible, and to anonymously share that with the community around them. The mechanism for this is Invisible, a campaign to place translucent sculptures in public places around the world. The approach that she has taken to the project is very interesting — she’s giving the art away to empower the campaign. Check out her talk from the Hackaday SuperConference.

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Review: Digilent Analog Discovery 2

December 28, 2016 by 57 Comments

I recently opened the mailbox to find a little device about the size of White Castle burger. It was an “Analog Discovery 2” from Digilent. It is hard to categorize exactly what it is. On the face of it, it is a USB scope and logic analyzer. But it is also a waveform generator, a DC power supply, a pattern generator, and a network analyzer.

I’ve looked at devices like this before. Some are better than others, but usually all the pieces don’t work well at the same time. That is, you can use the scope or you can use the signal generator. The ones based on microcontrollers often get worse as you add channels even. The Analog Discovery 2 is built around an FPGA which, if done right, should get around many of the problems associated with other small instrumentation devices.

I’d read good things about the Discovery 2, so I was anxious to put it through its paces. I will say it is an impressive piece of gear. There are a few things that I was less happy with, though, and I’ll try to give you a fair read on what I found both good and bad.

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Police Want Alexa Data; People Begin To Realize It’s Listening

December 28, 2016 by 143 Comments

It is interesting to see the wide coverage of a police investigation looking to harvest data from the Amazon Echo, the always-listening home automation device you may know as Alexa. A murder investigation has led them to issue Amazon a warrant to fork over any recordings made during the time of a crime, and Amazon has so far refused.

Not too long ago, this is the sort of news would have been discussed on Hackaday but the rest of my family would have never heard about it. Now we just need to get everyone to think one step beyond this and we’ll be getting somewhere.

What isn’t being discussed here is more of concern to me. How many of you have a piece of tape over your webcam right now? Why did you do that? It’s because we know there are compromised systems that allow attackers to turn on the camera remotely. Don’t we have to assume that this will eventually happen with the Echo as well? Police warrants likely to affect far less users than account breaches like the massive ones we’ve seen with password data.

All of the major voice activated technologies assert that their products are only listening for the trigger words. In this case, police aren’t just looking for a recording of someone saying “Alexa, help I’m being attacked by…” but for any question to Alexa that would put the suspect at the scene of the crime at a specific time. Put yourself in the mind of a black hat. If you could design malware to trigger on the word “Visa” you can probably catch a user giving their credit card number over the phone. This is, of course, a big step beyond the data already stored from normal use of the system.

It’s not surprising that Amazon would be served a warrant for this data. You would expect phone records (although not recordings of the calls) to be reviewed in any murder case. Already disclosed in this case is that a smart water meter from the home reported a rather large water usage during the time of the murder — a piece of evidence that may be used to indicate a crime scene clean-up effort.

What’s newsworthy here is that people who don’t normally think about device security are now wondering what their voice-controlled tech actually hears them say. And this is a step in the right direction.

SKiDL: Script Your Circuits In Python

December 28, 2016 by 28 Comments

SKiDL is very, very cool. It’s a bit of Python code that outputs a circuit netlist for KiCAD.

Why is this cool? If you design a PCB in KiCAD, you go through three steps: draw the schematic, assign footprints to the symbolic parts, and then place them. The netlist ties all of these phases together: it’s a list of which parts are connected to which, the output of schematic capture and the input for layout. The ability to generate this programmatically should be useful.

For instance, you could write a filter circuit generator that would take the order, cutoff, and type of filter as inputs, and give you a spec’ed netlist as output. Bam! In your next design, when you need a different filter, you just change a couple of variables. Writing your circuits as code would make arranging the little sub-circuits modular and flexible, like functions in code.

At the very least, it’s an interesting alternative to the mouse, click, drag, click paradigm that currently dominates the schematic capture phase. Just as some of you like OpenSCAD for 3D modelling, some of you will like SKiDL for circuit design.

We’ve become so accustomed to the circuit diagram as the means of thinking about circuits that we’re not sure that we can ever give up the visual representation entirely. Maybe designing with SKiDL will be like sketching out block diagrams, where each block is a bit of Python code that generates a circuit module? Who knows? All we know is that it sounds potentially interesting, and that it’ll certainly be mind-expanding to give it a try.

Give it a shot and leave feedback down in the comments!

In Defense Of The Electric Chainsaw

December 28, 2016 by 94 Comments

Here at Hackaday we are a diverse bunch, we all bring our own experience to the task of bringing you the best of the hardware scene. Our differing backgrounds were recently highlighted by a piece from my colleague [Dan] in which he covered the teardown of a cordless electric chainsaw.

It was his line “Now, we’d normally shy away from any electric chainsaw, especially a cordless saw, and doubly so a Harbor Freight special“. that caught my eye. I’m with him on cordless tools which I see as a cynical ploy from manufacturers to ensure 5-yearly replacements, and I agree that cheap tools are a false economy. But electric chainsaws? Here on this small farm, they’re the saw of choice and here’s why.

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