Self-Driving Cars Are Not (Yet) Safe

December 5, 2016 by Elliot Williams 123 Comments

Three things have happened in the last month that have made me think about the safety of self-driving cars a lot more. The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has issued its guidance on the safety of semi-autonomous and autonomous cars. At the same time, [Geohot]’s hacker self-driving car company bailed out of the business, citing regulatory hassles. And finally, Tesla’s Autopilot has killed its second passenger, this time in China.

At a time when [Elon Musk], [President Obama], and Google are all touting self-driving cars to be the solution to human error behind the wheel, it’s more than a little bold to be arguing the opposite case in public, but the numbers just don’t add up. Self-driving cars are probably not as safe as a good sober driver yet, but there just isn’t the required amount of data available to say this with much confidence. However, one certainly cannot say that they’re demonstrably safer.

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Body Cardio Weighing Scale Teardown

December 5, 2016 by Jenny List 22 Comments

If you weigh yourself by standing on a bathroom scale, not liking the result, then balancing towards one corner to knock a few pounds off the dial, you are stuck in a previous century. Modern bathroom scales have not only moved from the mechanical to the electronic, they also gather body composition measurements and pack significant computing power.

Yet they’re a piece of domestic electronics that sits in our bathroom and rarely comes under scrutiny. How do they work, and what do they contain? The team at November Five tore down a top-of-the-range Withings Body Cardio scale to find out.

After a struggle with double-sided sticky pads, the scale revealed its secrets: a simple yet accomplished device. There are four load cells and the electrodes for the body measurement, and the PCB. On the board is a 120 MHz ARM Cortex M4 microcontroller, a wireless chipset, battery management, and the analogue measurement chipset. This last is particularly interesting, a Texas Instruments AFE4300, a specialised analogue front-end for this application. It’s a chip most of us will never use, but as always an obscure datasheet is worth a read.

Finally, the wireless antenna is not the normal simple angular trace you’ll be used to from the likes of ESP8266 boards, but an organic squiggle. It’s a fractal antenna, presumably designed to present a carefully calculated bandwidth to the chipset. A nice touch, though one the consumer will never be aware of.

We’ve shown you quite a few bathroom scales over the years. There was this wisecracking Raspberry Pi scale, this scale reverse engineered to gather weight data, and this one laid bare for use as a controller.

Sporty Cars Making Fake Engine Noise

December 5, 2016 by Elliot Williams 125 Comments

Following the monumental emissions-cheating scandal at VW, further horrible revelations demonstrate just how corrupt the modern automotive industry has become: many cars make fake engine noise. And we’re not just talking about those darn sneaky Priuses.

Ford, BMWs, Porsche, and yes, Volkswagen are all doing it, to different degrees. Some of the systems, like the one in the BMW M5, play engine sounds at low volumes through the stereo system. As you’d expect from a BMW, it’s an overly-technological solution: they have built essentially a BMW engine-sound synthesizer that responds to the tachometer and gas pedal data from the car’s data bus. They also let you turn off the “acoustic experience”.

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Fail Of The Week: The Accidental FM Radio

December 4, 2016 by Dan Maloney 80 Comments

[B Arnold] is hearing voices and needs help from the Hackaday community. But before any of you armchair psychiatrists run off to WebMD, rest assured that [B Arnold] suffers not from schizophrenia but rather has an RF coupling problem.

The project (which isn’t posted yet) is an attempt to turn a C.H.I.P into an Amazon Echo, for which [B Arnold] needed an audio amplifier. Turning to the junk bin, he unearthed an LM386, that venerable power amp chip that first appeared in the mid-70s. Dead simple and able to run off a 9-volt battery, the LM386 that has found its way into thousands of commercial products and countless hacks.

Shortly after applying power to the amp, [B Arnold] started hearing things – faint, far-off voices, scratchy but discernible. A bit of repositioning of wires and hands improved the signal enough for a station ID – an FM talk radio station on 97.1 MHz. [B Arnold] doesn’t mention the call sign, but it might have been KFTK out of St. Louis, Missouri; in any case, it would be helpful to know the range from the transmitter to the inadvertent receiver. Two low-fidelity audio clips are included below for your listening pleasure – you’ll want your headphones on, and Sample 2 is better than Sample 1 – as are photos of the offending circuit.

What do you think is going on here? We’ve heard of RF coupling of AM radio stations before, but how would FM signals be making it into this circuit and out of the speaker? Is there anything [B Arnold] did wrong to get this result? Sound off in the comments and let us know your horror stories of RF coupling.

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Creepy Wireless Stalking Made Easy

December 4, 2016 by Elliot Williams 55 Comments

In a slight twist on the august pursuit of warwalking, [Mehdi] took a Raspberry Pi armed with a GPS, WiFi, and a Bluetooth sniffer around Bordeaux with him for six months and logged all the data he could find. The result isn’t entirely surprising, but it’s still a little bit creepy.

If your WiFi sends out probe requests for its home access points, [Mehdi] logged it. If your Bluetooth devices leak information about what they are, [Mehdi] logged it. In the end, he got nearly 30,000 WiFis logged, including 120,000 probes. Each reading is timestamped and geolocated, and [Mehdi] presents a few of the results from querying the resulting database.

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Hackaday Links: December 4, 2016

December 4, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

The Chaos Communication Congress is growing! Actually, it’s not, but there may be an ‘overflow venue’ for everyone who didn’t get a ticket. There’s a slack up for people who didn’t get a ticket to 33C3 but would still like to rent a venue, set up some tables, stream some videos, and generally have a good time.

Need to test a lot of batteries? Have one of those magnetic parts tray/dish things sitting around? This is freakin’ brilliant. Put your batteries vertically in a metal dish, clip one lead of a meter to the dish and probe each battery with the other lead of your meter.

Pravda reports the USS Zumwalt and HMS Duncan – the most technologically advanced ships in the US and Royal Navies – have turned into, ‘useless tin cans due to China’, with ‘Microchips made in China putting the vessels out of action’. Again, Pravda reports this, so don’t worry. In other news, someone found a few USB drives in a parking lot in Norfolk, Virginia.

Here’s how discourse goes on the Internet. Someone does something. Everyone says it’s stupid. We wait a few days or weeks. Someone posts something on Medium telling everyone it’s actually okay. Public opinion is muddled until the actual issue being discussed is rendered technologically irrelevant. For the newest MacBook Pro, we’re currently at stage 3 and ‘it’s kind of great for hackers’. Now if only we knew how to make USB-C ports work with microcontrollers…

If you have a Prusa i3, here’s a free gift: a Spitfire. The files to print a remote control, 973mm Spitfire Mk XVI are now free for Prusa i3 and i3 Mk 2 owners. Why? Because it’s cool, duh, and [Stephan Dokupil] and [Patrik Svida], the guys behind the Spitfire and other 3D printed RC planes, are also in Czech. Now all we need are Czech roundel stickers.

NASA Wants SpacePoop Hackers

December 4, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 90 Comments

NASA is looking for a few good men and women to solve an upcoming problem. Astronauts will soon be venturing outward beyond Earth orbit. If the spacecraft cabin should depressurize then they’ll have to put on their spacesuits and may have to keep them on for up to six days. During that time something will have to handle the resulting urine, fecal, and menstrual waste, all without the astronauts use of their hands. And that’s where you come in.

NASA is having a space poop challenge. The current system of an adult diaper won’t last six days. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to design a system that will move the waste away from the skin where it can cause infection. Continue reading for the rather unique requirements.

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