Rube Goldberg PC/Console Game Hack

January 28, 2016 by 19 Comments

There’s no holy war holier than establishing whether PC games are superior to console games (they are). But even so, there’s no denying that there are some good console titles out there. What if you’d still like to play them using a mouse and keyboard? If you’re [Agent86], you’d build up the most ridiculous chain of fun electronics to get the job done.

Now there is an overpriced off-the-shelf solution for this problem, and a pre-existing open-source project that’ll get the same job done for only a few bucks in parts. But there’s nothing like the fun in solving a problem your own way, with your own tangle of wires, darn it all! The details of the build span four (4!) pages in [Agent86]’s blog, so settle down with a warm cup of coffee.

Here’s the summary: an Xbox 360 controller is taken apart and turned into an Xbox controller. The buttons and joysticks are put under computer control via a Teensy microcontroller. GPIOs press the controller’s buttons, and digipots replace the analog sticks. Software on the Teensy drives the digipots and presses the buttons, interpreting a custom protocol sent over USB from the computer, which also gets some custom software to send the signals.

So if you’re keeping score: a button press on a keyboard is converted to USB, sent to a PC, converted to a custom serial protocol, sent to a Teensy which emulates a human for a controller that then coverts the signals back into the Xbox’s USB protocol. Pshwew!

Along the way, there’s learning at every stage, which is really the point of an exercise like this. And [Agent86] says that it mostly works, with some glitches in the mouse-to-joystick mapping. But if you’re interested in any part of this crazy chain, you’ve now got a model for each of them.

 

Warbots: Is It Already Too Late?

January 28, 2016 by 53 Comments

In 1971, a non-profit formed that holds the World Economic Forum each year. The Forum claims it “Engages the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.” This year, the Forum hosted a session: What If: Robots Go To War? Participants included a computer science professor, an electrical engineering professor, the chairman of BAE, a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, and a Time magazine editor.

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Old School Gauges Let You Know Which Way The Wind Blows

January 27, 2016 by 14 Comments

When your passion is a sport that depends on Mother Nature’s cooperation, you need to keep a close eye on weather conditions. With this in mind, and not one to let work distract him from an opportunity to play, [mechanicalsquid] decided to build a wind-monitoring gauge with an old-school look to let him know when the wind is right for kitesurfing.

old-school-meter-for-windBeing an aficionado of big engineering helped [mechanicalsquid] come up with a style for his gauge – big old dials and meters. We hesitate to apply the “steampunk” label to every project that retasks old technology, but it sure looks like a couple of the gauges he used could have been for steam, so the moniker probably fits here. Weather data for favorite kitesurfing and windsurfing locales is scraped from the web and applied to the gauges to indicates wind speed and direction. [mechanicalsquid] made a valiant effort to drive the voltmeter coil directly from the Raspberry Pi, but it was not to be. Servos proved inaccurate, so steppers do the job of moving the needles on both gauges. Check out the nicely detailed build log for this one, too.

For more weather station fun be sure to check out this meter-based weather station with a slightly more modern look. And for another build in the steampunk style, this vintage meter and Nixie power display is sure to impress.

Conductive Concrete Melts Snow And Ice

January 27, 2016 by 93 Comments

Winter sucks. Ice sucks. Shoveling sucks. What if roads, or your driveway, could get rid of snow and ice by themselves? (…with the help of our friend, the electron.)

A few days ago we shared a project about building an epic snow-melting system right into your driveway. But for obvious reasons, it’s not that easy to do — or cheap. But [Chris Tuan], an engineering professor at the University of Nebraska thinks he can change that.

He’s created his own special formula for conductive concrete. Which means you can turn the concrete into a resistive heat load. And this isn’t just a university research project that is going nowhere; it’s actually being trialed by the FAA for use in airports . There is a patch of it in Omaha undergoing testing right now.

And it’s actually not that complex. It consists of a mixture of 20% steel shavings and carbon particles, in a regular run-of-the-mill concrete. Apparently, this is enough to cause the entire patch of concrete to become conductive, meaning if you pump enough juice through it — it’d definitely melt some ice on top.

[Thanks Michael!]

Augmented Reality Ultrasound

January 27, 2016 by 14 Comments

Think of Virtual Reality and it’s mostly fun and games that come to mind. But there’s a lot of useful, real world applications that will soon open up exciting possibilities in areas such as medicine, for example. [Victor] from the Shackspace hacker space in Stuttgart built an Augmented Reality Ultrasound scanning application to demonstrate such possibilities.

But first off, we cannot get over how it’s possible to go dumpster diving and return with a functional ultrasound machine! That’s what member [Alf] turned up with one day. After some initial excitement at its novelty, it was relegated to a corner gathering dust. When [Victor] spotted it, he asked to borrow it for a project. Shackspace were happy to donate it to him and free up some space. Some time later, [Victor] showed off what he did with the ultrasound machine.

As soon as the ultrasound scanner registers with the VR app, possibly using the image taped to the scan sensor, the scanner data is projected virtually under the echo sensor. There isn’t much detail of how he did it, but it was done using Vuforia SDK which helps build applications for mobile devices and digital eye wear in conjunction with the Unity 5 cross-platform game engine. Check out the video to see it in action.

Thanks to [hadez] for sending in this link.

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Cheap WiFi Devices Are Hardware Hacker Gold

January 27, 2016 by 51 Comments

Cheap consumer WiFi devices are great for at least three reasons. First, they almost all run an embedded Linux distribution. Second, they’re cheap. If you’re going to break a couple devices in the process of breaking into the things, it’s nice to be able to do so without financial fears. And third, they’re often produced on such low margins that security is an expense that the manufacturers just can’t stomach — meaning they’re often trivially easy to get into.

Case in point: [q3k] sent in this hack of a tiny WiFi-enabled SD card reader device that he and his compatriots [emeryth] and [informatic] worked out with the help of some early work by [Benjamin Henrion]. The device in question is USB bus-powered, and sports an SD card reader and an AR9331 WiFi SOC inside. It’s intended to supply wireless SD card support to a cell phone that doesn’t have enough on-board storage.

The hack begins with [Benajmin] finding a telnet prompt on port 11880 and simply logging in as root, with the same password that’s used across all Zsun devices: zsun1188. It’s like they want to you get in. (If you speak Chinese, you’ll recognize the numbers as being a sound-alike for “want to get rich”. So we’ve got the company name and a cliché pun. This is basically the Chinese equivalent of “password1234”.) Along the way, [Benjamin] also notes that the device executes arbitrary code typed into its web interface. Configure it to use the ESSID “reboot”, for instance, and the device reboots. Oh my!

zsun_gpio_bootstrap_annotFrom here [q3k] and co. took over and ported OpenWRT to the device and documented where its serial port and GPIOs are broken out on the physical board. But that’s not all. They’ve also documented how and where to attach a wired Ethernet adapter, should you want to put this thing on a non-wireless network, or use it as a bridge, or whatever. In short, it’s a tiny WiFi router and Linux box in a package that’s about the size of a (Euro coin | US quarter) and costs less than a good dinner out. Just add USB power and you’re good to go.

Nice hack!

TP-LINK’s WiFi Defaults To Worst Unique Passwords Ever

January 27, 2016 by 82 Comments

This “security” is so outrageous we had to look for hidden cameras to make sure we’re not being pranked. We don’t want to ruin the face-palming realization for you, so before clicking past the break look closely at the image above and see if you can spot the exploit. It’s plain as day but might take a second to dawn on you.

The exploit was published on [Mark C.’s] Twitter feed after waiting a couple of weeks to hear back from TP-LINK about the discovery. They didn’t respond so he went public with the info.

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