A light blue marker with a two-pin header replacing the tip, being pressed against the back of the keypad baord that's removed from the safe

Anyone Can Be The Master Of This Master Lock Safe

June 5, 2022 by 21 Comments

[Etienne Sellan] got one of these lovely $5 logic analyzers. As with any shiny new tool, he started looking for things to investigate with it, and his gaze fell on a Sentry Safe (produced by Master Lock). On the surface level, this keypad-equipped safe is designed decently when it comes to privilege separation. You can take the keypad board off and access its backside, but the keypad doesn’t make any decisions, it merely sends the digits to a different board embedded behind the safe’s door. The solenoid-connected board receives the PIN, verifies it, and then controls the solenoid that unlocks the safe.

[Etienne] hooked up a logic analyzer to the communication wire, which turned out to be a UART channel, and logged the keypad communication packets — both for password entry and for password change. Then, he wrote some Arduino code to send the same packets manually, which worked wonders. Bruteforcing wasn’t viable, however, due to rate limitation in the solenoid controller. Something drew his attention from there – if you want to change the password, the keypad requires you enter the factory code, unique to each safe and supplied in the instruction manual. That code entry is a separate kind of packet from the “change password” one.

More after the break…

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A 3D-printed Portal Turret

3D Printed Portal Turret Moves And Talks Like The Real Thing

March 27, 2022 by 19 Comments

Thanks to its innovative gameplay and quirky humor, Portal became an instant hit when it was released in 2007. Characters became cultural icons, quotes became memes and the game became a classic along with its 2011 sequel. Even today, more than a decade later, we regularly see hackers applying their skills in recreating some of the game’s elements. One beautiful example is [Joran de Raaff]’s physical rendition of a Portal Turret.

A 3D CAD drawing of a Portal Turret
Inside the Turret it’s full of moving parts.

[Joran] decided to use his 3D printer to create a Turret that can move and speak exactly as it does in the game. The result, as you can see in the video embedded below, was a triumph. We’re making a note here, “huge success”. The outer shell is a beautiful shiny white, an effect achieved through patient sanding, priming, and spraying with high-gloss paint. The internals are even more impressive with servos, microswitches, and a whole array of 3D-printed gears, cams, and levers.

A motion sensor activates the Turret whenever a human moves nearby. It will then open its wings and fire its guns while playing the corresponding sounds from the game. Its brains are formed by a Wemos D1 which drives the various LEDs and servos, while an MP3 player board holds a library of sound bites and plays them through a speaker hidden inside the Turret’s shell.

After posting his creation on YouTube [Joran] got many requests for the 3D files, so he made them available and wrote a comprehensive build guide. This should enable anyone with a 3D printer to build this neat gun, without getting too much science done. If this model is too small for you, then perhaps this life-sized model is more to your liking. If you prefer your Turret small and cute, check out this plushie version.

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Robot Nerf Alarm Blasts You Awake With Foam

January 21, 2022 by 11 Comments

The sentry gun targets [Vinnie] with blasts of foam as he runs through the bedroom to the sounds of Your New Morning Alarm by [Marc Rebillet].
Waking up is hard; sometimes you need more than a little chiming alarm to get you out of bed. When [Vinnie Satriale] started unconsciously switching his alarms off, he went all out, deciding to build a Nerf sentry blaster to wake him up instead. 

A Nerf Rival Nemesis MXVII-10K flywheel blaster is the core of the build, with a 100-round capacity of soft foam balls. Stepper motors are used to control a pan and tilt system to aim the blaster. It’s moved under instruction from a Raspberry Pi that uses machine vision algorithms running on a Coral USB accelerator to track targets in the bedroom. A relay board is then used to activate the blaster’s firing action, blasting any targets until they wake up.

[Vinnie] had plenty of fun during build, also showing the sentry gun off to his coworkers in the office. It’s a hard sentry to dodge, with the machine vision algorithm using a full-body tracking model, so merely covering one’s face won’t be enough to get away.

We’ve seen all kinds of sentry guns over the years, from those firing rubber bands to others spraying jets of water. Video after the break.

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A robotic turret shooting plastic balls at a man

Automated Turret Keeps Dorm Clean, RoboCop Style

December 14, 2021 by 17 Comments

Students’ dorm rooms are not generally known to be the most orderly of places. Whether it’s mountains of dishes in the sink, piles of clothes waiting to be washed, or random bits and bobs strewn across the hallway, cleaning up is pretty low on the agenda for many dorm dwellers.

[Luis Marx] seems to have invented a useful solution to his (or his roommates’) sloppiness: a robotic turret that opens fire on anyone who leaves items unattended (video, in German, embedded below). This system uses a set of “clutter sensors” that can be placed in strategic locations around the house and will detect stray objects using ultrasonic sensors. If any are found, the main system is alerted through WiFi. The turret will then search for any persons in its vicinity and start shooting them with little plastic balls.

The turret in question is a beautifully-designed piece of kit made from 3D printed parts and controlled by an ESP32. It can swivel around its axis and tilt up and down using two servos, while its firing mechanism is driven by a DC motor. It tracks its target thanks to a camera-based object sensor that can recognize humans. The whole thing gives us a bit of a RoboCop vibe; we’d half expect it to shout Pick up those clothes. You have twenty seconds to comply.

While this might not be the definitive solution to messy dorm rooms, we like the creative thinking behind it. We’ve seen auto-targeting turrets before, but not in household applications like this. Of course there are plenty of other robots that can help you with domestic tasks.

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Get Some Close Air Support With A Nerf Drone

July 26, 2021 by 12 Comments

Working from home has the major advantage of spending more time with loved ones, but it all that time can sometimes lead to friction. [Cory] found that Nerf battles with his kids is an effective way to blow off some steam, but felt he was getting a bit too much exercise in the process. Instead, he equipped an FPV quadcopter with a 3D printed Nerf gun to take his place.

Since manually reloading the Nerf gun after every shot wasn’t an option, he needed to create an autoloader. The darts are propelled by a pair of brushless drone motors mounted side-by-side, with just enough space for a dart the squeeze between. The motors are allowed to spin up, and then a dart is loaded servo-operated plunger, out of an off-the-shelf Nerf magazine. The motors ESCs and servo is controlled by an Arduino Nano, which receives the fire command from one of the spare outputs on the drone’s flight controller. To nerf gear is easily removable from the drone, so [Cory] to also fly the drone on more peaceful missions. See the video of one of the battles after the break. [Cory] might need to find an alternative control location to prevent himself being used as cover by his adversaries.

Nerf guns are a fun and harmless way to live out your sci-fi warfare fantasies, especially with the technology we have available these days. From FPV sentry guns to auto-aiming rifles, and heavy artillery, anything is possible.

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A Nerf Ball Turret Complete With FPV

July 23, 2021 by 2 Comments

Sentry turrets have long been a feature of science fiction films and video games. These days, there’s nothing stopping you from building your own. [otjones99] has done just that, with his FPV Nerf Ball launcher.

The system works on the basic principle of launching soft foam balls via a pair of counter-rotating wheels. It’s a remarkably simple way of electrically launching projectiles without a lot of fuss and mucking around, and it works well here. A blower fan is used to gently roll ammunition towards the launcher wheels as required. There’s a hopper-style clip which uses a servo to drop one ball at a time into the launching tube.

An Arduino Uno is responsible for slewing the turret, and handling the firing process. A joystick is fitted with an NRF24L01 radio module to send signals to the Arduino to aim the turret, while an FPV camera mounted on the turret allows the user to remotely see what the turret is aiming at. With a simple pull of the joystick’s trigger, the turret opens fire.

It’s a fun build, and one that shouldn’t do too much damage to anything given the soft pliable nature of the Nerf ammunition. Of course, if you don’t want to aim your turret yourself, you can always go ahead and build yourself an automated sentry gun. Video after the break.

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Big Nerf Bazooka Packs A Wallop

November 20, 2020 by 4 Comments

Nerf blasters are a fun toy, often confiscated from children once they hit one too many precious ornaments around the home in the midst of battle. [Ivan Miranda] is bigger than most children however, and set about building a much larger blaster.

The bazooka-like design uses a several meters of 160mm PVC pipe, firing “darts” constructed out of foam yoga rollers and buffing pads. The build uses a littany of 3D printed components in its construction, both as part of the firing mechanism and as jigs to help machine the pipe. A large plunger is used to propel the darts, which is pulled back against the tension of thick rubber tubes before being released by the trigger mechanism.

It’s an intimidating device, to be sure. However, we suspect its short range, huge size, and slow reload time should stop it from breaking the meta-game at your local Nerf battles. That said, we still wouldn’t want to take a shot from this bad boy to the head. Hackers do love a good Nerf build, and they’re particularly popular in sentry applications. Video after the break.

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