Hilarious DARPA Robots Falling Video

August 23, 2015 by 46 Comments

If you’re worried about Skynet, take a quick gander at the outtakes reel (YouTube, inlined below the break) from the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) and you’ll feel a lot better. The IEEE Spectrum reporters assigned to the DRC took a break from their otherwise serious coverage and made this funny compilation of all the multi-million dollar robotic fails to go along with this article.

robot_fallingIt’s hard not to empathize with the robots, and we’ll admit that we winced a little bit with the first couple falls. (But after three or four, started breaking out in maniacal laughter.)

Continue reading “Hilarious DARPA Robots Falling Video” →

Hackaday Prize Entry: NetBOOT Powercycles Your Modem When You Can’t

August 22, 2015 by 20 Comments

Many people have their home network setup with a dynamic dns service in order to remote access their files, printers, or Pi based security camera systems. Many people also suffer from less than stellar internet connectivity and find themselves unable to access their home system due to a stalled signal.

netBOOT is an Arduino based device that automatically resets your modem for you, when you are unable to. Core of the system is a standard issue ATMEGA328p based Arduino board combined with a W5100 Ethernet module, and a relay module. The software on the Arduino periodically pings a list of IP addresses and listens for a response. If none is found within 3 tries the relay module, which is connected inline with the DC power of your modem, is clicked open for 10 seconds and then returned closed. Once your modem has rebooted and re-synced everything should be good to go.

We don’t remember seeing this feature in the list of specs for Google’s new OnHub. The ability to reset bad connections seems like a feature that should be built into future-thinking routers, right?

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

car dashboard

How Those Hackers Took Complete Control Of That Jeep

August 22, 2015 by 72 Comments

It was an overcast day with temperatures in the mid seventies – a perfect day to take your brand new Jeep Cherokee for a nice relaxing drive. You and your partner buckle in and find yourselves merging onto the freeway just a few minutes later.  You take in the new car smell as your partner fiddles with the central touch screen display.

“See if it has XM radio,” you ask as you play with the headlight controls.

Seconds later, a Taylor Swift song begins to play. You both sing along as the windows come down. “Life doesn’t get much better than this,” you think. Unfortunately, the fun would be short lived. It started with the windshield wipers coming on – the dry rubber-on-glass making a horrible screeching sound.

“Hey, what are you doing!”

“I didn’t do it….”

You verify the windshield wiper switch is in the OFF position. You switch it on and off a few times, but it has no effect. All of the sudden, the radio shuts off. An image of a skull and wrenches logo appears on the touchscreen. Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” begins blaring out of the speakers, and the four doors lock in perfect synchronization. The AC fans come on at max settings while at the same time, you feel the seat getting warmer as they too are set to max. The engine shuts off and the vehicle shifts into neutral. You hit the gas pedal, but nothing happens. Your brand new Jeep rolls to a halt on the side of the freeway, completely out of your control.

Sound like something out of a Hollywood movie? Think again.

[Charlie Miller], a security engineer for Twitter and [Chris Valasek], director for vehicle safety research at IOActive, were able to hack into a 2014 Jeep Cherokee via its wireless on-board entertainment system from their basement. A feature called UConnect, which allows the vehicle to connect to the internet via a cellular connection, has one of those things you might have heard of before – an IP address. Once the two hackers had this address, they had the ‘digital keys’ to the Jeep. From there, [Charlie] and [Chris] began to tinker with the various firmwares until they were able to gain access to the vehicle’s CAN bus. This gives them the ability to control many of the car’s functions, including (under the right conditions) the ability to kill the brakes and turn the steering wheel. You probably already have heard about the huge recall Chrysler issued in response to this vulnerability.

But up until this weekend we didn’t know exactly how it was done. [Charlie] and [Chris] documented their exploit in a 90 page white paper (PDF) and spoke at length during their DEF CON talk in Las Vegas. That video was just published last night and is embedded below. Take look and you’ll realize how much work they did to make all this happen. Pretty amazing.

Continue reading “How Those Hackers Took Complete Control Of That Jeep” →

MIT’s Glass 3D Printer

August 22, 2015 by 34 Comments

How hot does your 3D printer’s hot end get? Most low cost printers heat up to 240°C (464°F) at the most because they contain PEEK which starts to get soft if you go much higher. Even a metal hot end with active cooling usually won’t go much higher than 400°C (752°F). Pretty hot, right? [MIT’s] new G3DP printer goes to 1900°F (over 1000°C) and prints optically clear glass.

By changing design and print parameters, G3DP can limit or control light transmission, reflection and refraction. The printer uses a dual heated chamber. The upper chamber acts as a 1900°F kiln while the lower chamber serves to anneal the structures. The print head is an alumina-zircon-silica nozzle.

Continue reading “MIT’s Glass 3D Printer” →

Programmable DC Backup Power Supply

August 22, 2015 by 8 Comments

The uninterruptible power supply was once a standard fixture in the small office/home office as a hedge against losing work when the electrons stop flowing from your AC outlet. Somewhat in decline as computing hardware shifts away from dedicated PCs toward tablets, phones and laptops, the UPS still has a lot of SOHO utility, and off-the-shelf AC units are easy to find. But if your needs run more to keeping the electrons flowing in one direction, then you might want to look at [Kedar Nimbalkar]’s programmable DC backup power system.

Built inside a recycled ATX power supply case, [Kedar]’s project is heavy on off-the-shelf components, like a laptop power supply for juice, a buck converter to charge the 12 volt sealed lead acid battery, and a boost converter to raise the output to 19.6 volts. An Arduino and an optoisolator are in charge of controlling the charging cycle and switching the UPS from charging the battery to using it when mains voltage drops.

 If you need a DC UPS but would rather skip the battery, you could try running a Raspberry Pi with electrons stashed in a supercapacitor. Or if you’ve got an aging AC UPS, why not try beefing it up with marine batteries?

[Thanks for the tip, Morris]

Building An Atomic Force Microscope On The Cheap!

August 22, 2015 by 13 Comments

LEGO2NANO, are building an open hardware AFM (Atomic Force Microscope).

AFMs are a kind of probe microscope. Unlike an optical microscope, a probe is used to “feel” the topology of a surface. An atomic force microscope uses a flexible cantilever with a nanometer scale tip on the end. As the tip scans across the surface it will be deflected by its interaction with the surface. A laser spot is usually reflected off the back of the cantilever, and captured by a photodiode array. The angle of the reflected beam, and therefore which photodiodes are excited lets you know how much the cantilever was deflected by the surface.

One of the challenges of building an AFM is developing an actuator that can move with nanoscale precision. We recently reported on [Dan Berard]s awesome capacitor actuator, and have previously reported on his STM build which uses a piezo buzzer. LEGO2NANO are experimenting with a number of different configurations, including using Piezo buzzers, but in a different configuration to [Dan]s system.

The LEGO2NANO project runs as a yearly summer school to encourage high school students to take part in the ambitious task of building an AFM for a few hundred dollars (commercial instruments cost about 100,000USD). While the project isn’t yet complete, whatever the outcome the students have clearly learned a lot, and gained an exciting insight into this cutting edge microscopy technique.

Augmented Reality Sandbox Using A Kinect

August 22, 2015 by 11 Comments

Want to make all your 5 year old son’s friends jealous? What if he told them he could make REAL volcanoes in his sandbox? Will this be the future of sandboxes, digitally enhanced with augmented reality?

It’s not actually that hard to set up! The system consists of a good computer running Linux, a Kinect, a projector, a sandbox, and sand. And that’s it! The University of California (UC Davis) has setup a few of these systems now to teach children about geography, which is a really cool demonstration of both 3D scanning and projection mapping. As you can see in the animated gif above, the Kinect can track the topography of the sand, and then project its “reality” onto it. In this case, a mini volcano.

Continue reading “Augmented Reality Sandbox Using A Kinect” →