REFLOW CHÂTEAU

February 2, 2015 by 29 Comments

[Will] had a few reasons for turning a toaster oven into a reflow oven – he needed a project for an ECE lab, the lab’s current reflow oven was terrible, and the man is trying to keep [Will] down by not allowing toaster ovens in dorm rooms. What was born out of necessity actually turned into a great project – a reflow oven with touchscreen controls.

The toaster oven used for this build is a model [Will] picked up at Sears. It’s actually pretty unique, advertised as a ‘digital toaster’. This isn’t marketing speak – there’s actually a thermistor in there, and the stock toaster is closed loop. After disassembling the toaster and getting rid of the guts, [Will] whipped up a PCB for a Teensy 3.1 and the Adafruit capacative touch shield.

With the Teensy and touch screen, [Will] came up with an interface that looks ten times better than anything you would find on a Chinese auction site. It’s a great build, and since it’s kept in the electronics lab, will certainly see a lot of use.

Introducing The Raspberry Pi 2

February 2, 2015 by 184 Comments

TL;DR It’s called the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. Quad core ARM Cortex A7 with one Gig of RAM. It’s the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi Model B+. Available now at Newark, Element 14, Allied, and RS Components. It’s the same price as the old one. You’re not a child and you should learn to read.

The original Raspberry Pi released, three years ago, was looking a bit long in the tooth when it was first launched. That’s to be expected for a computer that sells for $35 USD. Three years is a long time in the world of electronics, and the Pi is due for an update. It’s here, now, and the biggest change is a faster quad-core chip, a better processor architecture, and 1GB of RAM.

The Raspberry Pi 2 Model B features a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 running at 1GHz with 1GB of RAM. This chip uses the ARMv7 architecture instead of the ARMv6 of the original Raspi. When playing around with it, it was noticeably zippier than my months-old Raspi Model B in web browsing tasks. Very, very cool, and something that opens up a few doors for CPU-intensive applications.

Although the CPU has been updated, there isn’t much else on the Pi that has changed. USB and Ethernet is still handled by the LAN9514 USB/Ethernet controller. If you’re looking for Gigabit Ethernet, sorry that’s not going to happen. We’re not going to get eMMC Flash, SATA ports, or anything groundbreaking other than the CPU with this hardware update. It’s pretty much just a CPU and RAM upgrade.

All the original ports found on the Raspberry Pi Model B+ are found on the Raspi 2; HDMI, audio, analog video, Ethernet, USB, CSI, the as-for-now unused DSI, and GPIO ports haven’t changed. Again, we’re looking at a CPU and RAM upgrade with this hardware release.

Instead of the odd Package On Package CPU and RAM stack featured in previous Raspberry Pis, the RAM has now moved to the back on the Raspi 2:

raspiback

The RAM chip is an Elpida EDB8132B4PB-8D-F, an eight gigabit DDR2 RAM that has the same clock rate as the RAM in the original Raspi. Don’t look for an increase in memory performance or speed. Instead, just be glad there’s now a full gigabyte of RAM on the Raspi.

A few of you may remember the ‘upgrade’ all those Raspberry Pi early adopters missed out on. After the first few hundred thousand Raspberry Pi Model Bs shipped, someone realized they could upgrade the RAM from 256 MB to 512 MB. It is not yet known whether the Raspberry Pi 2 will be upgraded as easily. Sixteen gigabit RAMs do exist, but now that the CPU and RAM aren’t on the same package, there’s more to consider than just plopping down a new RAM chip.

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Transcend DrivePro 200 Hack To Stream And Script; Begs For More

February 1, 2015 by 19 Comments

Transcend markets their DrivePro 200 camera for use as a car dashcam. We’re a bit surprised at the quality and apparent feature set for something relegated to a rather mundane task as this. But [Gadget Addict] poked around and found a nice little nugget: you can live stream the video via WiFi; the framerate, quality, and low-lag are pretty impressive. In addition to that, the next hack is just waiting for you to unlock it.

As it stands right now you turn on the camera’s built-in WiFi AP, telnet into two different ports on the device (sending it into smartphone connected mode) and you’ll be able to live stream the view to your computer using RTSP. Great, that in itself is a good hack and we’re sure that before long someone will figure out an automatic way to trigger this. [GA] also found out how to get the thing into script mode at power-on. He hasn’t actually executed any code… that’s where you come in. If you have one of these pull it out and get hacking! It’s a matter put putting files on the SD storage and rebooting. Crafting this file to enable shell access would open up an entire world of hacks, from things like time-lapse and motion sensing to special processing and filtering in real time. We think there’s huge potential so keep us up-to-date as you find new ways to pwn this hardware.

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Hackaday Links: February 1, 2015

February 1, 2015 by 6 Comments

It’s Sunday evening, and that means Hackaday Links, and that means something crowdfunded. This week it’s UberBlox. It’s a modular construction system based on Al extrusion – basically a modern version of an Erector set. Random musings on the perceived value UberBlox offers in the comments, I’m sure.

[Trevor] sent in something from his Etsy shop. Normally we’d shy away from blatant self-promotion, but this is pretty cool. It’s reproductions of 1960s Lockheed flying saucer plans. We’re not sure if this is nazi moon base/lizard people from the inner earth flying saucer plans or something a little more realistic, but there you go.

3D computer mice exist, as do quadcopters. Here’s the combination. It looks like there’s a good amount of control, and could be used for some aerobatics if you’re cool enough.

Who doesn’t love LED cubes? They’re awesome, but usually limited to one color. Here’s an RGB LED cube. It’s only 4x4x4, but there’s a few animations and a microphone with a beat detection circuit all powered by an ATMega32u4.

A while ago we had a post about a solar powered time lapse rig. Time lapse movies take a while, and the results are finally in.

BMW Remote Unlock Wasn’t Using Secure HTTP

February 1, 2015 by 32 Comments

Ah, the old HTTP versus HTTPS. If you want to keep people out, that trailing ‘S’ should be the first thing you do, especially if you’re trying to keep people out of a luxury automobile. It turns out that BMW screwed up on that one.

BMW has an infotainment feature called ConnectedDrive which builds your favorite apps and services right into the dashboard. You can even unlock the vehicle using this system which is built around a piece of hardware that includes a GSM modem and permanent SIM card. A security research group recently discovered that the commands sent for this system were being pushed over HTTP, the unencrypted sibling of HTTPS. The firm, hired by German automobile club ADAC, disclosed the vulnerability and an over-the-air upgrade has already been pushed to patch the flaw. The patch is described to have “turned on” the HTTPS which makes us think that it was always meant to be used and just configured incorrectly in the roll-out. We’ll leave you to debate that point in the comments. Seriously, how does something like this happen? It certainly sheds a lot more light on thieves being able to magically unlock high-end cars. Was this how they were doing it?

[Thanks Fabian]

Building A Modern Retro Console

February 1, 2015 by 9 Comments

There are a few dozen classic re-imaginings of classic game consoles, using hardware ranging from the ATMegas of the Uzebox to everyone’s favorite, stuffing some ROMs on a Raspi and calling it a day. You don’t necessarily learn anything doing that, which puts [Mike]’s custom game console head and shoulders above the rest.

The build started off as a plan for a Z80 computer with a dual ATMega GPU. He progressed far enough in the design where it would have been a masterpiece, but the inability to mill double-sided boards at home killed the design. Plans then moved on to an FPGA, then to an ATMega with the Analog Device AD725 PAL/NTSC encoder chip. That idea had a similar architecture to the Uzebox, but [Mike] wanted more power. He eventually settled on a PIC32 with the AD725.

This setup was capable of pumping out some impressive graphics, but for moving bits to a screen, you need DMA. [Mike] ran into a problem where the DMA timer runs at a maximum rate of 3.7 MHz. It’s a problem documented in a few projects, leading [Mike] to change his plan once again, this time to the STM32F4.

The bugs are worked out, and now [Mike] can stream a whole lot of pixels to a screen while still having some processing power left over to play a game. It’s a project that’s more than a year and a half old at this point, and so far he’s learned a lot.

Give Your Multimeter A Wireless Remote Display

February 1, 2015 by 27 Comments

Multimeters are one of the key tools in a hardware hacker’s bench. For 90% of us, the meter leads are perfect for making measurements and looking over at the results. Sometimes you need a bit more distance though, and for that, [Ken Kaarvik] has created the Multimeter remote display. Remote displays are pretty handy when you want to measure something several feet away from your bench. They’re also great if you need to check something in an enclosed space, like a server rack or a refrigerator. Fluke actually sells multimeters with wireless displays, such as their model 233.

The key to this project is the FS9721 LP3 chip by Fortune Semiconductor. (PDF link) The FS9721 is essentially a system on chip (SOC) for multimeters. It contains a digital to analog to digital converter, an LCD driver, and a microcontroller. It also can send data out over a 2400 baud serial link. Two of [Ken’s] multimeters, the Digitek DT-4000ZC and a Fluke 17B, both have this chip. The Digitek has a 1/8″ plug for connecting to the outside world, while the Fluke requires some simple hardware mods to enable data output.

Since this was his entry for the Trinket EDC contest,  [Ken] connected the serial output of the FS9721 to an Adafruit Pro Trinket. The Trinket formats the data and sends it to an  nRF24L01+ 2.4GHz radio module. The receiving end has an identical radio, and another Pro Trinket. [Ken] actually built two wireless displays. One is a dual-boot Game Boy advance which has a really slick background on the color display. The other receiver utilizes a 128×64 OLED. The trinket, nRF24L01+ and display all fit neatly inside an Altoids tin.

Click past the break to see both wireless remote displays in action!

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