Hacklet 39: The Kerbal Way Of Doing Things

March 20, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

Kerbal Space Program is a space flight simulator based on an extremely stupid race of green space frogs that have decided to dedicate all their resources towards the exploration of space. It is a great game, a better space simulator than just about anything except for Orbiter, and the game is extremely moddable. For this edition of the Hacklet, we’re going to be taking a look at some of the mods for KSP you can find over on hackaday.io.

Like most hardware builds for Kerbal Space Program, [lawnmowerlatte] is using a few user-made plugins for KAPCOM, a hardware controller and display for KSP. The Telemachus plugin is used to pull data from the game and display that data on a few screens [lawnmower] had sitting around.

There are a few very cool features planned for this build including seven-segment displays, a throttle handle, and neat enclosure.

[Gabriel] is working on a similar build for KSP. Like the KAPCOM, this one uses the Telemachus plugin, but this one adds three eight-digit, SPI-controlled, seven-segment displays, relegendable buttons, and a Kerbal-insipired frame made out of Meccano.

[Lukas]’ KSP Control Panel is another complicated control system that breaks immersion slightly less than a keyboard. He’s using a Raspberry Pi to talk to the Telemachus server to control every aspect of the craft. From staging to opening up the solar panels, it’s all right there in [Lukas]’ control panel.

You may have noticed a theme with these builds; all of them use the Telemachus plugin for KSP. Even though it’s fairly simple to create plugins for Unity, there really aren’t that many KSP plugins build for these immersive control panels and space flight simulators. Or rather, Telemachus is ‘good enough’. We’d like to see a fully controllable KSP command pod model, just like those guys with 737 flight simulators in their garage. If you have any idea how that could happen, leave a note in the comments.

Uber-Cheap FPV Snow Sled

March 20, 2015 by Rich Bremer 15 Comments

Has the winter blues got you RC vehicle guys down? Well, cheer up! Spring is just around the corner. In the meantime though, you can take a page out of [BenNBuilds’] book and build an FPV Snow Sled.

So how is using this Snow Sled in the winter different from any other RC vehicle? [BenNBuilds] controls it from inside his house where he stays warm and toasty. The on-board FPV camera sends video back to a receiver in the house where it can be either displayed on an LCD screen or on FPV goggles. Plus, being able to see the sled from the window doesn’t hurt either when getting in a sticky situation!

The craft it self was made on the cheap from spare parts that were kicking around. The frame is made from foam board and is powered by a ducted electric fan. A rudder similar to that of a hovercraft or swamp boat provides the steering. Since [BenNBuilds’] transmitter had a couple extra channels, he hooked up a pan and tilt system for his FPV camera. Check out the video of this puppy in action after the break….

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Exposing Private Facebook Photos With A Malicious App

March 20, 2015 by Rick Osgood 21 Comments

[Laxman] is back again with another hack related to Facebook photos. This hack revolves around the Facebook mobile application’s “sync photos” function. This feature automatically uploads every photo taken on your mobile device to your Facebook account. These photos are automatically marked as private so that only the user can see them. The user would have to manually update the privacy settings on each photo later in order to make them available to friends or the public.

[Laxman] wanted to put these privacy restrictions to the test, so he started poking around the Facebook mobile application. He found that the Facebook app would make an HTTP GET request to a specific URL in order to retrieve the synced photos. This request was performed using a top-level access token. The Facebook server checked this token before sending down the private images. It sounds secure, but [Laxman] found a fatal flaw.

The Facebook server only checked the owner of the token. It did not bother to check which Facebook application was making the request. As long as the app had the “user_photos” permission, it was able to pull down the private photos. This permission is required by many applications as it allows the apps to access the user’s public photos. This vulnerability could have allowed an attacker access to the victim’s private photos by building a malicious application and then tricking victims into installing the app.

At least, that could have been the case if Facebook wasn’t so good about fixing their vulnerabilities. [Laxman] disclosed his finding to Facebook. They had patched the vulnerability less than an hour after acknowledging the disclosure. They also found this vulnerability severe enough to warrant a $10,000 bounty payout to [Laxman]. This is in addition to the $12,500 [Laxman] received last month for a different Facebook photo-related vulnerability.

Auto-sleep Hacked In PC Speakers

March 19, 2015 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

We can commiserate with [HardwareCoder] who would rather not leave his PC speakers on all the time. The Creative T20 set that he uses turn off when you turn the volume knob all the way down until it clicks. So shutting them off means repositioning the volume each time they’re switched on again. This hack kills two birds with one stone by turning on and off automatically without touching that knob.

The system is based around an ATtiny45 and a few other simple components. It uses two ADCs to monitor the rear input channels of the PC speakers. If no sound is detected for more than one minute, the shutdown pin of the speakers’ amp chip is triggered. That’s not quite where the hack ends. We mentioned it monitors the rear input of the speakers, but it doesn’t monitor the front AUX input. An additional push button is used to disable the auto-sleep when using this front input. There is also a fancy PWM-based heartbeat on an LED when the speakers are sleeping.

[HardwareCoder] was worried that we wouldn’t be interested in this since it’s quite similar to a hack we ran a few years ago. We hope you’ll agree it’s worth another look. He also warned us that the demo video was boring. We watched it all anyway and can confirm that there’s not much action there but we embedded it below anyway.

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Hackaday Prize Worldwide: Maker’s Asylum Meetup In Mumbai

March 19, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 3 Comments

I am excited to announce Hackaday’s first ever event in India. We have a huge readership in the country and because I am based in Mumbai there is an opportunity to organize some events. On this Saturday, March 21st, at Maker’s Asylum hackerspace we will gather for “Bring-A-Hack Maker’s Asylum” to talk about our passion for making and hacking. We’ll discuss the 2015 Hackaday Prize which offers $500,000 in prizes for hackers who can build solutions to problems faced by a wide-range of people. What does that really mean? That’s one of the topics of the evening. Of course there will be plenty of time to show off your own hacks, ask for advice on difficult projects, and to socialize with everyone that attends. Please visit the event page for all the details.

For all of you who aren’t in the area, I’d like to share with you a little background about hackerspaces in India.

Hacking in India

Hack : “To use something in a way it was not originally intended”. This could sound very familiar when you say that “Hack is the English equivalent of Hindi-Urdu word Jugaad“. So Hacking has a very positive and useful connotation when used in such a context. Everybody does it some time or the other – sometimes unknowingly, but quite often on purpose. It follows that people who Hack be called Hackers – and again, that description is used in a very positive sense.

Sometime around the turn of the 21st century, individual Hackers who up until then used to work in isolation, started congregating together to form clubs and community spaces which came be called – no points for guessing – Hacker Spaces. The movement spread over Europe rapidly and then on to the United States, and slowly to other parts of the world. Hacker Spaces became the breeding grounds for individual innovation. People with bright ideas would seek guidance and peer reviews of their hacks, and if it was interesting enough for the wider community, they would launch themselves as enterprising startups. Hacker Spaces provided the environment, the tools, and a community for people to tinker away and build stuff. In a sense, it is like going back to our enterprising roots before the advent of wide spread industrialization stifled individual entrepreneurship.

Rise of our Hackerspace Culture

Around 2008, when my interest in hacking got revived, I could not find a single Hacker Space in India. It wasn’t until late 2013 that I found another hacker with similar interests who wanted to set up a Hacker Space. When [Vaibhav Chabbra] met me in Ahmedabad during Maker Fest and mentioned that he had set up such a space in Mumbai, I immediately jumped in to help him out. Thus was born Makers’ Asylum. Since then, within a span of just 1 1/2 years, Hacker Spaces have sprung up in Ahmedabad, Surat, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, New Delhi, Meerut, and I am sure we will hear about more of them soon in other Cities. The Hacker movement is very much here, and here to stay and grow.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Clever Chemistry Leads To Much Faster 3D Printing

March 19, 2015 by Mike Szczys 48 Comments

Resin printing, it can be messy but you get really great resolution thanks to the optical nature of curing the sticky goo with light from a projector. Soon it will have a few more notches in its belt to lord over its deposition cousins: speed and lack of layers. A breakthrough in resin printing makes it much faster than ever before and pretty much eliminates layering from the printed structure.

The concept uses an oxygen-permeable layer at the bottom of the resin pool. This inhibits curing, and apparently is the source of the breakthrough. The resin is cured right on the border of this layer and allows for what is described as a continuous growth process rather than a layer-based approach. One of the benefits described is no need for resin to flow in as the part is extracted but we’re skeptical on that claim (the resin still needs to flow from somewhere). Still, for us the need to work with resin which is expensive, possibly messy, and has an expiry (at least when compared to plastic filament) has kept deposition as a contender. The speed increase and claims of strength benefits over layer-based techniques just might be that killer feature.

The technology is coming from a company called Carbon3D. They are branding it CLIP, or Continuous Liquid Interface Production. After the break you can see a video illustration of the concept (which is a bit too simple for our tastes) as well as a TED talk which the company’s CEO, [Joseph Desimone] gave this month. Of course there is also the obligatory time-lapse print demo.

So what do you think: game changer or not, and why do you feel that way? Let us know in the comments.

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Measuring Heart Rate With A Piezo

March 19, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Look around for heart rate sensors that interface easily to microcontrollers, and you’ll come up with a few projects that use LEDs and other microcontrollers to do the dirty work of filtering out pulses in a wash of light.

[Thomas] was working on a project that detects if water is flowing through a pipe with a few piezoelectric sensors. Out of curiosity, he taped the sensor to his finger, and to everyone’s surprise, the values his microcontroller were spitting out were an extremely noise-free version of his heart rate.

The piezo in question is a standard, off the shelf module, and adding this to a microcontroller is as easy as putting the piezo on an analog pin. From there, it’s just averaging measurements and extracting a heartbeat from the data.

It’s a much simpler solution to measuring a heart rate, and since two people haven’t heard of this technique, it’s likely a lot more people haven’t heard of this technique either. If you’re looking for an entry to The Hackaday Prize, this would be a great jumping off point for anything in either the fitness or medical domains.