New Part Day: Really, Really Wide Screens

March 7, 2015 by 70 Comments

Once again my inbox runneth over with press releases, Kickstarter announcements, unsolicited emails, and a bunch of product announcements. Most of these, of course, are never to be seen again. Once in a great while – statistically insignificant, really – there’s a product announcement that’s just interesting enough to take a closer look at. This time, it’s a really, really wide screen.

LCDs are curious beasts when it comes to display interfaces. Back in the bad old days of gigantic tube TVs, the aspect ratio of these displays was fairly limited. You could get a 4:3 display, and with the rare exception of o-scopes, vector displays, and other weird devices, that was it. Since then we’ve moved to LCDs, a promising technology if you want a display in the shape of a car dashboard, or as a thin strip to put on some rackmount modules. It took this long for a sliver of an LCD to appear.

This display produced by EarthLCD is a 10.4 inch display, about ten inches wide and one inch tall. The resolution is 1024 by 100. It is, by far, the skinniest LCD ever produced. The closest you’re going to get to a display with this kind of aspect ratio are old character LCDs, and even then you’re not going to address individual pixels.

If you’re struggling to figure out what this would be used for, this product makes it somewhat obvious. It’s a 1U rack with a beautiful 1024×100 display embedded in the front. You’ve never seen a server that cool.

Interestingly, the 1U display is driven by a single Raspberry Pi, and looking at the datasheet for the display (PDF) tells you pretty much everything. The display is driven by a regular old parallel interface, with six bits of color for R, G, and B. That means it can be driven with a Raspberry Pi without an adapter board, a BeagleBone, or even smaller ARM micros with the obvious reduction in color depth.

While the display isn’t a game changer or something that will knock your socks off, it is, interesting and something that could find its way into some interesting projects. If you have any idea what those projects would be, drop a note in the comments.

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Looking Inside The KR580VM80A Soviet I8080 Clone

March 7, 2015 by 16 Comments

The folks at Zeptobars are on a roll, sometimes looking deep inside historic chips and at others exposing fake devices for our benefit. Behind all of those amazing die shots are hundreds of hours of hard work. [Mikhail] from Zeptobars recently tipped us off on the phenomenal work done by engineer [Vslav] who spent over 1000 hours reverse engineering the Soviet KR580VM80A – one of the most popular micro-controllers of the era and a direct clone of the i8080.

But before [Vslav] could get down to creating the schematic and Verilog model, the chip needed to be de-capped and etched. As they etched down, they created a series of high resolution images of the die. At the end of that process, they were able to determine that the chip had exactly 4758 transistors (contrary to rumors of 6000 or 4500). With the images done, they were able to annotate the various parts of the die, create a Verilog model and the schematic. A tough compatibility test confirmed the veracity of their Verilog model. All of the source data is available via a (CC-BY-3.0) license from their website. If this looks interesting, do check out some of their work that we have featured earlier like comparing real and fake Nordic dies and amazing descriptions of how they figure out the workings of these decapped chips. If this is too deep for you check out the slightly simpler but equally awesome process of delayering PCBs.

A Secret Door To The Mines Of Moria

March 7, 2015 by 9 Comments

What home movie theater is complete without a secret entrance? [Eclipse_007] had the brilliant idea to make this Lord of The Rings themed hidden door, akin to the entrance way to the Mines of Moria.

It’s a custom door panel filled to the brim with LED lights on the underside. The front panel is a large piece of plexi-glass with a vinyl coating on one side. [Eclipse_007] painstakingly cut the design out of the vinyl coating, all by hand. Once installed the door just looks like another part of the wall. But when touched, the door lights up and then swings open, revealing the movie theater. Plans are already in the works to make it voice controlled to open when the password is spoken.

As one reddit user puts it:

That is probably the coolest thing I have ever seen.

I’m trying to imagine an estate agent introducing your house… two bathrooms, double glazing, five bedrooms, the Westgate of Moria which opens into a basement movie theater when you say Mellon, and a stylish modern kitchen…

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Animated ASCII Fluid Dynamics Simulator Is Retro Cool

March 7, 2015 by 18 Comments

ASCII art holds a place near and dear to our hearts. If you were fortunate enough to get started in computers before there was such a thing as a graphical user interface (GUI) then you remember tolling for hours to make clever use of the ASCII characters to make on screen graphics appear as realistic as possible.

Although this animated ASCII fluid dynamics simulator dates back to 2012, it’s just too cool not to share. It’s the product of the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC). A contest held each year where the goal is to write the most confusing C code that you can – making use of loopholes and ambiguity in the C programming language to obfuscate(hide) the purpose of the program. Basically, doing everything you’re taught not to do in school. You can take a look at the source code here.

We’re sure the programmer [Yusuke Endoh] would be the first to admit, that there is no practical use for such a low resolution simulator, but we give it an A+ in the retro cool department anyways. (Not to mention, the source code is way too confusing to even comment on) Take a look at the animated ASCII graphics in the video after the break.

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IFS Trike

DIY Reverse Trike Bike Has Sick IFS

March 7, 2015 by 23 Comments

There is certainly no shortage of bicycle builds out there on the ‘net. We’re not talking custom race bikes or anything here, we mean cool odd-ball bikes built just because. We’ve seen trike conversions before, both with single wheels in the front and in the back, but today we stumbled across something we haven’t seen before.

[Kong79] has built a reverse trike, with 2 wheels in the front. That by itself is nothing new but this trike has an independent front suspension, meaning each wheel can move up and down independently from the other.  This particular build uses a double A-arm setup that keeps the axle of the wheel near parallel with the ground throughout its range of travel.

The trike started off as a standard mountain bike. The front fork was removed to make way for the new front suspension. There is a new box frame that was welded up and positioned directly below the head tube. This frame will support all 4 A-arms. Speaking of the A-arms, they certainly aren’t off the shelf units. Take a look, the uppers are bike forks and the lowers were welded together from bike frame tubes.

The spindles are where it gets a little tricky but [Kong79] made it happen with his resourcefulness. Bike head tubes, head bearings and standard stems make up the spindle components and are responsible for allowing each front wheel to steer. Each spindle is connected to the steering column by a tie rod scrounged from an ATV.  The shocks were found at a motorcycle scrap yard.

This is a pretty unique build and it’s sure great to see people doing stuff like this. For more trick trikes, check out this wooden one or this no-weld-required recumbent.

IP Tracker

An Arduino Device That Monitors Your External IP Address

March 6, 2015 by 43 Comments

[Bayres’] dad setup a webcam as a surveillance camera for a remote property. The only problem was that the only stable Internet connection they could get at this property was DSL. This meant that the external IP address of the webcam would change somewhat often; the needed a way to keep track of the external IP address whenever it changed. That’s when [Bayres] built a solution using Arduino and an Ethernet shield.

The main function of this device is to monitor the public IP address and report any changes. This is accomplished by first making a request to checkip.dyndns.org. This website simply reports your current public IP address. [Bayres] uses an Arduino library called Textfinder in order to search through the returned string and identify the IP address.

From there, the program compares this current value to the previous one. If there is any change, the program uses the Sendmail() function to reach out to an SMTP server and send an e-mail alert to [Beyres’] dad. The system also includes a small LCD. The Arduino outputs the current IP address to this display, making it easy to check up on the connection. The LCD is driven by 74HC595 shift register in order to conserve pins on the Arduino.

The system is also designed with a pretty slick setup interface. When it is booted, the user can enter a configuration menu via a Serial terminal. This setup menu allows the user to configure options such as SMTP server, email address, etc. These variables are then edited and can be committed to EEPROM as a more permanent storage solution. Whenever the system is booted, these values are read back out of the EEPROM and returned to their appropriate variables. This means you can reconfigure the device on the fly without having to edit the source code and re-upload.

Decoding ZeuS Malware Disguised As A .DOC

March 6, 2015 by 29 Comments

[Ronnie] recently posted about his adventures in decoding malware. One of his users reported a phishy email, which did indeed turn out to contain a nasty attachment. The process that [Ronnie] followed in order to figure out what this malware was trying to do is quite fascinating and worth the full read.

[Ronnie] started out by downloading the .doc attachment in a virtual machine. This would isolate any potential damage to a junk system that could be restored easily. When he tried to open the .doc file, he was presented with an error stating that he did not have either enough memory or disk space to proceed. With 45GB of free space and 2GB of RAM, this should not have been an issue. Something was definitely wrong.

The next step was to open the .doc file in Notepad++ for analysis. [Ronnie] quickly noticed that the file was actually a .rtf disguised as a .doc. [Ronnie] scanned through large chunks of data in an attempt to guess what the malware was trying to do. He noticed that one data chunk ended with the bytes “FF” and D9″, which are also found as the ending two bytes of .gif files.

[Ronnie] copied this data into a new document and removed all new line and return characters. He then converted the hex to ASCII, revealing some more signs that this was actually image data. He saved this file as a .gif and opened it up for viewing. It was a 79KB image of a 3D rendered house. He also found another chunk of data that was the same picture, but 3MB in size. Strange to say the least.

After finding a few other weird bits of data, [Ronnie] finally started to see more interesting sections. First he noticed some strings with mixed up capital and lowercase letters, a tactic sometimes used to avoid antivirus signatures. A bit lower he found a section of data that was about the size of typical shellcode. He decoded this data and found what he was looking for. The shellcode contained a readable URL. The URL pointed to a malicious .exe file that happened to still be available online.

Of course [Ronnie] downloaded the .exe and monitored it to see how it acted. He found that it set a run key in the registry to ensure that it would persist later on. The malware installed itself to the user’s appdata folder and also reached out repeatedly to an IP address known to be affiliated with ZeuS malware. It was a lot of obfuscation, but it was still no match for an experienced malware detective.