Ask Hackaday: Can Paper USB Business Cards Exist?

August 25, 2014 by 72 Comments

swivel business card

The swivelCard Kickstarter campaign recently received a lot of press coverage and makes some impressive claims as their goal is the development of USB and NFC business cards at a $3 unit price. While most USB-enabled business cards we featured on Hackaday were made of standard FR4, this particular card is made of paper as the project description states the team patented

a system for turning regular paper into a USB drive.

As you can guess this piqued our interest, as all paper based technologies we had seen until now mostly consisted of either printed PCBs or paper batteries. ‘Printing a USB drive on regular paper’ (as the video says) would therefore involve printing functional USB and NFC controllers.

Luckily enough a quick Google search for the patents shown in one of the pictures (patent1, patent2) taught us that a storage circuitry is embedded under the printed USB pads, which may imply that the team had an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) designed or that they simply found one they could use for their own purposes. From the video we learn that ‘each card has a unique ID and can individually be programmed’ (the card, not the UID) and that it can be setup to open any webpage URL. The latter can even be modified after the card has been handed out, hinting that the final recipient would go to a ‘www.swivelcard.com/XXXX” type of address. We therefore got confused by

Imagine giving your business card with pictures, videos, presentations, and websites for the recipient to interact with!

paragraph that the project description contains.

This leads us to one key question we have: what kind of USB drive can make a given user visit a particular website, given that he may have Linux, Windows, Mac or any other OS? They all have similar USB enumeration processes and different key strokes to launch a browser… our wild guess is that it may be detected as storage with a single html file in it. Unfortunately for us the USB detection process is not included in the video.

Our final question: Is it possible to embed both USB and NFC controllers in a thin piece of paper without worrying about broken ICs (see picture above)? NFC enabled passports have obviously been around for a long time but we couldn’t find the same for USB drives.

Possible or not, we would definitely love having one in our hands!

Edit: One of our kind readers pointed out that this campaign actually is a re-launch of a failed indiegogo one which provides more details about the technology and confirms our assumptions.

The Handsfree Icebucket Challenge Backpack

August 25, 2014 by 9 Comments

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The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has taken the internet by storm as tv stars, musicians, athletes, kids, students and everyone in between have thrown freezing water all over themselves in an effort to raise awareness (and millions of dollars) to help cure the neurodegenerative disease. So when [Christopher] was challenged by a friend, he decided to make an icebucket backpack that would pour the liquid from above without having to use his hands.

The wearable device uses a Barometric pressure sensor that is triggered when air is blown into a tube. This sensor is attached to an Arduino Uno. Once activated, the pouring process begins drenching the person below in ice cold water. It’s a little unnecessary, but it gets the job done in a fun, maker-style way. Now if you make something similar, don’t forget to actually support the cause and donate money.

To see the icebucket backpack in action, check out the video after the break:

Continue reading “The Handsfree Icebucket Challenge Backpack” →

A Virtual Touchscreen (3D Ultrasonic Radar)

August 24, 2014 by 4 Comments

virtualtouch

Producing items onto a screen simply by touching the air is a marvelous thing. One way to accomplish this involves four HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor units that transmit data through an Arduino into a Linux computer. The end result is a virtual touchscreen that can be made at home.

The software of this device was developed by [Anatoly] who translated hand gestures into actionable commands. The sensors attached to the Arduino had an approximate scanning range of 3m, and the ultrasonic units were modified to broadcast an analog signal at 40 kHz. There were a few limitations with the original hardware design as [Anatoly] stated in the post. For example, at first, only one unit was transmitting at a time, so there was no way the Arduino could identify two objects on the same sphere. However, [Anatoly] updated the blog with a 2nd post showing that sensing multiple items at once could be done. Occasionally, the range would be finicky when dealing with small items like pens. But besides that, it seemed to work pretty well.

Additional technical specifications can be found on [Anatoly]’s blog and videos of the system working can be seen after the break.

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Open Source Marker Recognition For Augmented Reality

August 24, 2014 by 17 Comments

marker

[Bharath] recently uploaded the source code for an OpenCV based pattern recognition platform that can be used for Augmented Reality, or even robots. It was built with C++ and utilized the OpenCV library to translate marker notations within a single frame.

The program started out by focusing in on one object at a time. This method was chosen to eliminate the creation of additional arrays that contained information of all of the blobs inside the image; which could cause some problems.

Although this implementation did not track marker information through multiple frames, it did provide a nice foundation for integrating pattern recognition into computer systems. The tutorial was straightforward and easy to ready. The entire program and source code can be found on Github which comes with a ZERO license so that anyone can use it. A video of the program comes up after the break:

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Hackaday Links: August 24, 2014

August 24, 2014 by 16 Comments

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Remember those ‘cocktail’ arcade cabinets? The Ikea Lack table has existed for years, so why not make one into an arcade table? Raspberry Pi with RetroPie as the brains,  and an ancient 4:3 monitor as the display.

Old Unixes! Running on PDPs, Novas, and IBMs! Thanks to Simh, you can emulate these old machines. [Matt] put up a guide to getting Simh running on a Pi that includes running Unix V5 on an emulated PDP-11.

Ever wanted to run your own telecom? The folks at Toorcamp did just that, 50 lines, 10,000 feet of 1-pair, and 1,500 feet of 2-pair. There’s a facebook album of all the pics.

Remember last week when Sparkfun said they shipped 2000 Microviews without a bootloader? Make interviewed [Marcus Schappi], the guy behind the MicroView. There’s also a tutorial on how to fix the issue.

Barbie needs an exorcism.

Remember the [Lord Vetinari] clock from way back when? It’s a clock that ticks 86400 times a day, but the interval between each second is just slightly random and enough to drive people insane. Here’s a kit on Tindie that makes it pretty easy to build a Ventinari clock, or a variety of other clocks that are sufficiently weird. There’s also a martian clock that’s 39 minutes and 36 seconds longer than normal, perfect for the folks at JPL.

0x1f 0x000 IZO EMESS 1407981609

A Geiger Counter For An Off-Road Apocalypse Vehicle

August 24, 2014 by 33 Comments

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If the world comes to an end, it’s good to be prepared. And let’s say that the apocalypse is triggered by a series of nuclear explosions. If that is the case, then having a Geiger counter is a must, plus having a nice transport vehicle would be helpful too. So [Kristian] combined the two ideas and created his own Geiger counter for automotive use just on the off chance that he might need it one day.

It all started with a homemade counter that was fashioned together. Then a display module with a built-in graphics controller that was implemented to show all kinds of information in the vehicle. This was done using a couple of optocouplers as inputs. In addition, a CAN bus interface was put in place. As an earlier post suggests, the display circuit was based on a Microchip 18F4680 microcontroller. After that, things kind of got a little out of control and the counter evolved into more of a mobile communications center; mostly just because [Kristian] wanted to learn how those systems worked. Sounds like a fun learning experience! Later the CPU and gauge was redesigned to use low-quiescent regulators. A filtering board was also made that could kill transients and noise if needed.

The full project can be seen on [Kristian]’s blog.

Phone Gyroscope Signals Can Eavesdrop On Your Conversations

August 24, 2014 by 9 Comments

A gyroscope is a device made for measuring orientation and can typically be found in modern smartphones or tablet PCs to enable rich user experience. A team from Stanford managed to recognize simple words from only analyzing gyroscope signals (PDF warning). The complex inner workings of MEMS based gyroscopes (which use the Coriolis effect) and Android software limitations only allowed the team to only sniff frequencies under 200Hz. This may therefore explain the average 12% word recognition rate that was achieved with custom recognition algorithms. It may however still be enough to make you reconsider installing an app that don’t necessarily need access to the on-board sensors to work. Interestingly, the paper also states that STMicroelectronics currently have a 80% market share for smartphone / Tablet PCs gyroscopes.

On the same topic, you may be interested to check out a gyroscope-based smartphone keylogging attack we featured a couple of years ago.