Hackaday Links: February 15, 2015

February 15, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

[Matthias Wandel], also known as the genius/demigod that can make anything out of wood, put together a mount for a Raspberry Pi and a camera. Yes, it’s just a holder for a Raspi, but some of our readers who aren’t up to speed with [Matthias] might want to check out his Youtube channel. There are hundreds of awesome videos. Report back in a month.

[Evan], the guy working his butt off for the MidAtlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, and the organizer for the Vintage Computer Festival East (we’re going, April 17-19, Wall, NJ) has been working on a book. It’s about mobile computing, and he’s crowdfunding it.

Your keyboard has buttons, and so does and Akai MPC. Daft PunKonsole! Press the space bar for instrumental part. There is, as yet, no video of someone doing this correctly.

Valentine’s Day was yesterday, and that means Valentine’s Day builds started rolling in on the tip line. Here’s something that’s actually a very simple circuit that’s inspired from an old ‘Electronic Games and Toys’ book by [Len Buckwalter]. Here’s a video of it in action.

A few years ago the name of the game was tiny, credit card-sized ARM boards. It had to come to this: a 64-bit board. ARM Cortex A53 running at 1.2GHz. It also costs $120 and only has a gig of RAM, but there you go.

Quadcopter Plane Transformer Is Awesome

February 15, 2015 by Will Sweatman 34 Comments

Is it a quadcopter? A plane? No, it’s both! [Daniel Lubrich] is at it again with a vertical take off and landing transformer he calls the SkyProwler.

The SkyProwler uses a switch blade type mechanism to move from quadcopter mode to plane mode. The wings can be detached to make it a normal quad that has all the typical bells and whistles. It can follow you around with GPS, fly autonomously via way points, and has this cool gimbal mechanism that keeps the GoPro stable as the drone pitches in flight, allowing for a better video experience.

[Dan’s] ultimate goal is a full size passenger model called the SkyCruiser, which uses the same switchblade transformation mechanism as his much smaller SkyProwler. Be sure to check out the video below if you haven’t already, and let us know of any quadcopter / plane hybrids of your own.

Correction: We previously associated [Daniel Lubrich] with the ATMOS program. This was in error and has been removed from the article. The ATMOS UAV is a separate project which we previously covered.

Continue reading “Quadcopter Plane Transformer Is Awesome” →

Deleting Facebook Albums Without Permission

February 15, 2015 by Rick Osgood 17 Comments

[Laxman] was poking around Facebook looking for security vulnerabilities. Facebook runs a bug bounty program which means if you can find a vulnerability that’s serious enough, it can earn you cold hard cash. It didn’t take much for [Laxman] to find one worthy of a bounty.

The graph API is the primary way for Facebook apps to read and write to the Facebook social graph. Many apps use this API, but there are limitations to what it can do. For example, the API is unable to delete users’ photo albums. At least, it’s not supposed to be able too. [Laxman] decided to test this claim himself.

He started by sending a command to delete one of his own albums using a graph explorer access token. His request was denied. The application didn’t have the correct permissions to be able to perform that action. It seemed that Facebook was correct and the API was unable to delete photos. [Laxman] had another trick up his sleeve, though. He noticed that the wording of the response suggested that other apps would have the ability to delete the albums, so he decided to check the Facebook mobile application.

He decided to send the same request with a different token. This time he used a token from the Facebook for Mobile application. This actually worked, and resulted in his photo album being deleted. To take things a step further, [Laxman] sent the same requests, but changed the user’s ID to a victim account he had set up. The request was accepted and processed without a problem. This meant that [Laxman] could effectively delete photo albums from any other user without that user’s consent. The vulnerability did require that [Laxman] had permission to view the album in the first place.

Since [Laxman] is one of the good guys, he sent this bug in to the Facebook team. It took them less than a day to fix the issue and they rewarded [Laxman] $12,500 for his trouble. It’s always nice to be appreciated. The video below shows [Laxman] walking through how he pulled off this hack using Burp Suite. Continue reading “Deleting Facebook Albums Without Permission” →

Home-brew Vibration Cleaner Leaves Your SLA Prints Squeaky-Clean

February 15, 2015 by Sonya Vasquez 11 Comments

If you’ve had the chance to add a Form 1+ 3D printer to your basement, you might find the post-print cleaning step a bit tedious. (A 20-minute alcohol bath? Outrageous!) Fortunately, for the impatient, [ChristopherBarr] has developed the perfect solution: a post-print agitator that cuts the time in-and-out-of the bath from 20 minutes to about two.

[ChristopherBarr’s] build is the right conglomerate of parts we’d expect when keeping the price down for this hack. He’s combined a palm sander, a couple pints of urethane expanding foam, and two loaf pans into one agitating mechanism that he’s dubbed “the Loafinator.” With the urethane expanding foam, [ChristopherBarr] achieved a near-perfect fit of the sander inside the loaf pan, now that the foam has filled in the remaining contours to hold the sander in place. Best of all, the sander hasn’t been sacrificed for this build; instead, the foam holder was assembled in three stages and isolated from the sander with a layer of plastic wrap to enable later extraction.

[ChristopherBarr’s] simple, yet practical, hack serves as an excellent solution to a number of hobbyists looking to “get things agitated.” While his device is able to polish off the uncured resin from his resin prints much faster than the conventional approach, we’d imagine that a similar build could greatly expedite the PCB etching process in a muriatic-acid or ferric-chloride based PCB etching procedure–far more quickly than our previous automated solution. The time-saving comes at a price; however. Once you’ve installed your very own Loafinator alongside your printer, expect a few nosy neighbors to start asking for visits to check out your new motorboat.

Continue reading “Home-brew Vibration Cleaner Leaves Your SLA Prints Squeaky-Clean” →

Repurposing IOT Lightbulb Chip For Anything

February 15, 2015 by James Hobson 27 Comments

Home automation products have hit critical mass in the world of consumerism, and now suddenly everyone has a product you can control using some protocol or other. Cree (the maker of LEDs) has a rather cheap IOT-enabled bulb available in Canada and the US for the low price of $15 — not bad considering regular LED bulbs can run you that much, without wireless connectivity!

So if you want to outfit your house in smart lights — great. But what about other things? Well, [Mac Alpine] decided to crack open one of the bulbs to see if he could re-purpose the IOT board. Turns out, you can.

In fact it’s almost too convenient. It’s a remarkably small chip, about half the size of a silver dollar. And it features a small ZigBee radio module. All you need is a 3V power supply, and boom — you have an IOT module that is capable of PWM output. It features an Atmel ATSAMR21E microprocessor which communicates over the radio to a Quirky Wink hub — it can also be triggered using IFTTT.

Continue reading “Repurposing IOT Lightbulb Chip For Anything” →

Hackaday Retro Edition: The Second Most Valuable Home Computer

February 15, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 38 Comments

This will come to no surprise to anyone who has ever talked to me for more than a few minutes, but one of my guilty Internet pleasures is heading over to eBay’s ‘vintage computing’ category, sorting by highest price, and grabbing a cup of coffee. It’s really just window shopping and after a while you start seeing the same things over and over again; Mac 512s with a starting bid far more than what they’re worth, a bunch of old PC-compatible laptops, and a shocking amount of old software. For the last week I’ve been watching this auction. It’s a Commodore 65 prototype – one of between 50 and 200 that still exist – that has over 60 bids, the highest for over $20,000 USD. It’s the most successful vintage computer auction in recent memory, beating out the usual high-profile auctions like Mac 128s and Altair 8800s. The most valuable home computer is the Apple I, but if you’re wondering what the second most valuable one is, here you go.

The C65 is not a contemporary of the C64, or even our own [Bil Herd]’s C128. This was the Amiga era, and the C65 was intended to be the last great 8-bit machine. From a page dedicated to the C65, it’s pretty much what you would expect: the CPU is based on a 6502, with the on-die addition of two 6526 CIA I/O controllers. The standard RAM is 128kB, expandable to 8MB by an Amiga 500-like belly port. Sound would be provided by two SIDs, and the video is based on the VIC-III, giving the C65 a pallette of up to 4096 colors and a resolution of up to 1280×400.

There’s still a little over five hours to go in the auction, but the current $21000 price should go even higher in the final hour; a C65 auction from a few years ago fetched $20100 for ‘a computer with missing parts’. This auction is for a complete, working system that has remained intact since it was discovered during the Commodore closing.

Update: Auction finished for $22,862.01 USD. For historical purposes, here’s a flickr album, a video, and another video.

The Hackaday Retro Edition is our celebration of old computers doing something modern, in most cases loading the old, no CSS or Javascript version of our site.

If old and rare computers are your sort of thing, Hackaday will be at the VCF East this year.

If you have an old computer you’d like featured, just load up the retro site, snap some pictures, have them developed, and send them in.

Rock Climbing Wall Installed In Garage Doubles As Storage Space

February 14, 2015 by Rich Bremer 8 Comments

Climbing enthusiast and human spider [Swighton] just couldn’t get enough climbing crammed into his day. If he couldn’t get out to the climbing spots, why not bring the climbing spot to him? So he did that by building a climbing wall in his garage.

The process started with determining the available space that can be allocated to the project. In [Swighton]’s case he could afford an 8×12 ft section of real estate. The garage ceilings were 8 ft high. A few days were spent sketching out ideas and designs. To suit his needs, the wall had to have a 45 degree overhang section, a small 90 section (think ceiling, not wall) and a pull-up bar. Once the design was finalized, it was time to pull some sheet rock off the walls and ceiling so that the 2×4 and 2×6 climbing wall framing could be securely fastened to the current garage structure.

Three-quarter inch plywood would cover the wooden frame. Before the plywood sheets were cut to size and installed, he drilled holes every 8 inches to accept t-nuts. These t-nuts allow hand holds to be installed and easily reconfigured. The quantity of t-nuts adds up quickly, an 8 inch square spacing results in 72 t-nuts per sheet of plywood.

[Swighton] also added a hatch to allow access to the inside of the climbing wall so that space would not go to waste. It is now a storage area but may become a kids’ fort in the future. After it was all said and done the wall only cost $400 which includes $180 for the hand holds.

If you’re like [Swighton] and can’t get enough climbing action, check out this wall with light up hand holds or this interactive wall.