[Robin] over at acidmods sent in this interesting PSP mod. [PvP] added an internal hard drive (with the exception of a mini-usb cable sticking out the top) to his PSP. The advantage? Laptop hard drives are dirt cheap while sony memory sticks are still pretty pricy. More details should be along soon, but [Robin] assures me that this means up to 200GB of storage is possible for the PSP.
Got Spam? Let Us Know
I’ve been getting a few sporadic reports of SPAM that’s supposedly from hackaday.com on it. It’s a bit surprising, considering that the only email we send out automatically consists of comment confirmation requests to prevent comment SPAM.
So do me a favor… if you’ve gotten any, send it along with the email headers so I can track down the source and destroy er make it stop.
Inexpensive MPG Modding
[basjoos] modded [via] the body of his ’92 Honda Civic – and managed to improve his fuel efficiency from 50-60MPG up to 95MPG for about $400. Even more interesting is the SuperMID (Translated) that he added to the car to monitor his fuel efficiency. It’s based on an ATMega8 that reads the CAN bus and displays realtime MPG information an a character LCD. The SuperMID is popular for Prius modders because the on-board display maxes out at a paultry 99MPG. If micro-controller’s aren’t your thing, [Atilla] put together his own CAN bus decoder and ported his code to a Zaurus SL-C700. He even added voice feedback notification for certain data events.
DIY Rotomolding
Rotomolding is used to create hollow forms by slowing rotating a mold while the material covers and hardens to the shape of the mold. [ds] built this version using a stepper motor to drive the assembly and a belt drive link An extreme version is used to form whitewater kayaks and other plastics. This thread over at cnczone has a rotisserie oven version that looks ideal for small plastic or wax molding.
24C3 Mifare Crypto1 RFID Completely Broken
Another highlight for us at CCC was [Karsten Nohl] and [Henryk Plötz] presenting how they reversed Philips crypto-1 “classic” Mifare RFID chips which are used in car keys, among other things. They analyzed both the silicon and the actual handshaking over RF. Looking at the silicon they found about 10K gates. Analyzing with Matlab turned up 70 unique functions. Then they started looking “crypto-like” parts: long strings of flip-flops used for registers, XORs, things near the edge that were heavily interconnected. Only 10% of the gates ended up being crypto. They now know the crypto algorithm based on this analysis and will be releasing later in the year.
The random number generator ended up being only 16-bit. It generates this number based on how long since the card has been powered up. They controlled the reader (an OpenPCD) which lets them generate the same “random” seed number over and over again. This was actually happening on accident before they discovered the flaw.
One more broken security-through-obscurity system to add to the list. For more fun, watch the video of the presentation.
Happy New Year Extra
Goodbye 1167627600 –1199167140 1199163540.
[Justin] is having fun telling everyone that an exploit has been found for the Archos 605 media player. The hack gets you remote root access on the player… need I say more?
[Gene] sent in his polar coordinate based LEGO 3d printer. He’s still working on the driver end, but it’s an interesting project.
[Kyle] sent in the gutting of his flip video camera.
Need some new storage? [forrest] sent in his price/GB price comparison script. It scrapes New Egg and graphs out the results.
Despite the link on our old post being dead, [Txoof] built his own CCFL macro light from a dead laptop LCD.
[Dan] sent in his LED cube matrix. The LEDs are wired in a matrix, so he can actually address them individually.
Frostbot: CNC Cookie Frosting
[Brian Schmalz] sent in his Frostbot. It’s a fun CNC bot project that he built to frost cookies for his latest holiday party. He (wussed out a bit) and started with a kit based CNC machine, but he made up for it by driving it with his own control hardware (that sparkfun happens to have for sale). His USB bit wacker interface certainly looks interesting – I might consider adding it in front of the stepper controllers on my cnc mill. Especially interesting is the HPGL interpreter software that converts graphics to stepper commands via the bit whacker interface.
