Be Anyone Or Anything With Facial Projection Mask

October 31, 2019 by 18 Comments

In the market for a low-poly change to your look? Hate the idea of showing up for a costume party only to find out someone is wearing the same mask as you? Then this face changing front-projection mask may be just the thing for you.

To be honest, we’re not sure just how much [Sean Hodgins]’ latest project has to do with cosplay. He seems to be making a subtle commentary about dealing with life in the surveillance state, even though this is probably not a strategy for thwarting facial-recognition cameras. [Ed Note: Or maybe it’s just Halloween?]

The build consists of a Raspberry Pi and a pico projector of the kind we’ve seen before. These are mated together via a custom PCB and live inside a small enclosure that’s attached to the end of a longish boom. The boom attaches to the chin of 3D-printed mask, which in turn is connected to the suspension system of a welding helmet. Powered by a battery pack and controlled by a smartphone app, the projector throws whatever you want onto the mask – videos, effects, even images of other people. Even with some Photoshop tweaks to account for keystone distortion from the low angle of projection, there’s enough distortion that the effect is more artistic than masquerade. But honestly, having your face suddenly burst into flames is pretty cool. We just wonder what visibility is like for the wearer with a bright LED blasting into your eyes.

As a bonus, [Sean] has worked this build into a virtual treasure hunt. Check out 13thkey.com and see what you can make from the minimal clues there.

Continue reading “Be Anyone Or Anything With Facial Projection Mask” →

The Young Engineers Guide To Career Planning

October 28, 2019 by 41 Comments

It’s often said that engineers aren’t born, they’re made. Or more accurately, taught, tested, and accredited by universities. If you’re in high school, you’re probably starting to think about potential career paths and may be considering an engineering degree. A lot of work goes into a good college application, and it might seem like the hardest part is getting in. However, if your end goal is to get yourself a great engineering job at the end of your studies, it pays to have your head up from day 1!

I Just Need A Degree, Right?

Back in my freshman days, there was a saying that was popular on campus, particularly with those studying STEM topics. “Ps get degrees.” Your college’s grading system might use different letters, but the basic gist was that a pass mark was all that was required to get your piece of paper at the end of your four years. While this is technically true, it’s only really a useful ethos if your aim is to simply get a degree. If your goal is to use that degree to score yourself a plum job in your field, it would be unwise to follow this credo.

This attitude will net you plenty of wonderful memories at the bar, but it will dent your chances of landing a solid job upon graduation. All in moderation!

The reality of the modern job market is that it’s highly competitive. Recruiters can receive hundreds of applications for a single job, meaning the vast majority of applicants don’t even make it to the interview stage. To trim down the pile, various criteria are used to pick out the ideal candidates. An easy way to do this is to sort by grades. Having a low GPA can therefore see your application relegated to the trashcan, before you even get a chance to impress anyone with your carefully honed skills. Continue reading “The Young Engineers Guide To Career Planning” →

DNS-over-HTTPS Is The Wrong Partial Solution

October 21, 2019 by 51 Comments

Openness has been one of the defining characteristics of the Internet for as long as it has existed, with much of the traffic today still passed without any form of encryption. Most requests for HTML pages and associated content are in plain text, and the responses are returned in the same way, even though HTTPS has been around since 1994.

But sometimes there’s a need for security and/or privacy. While the encryption of internet traffic has become more widespread for online banking, shopping, the privacy-preserving aspect of many internet protocols hasn’t kept pace. In particular, when you look up a website’s IP address by hostname, the DNS request is almost always transmitted in plain text, allowing all the computers and ISPs along the way to determine what website you were browsing, even if you use HTTPS once the connection is made.

The idea of also encrypting DNS requests isn’t exactly new, with the first attempts starting in the early 2000s, in the form of DNSCrypt, DNS over TLS (DoT), and others. Mozilla, Google, and a few other large internet companies are pushing a new method to encrypt DNS requests: DNS over HTTPS (DoH).

DoH not only encrypts the DNS request, but it also serves it to a “normal” web server rather than a DNS server, making the DNS request traffic essentially indistinguishable from normal HTTPS. This is a double-edged sword. While it protects the DNS request itself, just as DNSCrypt or DoT do, it also makes it impossible for the folks in charge of security at large firms to monitor DNS spoofing and it moves the responsibility for a critical networking function from the operating system into an application. It also doesn’t do anything to hide the IP address of the website that you just looked up — you still go to visit it, after all.

And in comparison to DoT, DoH centralizes information about your browsing in a few companies: at the moment Cloudflare, who says they will throw your data away within 24 hours, and Google, who seems intent on retaining and monetizing every detail about everything you’ve ever thought about doing.

DNS and privacy are important topics, so we’re going to dig into the details here. Continue reading “DNS-over-HTTPS Is The Wrong Partial Solution” →

The Arduino IDE Finally Grows Up

October 21, 2019 by 105 Comments

While the Arduino has a very vocal fan club, there are always a few people less than thrilled with the ubiquitous ecosystem. While fans may just dismiss it as sour grapes, there are a few legitimate complaints you can fairly level at the stock setup. To address at least some of those concerns, Arduino is rolling out the Arduino Pro IDE and while it doesn’t completely address every shortcoming, it is worth a look and may grow to quiet down some of the other criticisms, given time.

For the record, we think the most meaningful critiques fall into three categories: 1) the primitive development environment, 2) the convoluted build system, and 3) the lack of debugging. Of course, there are third party answers for all of these problems, but now the Pro IDE at least answers the first one. As far as we can tell, the IDE hides the build process just like the original IDE. Debugging, though, will have to wait for a later build.

Continue reading “The Arduino IDE Finally Grows Up” →

Revisiting The BlackHat Hack: How A Security Conference Was Pwned

October 18, 2019 by 1 Comment

Does anyone remember the Black Hat BCard hack in 2018? This hack has been documented extensively, most notoriously by [NinjaStyle] in his original blog post revealing the circumstances around discovering the vulnerability. The breach ended up revealing the names, email addresses, phone numbers, and personal details of every single conference attendee – an embarrassing leak from one of the world’s largest cybersecurity conferences.

To recap: The Black Hat conference badges included an embedded NFC tag storing the participant’s contact details presumably for vendors to scan for marketing purposes. After scanning the tag, [NinjaStyle] realized that his name was readily available, but not his email address and other information. Instead, the NFC reader pointed to the BCard app – an application created for reading business cards.

[NinjaStyle] decompiled the APK for the app to search for API endpoints and found that the participants each had a custom URL made using event identification values. After finding data that appeared to correspond to an eventID and badgeID, he sent a request over a web browser and found that his attendee data was returned completely unauthenticated. With this knowledge, it was possible to brute-force the contact details for every Black Hat attendee (the range of valid IDs was between 100000-999999, and there were about 18,000 attendees). Using Burp Suite, the task would take about six hours. 

He was able to get ahold of BCard to reveal the vulnerability, which was fixed in less than a day by disabling the leaky API from their legacy system. Even so, legacy APIs in conference apps aren’t an uncommon occurrence – the 2018 RSA Conference (another cybersecurity conference) also suffered from an unprotected app that allowed 114 attendee records to be accessed without permission.

With the widespread publicity of leaked attendee data, event organizers are hopefully getting smarter about the apps that they use, especially if they come from a third-party vendor. [Yashvier Kosaraju] gave a talk at TROOPERS19 about pen testing several large vendors and discovering that Kitapps (Attendify) and Eventmobi both built apps with unauthenticated access to attendee data. It’s hard to say how many apps from previous years are still around, or whether or not the next event app you use will come with authentication – just remember to stay vigilant and to not give too much of your personal data away.

Replacing The 3D Printer And Router: A Tool For Manufacturing Human-Scale Forms

October 18, 2019 by 27 Comments

The purpose of Geometer becomes apparent when you realize its simplicity: [David Troetschel]’s project is to create an easily understandable design tool that encourages goal-oriented design. The kit comes with physical components and digital counterparts that can be combined in a modular way. They each have a specific geometry, which provide versatility while keeping manufacturing simple.

For the prototyping phase, small snap-on parts 3D printed on a Formlabs printer mimic the module components on a smaller scale. Once a design is conceived and the Geometer Grasshopper program finalizes the module arrangement necessary for the model, the larger pieces can be used as a mold for a concrete or hydrocal mold casting.

The present set of modules is in its seventh iteration, initially beginning as a senior thesis for [Troetschel]. Since then, the project itself has had an extensive prototyping phase in which the components have gone from being injection-molded to 3D printed.

The overall process for prototyping is faster than 3D printing and more cost-effective than sending to a third-party shop to build, which adds to the project’s goal of making manufacturing design more accessible. This is an interesting initiative to introduce a new way of making to the DIY community, and we’re curious to see this idea take off in makerspaces.

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Speakers Taking The Stage At Supercon Plus A Hint Of The Hacking To Come

October 18, 2019 by 3 Comments

Four weeks from today the Hackaday Superconference comes alive for the fifth year. From engineering in challenging environments to elevating the art form of electronics, here are nine more talks that will make this a year to remember.

In addition to the slate of speakers below there are three other announcements, plus workshops. Jeroen Domburg (aka Sprite_TM) is designing this year’s badge based around a beefy FPGA running a RISC-V core and using open source synthesis tools. We’ll have more on that soon, but if you just can’t wait, check out the expansion board spec he just published, and join the conference chat room for the inside track. Badge hacking is sure to be the liveliest we’ve ever seen.

Tickets are sold out but you can still get on the waiting list and hope that one becomes available. If you are holding onto one of these hot commodities but are unable to use it, please return your ticket so that we can get it to someone waiting with their fingers crossed.

The Talks (Part Four of Many)


  • Laurel Cummings

    When it Rains, It Pours

    Over the last two years my work has been beyond ordinary, building and prototyping in strange locations like being stranded on a sailboat in the Atlantic Ocean, teaching US Marines in Kuwait, and building fuel gauge sensors for generators for vital systems in North Carolina post hurricane Florence. Some of the big lessons I’ve learned are about how to source materials and supplies in weird places, like finding potentiometers in the backwoods of North Carolina when Amazon cannot physically deliver across flooded highways, how to find welding gas in Kuwait City (and how a local chef could possibly be your best bet), or how far you can get with an O’Reilly’s Auto Parts store near the city docks. These situations help you really see the “engineer creep” that can happen to a project. I’ve learned that when you’re in high-risk situations, you really should stop caring about whether the edges of your 3D print are chamfered. In fact, version 1 of the hurricane fuel gauge sensor was demonstrated while being housed inside an elegant, tasteful sandwich baggie.


  • Angela Sheehan

    Building Whimsical Wearables: Leveling Up Through Playful Prototyping

    Whether it’s for a theme party, Halloween, cosplay, or That Thing in The Desert, designing wearables for whimsical self expression presents a great opportunity to challenge yourself as a maker, wearer, and collaborator. As an artist and designer who crash landed into a career in tech, I’ve found that imposter syndrome can often place limits on what feels personally achievable from an electronics and programming standpoint. Recontextualizing a project to shift the focus from ‘wearable tech hardware endeavor’ to ‘quirky mixed media experiment in personal styling’, I’ve created a safe space to play and try new things just outside my skill set and produced some of my most technically complex and polished personal work. Take a journey with me through the process of conceptualizing and building my Color Stealing Fairy project, an exercise in iterative design and upgrading an interactive wearable project over the course of two years and counting.


  • Michael Ossmann and Kate Temkin

    Software-Defined Everything

    The popularity of Software-Defined Radio (SDR) has led to the emergence of powerful open source software tools such as GNU Radio that enable rapid development of real-time Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques. We’ve used these tools for both radio and non-radio applications such as audio and infrared, and now we are finding them tremendously useful for diverse sensors and actuators that can benefit from DSP. In this talk we’ll show how we use the open source GreatFET platform to rapidly develop an SDR-like approach to just about anything.


  • Kelly Heaton

    “Hacking Nature’s Musicians” (or, “The Art of Electronic Naturalism”)

    The general lack of acceptance of electronic art results from a scarcity of critics, curators, collectors, and grantors who understand electronic media, compounded by a cultural gap between the artistic and engineering communities. In order to solve this problem, we must stretch our comfort zone and vocabularies to have a respectful, enlightening conversation with people with different educational backgrounds. In this talk I’ll discuss my wonderment at the simple, analog circuit designs that mimic life-like behavior such as chirping crickets and singing birds. This will include discussion of various schematics and demonstrations of a small. along with an abbreviated survey of my work to-date.


  • Jasmine Brackett

    Setting your Electronics Free

    In this panel we’ll discuss the key ways to get your projects from your workshop into the hands of the first few users, and what you can do to scale up from there. We’ll talk about common pitfalls, and also what are the best resources to draw upon.


  • David Williams

    MicroFPGA – The Coming Revolution in Small Electronics

    Big FPGA’s are awesome. They’re doing what they’ve always done, enabling AI, signal processing, military applications etc. However, there is a new possibility emerging – FPGA’s for small applications – which is quite possibly even more significant. Using open source tools, cheap flexible development boards, and new libraries, designers have a whole new set of options, creating incredibly high performance, flexible, low power projects and products.


  • Nick Poole

    Boggling the Boardhouse: Designing 3D Structures, Circuits, and Sensors from PCBs

    The presentation will be a series of design features or techniques with a few minutes of exploration into the ‘gotchas’ of each, as well as example layouts in EAGLE and physical examples. I’d like to cover as many different techniques as I can cram into 30 minutes, including bringing weird shapes into EDA, the inside corner problem caused by tab and slot, fillet soldering, stacking boards, imitating model sprues with mouse bites, manipulating the mask layer for custom displays, bendy tab buttons, working rotary encoder, and ergonomic design for handheld PCBs.


  • Ted Yapo

    Towards an Open-Source Multi-GHz Sampling Oscilloscope

    Tektronix designed a 14.5 GHz sampling oscilloscope in 1968. With the easy multi-layer PCB designs, tiny surface-mount parts, blazingly fast semiconductors, and computer horsepower available to the individual designer today, can a similar sampling head be re-created inexpensively with common, off-the-shelf components? Should be easy, right? It’s not. In this talk, I’ll discuss progress towards an open-source GHz+ sampling oscilloscope, including a lot of dead ends, plus some very promising leads.


  • Jeroen Domburg

    Building the Hackaday Superconference Badge

    The tradition of the Hackaday Supercon badge is to build something unlike any Supercon badge that came before. This year’s badge has an FPGA as its central component, and this comes with some extra challenges: the FPGA only comes in a BGA package with a whopping 381 pads to solder, and instead of just referring to the datasheet of the SoC to write the badge software, the SoC itself had to be written first.  I will discuss the development process of the badge, as well as the many challenges encountered along the way.

 

Keep Your Eye on Hackaday for the Livestream

The speakers you’ll see at Supercon have an amazing wealth of experience and we can’t wait to see their talks. But even if you couldn’t get a ticket, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out. Keep your eye on Hackaday for a link to the livestream which will begin on Saturday, November 16th.