It was a good weekend to be geeky in Bavaria. In addition to our own Hackaday Prize Bring-a-Hack party, there was the reason that we scheduled it in the first place, Munich’s independent DIY expo, Make Munich.
If you’re a loyal Hackaday reader, many of the projects would seem uncannily familiar. I walked in and was greeted by some beautiful word clocks in both German and English, for instance. Still, seeing the Open Theremin being sold with an “as seen on Hackaday” sticker made us smile. And then we had a great conversation about [Urs Gaudenz]’s other project: DIY biological apparatus, also seen on Hackaday.
There were robots galore. Someone (from Gmünd?) was driving around a graffiti-bot and spraying the floor with water instead of paint or chalk to very nice effect. The full evolution of the Zoobotics robot family was on display. Even the Calliope (a German version of the micro:bit) booth had this cute Bluetooth vibrobot. Join me after the break as I dive into all of the great stuff on display over the weekend.
Thanks to everyone who came to the Hackaday Prize Make Munich Meetup and Bring-a-Hack last night! We had a great time, and there were a bunch of cool projects on display, some of which we even got pictures of. Frankly, we were enjoying chatting too much to be peering through a camera lens.
Around 30 people made it over to the Munich CCC, including some familiar faces from the last time we had a party in Munich. Although it was a mostly local crowd, we also had visitors from Switzerland, Austria, and even the US of A: TV-B-Gone inventor, HaD Prize judge, and mad hacker [Mitch Altmann] was in the house.
After we got a little food and drink, we opened up the floor for the projects, lightning-talk style. The largest projects were probably a tie between an own-design CoreXY 3D printer and a boombox with some serious sound output. One guest’s automated bacterial culture apparatus probably wouldn’t have fit on the table, so it’s OK that it got left in the lab. The smallest hack? Probably [Alex]‘s super-mini USB LED clock gizmo, complete with hand-soldered 0402 LEDs, and “even smaller stuff on the backside”.
When makers take to designing furniture for their own home, the results are spectacular. For their senior design project, [Phillip Murphy] and his teammates set about building a smart table from the ground up. Oh, and you can also use it to play games, demonstrated in the video below.
The table uses 512 WS2812 pixels in a 32 x 16 array which has enough resolution to play a selection of integrated games — Go, 2-player Tetris, and Tron light cycle combat — as well as some other features like a dancing bird party mode — because what’s the point of having a smart table if it can’t also double as rave lighting?
A C2000-family microcontroller on a custom board is the brains, and is controlled by an Android app via Bluetooth RN-42 modules. The table frame was designed in Sketchup, laser-cut, and painstakingly stained. [Murphy] and company used aluminum ducting tape in each of the ‘pixels’, and the table’s frame actually forms the pixel grid. Check out the overview and some of the games in action after the break.
If you’re in Munich, Germany this weekend and you’ve got a sweet hack to show off and a thirst for beer and/or good geeky company, then you’re in luck! Come join Hackaday at the muCCC for a Hackaday Prize Bring a Hack.
The location is Schleißheimer Str. 41, a short walk west along Heßstraße from the Theresienstraße U-Bahn. No reservation is needed, but it’d be swell if you’d let us know in the comments that you’re coming (or better yet, click the “join this event” button in the upper right of the event page) so that we have enough pizza on hand.
The party starts at 20:00, not entirely coincidentally as soon as exhibitor setup at Make Munich closes. So if you’re setting up a booth, come on over to the other side of town where you can show off a small project to a select audience of fellow hackers. If you’re only going to be attending Make Munich, this is a great warm up.
Hackaday’s [Elliot Williams] will be there and taking photos if you’ve got something portable that you’d like to show the world! Otherwise, relax and hang out with kindred spirits. Need a time and place to get a team together for the Hackaday Prize? Here, with beer! (Or Spezi, but nothing rhymes with Spezi.)
WiFi and Bluetooth have their use cases, but both have certain demands on things like battery life and authentication that make them unsuitable for a lot of low-power use cases. They’re also quite limited in range. There are other standards out there more suitable for low-power and wide area work, and thankfully, LoRa is one of them. Having created some LoRa pagers, [Moser] decided to head out and test their range.
Now, we’ve done range tests before. Often this involves sending one party out with a radio while the other hangs back at base. Cellphones serve as a communications link while the two parties go back and forth, endlessly asking “Is it working now? Hang on, I’ll take a few steps back — what about now?”
It’s a painful way to do a range test. [Moser]’s method is much simpler; set a cellphone to log GPS position, and have the pager attempt to send the same data back to the base station. Then, go out for a drive, and compare the two traces. This method doesn’t just report straight range, either — it can be used to find good and bad spots for radio reception. It’s great when you live in an area full of radio obstructions where simple distance isn’t the only thing affecting your link.
Build details on the pagers are available, and you can learn more about LoRa here. While you’re at it, check out the LoRa tag for more cool builds and hacks.
Attention Europe! Next weekend, May 6th and 7th, is Make Munich. Hackaday wants to help you warm up with a Bring-a-Hack party on Friday, May 5th from 20:30 and on at the Munich local branch of the Chaos Computer Club.
Immediately following build-up for exhibitors at Make Munich, head on over to Schleißheimer Str. 41 (corner Heßstrasse, U-Bahn Theresienstraße) where Hackaday will be providing beer, Mate, and pizza for anyone who brings along a small project that they’re working on. We’ll have Hackaday.com and Hackaday Prize stickers galore, and a few copies of the Hackaday Omnibus on hand for those who really wow us, or just ask really nicely.
Afterwards, get a little sleep and then head back over to Make Munich on Saturday morning. We’ll be wandering around at least on Saturday, so if you see anyone in a Hackaday t-shirt, say hi! There is a lot to see.
Unlike other similar fairs, Make Munich is entirely volunteer-run, and a great way to show your support for the local scene is to help out. The deal: hang out with cool people and help run the show for four hours, and you get in free. We’ve heard that they still have some shifts open.
Non-terrible robots.
Saturday night is the Hebocon terrible robot battle, which is always absurd, and always worth the price of admission. (And you’ve already paid that if you’re going to attend on Saturday anyway.) Rules are sumo-esque, and if your lump of, well whatever, moves — it’s a robot and it has a chance. Battle starts at 18:30. Check out the video from last year embedded below.
If you still want more Make Munich, it goes on Sunday as well. We’ll be at home typing up the previous days’ events so the rest of you can read about it while sipping coffee.
Just in case you missed it in all the hubbub, we repeat: Hackaday Prize Bring-a-Hack at μC3, Friday May 5th from 20:30 on.
Come say hi to [Elliot Williams] and all of your other favorite Munich hackers! Bring a hack, show and tell, pizza and beer. And Mate, and probably Spezi. If you’re coming, shout out in the comments, and let us know your favorite toppings. Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Bring-a-Hack At Make Munich Next Week!”→
We will all be used to malicious software, computers and operating systems compromised by viruses, worms, or Trojans. It has become a fact of life, and a whole industry of virus checking software exists to help users defend against it.
Underlying our concerns about malicious software is an assumption that the hardware is inviolate, the computer itself can not be inherently compromised. It’s a false one though, as it is perfectly possible for a processor or other integrated circuit to have a malicious function included in its fabrication. You might think that such functions would not be included by a reputable chip manufacturer, and you’d be right. Unfortunately though because the high cost of chip fabrication means that the semiconductor industry is a web of third-party fabrication houses, there are many opportunities during which extra components can be inserted before the chips are manufactured. University of Michigan researchers have produced a paper on the subject (PDF) detailing a particularly clever attack on a processor that minimizes the number of components required through clever use of a FET gate in a capacitive charge pump.
On-chip backdoors have to be physically stealthy, difficult to trigger accidentally, and easy to trigger by those in the know. Their designers will find a line that changes logic state rarely, and enact a counter on it such that when they trigger it to change state a certain number of times that would never happen accidentally, the exploit is triggered. In the past these counters have been traditional logic circuitry, an effective approach but one that leaves a significant footprint of extra components on the chip for which space must be found, and which can become obvious when the chip is inspected through a microscope.
The University of Michigan backdoor is not a counter but an analog charge pump. Every time its input is toggled, a small amount of charge is stored on the capacitor formed by the gate of a transistor, and eventually its voltage reaches a logic level such that an attack circuit can be triggered. They attached it to the divide-by-zero flag line of an OR1200 open-source processor, from which they could easily trigger it by repeatedly dividing by zero. The beauty of this circuit is both that it uses very few components so can hide more easily, and that the charge leaks away with time so it can not persist in a state likely to be accidentally triggered.
The best hardware hacks are those that are simple, novel, and push a device into doing something it would not otherwise have done. This one has all that, for which we take our hats off to the Michigan team.
