Nexmon Turns Nexus 5 (and RPi3!) Into WiFi Toolkit

September 8, 2016 by Elliot Williams 22 Comments

Back in the day, when wardriving was still useful (read: before WPA2 was widespread), we used to wander around with a Zaurus in our pocket running Kismet. Today, every cellphone has WiFi and a significantly more powerful processor inside. But alas, the firmware is locked down.

Enter the NexMon project. If you’ve got a Nexus 5 phone with the Broadcom BCM4339 WiFi chipset, you’ve now got a monitor-mode, packet-injecting workhorse in your pocket, and it looks a lot less creepy than that old Zaurus. But more to the point, NexMon is open. If you’d like to get inside what it took to reverse-engineer a hole into the phone’s WiFi, or make your own patches, here’s a great starting place.

But wait, there’s more! The recently released Raspberry Pi 3 has a similar Broadcom WiFi chipset, and has been given the same treatment, turning your RPi 3 into a wireless-sniffing powerhouse. How many Raspberry Pi “hacks” actually hack the Raspberry Pi? Well, here’s one.

We first learned of this project from a talk given at the MetaRhein-Main Chaos Days conference which took place last weekend. The NexMon talk (in German, but with slides in English) is just one of the many talks, all of which are available online.

The NexMon project is a standout, however. Not only do they reverse the WiFi firmware in the Nexus 5, but they show you how, and then apply the same methods to the RPi3. Kudos times three to [Matthias Schulz], [Daniel Wegemer], and [Matthias Hollick]!

Amazing Meccano Pinball Machine Fully Functional Before Meeting Its Fate

September 7, 2016 by Donald Papp 40 Comments

[Brian Leach] of the South East London Meccano Club has put an impressive amount of ingenuity into making his pinball machine almost entirely out of Meccano parts. He started in 2013 and we saw an earlier version of the table back in 2014, but it has finally been completed. It has all the trappings of proper pinball: score counter, score multiplier with timeout, standing targets, kickouts, pot bumpers, drop targets, and (of course) flippers and plunger.

The video (embedded below) is very well produced with excellent closeups of the different mechanisms as [Brian] gives a concise tour of the machine. Some elements are relatively straightforward, others required workarounds to get the right operation, but it’s all beautifully done. For example, look at the score counter below. Meccano electromagnets are too weak to drive the numbers directly, so a motor turns all numbers continuously with a friction drive and electromagnets are used to stop the rotation at specific points. Reset consists of letting the numbers spin freely to 9999 then doing a last little push for a clean rollover to zero.

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Nintendo Wields DMCA Ax On Fan Games

September 7, 2016 by Jenny List 61 Comments

In a move that may sadden many but should surprise nobody, Nintendo of America has issued a DMCA takedown notice for 562 fan-created games created in homage to Nintendo originals and hosted on the popular Game Jolt site. Games affected include Mario, Zelda, and Pokémon based creations among others, and Game Jolt have responded, as they are required to, by locking the pages of the games in question. They state that they believe their users and developers should have the right to know what content has been removed from their site and why the action has been taken, so they have begun posting any notices they receive in their GitHub repository.

It is likely that this action won’t be appreciated within our community, however it’s important to note that while there are numerous examples of DMCA abuse this is not one of them. Nintendo are completely within their rights over the matter, if you use any of the copyrighted Nintendo properties outside the safe harbor of fair use then you will put yourself legitimately in their sights.

Something that is difficult to escape though is a feeling that DMCA takedowns on fan-created games are rather a low-hanging fruit. An easy way for corporate legal executives to be seen to be doing something by their bosses, though against a relatively defenseless target and without really tackling the problem.

To illustrate this, take a walk through a shopping mall, motorway service station, or street market almost anywhere in the world, and it’s very likely that you will pass significant numbers of counterfeit toys and games copying major franchises including those of Nintendo. A lot of these dollar store and vending machine specials are so hilariously awful that their fakeness must be obvious to even the most out-of-touch purchaser, but their ready availability speaks volumes. Unlike the fan-created games which are free, people are buying these toys in huge numbers with money that never reaches Nintendo, and also unlike the fan-created games there’s not a Nintendo lawyer in sight. Corporate end-of-year bonuses are delivered on the numbers of violations dealt with, and those come easiest by piling up the simple cases rather than chasing the difficult ones that are costing the company real sales.

We’ve covered many DMCA stories over the years, and some of them have been pretty shocking. Questions over its use in the Volkswagen emissions scandal, or keeping John Deere tractor servicing in the hands of dealers. Let’s hope that the EFF and Bunnie Huang’s efforts pay off and dismantle section 1201, one of the most nonsensical parts of the law.

Via Engadget. Dendy Junior unauthorised Nintendo Famicom clone image, By Nzeemin (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Quantum Eraser

September 7, 2016 by Will Sweatman 64 Comments

Richard Feynmann noted more than once that complementarity is the central mystery that lies at the heart of quantum theory. Complementarity rules the world of the very small… the quantum world, and surmises that particles and waves are indistinguishable from one other. That they are one and the same. That it is nonsensical to think of something, or even try to visualize that something as an individual “particle” or a “wave.” That the particle/wave/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is in this sort of superposition, where it is neither particle nor wave. It is only the act of trying to measure what it is that disengages the cloaking device and the particle or wave nature is revealed. Look for a particle, and you’ll find a particle. Look for a wave instead, and instead you’ll find a wave.

Complementarity arises from the limits placed on measuring things in the quantum world with classical measuring devices. It turns out that when you try to measure things that are really really really small, some issues come up… some fundamental issues. For instance, you can’t really know exactly where a sub-atomic particle is located in space. You can only know where it is within a certain probability, and this probability is distributed through space in the form of a wave. Understanding uncertainty in measurement is key to avoiding the disbelief that hits you when thinking about complementarity.

This article is a continuation of the one linked above. I shall pick up where I left off, in that everyone agrees that measurement on the quantum scale presents some big problems. However, not everyone agrees what these problems mean. Some, such as Albert Einstein, say that just because something cannot be measured doesn’t mean it’s not there. Others, including most mainstream physicists, say the opposite — that if something cannot be measured, it for all practical purposes is not there. We shall continue on our journey by using modern technology to peer into the murky world of complementarity. But first, a quick review.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Adblock For TV

September 6, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 93 Comments

Contact, the 1985 book by Carl Sagan, was significantly better than the movie. Five people went through the wormhole, three machines were made (in Russia, Wyoming, and a third on Hokkaido), Erbium did something, and the novelization provided much better worldbuilding. One of the more interesting characters in the book was H.R. Haddon, the megalomaniacal business man, made his first million designing a chip that would block advertisements on TV. The book strongly suggests this commercial-blocking chip was a purely analog device, a concept that would have been an amazing abuse of NTSC produced by a damn fine engineer.

Now, even though cord cutting is commonplace and streaming is taking over, there’s still commercials on Hulu. In a few months, I’ll have to pay $5 a month to watch Star Trek with commercials. There is obviously a market for ‘adblock for TV’, and that’s what [PixJuan] is doing for his Hackaday Prize entry.

[Juan]’s device is a basically an HDMI switch with a remote that’s pressed every time the ads start to show on a broadcast. This switch will change the input of the HDMI switch from a cable box to a Raspberry Pi and play a short video clip or something else that isn’t selling you crap. When the Raspi is done, the switch goes back over to the original input.

With a bit of computation in this adblock-for-TV device, there are a few more options for ad detection. The Raspberry Pi could build a database of when ads play and for how long, depending on the channel. This is a great project that has a lot of potential to use some interesting techniques like computer vision and machine learning for the goal of removing commercials before they start.

Run A RepRap On An ESP8266

September 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 17 Comments

What can’t the little $5 WiFi module do? Now that [lhartmann] has got an ESP8266 controlling the motors of a 3D printer, that’s one more item to check off the list.

What’s coolest about this project is the way that [lhartmann] does it. The tiny ESP8266 has nowhere near the required number of GPIO pins, the primary SPI is connected to the onboard flash memory, and the secondary SPI is poorly documented and almost nobody uses it. So, [lhartmann] chose to use the I2S outputs.

I2S is most often an audio protocol, so this might at first seem like a strange choice. Although I2S sounds like I2C, it’s really essentially an SPI protocol with a fourth wire that alternates to designate the right or left channel. It’s actually just perfect for sending 16×2 bits of data at high data rates.

[lhartmann] takes these 32 bits and feeds them into four shift registers, producing 32 outputs from just the four I2S data lines. That’s more than enough signals to run the stepper motors. And since it updates at 192 kHz sample rate, it’s plenty fast enough to drive them.

The other side benefit of this technique is that it can work on single-board computers with just a little bit of software. Programming very complicated stepper movements then becomes just a matter of generating the right “audio” file and playing it out. [lhartmann] demonstrated this earlier with an Orange Pi. That’s pretty cool, too.

The code for turning the ESP8266 and a short handful of 74HC595s into a 3D printer controller are up on GitHub, so go check it out.

Thanks [CNLohr] for the tip!

What Is There To Know About Resistors?

September 6, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 65 Comments

Resistor: A passive chunk of material that resists the flow of electrical current. A terminal is connected to each end you’re done. What could be simpler?

It turns out it’s not so simple at all. Temperature, capacitance, inductance and other factors all play a part in making the resistor a rather complex component after all. Even its uses in circuits are many, but here we’ll just focus on the different types of fixed-value resistors, how they’re made, and what makes them desirable for different applications.

Let’s start with a simple one, and one of the oldest.

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