Image of the presenter on the podium, in front of the projector screen with graphs shown on it

Supercon 2022: [Alex Whittemore] On Treating Your Sensor Data Well

September 15, 2023 by Arya Voronova 4 Comments

If you build your own devices or hack on devices that someone else has built, you know the feeling of opening a serial terminal and seeing a stream of sensor data coming from your device. However, looking at scrolling numbers gets old fast, and you will soon want to visualize them and store them – which is why experienced makers tend to have a few graph-drawing and data-collecting tools handy, ready to be plugged in and launched at a moment’s notice. Well, if you don’t yet have such a tool in your arsenal, listen to this 16-minute talk by [Alex Whittemore] to learn about a whole bunch of options you might not even know you had!

For a start, there’s the Arduino Serial Plotter that you get for free with your Arduino IDE install, but [Alex] also reminds us of the Mu editor’s serial plotter – about the same in terms of features, but indisputably an upgrade in terms of UX. It’s not the only plotter in town, either – Better Serial Plotter is a wonderful standalone option, with a few features that supercharge it, as [Alex] demonstrates! You don’t have to stop here, however – we can’t always be tethered to our devices’ debugging ports, after all. Continue reading “Supercon 2022: [Alex Whittemore] On Treating Your Sensor Data Well” →

Hackaday Podcast 236: The Car Episode, Building Leonardo’s Water Mill, Reviving Radio Shack

September 15, 2023 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

Elliot and Dan got together this time around to recap the week in hacks, and it looks like the Hackaday writing crew very much had cars on their minds. We both took the bait, with tales of privacy-violating cars and taillights that can both cripple a pickup and financially cripple its owner. We went medieval — OK, more like renaissance — on a sawmill, pulled a popular YouTuber out of the toilet, and pondered what an animal-free circus would be like. Is RadioShack coming back? Can an ESP32 board get much smaller than this? And where are all the retro(computer)virus writers? We delve into these questions and more, while still saving a little time to wax on about personal projects.

And although the show is peppered with GSM interference for the first few minutes it’s not actually a clue for the What’s That Sound. (Elliot says sorry! And edited most it out by swapping over to the backup recording for most of the rest of the show.)

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download it yourself if that’s your jam.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast 236: The Car Episode, Building Leonardo’s Water Mill, Reviving Radio Shack” →

This Week In Security: Blastpass, MGM Heist, And Killer Themes

September 15, 2023 by Jonathan Bennett 7 Comments

There’s yet another 0-day exploit chain discovered as part of NSO Group’s Pegasus malware suite. This one is known as BLASTPASS, and it’s a nasty one. There’s no user interaction required, just receiving an iMessage containing a malicious PassKit attachment.

We have two CVEs issued so far. CVE-2023-41064 is a classic buffer overflow in ImageIO, the Apple framework for universal file format read and write. Then CVE-2023-41061 is a problem in the iOS Wallet implementation. Release 16.6.1 of the mobile OS addresses these issues, and updates have rolled out for macOS 11, 12, and 13.

It’s worth noting that Apple’s Lockdown mode does seem to block this particular exploit chain. Citizen Lab suggests that high-risk users of Apple hardware enable Lockdown Mode for that extra measure of security. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Blastpass, MGM Heist, And Killer Themes” →

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Death Metal Macro Pad

September 14, 2023 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

At “the size of three 60% keyboards (put together)” or approximately one Cannibal Corpse record on vinyl, this beautifully-executed death metal font-inspired macro pad by [zyumbik] may be better off hanging on the wall than hanging out on the desktop.

But let’s say you did have room for the 9-key Deathpad on your desktop. Wouldn’t you just play with the tentacles (?) all the time like I would? Yeah, that’s what I thought. They’re pretty inviting.

So why does this look so fantastic? It’s an SLA print, for one thing. For another, [zyumbik] spent over 1,000 hours designing the thing. Unfortunately it’s not open-source, but you can buy the only other one in existence for a cool $1,000.

Rubik’s Cube Keyboard

Although it doesn’t rotate (yet), creator [_Rudeism] is calling this the Rubik’s Cube Keyboard. Fine with me, though any type of actual rotation would be insanely difficult to pull off. The plan is to do it with RGB LEDs.

The layout is QWERTY-adjacent — the white side is the num pad, yellow has the modifiers, and the other four sides house all the letters. As you might imagine, this uses a custom frame and PCBs. The switches are Glorious Gateron Clears, which definitely supports the blinkenlights planned for V2.

This thing reminds me a bit of of the SafeType™ vertical keyboard, or even [Aaron Rasmussen]’s spherical keyboard. Be sure to check it out in Monkeytype action, where [_Rudeism] manages to pull off about 20WPM. Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Death Metal Macro Pad” →

Cheap LCD Uses USB Serial

September 11, 2023 by Al Williams 20 Comments

Browsing the Asian marketplaces online is always an experience. Sometimes, you see things at ridiculously low prices. Other times, you see things and wonder who is buying them and why — a shrimp pillow? But sometimes, you see something that probably could have a more useful purpose than the proposed use case.

That’s the case with the glut of “smart displays” you can find at very low prices. Ostensibly, these are being sold as system monitors. A business-card-sized LCD hooks up via USB and shows your CPU speed, temperature, and so on. Of course, this requires sketchy Windows software. I don’t run Windows, and if I did, I wouldn’t be keen to put some strange service on just so I could see tiny displays of my system information. But a 3.5-inch IPS LCD screen for $15 or less probably has some other uses. But how to drive it? Turns out, it is easier than you think and the hardware looks reasonably hackable, too.

Like a lot of this cheap stuff, these screens are sold under a variety of names, and apparently, there are some subtle differences. Two of the main makers of these screens are Turing and XuanFang, although you rarely see those names in the online listings. As you might expect, though, someone has reverse-engineered the protocol, and there is Python software that will replace the stock Windows software the devices use. Even better, there is an example of using the library for your own purposes.

Continue reading “Cheap LCD Uses USB Serial” →

Hackaday Links: September 10, 2023

September 10, 2023 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Most of us probably have a vision of how “The Robots” will eventually rise up and deal humanity out of the game. We’ve all seen that movie, of course, and know exactly what will happen when SkyNet becomes self-aware. But for those of you thinking we’ll get off relatively easy with a quick nuclear armageddon, we’re sorry to bear the news that AI seems to have other plans for us, at least if this report of dodgy AI-generated mushroom foraging manuals is any indication. It seems that Amazon is filled with publications these days that do a pretty good job of looking like they’re written by human subject matter experts, but are actually written by ChatGPT or similar tools. That may not be such a big deal when the subject matter concerns stamp collecting or needlepoint, but when it concerns differentiating edible fungi from toxic ones, that’s a different matter. The classic example is the Death Cap mushroom (Amanita phalloides) which varies quite a bit in identifying characteristics like color and size, enough so that it’s often tough for expert mycologists to tell it apart from its edible cousins. Trouble is, when half a Death Cap contains enough toxin to kill an adult human, the margin for error is much narrower than what AI is likely to include in a foraging manual. So maybe that’s AI’s grand plan for humanity — just give us all really bad advice and let Darwin take care of the rest.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: September 10, 2023” →

Agreeing By Disagreeing

September 9, 2023 by Elliot Williams 35 Comments

While we were working on the podcast this week, Al Williams and I got into a debate about the utility of logic analyzers. (It’s Hackaday, after all.) He said they’re almost useless these days, and I maintained that they’re more useful than ever. When we got down to it, however, we were actually completely in agreement – it turns out that when we said “logic analyzer” we each had different machines, and use cases, in mind.

Al has a serious engineering background and a long career in his pocket. When he says “logic analyzer”, he’s thinking of a beast with a million probes that you could hook up to each and every data and address line in what would now be called a “retrocomputer”, giving you this god-like perspective on the entire system state. (Sounds yummy!) But now that modern CPUs have 64-bits, everything’s high-speed serial, and they’re all deeply integrated on the same chip anyway, such a monster machine is nearly useless.

Meanwhile, I’m a self-taught hacker type. When I say “logic analyzer”, I’m thinking maybe 8 or 16 signals, and I’m thinking of debugging the communications between a microcontroller, an IMU, or maybe a QSPI flash chip. Heck, sometimes I’ll even break out a couple pins on the micro for state. And with the proliferation of easy and cheap modules, plus the need to debug and reverse commodity electronics, these logic analyzers have never been more useful.

So in the end, it was a simple misunderstanding – a result of our different backgrounds. His logic analyzers were extinct or out of my price range, and totally off my radar. And he thinks of my logic analyzer as a “simple serial analyzer”. (Ouch! But since when are 8 signals “serial”?)

And in the end, we both absolutely agreed on the fact that great open-source software has made the modern logic analyzers as useful as they are, and the lack thereof is also partially responsible for the demise of the old beasts. Well, that and he needs a lab cart then to carry around what I can slip in my pocket today. Take that!