Track Everything, Everywhere With An IoT Barcode Scanner

August 15, 2018 by Sean Boyce 33 Comments

I’ve always considered barcodes to be one of those invisible innovations that profoundly changed the world. What we might recognize as modern barcodes were originally designed as a labor-saving device in the rail and retail industries, but were quickly adopted by factories for automation, hospitals to help prevent medication errors, and a wide variety of other industries to track the movements of goods.

Medication errors in hospitals are serious and scary: enter the humble barcode to save lives. Source: The State and Trends of Barcode, RFID, Biometric and Pharmacy Automation Technologies in US Hospitals

The technology is accessible, since all you really need is a printer to make barcodes. If you’re already printing packaging for a product, it only costs you ink, or perhaps a small sticker. Barcodes are so ubiquitous that we’ve ceased noticing them; as an experiment I took a moment to count all of them on my (cluttered) desk – I found 43 and probably didn’t find them all.

Despite that, I’ve only used them in exactly one project: a consultant and friend of mine asked me to build a reference database out of his fairly extensive library. I had a tablet with a camera in 2011, and used it to scan the ISBN barcodes to a list. That list was used to get the information needed to automatically enter the reference to a simple database, all I had to do was quickly verify that it was correct.

While this saved me a lot of time, I learned that using tablet or smartphone cameras to scan barcodes was actually very cumbersome when you have a lot of them to process. And so I looked into what it takes to hack together a robust barcode system without breaking the bank.

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Friday Hack Chat: LED Diffusion

August 15, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

A decade ago, the first Arduino projects featuring addressable RGB LEDs came on the scene, and the world hasn’t been the same since. Now we have full wall video displays with WS2812s and APA102s, wearable blinky, and entire suits of armor made of LEDs. The future is bright, and in RGB.

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about how to maintain the blinky without eye-searing brightness. It’s the LED Diffusion Hack Chat, full of tips and tricks on how to get the glowey without it being imprinted on your retina.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat is the incredible Becky Stern. Becky is one of the most prolific makers around and has a long history of fabricating some really, really cool stuff. She’s published hundreds of tutorials on everything from microcontrollers to computerized knitting machines, and has been featured by dozens of media outlets including the BBC, CNN, The Late Show with Colbert, VICE, and Forbes. Right now, she’s working at Autodesk with Instructables.

During this Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about diffusing LEDs, with topics including:

Taking some sandpaper to LEDs
Light pipes
3D printed LED enclosures
Looking into a bright blue LED with your remaining eye

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Hack Chat Event Page and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week is just like any other, and we’ll be gathering ’round our video terminals at noon, Pacific, on Friday, August 17th. Need a countdown timer? Here ‘ya go.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io.

You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

All The Badges Of DEF CON 26 (vol 1)

August 14, 2018 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Two or three years back you would see a handful of really interesting unofficial badges at DEF CON. Now, there’s a deluge of clever, beautiful, and well executed badges. Last weekend I tried to see every badge and meet every badge maker. Normally, I would publish one megapost to show off everything I had seen, but this year I’m splitting it into volumes. Join me after the break for the first upload of the incredible badges of DC26!

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Behind The Pin: Logic Level Outputs

August 14, 2018 by Jenny List 20 Comments

There is one thing that unites almost every computer and logic circuit commonly used in the hardware hacking and experimentation arena. No matter what its age, speed, or internal configuration, electronics speak to the world through logic level I/O. A single conductor which is switched between voltage levels to denote a logic 1 or logic zero. This is an interface standard that has survived the decades from the earliest integrated circuit logic output of the 1960s to the latest microcontroller GPIO in 2018.

The effect of this tried and true arrangement is that we can take a 7400 series I/O port on an 8-bit microcomputer from the 1970s and know with absolute confidence that it will interface without too much drama to a modern single-board computer GPIO. When you think about it, this is rather amazing.

It’s tempting to think then that all logic level outputs are the same, right? And of course they are from a certain viewpoint. Sure, you may need to account for level shifting between for example 5V and 3.3V families but otherwise just plug, and go, right? Of course, the real answer isn’t quite that simple. There are subtle electrical differences between the properties of I/O lines of different logic and microcontroller families. In most cases these will never be a problem at all, but can rear their heads as edge cases which the would-be experimenter needs to know something about.

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Dawn Of The First Digital Camera

August 13, 2018 by Al Williams 71 Comments

Technology vanishes. It either succeeds and becomes ubiquitous or fails. For example, there was a time when networking and multimedia were computer buzzwords. Now they are just how computers work. On the other hand, when was the last time you thought about using a CueCat barcode reader to scan an advertisement? Then there are the things that have their time and vanish, like pagers. It is hard to decide which category digital cameras fall into. They are being absorbed into our phones and disappearing as a separate category for most consumers. But have you ever wondered about the first digital camera? The story isn’t what you would probably guess.

The first digital camera I ever had was a Sony that took a floppy disk. Surely that was the first, right? Turns out, no. There were some very early attempts that didn’t really have the technology to make them work. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was using analog electronic imaging as early as 1961 (they had been developing film on the moon but certainly need a better way). A TI engineer even patented the basic outline of an electronic camera in 1972, but it wasn’t strictly digital. None of these bore any practical fruit, especially relative to digital technology. It would take Eastman Kodak to create a portable digital camera, even though they were not the first to commercialize the technology.

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Hackaday Links: August 12, 2018

August 12, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

Falling into the marvelous space between, ‘I really want to do that’ and ‘but that’s a lot of work and I’m lazy’ comes this reproduction of the motherboard from the original IBM 5150. This is a complete reproduction of the first PC, being sold as a kit. Yes, chips are included, although I highly doubt they’ve gone through the trouble of finding chips with contemporaneous date codes. We’re dying for a writeup on this one.

Someone has found the source code for the first Furby. [Mark Boldyrev] was talking with a few fellows on the MAME forum to see if anyone had the source for the Furby. He was looking into contacting the USPTO for the original source but the red tape involed was a bit too intense. Luckily, that research turned up some info from [Sean Riddle] who somehow already found the original source listing. After [Mark] got in contact, [Sean] posted it as a PDF. Yes, it’s 6502 source, although the microcontroller is technically a SPC81A, with the rest of the hardware consisting of TI50C04 speech chip. (you would not believe how many toys are still shipping with a 6502-ish core somewhere inside). The files are up in the archive, and we’re probably going to have a Furby MAME sometime soon.

The Bitfi hardware wallet is a cryptocurrency storage device being bandied about by [John McAffee], and there’s a quarter million dollar bug bounty on it. It’s ‘unhackable’, and ‘it has no memory’. I’m serious, those are direct quotes from [McAffee]. Both of those claims are nonsense and now it can play Doom.

Oh noes, a new hardware backdoor in x86 CPUs! [xoreaxeaxeax] has published a demo that allows userland code to read and write kernel data (that’s very bad). The exploit comes in the form of the ‘rosenbridge backdoor’, a small embedded processor tightly coupled to the CPU that is similar to, but entirely different from, Intel’s ME. This processor has access to all the CPU’s memory, registers, and pipeline. The good news, and why this isn’t big news, is that this exploit only affects Via C3 CPUs. Yes, the other company besides Intel and AMD that makes x86 CPUs. These are commonly found in industrial equipment and ATMs.

Car Hacking At DEF CON 26

August 11, 2018 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

A great place to get your feet wet with the data-network-wonderland that is modern-day automobiles is the Car Hacking Village at DEF CON. I stopped by on Saturday afternoon to see what it was all about and the place was packed. From Ducati motorcycles to junkyard instrument clusters, and from mobility scooters to autonomous RC test tracks, this feels like one of the most interactive villages in the whole con.

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