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Hackaday Links: Supercon Sunday

November 12, 2017 by 11 Comments

This is not your normal Sunday links post. This is Superconference Sunday, and right now there are dozens of awesome projects floating around our conference in Pasadena. This links post will be mostly the projects from Supercon, but before that there’s some stuff we need to clear out of the queue:

Concerning other conferences, the Sparklecon site is up. Why go to Sparklecon? It’s a blast.

Tindie is worldwide! There were a bunch of Tindie sellers at the Maker Faire Adelaide this weekend. YouTuber MickMake is a friend of Tindie and we’re teaming up to give away a few prizes from Australian Tindie sellers. You can check out the full details here.

There’s an Internet of Things thing from 4D Systems. It’s an ESP8266 and a nice small display.

Well, crap. It might have finally happened. [Maxim Goryachy] and [Mark Ermolov] have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME via USB DCI. What the hell does that mean? It means you can plug something into the USB port of a computer, and run code on the Intel Management Engine (for certain Intel processors, caveats apply, but still…). This is doom. The Intel ME runs below the operating system and has access to everything in your computer. If this is real — right now we only have a screenshot — computer security is screwed, but as far as anyone can tell, me_cleaner fixes the problem. Also, Intel annoyed [Andy Tanenbaum].

With that out of the way, here’s some stuff from this weekend’s Supercon:

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: Supercon Sunday” →

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Hackaday Links: Remember, Remember

November 5, 2017 by 16 Comments

Buckle up, buttercup because this is the last weekly Hackaday Links post you’re getting for two weeks. Why? We have a thing next weekend. The Hackaday Superconference is November 11th and 12th (and also the 10th, because there’s a pre-game party), and it’s going to be the best hardware con you’ve ever seen. Don’t have a ticket? Too bad! But we’ll have something for our Internet denizens too.

So, you’re not going to the Hackaday Supercon but you’d like to hang out with like-minded people? GOOD NEWS! Barnes & Noble is having their third annual Mini Maker Faire on November 11th and 12th. Which Barnes & Noble? A lot of them. Our reports tell us this tends to be geared more towards the younger kids, but there are some cool people doing demonstrations. Worst case scenario? You can pick up a copy of 2600.

PoC || GTFO 0x16 is out! Pastor Laphroaig Races The Runtime Relinker And Other True Tales Of Cleverness And Craft! This PDF is a Shell Script That Runs a Python Webserver That Serves a Scala-Based JavaScript Compiler With an HTML5 Hex Viewer; or, Reverse Engineer Your Own Damn Polyglot.

In, ‘Oh, wow, this is going to be stupid’ news, I received an interesting product announcement this week. It’s a USB C power bank with an integrated hand warmer. Just think: you can recharge your phone on the go, warm your hands in the dead of winter, and hope your random battery pack from China doesn’t explode in your pocket. I’m not linking to this because it’s that dumb.

You can now cross-compile ARM with GCC in Visual Studio.

The iPhone X is out, and that means two things. There are far too many YouTube videos of people waiting in line for a phone (and not the good kind), and iFixit did a teardown. This thing is glorious. There are two batteries and a crazy double-milled PCB stack with strange and weird mezzanine connectors. The main board for the iPhone X is completely unrepairable, but it’s a work of engineering art. No word yet on reusing the mini-Kinect in the iPhone X.

Speaking of irreparable computers, the Commodore 64 is not. [Drygol] recently came across a C64 that was apparently the engine controller for a monster truck found on the bottom of the ocean. This thing was trashed, filled with rust and corrosion, and the power button just fell off. Prior to cleaning, [Drygol] soldered a new power button, bowered it up, and it worked. The crappiest C64 was repairable. A bit of cleaning, painting the case, and the installation of an SD2IEC brought this computer back to life, ready for another thirty years of retrogaming and BASIC.

The Zynq from Xilinx is one of the most interesting parts in recent memory. It’s a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 combined with an FPGA with a little more than a million reconfigurable gates. It’s been turned into a synth, a quadcopter, all of British radio, and it’s a Pynq dev board. Now there’s a new part in the Zynq family, an RFSoC that combines the general ARM/FPGA format with some RF wizardry. It’s designed for 5G wireless and radar (!), and one of those parts we can’t wait to see in use.

Do you keep blowing stuff up when attaching a USB to UART adapter to a board? Never fear, because here’s one with galvanic isolation. This is done with a neat digital isolator from Maxim

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Hackaday Links: ???? ???? Spooky Edition, 2017

October 29, 2017 by 23 Comments

A few links posts ago, we wrote something about a company selling huge LED panels on eBay, ten panels for $50. Those panels are gone now, but a few lucky hackers got their hands on some cool hardware. Now there’s a project to reverse engineer these Barco NX-4 LED panels. Who’s going to be the first to figure out how to drive these things? Doesn’t matter — it’s a group project and we’re all made richer by the contributions of others.

Prague is getting a new hackerspace.

A year and a half ago, a $79 3D printer popped up on Kickstarter. I said I would eat a hat if it shipped by next year. Seeing as how it’s basically November, and they’re not selling a $79 printer anymore — it’s $99 — this might go down as one of my rare defeats, with an asterisk, of course. I’m going to go source some very large fruit roll-ups and do this at Supercon. Thanks, [Larry].

Speaking of bets, this week Amazon introduced the most idiotic thing ever invented. It’s called Amazon Key. It’s an electronic lock (dumb), connected to the Internet (dumber), so you let strangers into your house to deliver packages (dumbest). CCC is in a few months, so I don’t know if Amazon Key will be hacked by then, but I’m pretty confident this will be broken by March.

The Lulzbot Taz is one of the best printers on the market, and it is exceptionally Open Source. The Taz is also a great printer for low-volume production. It was only a matter of time until someone built this. The Twoolhead is a parallel extruder for the Taz 6. Instead of one extruder and nozzle, it’s two, and instead of printing one object at a time, it prints two. Of course it limits the build volume of the printer, but if you need smaller parts faster, this is the way to go.

Hey, did you hear? Hackaday is having a conference the weekend after next. This year, we’re opening up the doors a day early and having a party at the Evil Overlord’s offices. Tickets are free for Supercon attendees, so register here.

At CES this year, we caught wind of one of the coolest advances in backyard astronomy in decades. The eVscope is ‘astrophotography in the eyepiece’, and it’s basically a CCD, a ton of magic image processing, and a small display, all mounted inside a telescope. Point the scope at a nebula, and instead of seeing a blurry smudge, you’ll see tendrils and filaments of interstellar gas in almost real-time. Now the eVscope is on Kickstarter. It’s a 4.5 inch almost-Newtonian (the eyepiece is decoupled from the light path, so I don’t even know how telescope nomenclature works in this case), an OLED display, and a 10-hour battery life.

Is the fidget spinner fad over? Oh, we hope not. A technology is only perfected after it has been made obsolete. Case in point? We can play phonographs with lasers. The internal combustion engine will be obsolete in automobiles in twenty years, but track times will continue going down for forty. Fidget spinners may be dead, but now you can program them with JavaScript. What a time to be alive!

Audio tomphoolery even an idiot tech blogger can see through! I received a press kit for a USB DAC this week that included the line, “…low drop out voltage regulators running at 3.3 V, meaning the 5 V USB limit is well preserved.” Yes, because you’re running your system at 3.3 V, you won’t draw too much current from a USB port. That’s how it works, right?

[Peter Sripol] is building an ultralight in his basement. The last few weeks of his YouTube channel have been the must-watch videos of the season. He’s glassed the wings, installed all the hardware (correctly), and now he has the motors and props mounted. This is an electric ultralight, so he’s using a pair of ‘150 cc’ motors from HobbyKing. No, that’s not displacement, it’s just a replacement for a 150 cc gas engine. On a few YouTube Live streams, [Peter] did what was effectively a high-speed taxi test that got out of hand. It flew. Doing that at night was probably not the best idea, but we’re looking forward to the videos of the flight tests.

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Hackaday Links: October 22, 2017

October 22, 2017 by 20 Comments

A few weeks ago, the popcorn overflowed because of an ambiguous tweet from Adafruit. Did Adafruit just buy Radio Shack? While everyone else was foaming at the mouth, we called it unlikely. The smart money is that Adafruit just bought a few fancy stock certificates, incorporation papers, and other official-looking documents at the Radio Shack corporate auction a few months ago. They also didn’t pick up that monster cache of Trash-80s, but I digress.

Here’s some more popcorn: Adafruit just applied for the ‘Radiofruit’ trademark. Is this Adafruit’s play to take over the Radio Shack brand? Probably not; they put a bunch of radio modules on Feather boards, and are just doing what they do. It does demonstrate Adafruit’s masterful manipulation effective use of social media, though.

Remember those 2D tilty maze rolling marble labyrinth game things? Here’s a 3D version on Kickstarter. It’s handheld, so this really needs a gimbal and associated twisty knobs.

In a video making the meme rounds, someone found an easter egg in the gauge cluster of a Russian GAZ van. It plays Tetris.

It’s Sunday, so it’s time to talk Star Trek. Here’s something interesting that hit my email: a press release telling me, “Trekkies Scramble To Get The First Toothbrush In Space As Seen On Star Trek Discovery”. This is the toothbrush, and here is the press kit. Dumb? Not at all. Star Trek has a long history of using off-the-shelf tools and devices for props. For example, the hyperspanners seen in Star Trek: Enterprise were actually this non-contact thermometer available from Harbor Freight. At least the hyperspanners and thermometers came out of the same injection mold.

There’s a new LimeSDR board on CrowdSupply. It extends any LimeSDR to 10 GHz.

Kerf bending is the application of (usually laser-cut) slots to bend plywood around corners. You’ve seen it a million times before, and done correctly the technique can produce some very interesting results. What about metal, though? You need a pretty big laser for that. [Proto G] is using a 2000 W fiber laser to experiment with kerf bending in stainless steel. It works as you would expect, and we eagerly await someone to replicate this, if only to see another 2000 Watt laser in action.

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Hackaday Links: October 15, 2017

October 15, 2017 by 32 Comments

For the last few months we’ve been running The Hackaday Prize, a challenge for you to build the best bit of hardware. Right now — I mean right now — you should be finishing up your project, crossing your t’s and dotting your lowercase j’s. The last challenge in the Prize ends tomorrow. After that, we’re going to pick 20 finalists for the Anything Goes challenge, then send the finalists off to our fantastic team of judges. Time to get to work! Make sure your project meets all the requirements!

It’s been a few weeks, so it’s time to start talking about Star Trek. I’m paying ten dollars a month to watch Star Trek: Discovery. I was going to pay that anyway, but I think this might actually be worth it. Highlights include Cardassian voles and Gorn skeletons. Also on the Star Trek front is The Orville, [Seth MacFarlane]’s TNG-inspired show. The Orville has far surpassed my expectations and is more Star Trek than Discovery. Leave your thoughts below.

It’s a new edition of Project Binky! Two blokes are spending years stuffing a 4WD Celica into a Mini. It’s the must-watch YouTube series of the decade.

AstroPrint now has an app. If you’re managing a 3D printer remotely and you’re not using Octoprint, you’re probably using AstroPrint. Now it’s in app format.

Have fifty bucks and want to blow it on something cool? A company is selling used LED display tiles on eBay. You get a case of ten for fifty bucks. Will you be able to drive them? Who knows and who cares? It’s fifty bucks for massive blinkies.

[Peter] is building an ultralight in his basement. For this YouTube update, he’s making the wings.

Oh it’s deer season, so here’s how you make deer jerky.

If you’re messing around with Z-Wave modules and Raspberry Pis, there’s a contest for you. The grand prize is an all-expense paid trip to CES2018 in Las Vegas. Why anyone would be enthusiastic about a trip to CES is beyond me, but the Excalibur arcade has Crazy Taxi, so that’s cool.

Go is the language all the cool kids are using. GoCV gives Go programmers access to OpenCV.

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Hackaday Links: October 8, 2017

October 8, 2017 by 40 Comments

On the top of the popcorn pile for this weekend is an ambiguous tweet from Adafruit that was offered without comment or commentary. [Lady Ada] is holding some sort of fancy incorporation papers for Radio Shack. The smart money is that Adafruit just bought these at the Radio Shack auction a month or so ago. The speculation is that Adafruit just bought Radio Shack, or at least the trademarks and other legal ephemera. Either one is cool, but holy crap please bring back the retro 80s branding.

A Rubik’s Cube is a fantastic mechanical puzzle, and if you’ve never taken one apart, oh boy are you in for a treat. Here’s an RGB LED Rubick’s Cube with not enough detail as to how each square is getting powered. Here’s an open challenge for anyone: build an RGB LED Rubick’s Cube, and Open Source the design.

Last weekend, the front fell off the engine of an Air France A380 flying over Greenland. As with all aircraft incidents, someone has to find the missing bits. It only took a week to find a mangled cowling on an ice sheet. This is incredibly impressive; if you want a comparison to another accident, it took three months to find the fan disk for UA 232 in an Iowa cornfield.

Poorly thought out Kickstarters don’t grab our attention like they used to, but this is an exception. The Aire is a mashup of one of those voice-activated home assistants (Alexa, whatever the Google one is named…) and a drone. The drone half of the build is marginally interesting as a ducted fan coaxial thingy, and building your own home assistant isn’t that hard with the right mics and a Raspberry Pi. The idea is actually solid — manufacturing is another story, though. It appears no one thought about how annoying it would be to have a helicopter following them around their house, or if the mics would actually be able to hear anyone over beating props. Here’s the kicker: this project was successfully funded. People want to buy this. A fool and his or her money…

Processing is cool, although we’re old skool and still reppin’ Max/MSP. It looks like the first annual Processing Community Day is coming up soon. The Processing Community Day will be at the MIT Media Lab on October 21st, with talks from the headliners of the Processing community.

Maker Faire NYC was two weekends ago, the TCT show in Birmingham was last week, and Open Hardware Summit was in Denver this weekend. Poor [Prusa] was at all of them, racking up the miles. He did, however, get to ride [James from XRobots.co.uk]’s electric longboard. There’s some great videos from [James] right here and here.

Speaking of Open Hardware Summit, there was a field trip to Sparkfun and Lulzbot this Friday. The highlight? The biggest botfarm in the states, and probably the second largest in the world. That’s 155 printers, all in their own enclosures, in a room that’s kept at 80° F. They’re printing ABS. Control of the printers is through a BeagleBone running Octoprint. These ‘Bones and Octoprint only control one printer each, and there is no software layer ‘above’ the Octoprint instances for managing multiple printers simultaneously. That probably means the software to manage a botfarm doesn’t exist. There have been attempts, though, but nothing in production. A glove thrown down?

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Hackaday Links: October 1, 2017

October 1, 2017 by 37 Comments

Remember when you first saw a USB port in a standard wall outlet? It was a really great idea at the time, but how’s that 500mA charge holding up now? Fresh from a random press release, here’s a USB 3.0 wall outlet, with USB A and C ports. 5A @ 5V. Future proof for at least several years, I guess.

This is what you call ‘pucker factor’. An Air France A380 traveling from CDG to LAX suffered an uncontained engine failure somewhere over Greenland. Everyone on board is fine, except for the fact they had to spend the night in Goose Bay, Canada. Want the best Twitter/YouTube account of being a passenger? Here you go. Want to know why it landed in Goose Bay? This video is about ETOPS which really doesn’t apply in this instance but it’s a sufficient introduction to diverting airplanes after engine failures.

There are mysterious pylons going up alongside bridges and tunnels in NYC (auto-playing video). No one knows what they are, and the transportation board for New York is hiding behind a cloud of secrecy. We do know there are ‘fiber optics necessary for Homeland Security items’ inside, so place your bets. It’s facial recognition, or at the very least license plate readers. You know, exactly what New York and dozens of other cities have been doing for years.

Did somebody lose a balloon? A Raspberry Pi high-altitude balloon was found on the beach in south-west Denmark.

[Peter] is building an ultralight in his basement. We’ve covered the first part of the build, and we’ve been keeping tabs on him with semi-weekly updates. Now he’s fiberglassed the fuselage and started construction of the wings. Updates of note this week: he’s found a shop with an 8-foot CNC hot wire cutter for the wings. That really cuts down on the build time and it’s actually pretty cheap. One interesting part of this build is a ‘landing gear ejection system’, or a spring thing that allows the landing gear to fall away with the tug of a wire. Why would anyone want a landing gear ejection system? In case he needs to land in a soybean field. A flat bottom means a smoother and more survivable landing. If anyone is still concerned about [Peter]’s safety, this is a put up or shut up situation. Pitch in ten bucks for a parachute if you’re so concerned.

Hoverbike Kalashnikov! What? It’s a guy’s name. No big deal.

Open Hardware Summit is this week in Denver. What will be the highlights of the event? Well, last year, OSHWA announced the creation of an Open Hardware license. This is an all-encompassing license for Open Source Hardware that’s trying to solve some very, very hard problems. Copyright doesn’t work with hardware (except for boat hulls) like it does with software, and this Open Hardware license is the best we’ve got going for us. We’re going to get an update on how well this license is propagating. Also on deck for Summit attendees is a field trip to Sparkfun and Lulzbot. Want to see the world’s second largest 3D printer bot farm? It’ll be awesome.