Playing Jedi Mind-Tricks On Your TV

May 3, 2018 by James Hobson 4 Comments

Gesture-enabled controls mean you get to live out your fantasy of wielding force powers. It does, however, take a bit of hacking to make that possible. Directly from the team at [circuito.io] comes a hand gesture controller for Jedi mind-trick manipulation of your devices!

The star of the show here is the APDS-9960 RGB and gesture sensor, with an Arduino Pro Mini 328 doing the thinking and an IR transmitter LED putting that to good use. The Arduino Sketch is a chimera of two code examples for IR LEDs and the gesture sensor — courtesy of the always estimable Ken Shirriff, and SparkFun respectively.

Of course, you can have the output trigger different devices, but since this particular build is meant to control a TV the team had to use a separate Arduino and IR receiver to discover the codes for the commands they wanted to use. Once they were added to the Sketch, moving your hand above the sensor in X, Y or Z-axes executes the command. Voila! — Jedi powers.

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Fix Your Insecure Amazon Fire TV Stick

April 18, 2018 by Tom Nardi 48 Comments

I recently spent a largely sleepless night at a hotel, and out of equal parts curiosity and boredom, decided to kill some time scanning the guest network to see what my fellow travelers might be up to. As you’d probably expect, I saw a veritable sea of Samsung and Apple devices. But buried among the seemingly endless number of smartphones charging next to their sleeping owners, I found something rather interesting. I was as picking up a number of Amazon-made devices, all of which had port 5555 open.

As a habitual Android tinkerer, this struck me as very odd. Port 5555 is used for Android Debug Bridge (ADB), a development tool used to control and perform various administrative tasks on an Android device over the network or (more commonly) locally over USB. The number of users who would have legitimately needed to enable network ADB on their devices is surely rather low, so to see a half dozen of them on the network at the same time seemed improbable to say the least.

Why would so many devices manufactured by Amazon all have network ADB enabled? I realized there must be a connection, and it didn’t take long to figure it out.

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Gramazon Gives Your Echo Dot A 1920’s Makeover

March 11, 2018 by Tom Nardi 23 Comments

Unless you’re particularly fond of hockey pucks, you probably aren’t really keen on the aesthetics of ~~the NSA’s~~ Amazon’s diminutive listening device, the Echo Dot. It’s not exactly ugly, but if anyone at Amazon spent more than ten minutes considering the visual design of the thing when it was being developed, we’d be shocked.

Luckily for us, there are hackers and makers who not only have the artistic chops to come up with visually appealing designs, but are kind enough to share them with those of us who are a few crayons short of a full box in that department. Such is the case with the jaw-dropping Gramazon by [Bård Fleistad], a 3D printed acoustic amplifier for the Echo Dot that converts the ho-hum looking device into a classic 1920’s style “horn” speaker.

[Bård] has wanted a horn speaker for awhile, but the prices on a real one in decent condition are getting pretty high. If he couldn’t have the real deal he figured the next best thing would be to 3D print his own version, but he’d still need electronics to put into it. Since the Echo is readily available and works as a Bluetooth speaker (not to mention plays audio from various online sources), it made sense to use it as the heart of his faux-horn.

The design he came up with is very slick, but the finish work on the printed parts is really what puts this project over the edge. [Bård] used Bondo and multiple primer coats to smooth the outside of the horn, and XTC-3D for the hard-to-reach internal curves. Plus sanding. Lots, and lots, of sanding.

If you’re looking for more information on putting high quality finishes on your 3D printed parts like this, check out our Visual 3D Print Finishing Guide. Or if you’d rather just find a swanky home for your always-listening hockey puck, we’ve got plenty of inspiration for you there as well.

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Only Mechanical Relays Will Do For Automated Hi-Fi Audio Source Switching

March 10, 2018 by Jenny List 54 Comments

If you are a devotee of audiophile-quality analogue hi-fi, switching between sources simply can not be done through a solid-state device. Only physical switches will do because they come without the risk of extra noise or distortion that their silicon equivalents might bring.

That is the philosophy that lies behind [Skrodahl]’s relay-based audio switching board, which boasts 5 high-quality relays each handling a stereo input, with their control passed either to a rotary switch or to an ESP32 module. The ground connections on audio and switching sides are isolated from each other to avoid transient noise finding its way to the speakers.

You might think that an audio switching board is a very simple device indeed and thus not worthy of Hackaday’s attention, but it’s surprisingly easy to make a mess of a module like this one and they have put in some effort to avoid the pitfalls. The metal-can version of the switching transistors seems a little overkill, but fancy audio is a funny business.

If the ESP isn’t your bag, we’ve brought you another relay based audio switcher in the past that used an Atmel chip.

Dungeons And Dragons TV Tabletop!

February 20, 2018 by James Hobson 26 Comments

With little more than pen, paper, dice, and imagination, a group of friends can transport themselves to another plane for shenanigans involving dungeons and/or dragons. An avid fan of D&D and a budding woodworker, Imgurian [CapnJackHarkness] decided to build gaming table with an inlaid TV for their inaugural project.

The tabletop is a 4’x4′ sheet of plywood, reinforced from underneath and cut out to accommodate a support box for the TV. Each leg ended up being four pieces of 1’x4′ wood, laminated together with a channel cut into one for the table’s power cable. An outer ledge has dice trays — if they’re even needed in today’s world — ready for all those nat 20s, cupholders because nobody likes crying over spilled drinks, and electrical outlets to keep devices charged. Foam squares cover the tabletop which can be easily removed and washed if needed — but more on that in a second. [CapnJackHarkness] painted the table as the wood rebuffed many attempts at staining, but they’re happy with how it turned out.

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ESP-01 Bridges The Gap Between IR And WiFi

February 20, 2018 by Tom Nardi 29 Comments

[Emilio Ficara] dropped us a line recently about his efforts to drag his television and receiver kicking and screaming into the modern era. His TV is old enough that it needs an external tuner, which means it requires two separate remotes to properly channel surf. He wanted to simplify the situation, and figured that while he was at it he might as well make the whole thing controllable over WiFi.

To begin the project, [Emilio] had to capture the IR signals from the two remotes he wanted to emulate. He put together a quick little IR receiver out of parts he had in the junk bin which would connect up to his computer’s microphone port. He then used an open source IR protocol analyzer to capture the codes and decode them into hex values.

As a proof of concept he came up with a little device that combines an ESP-01 with an ATmega88. The ESP-01 runs a minimal web server that receives hex codes as URL query strings. These hex codes are then interpreted by the ATmega88 and sent out over the IR LED. [Emilio] notes that driving the IR LED directly off of the ATmega pin results in fairly low range of around one meter, but that’s good enough for his purposes. If you want to drive the IR LED with more power, you’ll need to add a transistor to do the switching.

Passing the hex code 0x0408 to turn off the TV

Now that he can decode the signals from his original remotes and transmit them over WiFi via his bridge device, he has all the groundwork he needs to come up with a streamlined home entertainment controller. A native application for his smartphone or perhaps a minimal web interface is the last piece of the puzzle.

This project reminds us of a similar attempt at controlling legacy IR devices from a smartphone via Bluetooth. If you’re looking for more information about wrangling IR signals from your microcontroller, this primer from 2013 is still a great look at the subject.

Your Audio Will Be Back, Right After This Commercial Break

February 13, 2018 by James Hobson 37 Comments

[LittleTern] — annoyed by repetitive advertisements — wanted the ability to mute their Satellite Box for the duration of every commercial break. Attempts to crack their Satellite Box’s IR protocol went nowhere, so they thought — why not simply mute the TV?

Briefly toying with the idea of a separate remote for the function, [LittleTern] discarded that option as quickly as one tends to lose an additional remote. Instead, they’re using the spare RGYB buttons on their Sony Bravia remote — cutting down on total remotes while still controlling the IR muting system. Each of the four coloured buttons normally don’t do much, so they’re set do different mute length timers — customized for the channel or time of day. The system that sends the code to the TV is an Arduino Pro Mini controlling an IR LED and receiver, with a status LED set to glow according to which button was pressed.

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