WiFi Hacking Mr. Coffee

September 29, 2020 by Adam Zeloof 42 Comments

You wake up on a Sunday, roll out of bed, and make your way to the centerpiece of your morning, the magical device that helps you start your day: the coffee machine. You open the companion app, because everything has an app in 2020, and select a large latte with extra froth. As you switch open a browser to check Hackaday, the machine beeps. Then the built-in grinder cranks up to 100, the milk frother begins to whir, and the machine starts spraying water. Frantic, you look at the display for an error code and instead see a message instructing you to send $75 to a bitcoin wallet, lest your $300 machine become a doorstop.

Outlandish though it may seem, this has become quite a real possibility, as [Martin Hron] at the Avast Threat Labs demonstrates. In fact, he could probably make your modern macchiato machine do this without setting foot in your house (so long as it comes with a built-in ESP8266, like his did).

Building on others’ work that identified the simple commands that control the machine over it’s WiFi connection (nothing says “brew me a nice cup o’ joe” like 0x37), [Martin] reverse-engineered the Smarter Coffee companion app to extract and reverse engineer its firmware. He was actually able to find the entire firmware image packaged within the app- relatively uncommon in the world of Over-The-Air (OTA) updates, but convenient in this case. Using Interactive Disassembler (IDA) to sift through the firmware’s inner workings, he identified the functions that handle all basic operations, including displaying images on the screen, controlling the heating elements, and of course, beeping. From there, he modified the stock firmware image to include some malicious commands and ran an OTA update.

The mind-boggling part here is that not only was the firmware transmitted as unencrypted plaintext over unsecured WiFi, but the machine didn’t even require a user to confirm the update with a button press. With one quick reboot, the trap was set. The machine operated normally, while waiting for “Order 66,” causing it to turn all the heating elements on, spool up the built-in grinder, and beep. Constantly.

While a broken coffee machine seems relatively innocuous, there are some pretty significant lapses in hardware/firmware security here that, while avoidable, almost seem unnecessary in the first place. It makes us wonder- why does Mr. Coffee need a smartphone in the first place?

Continue reading “WiFi Hacking Mr. Coffee” →

DIY Grout Cleaning Machine Does A Good Job

September 24, 2020 by Lewin Day 26 Comments

Cleaning tiled floors can be a drag. Getting the tiles themselves clean is bad enough, but often dealing with the grouted joints in between requires more elbow grease and attention to detail. It’s a tedious chore, and thus one ripe for improvement. [Elite Worm]’s cleaning machine is an excellent solution to the problem.

The machine is built entirely from scratch, using primarily 3D printed components. A fluid tank is fitted to the chassis, along with a custom 3D-printed pump run by a DC motor, to deliver cleaning product where its needed. A large DC motor is then used to spin a nylon brush which gets deep in the tile grooves to clean out the grime. The chassis is then fitted with rollers to allow it to glide along the floor. Finally, a handle is fitted which allows the user to push the tool along, with switches to turn on the spinning brush and dispense cleaning fluid.

It’s a great tool, and one which eliminates hours of scrubbing on hands and knees. We’re sure the time investment in the build will pay off before long. We’ve seen other tricky cleaning hacks before, too. Video after the break.

Continue reading “DIY Grout Cleaning Machine Does A Good Job” →

Into The Belly Of The Beast With Placemon

September 17, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 11 Comments

No, no, at first we thought it was a Pokemon too, but Placemon monitors your place, your home, your domicile. Instead of a purpose-built device, like a CO detector or a burglar alarm, this is a generalized monitor that streams data to a central processor where machine learning algorithms notify you if something is awry. In a way, it is like a guard dog who texts you if your place is unusually cold, on fire, unlawfully occupied, or underwater.

[anfractuosity] is trying to make a hacker-friendly version based on inspiration from a scientific paper about general-purpose sensing, which will have less expensive components but will lose accuracy. For example, the article suggests thermopile arrays, like low-resolution heat-vision, but Placemon will have a thermometer, which seems like a prudent starting place.

The PCB is ready to start collecting sound, temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, illumination, and passive IR then report that telemetry via an onboard ESP32 using Wifi. A box utilizing Tensorflow receives the data from any number of locations and is training to recognize a few everyday household events’ sensor signatures. Training starts with events that are easy to repeat, like kitchen sounds and appliance operations. From there, [anfractuosity] hopes that he will be versed enough to teach it new sounds, so if a pet gets added to the mix, it doesn’t assume there is an avalanche every time Fluffy needs to go to the bathroom.

We have another outstanding example of sensing household events without directly interfacing with an appliance, and bringing a sensor suite to your car might be up your alley.

Garbage Can Takes Itself Out

September 10, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

Home automation is a fine goal but typically remains confined to lights, blinds, and other things that are relatively stationary and/or electrical in nature. There is a challenge there to be certain, but to really step up your home automation game you’ll need to think outside the box. This automated garbage can that can take itself out, for example, has all the home automation street cred you’d ever need.

The garbage can moves itself by means of a scooter wheel which has a hub motor inside and is powered by a lithium battery, but the real genius of this project is the electronics controlling everything. A Raspberry Pi Zero W is at the center of the build which controls the motor via a driver board and also receives instructions on when to wheel the garbage can out to the curb from an Nvidia Jetson board. That board is needed because the creator, [Ahad Cove], didn’t want to be bothered to tell his garbage can to take itself out or even schedule it. He instead used machine learning to detect when the garbage truck was headed down the street and instruct the garbage can to roll itself out then.

The only other thing to tie this build together was to get the garage door to open automatically for the garbage can. Luckily, [Ahad]’s garage door opener was already equipped with WiFi and had an available app, unbeknownst to him, which made this a surprisingly easy part of the build. If you have a more rudimentary garage door opener, though, there are plenty of options available to get it on the internets.

Continue reading “Garbage Can Takes Itself Out” →

This 3D Printed “Bladeless” Fan Gets It Done Cheap

September 1, 2020 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

Not long after Dyson unveiled their “bladeless” fan, a fairly steady stream of ever cheaper clones have been hitting the market. But this 3D printed version created by [Elite Worm] must surely be one of the most budget-friendly takes on the concept. If you’ve got a 3D printer, we’d wager you’ve already got most of the parts required to build your own.

To be clear, of course there’s a blade. They aren’t magic, obviously. The fan is just small, and hidden inside the base. Air is pulled from the sides and bottom, and into the ring mounted to the top of the unit. When the air eventually exits the thin slit in the ring, it “sticks” to the sides due to the Coandă effect and produces a low pressure zone in the center. That’s all a fancy way of saying that the air flow you get from one of these gadgets is several times greater than what the little dinky fan would be capable of under normal circumstances. That’s the theory, anyway.

We can’t promise that all the physics are working as they should in this 3D printed version, but in the video after the break it certainly appears to be moving a considerable amount of air. It’s also quite loud, but that’s to be expected given it’s using a brushless hobby motor. To get it spinning, [Elite Worm] is using a Digispark ATtiny85 connected to a standard RC electronic speed control (ESC). The MCU reads a potentiometer mounted to the side of the fan and converts that to a PWM signal required by the ESC.

Beyond the electronics, essentially every piece of this project has been printed on a standard desktop 3D printer. An impressive accomplishment, though we probably would have gone with a commercially available propeller for safety’s sake. On the other hand, the base of the fan should nicely contain the shrapnel created should it explode at several thousand RPM. Probably.

Continue reading “This 3D Printed “Bladeless” Fan Gets It Done Cheap” →

Two-Part, Four-Wire Air Quality Meter Shows How It’s Done

August 25, 2020 by Donald Papp 34 Comments

The Bosch BME680 is a super-capable environmental sensor, and [Random Nerd Tutorials] has married it to the ESP32 to create an air quality meter that serves as a great tutorial on not just getting the sensor up and running, but also in setting up a simple (and optional) web server to deliver the readings. It’s a great project that steps through everything from beginning to end, including how to install the necessary libraries and how to program the ESP32, so it’s the perfect weekend project for anyone who wants to learn.

The BME680 is a small part that communicates over SPI or I2C and combines gas, pressure, temperature, and humidity sensors. The gas sensor part detects a wide range of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and contaminants, including carbon monoxide, which makes it a useful indoor air quality sensor. It provides only a relative measurement (lower resistance corresponds to lower air quality) so for best results it should be calibrated against a known source.

The tutorial uses the Arduino IDE with an add-on to support the ESP32, and libraries from Adafruit. Unfamiliar with such things? The tutorial walks through the installation of both. There’s a good explanation of the source code, and guidance on entering setup values (such as local air pressure, a function of sea level) for best results.

Once the software is on the ESP32, the results can be read from the serial port monitor. By going one step further, the ESP32 can run a small web server (using ESPAsyncWebServer) to serve the data to any device wirelessly. It’s a well-written tutorial that covers every element well, and complements this other BME680-based air quality meter that uses MQTT and Raspberry Pi.

Cool Off With A Piezo And A Glass Of Water

August 21, 2020 by Kristina Panos 21 Comments

Some cool-mist humidifiers work by flinging water at a vaporizer, but our favorite kind uses a piezoelectric transducer. These work by using high-frequency sound waves to pound the surface of the water with mechanical energy. That energy introduces standing waves that force the water to break apart into a fine mist on the surface of the piezo disk.

The driving circuit for this DIY mist maker uses a 555 to generate 113 KHz, a trimmer potentiometer to fine-tune it, and a MOSFET to amplify the signal. You don’t need much more than that and a handful of passives to recreate this cool junk box experiment, but the spec of the piezo disk is quite important. The circuit is designed for atomizing transducers, which have a resonant frequency of 113 KHz — much higher than your average junk box piezo. Check out the demo and build video after the break.

Atomizing transducers can do way more than than moisten the air for our comfort. They’re not picky about where the water comes from, so if you have enough of them, you can dry a load of laundry in a few minutes.

Continue reading “Cool Off With A Piezo And A Glass Of Water” →