[Sprite_TM] Puts Linux In A Clock Radio

[Sprite] needs an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, and although his phone has an infinitely programmable alarm clock, his ancient Phillips AJ-3040 has never failed him. It’s served him well for 15 years, and there’s no reason to throw it out. Upgrading it was the only way, with OLED displays and Linux systems inside this cheap box of consumer electronics.

After opening up the radio, [Sprite] found two boards. The first was the radio PCB, and the existing board could be slightly modified with a switch to input another audio source. The clock PCB was built around an old chip that used mains frequency as the time base. This was torn out of the enclosure along with the old multiplexed LCD.

A new display and brain for the clock was needed, and [Sprite] reached into his parts drawer and pulled out an old 288×48 pixel OLED display. When shining though a bit of translucent red plastic, it’s can be a reasonable facsimile of the old LEDs. The brains of the clock would be a Carambola Linux module. After writing a kernel module for the OLED, [Sprite] had a fully functional Linux computer that would fit inside a clock radio.

After having a board fabbed with the power supplies, I2C expanders, USB stereo DAC, and SPI port for the OLED, [Sprite] had a clock radio that booted Linux on an OLED screen. In the video below, [Sprite] walks through the functions of the clock, including setting one of the many alarms, streaming audio from the Internet, and changing the font of the display. There’s also a web UI for the clock that allows alarms to be set remotely – from a phone, even, if [Sprite] is so inclined.

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The CryptoCape For BeagleBone

[Josh Datko] was wandering around HOPE X showing off some of his wares and was kind enough to show off his CryptoCape to us. It’s an add on board for the BeagleBone that breaks out some common crypto hardware to an easily interfaced package.

On board the CryptoCape is an Atmel Trusted Platform Module, an elliptic curve chip, a SHA-256 authenticator, an encrypted EEPROM, a real time clock, and an ATMega328p for interfacing to other components and modules on the huge prototyping area on the cape.

[Josh] built the CryptoCape in cooperation with Sparkfun, so if you’re not encumbered with a bunch of export restrictions, you can pick one up there. Pic of the board below.

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Apple ][ Graphics As Your Screensaver Or Second Screen

apple2-xscreensaver-weather-demo

Hipsters rejoice, you can actually make those high-tech IPS panels look like crap. Really nostalgic crap. [Kaveen Rodrigo] wrote in to show how he displays weather data as his Apple ][ emulated screensaver.

2014-07-08-234300_1366x768_scrotHe’s building on the Apple2 package that is part of the xscreensaver available on Linux systems. The program has an option flag that allows you to run another program inside of it. This can be just about anything including using it as your terminal emulator. [Adrian] recently sent us the screenshot shown here for our retro edition. He is running bash and loaded up freenet just to enjoy what it used to be like in the good old days.

In this case, [Kaveen] is using Python to pull in, parse, and print out a Yahoo weather json packet. Since it’s just a program that is called when the screensaver is launched, you can use it as such or just launch it manually and fill your second monitor whenever not in use.

We gave it a whirl, altering his code to take a tuple of zip codes. Every hour it will pull down the data and redraw the screen. But we’ve put enough in there that you’ll be able to replace it with your own data in a matter of minutes. If you do, post a screenshot and what you’re using it for in the comments.

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Rooting The Nest Thermostat

nest-300x293 A few months ago, Google bought a $3.2 billion dollar thermostat in the hopes it would pave the way for smart devices in every home. The Nest thermostat itself is actually pretty cool – it’s running Linux with a reasonably capable CPU, and adds WiFi to the mix for some potentially cool applications. It can also be rooted in under a minute,

As [cj] explains, the CPU inside the Nest has a Device Firmware Update mode that’s normally used for testing inside the Nest factory. This DFU mode can also be used to modify the device without any restrictions at all.

With a simple shell script, [cj] plugs the Nest into his laptop’s USB port, puts the device into DFU mode, and uploads a two-stage booloader to enable complete control over the Linux-powered thermostat.

As a bonus, the shell script also installs an SSH server and enables a reverse SSH connection to get around most firewalls. This allows anyone to remotely control the Nest thermostat, a wonderful addition to the Nest that doesn’t rely on iPhone apps or a cloud service to remotely control your Internet enabled thermostat.

Video of the rooting process below.

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An Introduction To The BeagleBone PRU

BBB While the BeagleBone is usually compared to the Raspberry Pi, there are a few features that make the ‘Bone a vastly more capable single board computer. There is a small difference in the capabilities of the processor, but the real power of the BeagleBone comes from the PRUs available: two small cores that give the BeagleBone the hardware equivalent of bitbanging pins. [Texane] has put up two great tutorials for using the PRU in the BeagleBone that should be required reading for every BeagleBone owner.

The first tutorial goes over the capabilities of the PRUs in the BeagleBone and setting up the software environment to develop your own hardware interfaces with the PRU. While writing code for the PRU has usually involved the Beagleboard packages, TI has recently released a version of Code Composer Studio that gives the option to compile C code for the PRU.

[Texane] used this C compiler to rehash the earlier, assembly only PRU program, making development significantly easier. There’s still a bit of inline assembly, and the inline assembly support isn’t as advanced as in GCC, but it’s still much easier than the assembly only variant.

While [Texane] is using the PRU in his BeagleBone to develop something at a synchrotron facility, three are a few things where really fast hardware bitbanging comes in handy: it can be used to make a video card for a vintage mac, or any sort of VGA video card, really. Very cool stuff, especially now that you can write something in C.

BeagleBone Blacks Still Not Available, Here’s Blue Steel

zoolander

The BeagleBone Black has been featured in an improbable number of awesome project, ranging from driving thousands of LEDs for a video display, to 3D printer controller boards. There’s a lot you can do with a tiny Linux board that’s much more powerful than the Raspberry Pi – if you can find one, that is. The BeagleBone Black has been out of stock everywhere for months now, with little sign of when distributors will receive some new stock.

Luckily, the BeagleBone Black is open source. Anyone can make them. Finally, someone did. It’s called Blue Steel, and notwithstanding the inevitable Zoolander references, it’s pretty much the same as the BeagleBone Black we all know and love.

There are a few differences between Blue Steel and the BeagleBone Black: Blue Steel doesn’t have an HDMI output, and the 4GB of on-board Flash featured on the BeagleBone isn’t found on Blue Steel. Still, it has the same processor, same amount of RAM, and the same connectors found in the BeagleBone Black.

You can pre-order Blue Steel here, with the boards eventually shipping at the end of the month. It’s the same price as the BeagleBone Black, not ideal considering the missing HDMI port and Flash storage. Still, you can actually buy it now, something you can’t say about the BeagleBone.

Fight The Google Glass Cyborgs With Glasshole.sh

Glasshole script

We live in a connected world where social media is ubiquitous and many people feel compelled to share every waking moment with anyone who will listen. In this type of world, wearable computers like Google Glass allow us to share experiences like never before. A Glass user can take photos, record video and audio, or potentially even stream video live on the Internet with the greatest of ease. That might be great for the Glass user, but what about the rest of us? As wearable computing becomes more and more mainstream, people are naturally going to become divided on the issue of privacy. Is it a good thing to have “cyborgs” with wearable computers and cameras constantly at the ready, or is it a privacy nightmare? The cyborg war is coming, and [Julian] has already chosen his side.

It would seem that [Julian] lands on the side of the privacy advocates, based on his “glasshole” script. Glasshole is a relatively simple bash script that relies on some other common network security tools to take care of the heavy lifting. The basic premise relies on the fact that every manufacturer of network interface devices is assigned their own MAC prefix. This is a piece of the MAC address that is unique to that manufacturer.

[Julian’s] script uses a utility called arp-scan to obtain a list of all MAC addresses on a given wireless network. It then loops through each address and compares it to the known Google Glass MAC prefix. If it finds a match, it will make an audible beeping noise to alert the script user. The script then launches aireplay-ng in de-authentication mode. This will send spoofed disassociate packets to the client (in this case the Google Glass device), hopefully forcing them to disconnect from the access point. The script runs continuously, ensuring that once the device reconnects to the network it will get booted off once again. The script is designed to be run on a small Linux computer such as a Raspberry Pi or a BeagleBone black. This way, the user can carry it around with them as a sort of portable defense mechanism.

How do you fit into the cyborg war? Will you stand proudly with your computer on your face for all to see? If so, what kind of countermeasures would you deploy to prevent this type of attack from working on you? If not, what other types of interesting attacks can you think of to keep the cyborgs at bay?

[Thanks Syed]