Last week was Bsides London, and [Steve Lord] was able to give a talk about the devices that could pass for either a terrible, poorly planned, ill-conceived Internet of Things Kickstarter, or something straight out of the NSA toolkit. [Steve] built the Internet of Wrongs, devices that shouldn’t exist, but thanks to all this electronic stuff, does.
Continue reading “The Terrible Devices Of The Internet Of Wrongs”
The term ‘Internet of Things’ was coined in 1999, long before every laptop had WiFi and every Starbucks provided Internet for the latte-sucking masses. Over time, the Internet of Things meant all these devices would connect over WiFi. Why, no one has any idea. WiFi is terrible for a network of Things – it requires too much power, the range isn’t great, it’s beyond overkill, and there’s already too many machines and routers on WiFi networks, anyway.
There have been a number of solutions to this problem of a WiFi of Things over the years, but none have caught on. Now, finally, there may be a solution. Nest, in cooperation with ARM, Atmel, dialog, Qualcomm, and TI have released OpenThread, an Open Source implementation of the Thread networking protocol.
The physical layer for OpenThread is 802.15.4, the same layer ZigBee is based on. Unlike ZigBee, the fourth, fifth, and sixth layers of OpenThread look much more like the rest of the Internet. OpenThread features IPv6 and 6LoWPAN, true mesh networking, and requires only a software update to existing 802.15.4 radios.
OpenThread is OS and platform agnostic, and interfacing different radios should be relatively easy with an abstraction layer. Radios and networking were always the problem with the Internet of Things, and with OpenThread – and especially the companies supporting it – these problems might not be much longer.
[Michael] was playing with his ESP8266. Occasionally he would notice a WiFi access point come up with, what he described as, “a nasty name”. Perhaps curious about the kind of person who would have this sort of access point, or furious about the tarnishing of his formerly pure airspace, he decided to see if he could locate the router in question.
[Michael] built himself a warwalking machine. His ESP8266 went in along with a GPS module interfaced with a PIC micro controller. It was all housed in an off the shelf case with a keypad and OLED screen. He took his construction for a nice calming war walk around the neighborhood and came home with a nice pile of data to sort through. To save time, he placed the data in a SQL database and did the math using queries. After that it was a quick kludge to put together a website with the Google Maps API and some JavaScript to triangulate the computed results.
Sure enough, the person with the questionable WiFi access point shows up on the map.
So you’ve built a central server and filled your house with WiFi-connected nodes all speaking to each other using the MQTT protocol. In short, you’ve got the machine-to-machine side of things entirely squared away. Now it’s time to bring the humans into the loop! We’re going to explore a couple graphical user interfaces.
You could build a physical knob and/or LED display for every little aspect of your entire system, but honestly, this is where GUIs really shine. In this installment of Minimal MQTT, we’re going to look at human-friendly ways of consuming and producing data to interact with your connected sensors, switches, and displays. There are a ton of frameworks out there that use MQTT to build something like this, but we’re going to cut out the middle-man and go straight for some GUI MQTT clients.
In this short series, we’re going to get you set up with a completely DIY home automation system using MQTT. Why? Because it’s just about the easiest thing under the sun, and it’s something that many of you out there will be able to do with material on-hand: a Raspberry Pi as a server and an ESP8266 node as a sensor client. Expanding out to something more complicated is left as an exercise to the motivated reader, or can be simply left to mission creep.
We’ll do this in four baby steps. Each one should take you only fifteen minutes and is completely self-contained. There’s a bunch more that you can learn and explore, but we’re going to get you a taste of the power with the absolute minimal hassle.
In this installment, we’re going to build a broker on a Raspberry Pi, which is the hub of your MQTT network. Next time, we’ll get an ESP8266 up and running and start logging some data. After that, we’ll do some back-end scripting in Python to make the data speak, and in the last installment, we’ll explore some of the useful frills and fancy bits. Let’s get started!
The venerable ESP8266 has rocked the Internet of Things world. Originally little more than a curious $3 WiFi-to-serial bridge, bit by bit, the true power of the ESP has become known, fully programmable, with a treasure trove of peripherals it seemed that the list of things the ESP couldn’t do was short. On that list, at least until today was Ethernet.
No, despite the misleading title, the ESP does not have a MAC and/or PHY, but what it does have is an incredible 80 MHz DMA-able shift register which can be used to communicate 10BASE-T Ethernet using a new project, espthernet. Join me after the break for video proof, and a deep dive into how this is possible.
Continue reading “Ethernet Controller Discovered In The ESP8266”
You want to put your credit card number into a web site. You know to look for a secure web site. But what does that really prove? And now that so many electronic projects have Web servers (ok, I’ll say it… the Internet of Things), do you need to secure your web server?
There was a time when getting a secure certificate (at least one that was meaningful) cost a pretty penny. However, a new initiative backed by some major players (like Cisco, Google, Mozilla, and many others) wants to give you a free SSL certificate. One reason they can afford to do this is they have automated the verification process so the cost to provide a certificate is very low.
Continue reading “Anti-Hack: Free Automated SSL Certificates”
