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Open Source Underwater Glider Wins 2017 Hackaday Prize

November 11, 2017 by 8 Comments

The Open Source Underwater Glider has just been named the Grand Prize winner of the 2017 Hackaday Prize. As the top winner of the Hackaday Prize, the Open Source Underwater Glider will receive $50,000 USD completes the awarding of more than $250,000 in cash prizes during the last eight months of the Hackaday Prize.

More than one thousand entries answered the call to Build Something That Matters during the 2017 Hackaday Prize. Hardware creators around the globe competed in five challenges during the entry rounds: Build Your Concept, Internet of Useful Things, Wings-Wheels-an-Walkers, Assistive Technologies, and Anything Goes. Below you will find the top five finisher, and the winner of the Best Product award of $30,000.

Open Source Underwater Glider

Grand Prize Winner ($50,000 USD): The Open Source Underwater Glider is an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) capable of long-term underwater exploration of submarine environments. Where most AUVs are limited in both power and range, the Open Source Underwater Glider does not use active propulsion such as thrusters or propellers. This submersible glides, extending the range and capabilities of whatever task it is performing.

The Open Source Underwater Glider is built from off-the-shelf hardware, allowing anyone to build their own copy of this very capable underwater drone. Extended missions of up to a week are possible, after which the Glider would return home autonomously.

Connected Health: Open source IoT patient monitor

Second Place ($20,000): The Connected Health project aims to bring vital sign monitoring to the masses with a simple, inexpensive unit built around commodity hardware. This monitoring system is connected to the Internet, which enables remote patient monitoring.

Assistance System for Vein Detection

Third Place ($15,000): This Assistance System for Vein Detection uses off-the-shelf components and near-IR imaging to detect veins under the skin. This system uses a Raspberry Pi and camera module or a modified webcam and yet is just as reliable as professional solutions that cost dozens of times more than this team’s prototype.

Adaptive Guitar

Fourth Place ($10,000): The Adaptive Guitar is an electromechanical system designed to allow disabled musicians to play the guitar with one hand (and a foot). This system strums the strings of a guitar while the musician frets each string.

Tipo : Braille Smartphone Keypad

Fifth Place ($5,000): Tipo is effectively a Braille USB keyboard designed for smartphones. The advent of touchscreen-only phones has unfortunately left the visually impaired without a modern phone. Tipo allows for physical interaction with modern smartphones.

Best Product Winner: Tipo : Braille Smartphone Keypad

The winner of the Best Product is Tipo : Braille Smartphone Keypad. Tipo is the solution to the problem of the increasingly buttonless nature of modern smartphones. A phone that is only a touchscreen cannot be used by the visually impaired, and Tipo adds a Braille keypad to the back of any phone. It is effectively a USB keypad, designed for Braille input, that attaches to the back of any phone.

The Best Product competition ran concurrently with the five challenge rounds and asked entrants to go beyond prototype to envision the user’s needs, manufacturing, and all that goes into getting to market. By winning the Best Product competition, the creators of Tipo will refine their design, improve their mechanical build, start looking at injecton molding, and turn their 3D printed prototype into a real product that has the ability to change lives.

Congratulations to all who entered the Hackaday Prize. Taking time to apply your skill and experience to making the world better is a noble pursuit. It doesn’t end with the awarding of a prize. We have the ability to change lives by supporting one another, improving on great ideas, and sharing the calling to Build Something that Matters.

The HackadayPrize2017 is Sponsored by:

Take Robby Home

November 8, 2017 by 25 Comments

Ok, we’ll stipulate it right up front: this isn’t a hack. But you have to admit, it would make a fine starting point for a truly epic one. Robby the Robot — the robot from the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet is up for sale. Well, technically he isn’t so much a robot as he is a suit with some animatronics. The auction lot includes Robby, his (non-functioning) vehicle, a control panel, and some other accouterments. If you have deep pockets, you’ll need to bid before November 21.

MGM reportedly spent $125,000 on Robby which was a crazy amount of money in the 1950s. In today’s currency, that would be well over a million bucks. They got their money’s worth, though, as Robby appeared in movies and TV shows including Lost in Space and several episodes of the Twilight Zone. He even made a motionless cameo on The Big Bang Theory.

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Bionic Eye Trial Approved

November 7, 2017 by 27 Comments

Pixium Vision, a French company, has received the approval to begin in-human trials of a miniature wireless sub-retinal implant. Named PRIMA, the device may help those with advanced dry age-related macular degeneration get improvements in their eyesight. The company is in talks to also conduct trials in the United States.

The PRIMA implant is a photovoltaic chip about 2mm square and only 30 microns thick. That’s tiny, but the device has 378 electrodes. The patient uses a device that looks like a conventional pair of glasses but contains an integrated camera that sends data wirelessly to a small pocket-sized image processing computer. This computer then commands the glasses to send data to the implant via invisible infrared light. The chip converts the light to electrical impulses and conducts them to the optic nerve. You can see a video about how the system works below.

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Mergers And Acquisitions: Broadcom, Qualcomm, And One Hundred Billion Dollars

November 5, 2017 by 76 Comments

Rumors have been circulating this last weekend of the largest semiconductor acquisition ever. Broadcom might buy Qualcomm for the princely sum of one hundred Billion dollars.

You will most likely be familiar with both Qualcomm and Broadcom for their wireless and cellphone chipsets. As far as the Maker community is concerned, Broadcom makes the chipset for the Raspberry Pi, but in the context of a two hundred Billion dollar company, a ‘maker’ focused Linux dev board is the equivalent of a rounding error on a balance sheet.

This news comes a little more than a year after the announcement that Qualcomm is snatching up NXP, and two years after the news of NXP is merging with Freescale. The industry is in a state of consolidation.

This proposed deal follows several other semiconductor mergers and acquisitions including NXP and Freescale, Intel and Altera, Avago and Broadcom, On Semiconductor and Fairchild, and the one we’re most befuddled with, Atmel and Microchip. Why are these companies merging? Because they’re sitting on mountains of cash. All of these mergers with the exception of Avago and Broadcom, have been for single-digit Billions of dollars. The merger of Broadcom and Qualcomm — if it happens — will be the largest merger of two semiconductor companies ever. That’s easy to do when both Broadcom and Qualcomm are on the top ten list of largest semiconductor companies, but it is evidence enough that the mergers and acquisitions in the industry are not slowing down.

Google’s Inception Sees This Turtle As A Gun; Image Recognition Camouflage

November 3, 2017 by 52 Comments

The good people at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory [CSAIL] have found a way of tricking Google’s InceptionV3 image classifier into seeing a rifle where there actually is a turtle. This is achieved by presenting the classifier with what is called ‘adversary examples’.

Adversary examples are a proven concept for 2D stills. In 2014 [Goodfellow], [Shlens] and [Szegedy] added imperceptible noise to the image of a panda that from then on was classified as gibbon. This method relies on the image being undisturbed and can be overcome by zooming, blurring or rotating the image.

The applicability for real world shenanigans has been seriously limited but this changes everything. This weaponized turtle is a color 3D print that is reliably misclassified by the algorithm from any point of view. To achieve this, some knowledge about the classifier is required to generate misleading input. The image transformations, such as rotation, scaling and skewing but also color corrections and even print errors are added to the input and the result is then optimized to reliably mislead the algorithm. The whole process is documented in [CSAIL]’s paper on the method.

What this amounts to is camouflage from machine vision. Assuming that the method also works the other way around, the possibility of disguising guns (or anything else) as turtles has serious implications for automated security systems.

As this turtle targets the Inception algorithm, it should be able to fool the DIY image recognition talkbox that Hackaday’s own [Steven Dufresne] built.

Thanks to [Adam] for the tip.

Crystal radios from Jeri Ellsworth's museum tour

Jeri Ellsworth Tours A Radio And Tech Museum

October 27, 2017 by 12 Comments

[Jeri Ellsworth] has done some YouTubing again (yes, that’s a word, just like YouTuber) after a four-year hiatus. She’s recently uploaded a very enjoyable four-part series touring the Museum of Radio and Technology in Huntington, West Virginia.

Part one contains radios spanning the ages, starting with a spark gap transmitter, some wonderful crystal sets, pocket radios from the 1940s, commercially available amateur radio transmitters and receivers from the 1930s to the 1950s, and more. There’s even a lovely hack of a transmitter built into an old refrigerator. Part two contains educational toys, three covers television sets and cameras, and four is about all types of record players and hi-fi. Each contains equipment as old as the spark gap transmitters in part one.

You may know of [Jeri] as co-founder of castAR, an augmented reality startup that recently shut its doors, but before that she was famous among hackers for her numerous projects ranging from a flexible electroluminescent display,  a centimeter wave scanner using hacked feed horns, to yours truly’s personal favorite, a Commodore 64 bass keytar.

So nuke some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the tour following the break.

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DUHK: Don’t Use Hard-Coded Keys

October 25, 2017 by 31 Comments

The title reads like the name of a lecture in cryptography 101 or the first rule of Crypto Club. ‘DUHK‘ is in fact neither of those but the name of a recently disclosed vulnerability in a pseudorandom number generating algorithm (PNRG) that was until recently part of the federal standard X9.31.

Random numbers are essential to viable cryptography. They are also hard to obtain leading to solutions like using the physical properties of semiconductors or decaying matter, that are governed by quantum effects. The next best solution is to log events that are hard to predict like the timing of strokes on a keyboard. The weakest source of randomness is math, which makes sense, because one of maths most popular features is its predictability. Mathematical solutions have the one redeeming quality of being able to produce a lot of numbers that look random to a human in a short time.

PNRGs require a starting point from which they begin to produce their output. Once this seed is known the produced sequence becomes predictable.

The X9.31 PNRG is an algorithm that is used in various cryptographic algorithms and has been certified in the Federal Information Processing Standards for decades until it was dropped from the list of approved standards in 2016. The researchers behind DUHK found out that the standard allowed the seed to be stored in the source code of its implementation. The next step was to look for software that did this and they found X9.31 in an older version of FortiOS running on VPN gateways.

Should I be Worried?

Probably, maybe not. The analysis (PDF) published by the team behind DUHK notes that the vulnerability is limited to legacy implementations and doesn’t allow to takeover the device running them, only to eavesdrop on ‘secure’ connections. The scope of this is much more limited than exploits like remote code execution via bluetooth. It is on the other hand providing a strong case for handling standards and technical certifications with extreme scrutiny. The teams conduct also gives insight into the best practises for white-hat hacking which are frequently discussed around here. And they have a great theme song.