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Goodbye, TechShop

November 17, 2017 by 112 Comments

The CEO of TechShop, [Dan Woods], has hit the legal E-stop and declared Chapter-7 bankruptcy for the business. All ten US locations were shuttered on Wednesday with absolutely no advance warning. You can read the full statement from [Dan] here.

We are deeply saddened to hear of TechShop’s closing, and while it wasn’t implausible that this might happen someday, the abrupt shuttering must come as a painful shock to many for whom TechShop was an important part of their personal and professional lives. We owe a lot to the work and effort they put forth; they led the way as a pioneering makerspace and for more than ten years, TechShop provided access to tools, taught classes, and created opportunities for the DIY world that are still as important today as they were in the mid-aughts.

Leading the Way

Jim Newton, founder of TechShop, originally wanted a space to tinker with his pet projects. “I’m a frustrated inventor who needs to have access to this kind of stuff. And people always say that the best companies are the ones where the founders are passionate about what they are creating, which is exactly what I am,” Jim said in an interview in 2007, at the beginnings of TechShop.

It turned out that there were a lot of other tinkerers who wanted to work their pet projects too.

TechShop took a risk. All new business ventures are risky and most fail quite quickly, but in 2006, this whole movement, this idea that people could build things and take advantage of new technologies, personal fabrication, ad-hoc manufacturing, and rapid prototyping outside of universities and commercial R&D labs, was just a dream.

Adafruit was incubating in Limor’s dorm room. Arduino was just the name of some pub in Italy. Eben Upton was wiring prototype Raspberry Pi’s by hand. Nathan Seidle was still reflowing Sparkfun’s boards with a toaster oven. Maker Faire, “The World’s Largest Show and Tell,” wouldn’t even launch until the following year.

In the fading light of high school shop classes, people often were shown the ways of woodworking, light metalwork, and maybe how to fix a car or two. Filling a business with a smorgasbord of advanced machinery and teaching people how to use it, was, and still is, a relatively new concept. TechShop had a dream and made it real with the dedication of hardworking support staff and instructors around the country. Continue reading “Goodbye, TechShop” →

Is Intel’s Management Engine Broken Yet?

November 17, 2017 by 50 Comments

Our own [Brian Benchoff] asked this same question just six months ago in a similar headline. At that time, the answer was no. Or kind of no. Some exploits existed but with some preconditions that limited the impact of the bugs found in Intel Management Engine (IME). But 2017 is an unforgiving year for the blue teams, as lot of serious bugs have been found throughout the year in virtually every fields of computing. Researchers from Positive Technologies report that they found a flaw that allows them to execute unsigned code on computers running the IME. The cherry on top of the cake is that they are able to do it via a USB port acting as a JTAG port. Does this mean the zombie apocalypse is coming?

Before the Skylake CPU line, released in 2015, the JTAG interface was only accessible by connecting a special device to the ITP-XDP port found on the motherboard, inside a computer’s chassis. Starting with the Skylake CPU, Intel replaced the ITP-XDP interface and allowed developers and engineers to access the debugging utility via common USB 3.0 ports, accessible from the device’s exterior, through a new a new technology called Direct Connect Interface (DCI). Basically the DCI provides access to CPU/PCH JTAG via USB 3.0. So the researchers manage to debug the IME processor itself via USB DCI, which is pretty awesome, but USB DCI is turned off by default, like one of the researchers states, which is pretty good news for the ordinary user. So don’t worry too much just yet.

Continue reading “Is Intel’s Management Engine Broken Yet?” →

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.

Continue reading “Take Robby Home” →

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.

Continue reading “Bionic Eye Trial Approved” →

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.