Overunity, Free Energy And Perpetual Motion: The Strange Side Of YouTube

January 25, 2016 by Adam Fabio 210 Comments

Spend enough time on YouTube, and you’ll eventually find yourself in one of the many dark corners hiding within it. No, I’m not talking about the comments. In this case, I mean the many videos dedicated to free energy, overunity devices, perpetual motion machines, or anything else that violates the laws of thermodynamics by trying to get out more energy than is put in. The human race has been reaching for impossible dreams of perpetual motion and free energy for just about all of recorded history. Now it’s convenient to find them all in one place.

Browsing the tubes, it’s easy to break free energy videos down into two major groups: enthusiasts and scammers. Catching a scammer is easy – they’re looking for money. Somewhere in the video or description will be a link to a website with more information. Eventually that will lead you to a place where the scammer attempts to part you and your hard-earned money.

Names like John Searl, Muammer Yildiz, and M. T. Keshe go here. Searl especially deserves note because he’s been at it for decades. Supposedly, his “Searl Effect Generator” SEG has been built several times, but the prototypes generate so much power they create their own anti-gravity field and fly off into space. Obviously this man and his staff need your money to continue their work. Scammers deserve disdain and public shaming. These are the folks who know their “discoveries” are nothing more than snake oil.

On the other side of the coin lie the enthusiasts. These are the backyard tinkerers, the ones who put down their computers, pick up their tools, and try to build something. Sounds a lot like the average Hackaday reader, doesn’t it? I have to admit I went into this article with the same disdain for the enthusiasts that I have for the scammers, possibly even more. In some cases, these are the folks who truly believe they can have a chance to violate the laws of thermodynamics. Inevitably these folks fail to build free energy generators, overunity devices, or whatever their pursuit is, but they all do seem to learn something in the process. A lot can be said about the builds themselves. Some of these are awesome devices. Even if they don’t work for their intended purpose, they are great demonstrations of magnetism or chemistry. This is where I had a change of heart. If someone wants to spend their time working on an impossible hack, then more power to them. I may not think they have any chance of success, but at the very least, they’ll learn how to build.

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Don’t Shovel Snow; Build An Epic Melt System!

January 24, 2016 by Al Williams 156 Comments

When [Ronald Walters] was building a new house, he decided he didn’t want to shovel snow anymore. So he built a snow melt system under his new driveway. He knew the system would be expensive to operate, but he reasoned it was cheaper than back surgery and much cheaper than having a heart attack.

The system uses PEX pipe on rebar and insulation that is all set down before the concrete in the driveway. An instant-on water heater produces the heat that melts the snow and ice off [Ronald’s] driveway with no shoveling required. The working fluid includes anti-freeze, of course, and there is a set of pumps, flow valves, and flow meters to keep everything flowing when the system is in operation.

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Five Bucks, Three Parts: WiFi Camera Remote

January 24, 2016 by Elliot Williams 14 Comments

It’s just ridiculous how cheap and easy it is to do some things today that were both costly and difficult just two or three years ago. Case in point: Hackaday.io user [gamaral] built a WiFi remote control for his Canon E3 camera out of just three parts: an ESP8266 module, a voltage regulator, and a stereo plug that the camera uses as its remote trigger.

And the codebase is just about as minimal, although it’s not without its nice touches. Control is easy — just pull down a pin for focus or shutter. The ESP listens to a custom port, and when it gets the message, “presses” or “releases” the pins. It’s a good, simple example of how to work with the ESP IOT SDK.

The timing is all on the client side. [gamaral] knew that he was going to want to play around with how long to hold down the focus button, for instance, so he left that flexible. Using Netcat makes the client-side code completely trivial: echo -n "SHUTTER HOLD" | nc -w 1 -q 1 roosevelt 9021. Bam. And it worked first time. Check the well-done video just below for more details.

And keep your eye on [gamaral]’s Hackaday.io page, because he’s going to make another video when the PCBs arrive in the mail.

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The Trouble With Intel’s Management Engine

January 22, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 93 Comments

Something is rotten in the state of Intel. Over the last decade or so, Intel has dedicated enormous efforts to the security of their microcontrollers. For Intel, this is the only logical thing to do; you really, really want to know if the firmware running on a device is the firmware you want to run on a device. Anything else, and the device is wide open to balaclava-wearing hackers.

Intel’s first efforts toward cryptographically signed firmware began in the early 2000s with embedded security subsystems using Trusted Platform Modules (TPM). These small crypto chips, along with the BIOS, form the root of trust for modern computers. If the TPM is secure, the rest of the computer can be secure, or so the theory goes.

The TPM model has been shown to be vulnerable to attack, though. Intel’s solution was to add another layer of security: the (Intel) Management Engine (ME). Extremely little is known about the ME, except for some of its capabilities. The ME has complete access to all of a computer’s memory, its network connections, and every peripheral connected to a computer. It runs when the computer is hibernating, and can intercept TCP/IP traffic. Own the ME and you own the computer.

There are no known vulnerabilities in the ME to exploit right now: we’re all locked out of the ME. But that is security through obscurity. Once the ME falls, everything with an Intel chip will fall. It is, by far, the scariest security threat today, and it’s one that’s made even worse by our own ignorance of how the ME works.

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A Power Switch For The Chromecast

January 22, 2016 by James Hobson 17 Comments

Chromecasts are fantastic little products, they’re basically little HDMI sticks you can plug into any monitor or TV, and then stream content using your phone or computer as the controller. They are powered by a micro USB port in the back, and if you’re lucky, your TV has a port you can suck the juice off. But what if you want to turn it off ~~while you use a different input on your TV~~ so that your monitor will auto-sleep? You might have to build a power switch.

Now in all honesty, the Chromecast gets hot but the amount of power it draws when not in use is still pretty negligible compared to the draw of your TV. Every watt counts, and [Ilias] took this as an opportunity to refine his skills and combine a system using an Arduino, Bluetooth, and Android to create a robust power switch solution for the Chromecast.

The setup is rather simple. An HC-05 Bluetooth module is connected to an Attiny85, with some transistors to control a 5V power output. The Arduino takes care of a bluetooth connection and uses a serial input to control the transistor output. Finally, this is all controlled by a Tasker plugin on the Android phone, which sends serial messages via Bluetooth.

All the information you’ll need to make one yourself is available at [Ilias’] GitHub repository. For more information on the Chromecast, why not check out our review from almost three years ago — it’s getting old!

Drawn In By The Siren’s Song

January 21, 2016 by Elliot Williams 31 Comments

When I say “siren” what do you think of? Ambulances? Air raids? Sigh. I was afraid you were going to say that. We’ve got work to do.

You see, the siren played an important role in physics and mathematics about 150 years ago. Through the first half of the 1900s, this fine apparatus was trivialized, used for its pure noise-making abilities. During the World Wars, the siren became associated with air raids and bomb shelters: a far cry from its romantic origins. In this article, we’re going to take the siren back for the Muses. I want you to see the siren in a new light: as a fundamental scientific experiment, a musical instrument, and in the end, as a great DIY project — this is Hackaday after all.

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Misleading Tech: Kickstarter, Bomb Sights, And Medical Rejuvinators

January 21, 2016 by Al Williams 67 Comments

Every generation thinks it has unique problems and, I suppose, sometimes it is true. My great-grandfather didn’t have to pick a cell phone plan. However, a lot of things you think are modern problems go back much further than you might think. Consider Kickstarter. Sure, there have been plenty of successful products on Kickstarter. There have also been some misleading duds. I don’t mean the stupid ones like the guy who wants to make a cake or potato salad. I mean the ones that are almost certainly vaporware like the induced dream headgear or the Bluetooth tag with no batteries.

Overpromising and underdelivering is hardly a new problem. In the 30’s The McGregor Rejuvenator promised to reverse aging with magnetism, radio waves, infrared and ultraviolet light. Presumably, this didn’t work. Sometimes products do work, but they don’t live up to their marketing hype. The Segway comes to mind. Despite the hype that it would revolutionize transportation, the scooter is now a vehicle for tourists and mall cops.

One of my favorite examples of an overhyped product comes from World War II: The Norden Bomb Sight. What makes the Norden especially interesting is that even today it has a reputation for being highly accurate. However, if you look into it, the Norden–although a marvel for its day–didn’t always live up to its press.

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