Mayor Is A Hacker And Wants To Use DIY Parking Meters

April 8, 2011 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

The Mayor of Silverton, Oregon is a hacker and wants to use roll-your-own hardware in the town’s parking meters. It’s not that he thinks he can do a better job than companies selling modern meters (although there have been notable problems with those), but he wants to retain the sentiment of the 1940’s era parking meters that are being replaced. Those meters are known as penny parking meters, because you can get 12 minutes of time for just one penny.

Many municipalities have gone digital with parking payment systems due to costs associated with servicing mechanical meters and collecting coins from each one of them. This hack aims to keep the look of the vintage meters, but replace the mechanical readout with a digital screen. The meter would still offer a reasonable parking deal; five minutes for free. Cost for replacing the internals is estimated at $150 per meter… which seems just a bit high if they are looking at a 250 unit run. The main problem that we see with the idea is that the original parking meter bodies don’t have a slot which can accept quarters.

[Thanks Rick]

Aftermarket Visor-mounted GPS Better Than OEM

April 3, 2011 by Mike Nathan 40 Comments

mini_gps

When [Roberto] bought his Mini Cooper, he opted to forgo the factory GPS system as it was over priced and didn’t have the best of reputations. He decided that he still needed GPS in his car, so he committed himself to install a TomTom unit in a way that would not detract from the car’s interior.

He dismantled the driver’s side sun visor, taking measurements of the original plastic housing that contained the mirror and lighting. He then drew up a 3D model of a replacement housing that would allow him to fit both the GPS unit and the speaker in the same amount of space formerly occupied by the mirror.

He gutted his TomTom unit, removing any extraneous parts he could find. A smaller speaker was sourced due to size constraints, then everything was mounted in his new housing once it arrived.

The end result is amazing. The GPS unit looks like it was installed at the factory – there is no sign that this was any sort of aftermarket modification. We are sure people will be quick to say that would be difficult to keep your eyes on the road while looking at the navigation screen, but as [Roberto] points out, you should be following the spoken directions once the car is in motion anyhow.

Hand-built Car Made Almost Entirely From Scavenged Parts

March 25, 2011 by Mike Nathan 73 Comments

shrimpmobile_scrounged_car

So you’ve swapped out your car’s motor or added new tranny. Perhaps you’ve rewired your ancient VW bus from 6v to 12v. Do you think that makes you a car expert? [Orismar de Souza] might beg to differ.

The homeless Brazilian native has spent the last four years of his life building a car from sheet metal and junked parts. He searched high and low across the region looking for parts, scoring a 125cc motorcycle motor, among other various components – mostly from old Fiats. He scraped together $270 while panhandling and simultaneously fighting off starvation over the span of four months in order to purchase enough sheet metal to skin the vehicle. Crafting the body panels by hand using a borrowed hammer and chisel, he nearly gave up, but was resolute in not letting his dream die.

The car features more amenities than you would imagine. It can hit 50 mph on the freeway and includes a real car ignition, which replaces the old motorcycle kickstarter. It was recently fitted with a new gearbox that allows him to go in reverse, and if you look at the picture above closely enough, you will also see that he even took the time to install a stereo.

We are totally blown away by [Orismar’s] “Shrimpmobile” – it definitely takes scavenging to a whole new level. Got any amazing stories of scrounging and hacking? Share them with us in the comments.

Researchers Discover That Cars Can Be Hacked With Music

March 17, 2011 by Mike Nathan 32 Comments

car_dash

In 2009, [Dr. Stefan Savage] and his fellow researchers published a paper describing how they were able to take control of a car’s computer system by tapping into the CAN Bus via the OBD port. Not satisfied with having to posses physical access to a car in order to hack the computer system, they continued probing away, and found quite a few more attack vectors.

Some of the vulnerabilities seem to be pretty obvious candidates for hacking. The researchers found a way to attack the Bluetooth system in certain vechicles, as well as cellular network systems in others. Injecting malicious software into the diagnostic tools used at automotive repair shops was quite effective as well. The most interesting vulnerability they located however, was pretty unexpected.

The researchers found that some car entertainment systems were susceptible to specially-crafted MP3 files. The infected songs allowed them to inject malicious code into the system when burned to a CD and played. While this sort of virus could spread fairly easily with the popularity of P2P file sharing, it would likely be pretty useless at present.

The researchers say that while they found lots of ways in which it was possible to break into a car’s computer system, the attacks are difficult to pull off, and the likelihood that they would occur in the near future is pretty slim.

It does give food for thought however. As disparate vehicle systems become more integrated and cars become more connected via wireless technologies, who knows what will be possible? We just hope to never see the day where we are offered an anti-malware subscription with a new car purchase – at that point, we’ll just ride our bike, thanks.

[Picture courtesy of Autoblog]

Lightweight Robosuit Is Like Stilts On Steroids

March 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 49 Comments

What would you do if you were a foot or two taller? How about if you had an arm span two times as wide as you have now?

A group of Japanese engineering students asked themselves the same question and built a wearable chassis that does just that. Their project is called “Sukerutonikusu”, which we believe roughly translates to: “This is freaking awesome, we’ll take two!”. [Thopter] however informs us that it translates to “Skeletonics”, a fusion of the words “skeleton” and “mechanics”.

The suit is comprised of lightweight aluminum pipes and sheeting, allowing for it to be powered solely by the person wearing it. Stepping inside the chassis looks like it lifts the wearer about a foot and a half off the ground, while increasing their wingspan by nearly 6 feet! In the video embedded below you can see that while in the suit, the wearer is quite agile, and even has the ability to run at a decent tick.

If this ever comes to market, you can bet we will buy one in a heartbeat – until then, we will have to settle for making RoboCop sounds as we walk about the office.

Continue reading “Lightweight Robosuit Is Like Stilts On Steroids” →

CAN Sniffing For Steering Wheel Button Presses

March 8, 2011 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

You can make those buttons on your steering wheel much more functional if you have a way of monitoring them. Don’t even think of cracking open the factory finish to get to the solder points, just tap into the CAN bus and monitor the data traffic.

The small board seen above is the result of a project [Peter Shabino] calls the CAN sniffer. The connector on the left will plug into the Control Area Network system on your car, giving the chips on board something to do. There’s an MCP2551 CAN transceiver (hidden under that linear regulator) and an SPI controlled MCP2515 CAN controller which take care of the particulars of the CAN protocol. The big chip in the middle is a PIC 16F876, responsible for making sense out of the data. From there a MAX232 chip is used to provide a serial interface to connect the device to a computer.

This really isn’t tied down to one particular function. Once you have access to the bus for a microcontroller you’ll only be limited by your firmware writing skills. [Peter] has posted an archive with all of the open source files, as well as an illustrated step-by-step board assembly. We’ve embedded the schematic from that archive after the break. Continue reading “CAN Sniffing For Steering Wheel Button Presses” →

Autonomous Cars Already Drive The Roads Among Us

March 5, 2011 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

Google’s showing off this autonomous car at the TED convention right now, but the hardware has already made automated trips from San Fransisco to Los Angeles. According to the commentary in the video after the break, the scene above shows the car “hauling Prius ass” on a closed course. The car learned this route while being driven by a person and now the vehicle is set to take riders through an aggressively driven loop in the cone-adorned parking ramp. But on the open road you do not need to teach it anything. It has no problem taking a GPS route and following the rules of the road while traveling from one waypoint to another.

The link above doesn’t include hardware information but they did point to a Times article which includes an infographic. The spinning box on the top of the car is 3D-mapping LIDAR with a 200 foot radius. There’s a rotary encoder on one of the wheels for precise movement data, radar sensors on the front and back bumpers, and a rear-view-mirror-mounted camera for image processing. It makes us wonder how the system performs when the car is coated in road-muck? Maybe you just add a dedicated wiper for each sensor.

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