RCA DSB772WE Teardown Shows That This Cheap Streaming Box Might Have Potential

December 3, 2011 by Mike Nathan 75 Comments

RCA-DSB772WE

[David Anders] wrote in to share some details of a cheap little gadget he picked up at his local Wal-Mart. He scored the RCA DSB772WE media streaming box for $48, and so far it looks like it could be a promising addition to his living room.

He started a project page for the box, detailing some of his findings thus far. The device is MIPS based and runs the Linux kernel version 2.6.28.9 right out of the box. The networking components are based on the Broadcom BCM7615 chipset, though it looks to [David] that the Ethernet jack was removed at some point during production.

So far, he’s managed to get a serial console running on the device, along with an additional USB host connection. That’s about all the poking around he has done thus far, but seeing as the box can output a 1080p signal over HDMI, it could be a cheap substitute for an Apple TV or similar device.

If you happen to have one of these at home, or are planning on buying one, be sure to check out his project page and contribute any information you might be able to glean from it. We’re sure [David] would appreciate it, and we certainly look forward to seeing what else comes out of his hacking adventures.

HDCP Falls To FPGA-based Man-in-the-middle Attack

November 30, 2011 by Mike Nathan 49 Comments

fpga-hdcp-maninthemiddle-attack

It’s been a little while since we talked about HDCP around here, but recent developments in the area of digital content protection are proving very interesting.

You might remember that the Master Key for HDCP encryption was leaked last year, just a short while after Intel said that the protection had been cracked. While Intel admitted that HDCP had been broken, they shrugged off any suggestions that the information could be used to intercept HDCP data streams since they claimed a purpose-built processor would be required to do so. Citing that the process of creating such a component would be extremely cost-prohibitive, Intel hoped to quash interest in the subject, but things didn’t work out quite how they planned.

It seems that researchers in Germany have devised a way to build such a processor on an extremely reasonable budget. To achieve HDCP decryption on the fly, the researchers used a standard off the shelf Digilent Atlys Spartan-6 FPGA development board, which comes complete with HDMI input/output ports for easy access to the video stream in question. While not as cheap as this HDCP workaround we covered a few years ago, their solution should prove to be far more flexible than hard wiring an HDMI cable to your television’s mainboard.

The team claims that while their man-in-the-middle attack is effective and undetectable, it will be of little practical use to pirates. While we are aware that HDMI data streams generate a ton of data, this sort of talking in absolutes makes us laugh, as it often seems to backfire in the long run.

[via Tom’s Hardware]

Gif Player Does It Using Paper Medium

November 23, 2011 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

Ditch that fancy wide-format LCD monitor and go back to the days when animation was made up of moving frames played back by a specialized device. [Pieterjan Grandry] built this gif player which does just that. The frames of the animation are printed on a paper disk. When spun and viewed through a looking hole the same size as one frame an animated image is formed.

If you know a thing or two about how movie projectors work you might have a raised eyebrow right now. To make the animation smooth you need a way to hide the changing of the frames. With a projector there’s usually a spinning shutter (like a fan) that covers the transition between frames. In this case, [Pieterjan] has mounted the case of the gif player far enough in front of the paper disk that the image is in shadow, making it hard to see. A microcontroller responsible for the speed of the spinning disk flashes some white LEDs with precise timing which gives light to each frame at just the right time.

This is really a 2D equivalent to the 3D stroboscope we saw a few days ago.

[Thanks Agtrier]

Monitoring Batch Jobs The Cylon Way With Python And A Parallel Port

November 18, 2011 by Mike Nathan 14 Comments

parallel-port-trigger

If you happen to do a lot of video encoding, you know that your computer can really drag while the process is carried out. Our own [Mike Szczys] transcodes videos at home fairly often, and because the process is automated, he doesn’t always know if a conversion is taking place in the background.

He has been tinkering with Larson Scanners recently and thought he could put everything he’s learned along the way to good use by using the scanner as a “busy” indicator for his PC. He hooked the scanner up to the computer’s parallel port, and took a few minutes to bang out some Python code that would alert him when his PC was busy.

He set his notifier script to launch along with FFMPEG, whenever his MythTV setup had something ready to convert. The Python script drives a pin on the parallel port high, triggering the Larson Scanner’s animation. Every minute, the script checks the status of FFMPEG and continues to hold the pin high until the application exits. Once the conversion is done, the scanner goes back to sleep, letting [Mike] know that the coast is clear.

Check out the video below the break to see his parallel port trigger in action.

Continue reading “Monitoring Batch Jobs The Cylon Way With Python And A Parallel Port” →

Video: Interrupts On The ATmega328p

November 17, 2011 by Jack Buffington 1 Comment

This week, we are bringing you the final video in our series where [Jack] uses the 3pi robot as a fancy development board for the ATmega328p processor. Today’s video deals with interrupts. If you have been wanting to have your programs do more than one thing simultaneously, interrupts are the solution. [Jack] discusses various ways that you can use interrupts in your programs and then shows how he created a interrupt routine that drives the 3pi’s beeper. He also shows the routines that enable, disable, and control the interrupt.

Since this is the last post for this series of videos, we are posting the code used for all of the previous videos. Click here to grab a copy.

For our next series of videos, we are going to attempt something more challenging so most likely we will be taking a couple of weeks off to do some development before presenting it here. Stay tuned folks, we’ll be back.

Video is after the break…

In case you missed any of the previous videos, check out these links:

Part 1: Setting up the development environment
Part 2: Basic I/O
Part 3: Pulse Width Modulation
Part 4: Analog to Digital conversion
Part 5: Working with the 3pi’s line sensors

Continue reading “Video: Interrupts On The ATmega328p” →

Video: Working With The 3pi Robot’s Line Sensors

November 12, 2011 by Jack Buffington 4 Comments

This week, we are serving up part five in our series where we are using the Pololu 3pi robot as a fancy development board for the ATmega328p processor. This week we are taking a quick break from working with the perpherals specific to the processor and will show how to work with the 3pi’s line sensors. A quick look at the schematic for the 3pi might lead you to think that you should be reading the line sensors with the A2D peripheral. Even though they are wired to the A2D pins, they need to be read digitally. In the video, [Jack] will show how to read raw values from the sensors and then how to calibrate the results so that you can get a nice clean 8-bit value representing what the sensors are seeing. Of course, that would happen under normal circumstances. Murphy had his way in this video and it turned out that our studio lighting was interfering a bit with the sensor readings when we were shooting so we didn’t get as good of a calibration as we would have liked when we shot.

Video is after the break.

In case you have missed the previous videos here are some links:

Part 1: Setting up the development environment
Part 2: Basic I/O
Part 3: Pulse Width Modulation
Part 4: Analog to Digital conversion

Continue reading “Video: Working With The 3pi Robot’s Line Sensors” →

Ghostly Images Appear Thanks To Projections On Fog

November 12, 2011 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

This wire-frame cube appears to be floating in mid-air because it actually is. This is a project which [Tom] calls a Laminar Flow Fog Screen. He built a device that puts out a faint amount of fog, which the intense light from a projector is able to illuminate. The real trick here is to get a uniformed fog wall, which is where the laminar part comes in. Laminar Flow is a phenomenon where fluids flow in a perfectly parallel stream, not allowing errant portions to introduce turbulence. This is a favorite trick with water.

[Tom’s] fog screen starts off with a PC fan to move the air. This airflow is smoothed and guided by a combination of a sponge, and multiple drinking straws. This apparatus is responsible for establishing the laminar flow, as the air picks up fog from an ultrasonic fogger along the way.

The only real problem here is that you want the projector shooting off into infinity. Otherwise, the projection goes right through the fog and displays on the wall, ruining the effect. Outdoor applications are great for this, as long as there’s no air movement to mess with your carefully established fog screen.

You can find a short test clip embedded after the break but there are other videos at the link above.

Continue reading “Ghostly Images Appear Thanks To Projections On Fog” →