$3 Smartphone From India

February 18, 2016 by Bob Baddeley 49 Comments

The release of the Ringing Bells Freedom 251 means exciting things for India, and if it goes well possibly the hacker community, too. This $3 device comes with all the things you’d expect from your standard smartphone. Considering any of the individual components alone (4″ IPS screen, cell modem, 1450 mAh battery, 1.3 GHz quad-core processor, 3.2 MP front and 0.3 MP rear cameras) could cost more than the whole thing put together, some skepticism is warranted.

There is speculation about how this is possible given Ringing Bells’ claims of no government subsidies. Considering the prototype presented to the media was from Chinese company Adcom, this may be a big scam in the making. The BBC does an examination of the many ways this seems sketchy, including the lack of appropriate government approvals (like the Indian equivalent of the FCC), and the experience of the company selling it (established in 2015).

Still, consider us curious and hopeful that we may have a new tool as useful and cheap as the ESP8266 has been. That said, it will be interesting to see if the company can maintain stock and limit hardware sales to their intended market or will a curious world electronics ecosystem make them a scarce stock item.

[via BBC]

Cheap WiFi Outlets Reflashed; Found To Use ESP8266

February 6, 2016 by Dan Maloney 52 Comments

There’s a bunch of simple WiFi-enabled outlets on the market today, and all of these blister-pack goodies seem to have something in common – crappy software. At least from the hacker’s point of view; there always seems to be something that you want to do that the app just doesn’t support. Stuck in this position, [scootermcgoober] did the smart thing and reflashed his cheap IoT outlets.

Although [scooter]’s video is very recent, and he says he got his plugs at Home Depot, we were unable to find them listed for sale at any store near us. Walmart lists the same device for a paltry $15, though, so the price is right for repeating his experiment. The video after the break shows his teardown, which locates all the major components, including a mystery module that was revealed to be an ESP8266 upon decapping. Pins were traced, leads were tacked to his serial-to-USB adapter, and soon new firmware was flashing. [scooter]’s new app is simple, but there’s plenty of room for improvement once you’ve got the keys. All the code is up on GitHub.

WiFi outlets like this and the WeMo have proved to be fertile ground for hacking. Of course, if you’re not into the whole blister-pack thing, you could always roll your own WiFi outlet.

Continue reading “Cheap WiFi Outlets Reflashed; Found To Use ESP8266” →

ESP8266 Transmits Television On Channel 3

January 31, 2016 by Al Williams 57 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of ESP8266 projects in the past, but this one most definitely qualifies as a hack. [Cnlohr] noticed that the ESP8266, when overclocked, could operate the I2S port at around 80MHz and still not lose DMA data. He worked out how to create bit patterns that generate RF around 60MHz. Why is that interesting? Analog TVs can receive signals around that frequency on channel 3.

As you can see in the video below, the output is monochrome only and is a little snowy. It also will lose frames on some WiFi events, but this is all forgivable when you consider this very inexpensive module isn’t meant to do video output at all.

Continue reading “ESP8266 Transmits Television On Channel 3” →

Hacklet 93 – Robotics Toolkit And ESP8266 Packet Injection

January 30, 2016 by Adam Fabio 6 Comments

You never know where a hack will take you. Sometimes a simple project will take on a life of its own and become a huge software framework. Other times, a reading blog can turn into a weekend project. Hackaday.io is the place to upload every project, big, small, or somewhere in between. This week on the Hacklet, we’re taking a look at two projects – one big, one small.

[Rand Druid] recently spent a Weekend on the Dark Side, creating an ESP8266 packet injector. The project started when [Rand] read about [Kripthor’s] deauth packet injection attacks right here on Hackaday. He initially created the WiFi denial of service throwie mentioned in the article. The basic Bill of Materials (BOM) for this device is an ESP8266 module, a DC/DC converter, a 9V battery, connectors, and a few resistors. This worked well, but some devices (most notably [Rand’s] son’s Android Phone) would disconnect and reconnect so quickly the attack had no practical impact.

[Rand] fixed the problem by adding a second ESP8266 module. The first is the listener. It listens for WiFi access points. Once an AP is found, it sends this information to the second jammer” module via a unidirectional single line serial link. The jammer module pumps out deauth packets at full speed. He even managed to create a single executable which performs as both listener and jammer. At boot, the software sends out a series 0xFF bytes through the serial port. The listener has its serial transmit pin directly connected to the jammer’s serial receive line. When the jammer receives the 0xFF bytes, it jumps into the correct function. This was more than enough to kick that pesky Android phone off the network. As with the original article, we have to stress that you should only use modules like these for testing on your own equipment. Be careful out there folks!

[Kevin Harrington] loves robots, but hates reinventing the wheel every time he creates a new machine. He’s built BowlerStudio: A robotics development platform to combat this problem. BowlerStudio was a semifinalist in the 2015 Hackaday Prize. BowlerStudio is a soup-to-nuts platform for creating all sorts of robots. [Kevin] has integrated Computer Aided Design (CAD), 3D modeling, kinematics, machine vision, and a simulation engine complete with physics modeling into one whopper of a software package. To prove how versatile the system is, he designed a hexapod robot in the CAD portion of the program. The robot then taught itself to walk in the simulation. Once the design was 3D printed, the real robot walked right off the bread board. [Kevin] linked the hardware and software with DyIO, another of his projects.

BowlerStudio is a huge boon for just about any robotics hacker, as well as educators. An entire curriculum could be created around the system. Thanks to its Java roots, BowlerStudio is also a multi-platform. [Kevin] has binaries ready to go for Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu.

The newest feature in BowlerStudio is JBullet. JBullet is a Java port of the Bullet physics library. Physics means that important real world effects like gravity and surface friction can now be added to simulations. In [Kevin’s] own words “This project is starting to feel more and more like a game engine targeted towards designing robotics and engineering tools.”

That’s it for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

ESP8266 Killer?

January 30, 2016 by Elliot Williams 47 Comments

We’ve seen rumors floating around the Twittersphere about a new integrated microprocessor and WiFi SOC: the NL6621 from Nufront. Details are still scarce, but that doesn’t seem to be because the chip is vaporware: you could buy modules on Taobao.com and eBay right now for between two-and-a-half and three bucks, and Nufront’s website says they’ve produced a million modules since 2013.

The NL6621 WiFi SOC is powered by a 160 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 with 448 KB of RAM, and everything else is integrated in the SOC. The module has 32 GPIOs, SPI, I2C, I2S digital audio, and most of the peripherals that you’d expect. They say they have a completely open source SDK, but we can’t find a link to it anywhere. An English-language forum has sprung up in anticipation of the next new thing, and they say that they’ve contacted Nufront about the SDK, so that’s probably as good a place as any to lurk around if you’re interested. With an ARM core, it shouldn’t be long before someone gets GCC working on these things anyway.

It’s also worth noting that we’ve announced ESP8266 killers before, and it hasn’t come to pass. The mixture of community and official support that (eventually) came out of Espressif seems to be the main factor determining the ESP8266’s success, and we don’t see that yet with the NL6621. So take the question mark in the title seriously, but if this turns out to be the next big thing, remember where you heard it first, ok?

Thanks [David Hunt] for the tip!

Adorable Quadruped Robot Hops And Walks

January 29, 2016 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

The ESP8266 is finding its way into all sorts of projects these days. It’s a capable little device, to be sure, but we’d have to say that finding it running a quadruped robot that can hop and run was a little unexpected. And to have it show up in such an adorable design was pretty cool too.

From the looks of [Javier Isabel]’s build log, he put a lot of thought into [Kame]. All the body parts and linkages are 3D printed from PLA, with the nice touch of adding a contrasting color. The legs are powered by eight high-speed Turnigy servos, and good quality bearings are used in the linkages. A NodeMCU runs the show with custom oscillator algorithms that control the various gaits, including the hopping motion. The BOM even lists “Adhesive 12mm diameter eyes” – perhaps that’s some sort of slang for the more technically correct “googly eyes.”

Built primarily as a test platform for studying different gaits, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of sensors in [Kame]’s current incarnation. But with an ESP8266 under the hood, the possibilities for autonomous operation are good. We look forward to seeing where this project goes next. And we kid about the cuteness factor, but never doubt the power of an attractive design to get the creative juices flowing.

We’ve covered a lot of quadruped robots before, and a lot of them seem to trend toward the cute end of the spectrum. Check out this baby-quad that’s learning to walk or this quad that thinks it’s a puppy.

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Truly Versatile ESP8266 WiFi Webcam Platform

January 24, 2016 by Elliot Williams 33 Comments

[Johan Kanflo] built a sweet little ESP8266-based wireless camera. It’s a beautiful little setup, and that it’s all open and comes with working demo code is gravy on the cake! Or icing on the potatoes. Or something.

[Johan]’s setup pairs an ESP8266-12 module with an Arducam, which looks like essentially an SPI breakout board for the ubiquitous small CMOS image sensors. The board naturally has a power supply and headers for programming the ESP module as well as connectors galore. Flash in some camera code, and you’ve got a custom WiFi webcam. Pretty slick.

But since [Johan] designed the ESP-8266 board with standard female headers connecting to the ESP, it could also be used as a general-purpose ESP dev board. [Johan] built a few daughterboards to go along with it, including a bed-of-nails ESP8266 tester (since you can never tell when you’re going to get a dud ESP unit) and WiFi-to-RFM69 radio bridge. That’s two awesome applications for a tidy little system, and a reminder to design for extensibility when you’re laying out your own projects.

We’ve previously covered [Johan]’s Skygrazer project, which tracks planes as they fly overhead and displays them on a gutted old Mac. Is it any surprise, then, that he’s also created an ADS-B-controlled moodlight? This guy is on fire!