Well-Loved Toy Turned Into Robotic Glockenspiel

February 4, 2019 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

If there’s a happier word ever imported into the English language than “Glockenspiel”, we’re not sure what it is. And controlling said instrument with a bunch of servos and an Arduino makes us just as happy.

When [Leon van den Beukel] found a toy glockenspiel in a thrift store, he knew what had to be done – Arduinofy it. His first attempt was a single hammer on a pair of gimballed servos, which worked except for the poor sound quality coming from the well-loved toy. The fact that only one note at a time was possible was probably the inspiration for version two, which saw the tone bars removed from the original base, cleaned of their somewhat garish paint, and affixed to a new soundboard. The improved instrument was then outfitted with eight servos, one for each note, each with a 3D-printed arm and wooden mallet. An Arduino runs the servos, and an Android app controls the instrument via Bluetooth, because who doesn’t want to control an electronic glockenspiel with a smartphone app? The video below shows that it works pretty well, even if a few notes need some adjustment. And we don’t even find the servo noise that distracting.

True, we’ve featured somewhat more accomplished robotic glockenspielists before, but this build’s simplicity has a charm of its own.

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A Nexus 5 Smartphone Running PostmarketOS

PostmarketOS Turns 600 Days Old

January 17, 2019 by Eric Evenchick 18 Comments

PostmarketOS began work on a real Linux distribution for Android phones just over 600 days ago. They recently blogged about the state of the project and ensured us that the project is definitely not dead.

PostmarketOS’ overarching goal remains a 10 year life-cycle for smartphones. We previously covered the project on Hackaday to give an introduction. Today, we’ll concern ourselves with the progress the PostmarketOS team has made.

The team admits that they’re stuck in the proof-of-concept phase, and need to break out of it. This has required foundational changes to the operating system to enable development across a wide variety of devices and processor architectures. There’s now a binary package repository powered by builds.sr.ht which will allow users to install packages for their specific device.

Other updates include fixing support for the Nexus 5 and Raspberry Pi Zero, creating support for open source hardware devices including the Pine A64-LTS and Purism Librem 5. PostmarketOS now boots on a total of 112 different devices.

We’re excited to see the PostmarketOS project making progress. With the widespread move to mobile devices, users lose control over their computing devices. PostmarketOS gives us the ability to run code that we can read and modify on these devices. It’s no small feat though. Supporting the wide variety of custom hardware in mobile devices requires a lot of effort.

While it may be a while before PostmarketOS is your daily driver, the project is well suited to building task-specific devices that require connectivity, a touch screen, and a battery. We bet a lot of Hackaday readers have a junk drawer phone that could become a project with the help of PostmarketOS.

Code On Your Phone With CircuitPython Editor

January 10, 2019 by Kristina Panos 17 Comments

[foamyguy] loves Python and messing around with electronics. Boards such as Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Express make it easy for him to take both anywhere. He recently found himself wanting to program Circuit Python boards in the field, but doesn’t always have a laptop on him. So he created an Android app to make on-the-go programming fast and easy.

Using CircuitPython Editor and one or two USB cables, you can program Circuit Python boards with most Android device, including Tinkerboards. It features serial communication, a basic code editor, and a REPL sandbox for code-based castle building. [foamyguy]’s most recent addition to this work in progress is a macro creation tool that lets you edit and store modular, repeatable tasks, like turning all the NeoPixels blue, or lighting them up in a smiley face pattern. The Circuit Python board will draw its power from the Android device, so keep that in mind before you program some crazy light show.

You can get the app in the Play store or download it directly from the ‘hub. If you have any trouble setting it up, check out [foamyguy]’s Adafruit guide.

Smartphone App Uses AR To Visualize The RF Spectrum

January 9, 2019 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

Have you ever wished you could see in the RF part of the radio spectrum? While such a skill would probably make it hard to get a good night’s rest, it would at least allow you to instantly see dead spots in your WiFi coverage. Not a bad tradeoff.

Unwilling to go full [Geordi La Forge] to be able to visualize RF, [Ken Kawamoto] built the next best thing – an augmented-reality RF signal strength app for his smartphone. Built to aid in the repositioning of his router in the post-holiday cleanup, the app uses the Android ARCore framework to figure out where in the house the phone is and overlays a color-coded sphere representing sensor data onto the current camera image. The spheres persist in 3D space, leaving a trail of virtual breadcrumbs that map out the sensor data as you warwalk the house. The app also lets you map Bluetooth and LTE coverage, but RF isn’t its only input: if your phone is properly equipped, magnetic fields and barometric pressure can also be AR mapped. We found the Bluetooth demo in the video below particularly interesting; it’s amazing how much the signal is attenuated by a double layer of aluminum foil. [Ken] even came up with an Arduino with a gas sensor that talks to the phone and maps the atmosphere around the kitchen stove.

The app is called AR Sensor and is available on the Play Store, but you’ll need at least Android 8.0 to play. If your phone is behind the times like ours, you might have to settle for mapping your RF world the hard way.

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3D Printed Head Can Unlock Your Phone

December 19, 2018 by Al Williams 23 Comments

[Thomas Brewster] writes for Forbes, but we think he’d be at home with us. He had a 3D printed head made in his own image and then decided to see what phones with facial recognition he could unlock. Turns out the answer is: most of them — at least, those running Android.

The models tested included an iPhone X, an LG, two Samsung phones, and a OnePlus. Ironically, several of the phones warn you when you enroll a face that the method may be less secure than other locking schemes. Conversely, one phone had a faster feature that is known to make the phone less secure.

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Rooting The Amazon Fire TV Cube With An Arduino

November 7, 2018 by Tom Nardi 11 Comments

Amazon might not be happy about it, but at least part of the success of their Fire TV Stick was due to the large hacking and modification scene that cropped up around the Android-powered device. A quick search on YouTube for “Fire Stick Hack” will bring up a seemingly endless array of videos, some with millions of views, which will show viewers how to install unofficial software on the little media dongle. Now it looks like their latest media device, the Fire TV Cube, is starting to attract the same kind of attention.

The team at [Exploitee.rs] has recently taken the wraps off their research which shows the new Fire TV Cube can be rooted with nothing more than an Arduino and an HDMI cable you’re willing to cut apart. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than just that, but between the video they’ve provided and their WiKi, it looks like all the information is out there for anyone who wants to crack open their own Cube. Just don’t be surprised if it puts you on the Amazon Naughty List.

The process starts by putting the device’s Amlogic S905Z into Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU) mode, which is done by sending the string “boot@USB” to the board over the HDMI port’s I2C interface. That’s where the HDMI cable comes in: you can cut into one and wire it right up to your Arduino and run the sketch [Exploitee.rs] has provided to send the appropriate command. Of course, if you want to get fancy, you could use an HDMI breakout board instead.

With the board in DFU mode in you gain read and write access to the device’s eMMC flash, but that doesn’t exactly get you in because there’s still secure boot to contend with. But as these things tend to go, the team was able to identify a second exploit which could be used in conjunction with DFU mode to trick the device into disabling signature verification. Now with the ability to run unsigned code on the Fire TV Cube, [Exploitee.rs] implemented fastboot to make it easier to flash their custom rooted firmware images to the hardware.

As with the Fire TV Stick before it, make sure you understand the risks involved when you switch off a device’s security features. They’re often there to protect the end user as much as the manufacturer.

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Learn To Optimize Code In Assembly… For Android

October 30, 2018 by Bryan Cockfield 11 Comments

When programming a microcontroller, there are some physical limitations that you’ll come across much earlier than programming a modern computer, whether that’s program size or even processor speed. To make the most use of a small chip, we can easily dig into the assembly language to optimize our code. On the other hand, modern processors in everyday computers and smartphones are so fast and have so much memory compared to microcontrollers that this is rarely necessary, but on the off-chance that you really want to dig into the assembly language for ARM, [Uri Shaked] has a tutorial to get you started.

The tutorial starts with a “hello, world” program for Android written entirely in assembly. [Uri] goes into detail on every line of the program, since it looks a little confusing if you’ve never dealt with assembly before. The second half of the program is a walkthrough on how to actually execute this program on your device by using the Android Native Deveolpment Kit (NDK) and using ADB to communicate with the phone. This might be second nature for some of us already, but for those who have never programmed on a handheld device before, it’s worthwhile to notice that there are a lot more steps to go through than you might have on a regular computer.

If you want to skip the assembly language part of all of this and just get started writing programs for Android, you can download an IDE and get started pretty easily, but there’s a huge advantage to knowing assembly once you get deep in the weeds especially if you want to start reverse engineering software or bitbanging communications protocols. And if you don’t have an Android device handy to learn on, you can still learn assembly just by playing a game.