Hackaday Links: August 21, 2022

August 21, 2022 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

As side-channel attacks go, it’s one of the weirder ones we’ve heard of. But the tech news was filled with stories this week about how Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” is actually a form of cyberattack. It sounds a little hinky, but apparently this is an old vulnerability, as it was first noticed back in the days when laptops commonly had 5400-RPM hard drives. The vulnerability surfaced when the video for that particular ditty was played on a laptop, which would promptly crash. Nearby laptops of the same kind would also be affected, suggesting that whatever was crashing the machine wasn’t software related. As it turns out, some frequencies in the song were causing resonant vibrations in the drive. It’s not clear if anyone at the time asked the important questions, like exactly which part of the song was responsible or what the failure mode was on the drive. We’ll just take a guess and say that it was the drive heads popping and locking.

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Bacon Beacon

April 13, 2016 by Jenny List 13 Comments

The device featured here is quite simple, but it’s well executed and involves bacon, so what’s not to like!

They take their bacon sandwiches seriously in Dundee. And let us tell you, in Scotland they make good bacon! At the co-working space where [Grant Richmond] works, people were missing out on the chance to order when someone went to the bacon sandwich emporium for a refill.

His solution was the Bacon Beacon, a nicely lasercut box with a series of buttons on top connected to a Particle Photon microcontroller. Press a button, and a node.js web app is called on a server, which in turn sends notifications to the “Fleeple”, the inhabitants of the Fleet Collective co-working space. They can then reply with the details of their order, such as their desired sauce.

The work of sending the notifications is done through Pushbullet, but the code for [Grant]’s side of things can all be found on his GitHub repository. The whole thing was put together in Dundee MakerSpace.

We have something of an affinity for bacon and cured meat products here at Hackaday, we’ve featured more than one bacon-related exploit. The Rabbit Hole hackerspace’s “Push button, receive bacon” cooking system using a laser printer fusing roller for example, an alarm clock that cooks your tasty treat, or a full cooked breakfast using workshop tools.

Please keep them coming, and resolve to make space for a bacon-related hack this year. We promise, it won’t be one of your rasher decisions.

Push Button, Receive Bacon.

November 19, 2014 by Adam Fabio 28 Comments

Members of the Rabbit Hole hackerspace spent the last weekend competing in The Deconstruction, a 48 hour hackathon competition. The hackerspace’s theme was “Light it up!”, so members created some awesome projects involving light. The star of the show was their bacon cooking machine. The Rabbit hole made the “Push Button. Receive Bacon” meme real.

A broken laser printer was gutted for its drive train and fuser assembly. Laser printer fusers are essentially hot rollers. The rollers melt toner and fuse it with paper as it passes through the printer. The heat in this case comes from a lamp inside the roller. That lamp also puts out plenty of light, which fit perfectly with the team’s theme.

The Rabbit Hole members wasn’t done though, they also built a pocket-sized infinity mirror from an empty Altoids tin. The bottom of the tin was cut out, and a mirror glued in. A filter from a broken projector made a perfect half silver mirror, and some LEDs completed the project.

The members also built a fandom art piece, consisting of 25 fans connected together in a skull shape. The eye and nose fans were lighted. When the fans were plugged in, they kicked for a few seconds before spinning up. Once they did spin though – there was a mighty wind in the Rabbit Hole.

Click past the break for The Rabbit Hole’s Deconstruction video!

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Bacon Alarm Clock Won’t Burn Your House Down

May 5, 2014 by James Hobson 20 Comments

If you have trouble waking up in the morning then maybe this alarm clock is for you. A bacon-aroma-releasing alarm clock!

Fueled by her love of bacon, Instructable’s user [llopez2005] decided she wanted to try making an alarm clock that would actually get her out of bed, hungry, and ready for bacon. Instead of trying to design a clock that would actually cook bacon — which might be a bit dangerous — she’s found an extract of bacon aroma which she could slowly release instead.

The clock makes use of an Arduino Uno with a RTC shield as well as a LED array for the clock’s display. The “bacon” is actually made out of bake-able clay, which sits on top of unscented wax, infused with the bacon aroma oil. The bacon and “bacon grease” sit in a baby frying pan over top of a small heater element designed for warming candles. Before the alarm goes off, a SSR turns on the element which slowly melts some of the wax, releasing its ever so delicious scent.

What we really like about the clock is the level of detail she put into its appearance. The base is designed after a small wood burning stove they have in the house, and she’s even made a Plexiglas display case for the frying pan — with holes to let the aroma out though of course!

Talking Bacon Plushie Greets You At The Door

March 21, 2014 by James Hobson 8 Comments

BaconMaterials

The folks over at [gTar] decided to create a motion activated talking bacon plush toy to greet visitors to their office.

They started with a toy called My First Bacon, available from ThinkGeek — it’s a plush toy that exclaims “I’m Bacon!” when you squeeze it. But then they cut him open. We can’t imagine what must have been going through this poor self-aware Bacon’s mind!

The hack itself is quite simple. They are basically replacing the “squeeze” circuit with an IR motion sensor — a PIR sensor from SparkFun to be precise. In addition to that they needed a small inverter IC. This is because the standard talking bacon module requires a positive leading edge signal in order to trigger the audio output, and their PIR sensor drives an output pin low — slap on an inverter IC (they had an old schmitt trigger lying around) and you’re ready to go!

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