configuration

2 Articles

Open-Source Robot Transforms

November 5, 2024 by 2 Comments

Besides Pokémon, there might have been no greater media franchise for a child of the 90s than the Transformers, mysterious robots fighting an intergalactic war but which can inexplicably change into various Earth-based object, like trucks and airplanes. It led to a number of toys which can also change shapes from fighting robots into various ordinary objects as well. And, perhaps in a way of life imitating art, plenty of real-life robots have features one might think were inspired by this franchise like this transforming quadruped robot.

Called the CYOBot, the robot has four articulating arms with a wheel at the end of each. The arms can be placed in a wide array of positions for different operating characteristics, allowing the robot to move in an incredibly diverse way. It’s based on a previous version called the CYOCrawler, using similar articulating arms but with no wheels. The build centers around an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, giving it plenty of compute power for things like machine learning, as well as wireless capabilities for control or access to more computing power.

Both robots are open source and modular as well, allowing a range of people to use and add on to the platform. Another perk here is that most parts are common or 3d printed, making it a fairly low barrier to entry for a platform with so many different configurations and options for expansion and development. If you prefer robots without wheels, though, we’d always recommend looking at Strandbeests for inspiration.

Naenara

Messing Around With Naenara, North Korea’s Web Browser

January 10, 2015 by 34 Comments

[Robert] has been snooping around Naenara in order to learn more about how North Korea’s intranet might work. Naenara is the web browser that comes bundled with North Korea’s official Linux-based operating system known as Red Star OS. [Robert] once saw a screenshot of the browser and found it interesting that the browser seemed to automatically load a non-routable IP address immediately upon start-up. This made him curious about what other oddities one might uncover from the software.

Upon start-up, the browser tries to load a page located at IP address 10.76.1.11, which is a reserved IP address for private use. This indicated that North Korea’s “Internet” is actually more of in intranet. [Robert] suspects that the entire country may be running in private address space, similar to how your home or business likely runs.

[Robert’s] next thoughts were that the browser looks like a very old version of Mozilla Firefox, but with some default configuration changes. For one, all crashes are automatically transmitted to “the mothership”, as [Robert] calls it. He suspects this is to fix not only bugs, but also to find and repair any security vulnerabilities that may allow users more control.

There are some other interesting changes as well, such as the supported security certificates. The Naenara browser only accepts certificates issued by the DPRK, which would make it very easy for them to snoop on encrypted HTTPS traffic. there is also evidence suggesting that all traffic for the entire country is routed through a single government controlled proxy server.

None of these findings are all that surprising, but it’s still interesting to see what kind of information can be gleamed from poking around the browser and operating system. [Robert] has found more than just these few findings. You can check out the rest of his findings on his blog.

[via Reddit]