Introducing USB Armory, A Flash Drive Sized Computer

October 14, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 22 Comments

[Andrea] tipped us about USB armory, a tiny embedded platform meant for security projects. It is based on the 800MHz ARM Cortex-A8 Freescale i.MX53 together with 512MB of DDR3 SDRAM, includes a microSD card slot, a 5-pin breakout header with GPIOs/UART, a customizable LED and is powered through USB.

This particular processor supports a few advanced security features such as secure boot and ARM TrustZone. The secure boot feature allow users to fuse verification keys that ensure only trusted firmware can be executed on the board, while the ARM TrustZone enforces domain separation between a “secure” and a “normal” world down to a memory and peripheral level. This enables many projects such as electronic wallets, authentication tokens and password managers.

The complete design is open hardware and all its files may be downloaded from the official GitHub repository. The target price for the final design of the first revision is around €100.

OLinuXino Booting Android

August 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

We can’t say the name rolls off the tongue, but it is beginning to look like the OlinuXino is going to happen. Here you can see the prototype hardware booting Android. If this is the first time you’re seeing the hardware you can think of it in the same category as the Raspberry Pi. It’s a butt-kicking ARM platform that comes as a bare-board with which you can do what you please.

Olimex Ltd. put together the offering, which seems to be part of the name mash-up (Olimex + Linux + Arduino?). The board hosts an ARM Cortex-A8 processor which runs at 1 GHz. There’s a half a gigabyte of ram, four USB and one USB-OTG ports, and a big array of breakout pins. One eyebrow-raising choice was not to include an HDMI connector. Instead the board offers VGA and Audio outputs. There is a pin header meant for an LCD screen, as seen in the image above, so it could be that the intention here is for smaller or more portable applications. But like we said, the form factor really lets you do what you want.

Possibly the best part is the price. The target for the top-of-the-line board is 55 Euros (about $68) and that comes with WiFi and 4 GB of NAND storage on the board. There’s a bunch of posts on the project, including a look at the PCB routing work. This link to the A13 tag will give you the widest overview of the work so far.

[Thanks Acce]

Say Hello To Our Little Friend, The BeagleBone

November 1, 2011 by Mike Szczys 57 Comments

Small and more powerful… what more can you want? This is the newest BeagleBoard offering, called the BeagleBone. It’s packed with some pretty intriguing features, but let’s take a tour of the hardware first.

Like its predecessors, the BeagleBone sports an ARM processor. This time around it’s a TI AM3358 ARM Cortex-A8. It will ship with a 2 GB microSD card and has an Ethernet port and USB connection. The dual pin headers on either side of the board are designed to receive ‘Capes’ for expansion. Currently a DVI cape is in the works, with HDMI and others to follow.

Linux is running on board and one of the best features we see in the video after the break is the browser-based programming interface. When connected to a network, the BeagleBone serves HTML5 web pages. One of these is an IDE that lets you write and execute code directly from your browser.

Now, can we finally have our open-hardware set top box (hopefully running XBMC)?? At an MSRP of $89 this should be able to give AppleTV 2 a run for its money as an easy way to get your television some network connectivity. Continue reading “Say Hello To Our Little Friend, The BeagleBone” →

The New Apple TV

September 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 38 Comments

You’ve probably already heard about the Apple TV 2. It retails for $99 and packs a punch with HD video, optical audio, and WiFi in that tiny package. But as always, we like it for its hackability. Even though it’s just starting to ship, the hacks are already rolling in. The firmware is available from Apple’s servers and has already been unlocked with the yet-to-be-release SHAtter exploit. [Das_coach] even sent us a link to a video of the new Frontrow ported for the iPod touch (embedded after the break).

But the holy grail has to be XBMC. We’ve seen it on the first generation Apple TV and it was good. The second generation switches to the A4 processor which is an ARM Cortex-A8. Not quite as easy to port for as the Intel chip on the first generation was. But there is hope, one of the 2010 Google Summer of Code projects worked to port XBMC to another ARM device, it’s just a matter of inspiring some developers to take on the quest to make it happen. We can’t wait for the day that we can just velcro one of these to the back of our TV and be done with it, that first generation Xbox isn’t going to last forever.

Continue reading “The New Apple TV” →