intel

115 Articles

Hackaday Links: July 25, 2012

July 25, 2012 by 45 Comments

Ever wonder what CPU dev boards look like?

In the realm of highly confidential hardware, it doesn’t get much more secret than upcoming CPUs coming out of Intel. Somehow, a few CPU dev boards wound up on eBay, and [Leon] was cool enough to save all the pictures (Polish, Google translation, or translate in the sidebar). There are a few ongoing auctions right now, but we’d settle for this LGA 1156 breakout board. So cool.

No, we’re not linking directly to the free stuff

TI is giving away a brushless motor controller powered by a Stellaris ARM processor. [Chris] says he’s ordering one to figure out how to make a Stellaris dev board out of the giveaway. This controller is designed for e-bikes, so at the very least we see a few ginormous UAVs in someone’s future.

More rocket stuff!

One of [Bill]’s older hacks was taking a CVS disposable digital camera (remember that?) and stuffing it into the nose code of an Estes D-powered rocket. There’s a ton of videos of the flights [Bill] put up on YouTube.

On another note, [CyberPunk] built a half-scale model of a swing-wing rocket launched glider (pics: 1, 2, 3, 4). He’s currently building the full-size version capable of carrying RC and video gear and wants some feedback.

So, CAD on a tablet?

[spuder] caught wind of a tablet-based engineering notebook a few people are working on. They’re looking for some feedback on their demo video. We think it’s cool – especially the ability to share stuff between devices – but CAD on a tablet makes us extremely skeptical. Tell them what you think; we’d love to see this make it to our phone.

Now if they only made one for editing WordPress posts….

Test-driven development just got cooler. Here’s a Tamagotchi for Eclipse that you ‘feed’ by going from red to green and refactoring your code. Be careful, because having the same code test as red twice will kill your little code ninja.

And now I’ll rant about you.

A few days ago, I posted [Becky Stern]’s light-up handlebars project, and one comment surprised me. Who says guys can’t sew? It’s time to confront the gender roles that show up whenever sewing is used in a project. I’m doing a tutorial on how to sew a parachute, but I need your help. It’ll be a two-parter: one on how to actually use a sewing machine, and another for how to make a ‘chute. Is there anything else you’d like to see?

Binary Division When Your Processor Lacks Hardware Division

December 1, 2011 by 27 Comments

[Hamster] wanted to take a look at division operations when the chip you’re using doesn’t have a divide instruction. He makes the point that the divide instruction takes a lot of space on the die, and that’s why it’s sometimes excluded from a chip’s instruction set. For instance, he tells us the ARM processor used on the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a divide instruction.

Without hardware division you’re left to implement a binary division algorithm. Eventually [Hamster] plans to do this in an FPGA, but started researching the project by comparing division algorithms in C on an AMD processor.

His test uses all 16-bit possibilities for dividend and divisor. He was shocked to find that binary division doesn’t take much longer than using the hardware instruction for the same tests. A bit of poking around in his code and he manages to beat the AMD hardware divide instruciton by 175%. When testing with an Intel chip the hardware beats his code by about 62%.

He’s got some theories on why he’s seeing these performance differences which we’ll let you check out on your own.

HDCP Falls To FPGA-based Man-in-the-middle Attack

November 30, 2011 by 49 Comments

fpga-hdcp-maninthemiddle-attack

It’s been a little while since we talked about HDCP around here, but recent developments in the area of digital content protection are proving very interesting.

You might remember that the Master Key for HDCP encryption was leaked last year, just a short while after Intel said that the protection had been cracked. While Intel admitted that HDCP had been broken, they shrugged off any suggestions that the information could be used to intercept HDCP data streams since they claimed a purpose-built processor would be required to do so. Citing that the process of creating such a component would be extremely cost-prohibitive, Intel hoped to quash interest in the subject, but things didn’t work out quite how they planned.

It seems that researchers in Germany have devised a way to build such a processor on an extremely reasonable budget. To achieve HDCP decryption on the fly, the researchers used a standard off the shelf Digilent Atlys Spartan-6 FPGA development board, which comes complete with HDMI input/output ports for easy access to the video stream in question. While not as cheap as this HDCP workaround we covered a few years ago, their solution should prove to be far more flexible than hard wiring an HDMI cable to your television’s mainboard.

The team claims that while their man-in-the-middle attack is effective and undetectable, it will be of little practical use to pirates. While we are aware that HDMI data streams generate a ton of data, this sort of talking in absolutes makes us laugh, as it often seems to backfire in the long run.

[via Tom’s Hardware]

Intel’s New Way Of Creating Randomness From Digital Orderliness

September 2, 2011 by 43 Comments

Random number generation is a frequent topic of discussion in projects that involve encryption and security. Intel has just announced a new feature coming to many of their processors that affect random number generation.

The random number generator, which they call Bull Mountain, marks a departure from Intel’s traditional method of generating random number seeds from analog hardware. Bull Mountain relies on all-digital hardware, pitting two inverters against each other and letting thermal noise tip the hand in one direction or the other. The system is monitored at several steps along the way, tuning the hardware to ensure that the random digits are not falling more frequently in one direction or the other. Pairs of 256-bit sequences are then run through a mathematical process to further offset the chance of predictability, before they are then used as a pseudorandom number seed. Why go though all of this? Transitioning to an all-digital process makes it easier and cheaper to reduce the size of microchips.

A new instruction has been added to access this hardware module: RdRand. If it works as promised, this should remove the need for elaborate external hardware as a random number source.

[via Reddit]

Intel: High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection Cracked

September 18, 2010 by 54 Comments

Intel says that HDCP has been cracked, but they also say that it’s unlikely this information will be used to unlock the copying of anything. Their reasoning for the second statement is that for someone to make this work they would need to produce a computer chip, not something that is worth the effort.

We question that logic. Not so much for Blu-Ray, which is the commonly associated media format that uses HDCP, but for HD digital cable programming. There are folks out there who would like to have the option of recording their HD television shows without renting a DVR from the cable company. CableCard tuners have been mostly absent from the market, making this type of recording difficult or impossible. Now that there’s a proven way to get the encryption key for HDCP how hard would it really be to create a man-in-the-middle device that uses that key to authenticate, decrypt, and funnel the audio and video to another encoder card? We know next-to-nothing about the protocol but why couldn’t any powerful processor, like an ARM, or even an FPGA (both rather inexpensive and readily available) be programmed for this task?

Leave a comment to let us know what you think about HDCP, and what the availability of the master-key really means.

[Thanks Dave]

Dexterous Hexapod Rocks An Atom Processor

February 10, 2010 by 21 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ovrT8pWww]

[Matt Bunting’s] hexapod caught Intel’s eye (and their wallet). This coordinated little bot runs Ubuntu on an Atom Z530 processor, popular in netbooks like the Dell Mini 10, and uses a webcam to coordinate and monitor its motion. Intel picked up two of them from [Matt] to exhibit at trade shows. As you can see, the 18 servos provide some gorgeous motion to the beast. It’s no DJ Roomba but it approaches the zen-like perfection that is the A-Pod.

[Thanks Miked]

Intel 8008 Clock

July 7, 2009 by 11 Comments

Every year [Len Bales] designs and builds a new clock. His 2006 clock runs on the classic Intel 8008 microprocessor. The design is definitely not for the faint of heart, but he includes all code, diagrams and a good description on his site. The project is an interesting look into the not-so-distant past of computing. While the function of the project is a clock, it is actually a fully programmable 8008 computer running at 500khz with 16k of memory space and 4io ports. [Len] also links a lot of useful 8008 resources for anyone wanting to tackle a project of their own.