Forcing Amazon Alexa Compatible Stuff To Speak To Google Assistant

January 1, 2019 by Lewin Day 21 Comments

It took a long time, but it’s 2019, and we’re starting to get used to the concept of talking to a computer to make it control things around the house. It’s not quite as cool as it seemed when we saw it in films way back when, but that’s just real life. The problem is, there’s a multitude of different systems and standards and they don’t all necessarily work together. In [Blake]’s case, the problem is that Woods brand hardware only works with Amazon Alexa, which simply won’t do.

[Blake] went through the hassle of getting an Amazon Alexa compatible WiFi outlet to work with Google Assistant. It’s a bit of a roundabout way of doing things, but it works. A TP-Link HS-105 WiFi plug is used, which can be controlled through Google Assistant voice commands. The part consists of two PCBs – a control board that speaks WiFi, and a switching board with relays. [Blake] used the control board and hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi. When switched on by a command from Google, the HS-105 sets a pin high, which is detected by the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi then runs a software implementation of the KAB protocol used by the Woods hardware, triggering it when it receives the signal from the TP-Link hardware.

If we understand correctly, [Blake] had to go to this trouble in order to make his special outdoor-rated outlets work with his Google Home setup. Hopefully interoperability improves in years to come, but we won’t hold our breath.

We’ve seen some pretty convoluted projects in this space before, often using IFTTT — like this ESP8266 voice controlled tank.

The Umbrella That Tells You The Weather

December 25, 2018 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Most people can tell you the various uses of the umbrella — it keeps the rain off, pokes sleeping train passengers awake, and can be used as an improvised defensive weapon when tension in the hot dog line reaches boiling point. A true Englishman would never deign to employ their brolly so imprudently, of course, but they might just give it an upgrade by packing in a full weather station.

Please do not message us to complain about the redundancy of a rain sensor on an umbrella.

The build uses the Particle Photon as the brains of the operation, interfacing it with several sensors. There’s a DHT11 to handle temperature and humidity measurement, an Adafruit barometric pressure sensor, along with a custom-built anemometer using a brushed motor with 3D printed wind cups. Finally, a breadboard is turned into a rain detector, based on the same principles as those used in automotive applications.

The Particle Photon uses WiFi to tether to a smartphone, deliver the collected data to the cloud via Adafruit IO. This enables the data to be collated and processed further on a PC. Yes, it’s 2018, and they have the internet on umbrellas now.

As we reach further into the depths of winter, it’s one project that could very much come in handy, and [The Gentlemen Maker] has been kind enough to share the code on Particle.io. If that’s not good enough, perhaps you could use your umbrella as a WiFi antenna. Video after the break.

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Weaponized Networked Printing Is Now A Thing

December 7, 2018 by Tom Nardi 37 Comments

It’s a fairly safe bet that a Venn diagram of Hackaday readers and those who closely follow the careers of YouTube megastars doesn’t have a whole lot of overlap, so you’re perhaps blissfully unaware of the man who calls himself [PewDiePie]. As such, you might not know that a battle between himself and another YouTube channel which uploads Bollywood music videos has reached such a fever pitch that his fans have resorted to guerrilla hacking to try to sway public opinion towards their side. It’s perhaps not the dystopian future we imagined, but it just might be the one we deserve.

To briefly summarize the situation, a hacker known only by the handle [TheHackerGiraffe] decided to help out Dear Leader by launching an automated attack against 50,000 Internet connected printers. When the hack was successful, the printer would spit out a page of digital propaganda, complete with fist ASCII art, that urged the recipient to go on YouTube and pledge their support for [PewDiePie]. There’s some debate about how many of the printers [TheHackerGiraffe] targeted actually delivered their payload, but judging by reactions throughout social media, it was enough to get the message out.

While the stunt itself may have come as a surprise, the methodology wasn’t. In fact, the only surprising element to the security researchers who’ve weighed in on the situation is that this hasn’t happened more often. It certainly isn’t the first time somebody’s done it, but the fact that this time its been connected to such a high profile Internet celebrity is putting more eyes on the problem then there have been in the past. Now that the proverbial cat is out of the bag, there are even websites springing up which claim to be purveyors of “Printer Advertising”. Odds are good this won’t be the last time somebody’s printer starts running off more than TPS reports.

We here at Hackaday don’t have much interest in the battle for YouTube supremacy. We’re just pulling for Dave Jones’s EEVBlog channel to join [AvE] in breaking a million subscribers. But we’re very interested in the technology which made this attack possible, how likely it is we’re going to see more people exploit it, and what are we supposed to do now that even our own printers can be turned against us?

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Vibrosight Hears When You Are Sleeping. It Knows When You’re Awake.

October 22, 2018 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

No matter how excited you are to dive headfirst into the “Internet of Things”, you’ve got to admit that the effort and expense of going full-on Jetsons is a bit off-putting. To smarten up your home you’ve generally got to buy all new products (and hope they’re all compatible) or stick janky after-market sensors on the gear you’ve already got (and still hope they’re all compatible). But what if there was a cheap and easy way to keep tabs on all your existing stuff? The answer may lie in Cold War era surveillance technology.

As if the IoT wasn’t already Orwellian enough, Vibrosight is a project that leverages a classic KGB spy trick to keep tabs on what’s going on inside your home. Developed by [Yang Zhang], [Gierad Laput] and [Chris Harrison], the project uses retro-reflective stickers and a scanning laser to detect vibrations over a wide area. With this optical “stethoscope”, the system can glean all kinds of information; from how long you’ve been cooking something in the microwave to whether or not you washed your hands.

The project takes its inspiration from the optical eavesdropping system developed by Léon Theremin in the late 1940’s. By bouncing a beam of light off of a window, Theremin’s gadget was able to detect what people inside the room were saying from a distance. The same idea is applied here, except now it uses an automated laser scanner and machine learning to turn detected vibrations into useful information that can be plugged into a home automation system.

For Vibrosight to “listen” to objects, the user needs to place retro-reflective tags on whatever they want to include in the system. The laser will periodically scan around the room looking for these tags. Once the laser finds a new tag, will add it to a running list of targets to keeps an eye on. From there Vibrosight is able to take careful vibration measurements which can provide all sorts of information. In the video after the break, Vibrosight is shown differentiating between walking, jogging, and running on a treadmill and determining what kind of hand tools are being used on a workbench. The team even envisions a future where Vibrosight-ready devices would “hum” their IP address or other identifying information to make device setup easier.

If all this talk of remote espionage at a distance has caught your interest, we’ve covered Theremin’s unique surveillance creations in the past, and even a way to jam them if you’re trying to stay under the radar.

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Photon Door Lock Swaps Keys For A POST Request

September 7, 2018 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

At this point we’re all well aware of the fact that there is some inherent danger involved when bringing “things” onto the Internet. Nobody wants to come home to a smoldering pile of ruble because their Internet connected toaster oven decided to get stuck on “Hades.” But even with the risks, occasionally we see projects that prove at least some intrepid hackers are managing to navigate the Internet of Things to solve real-world problems.

[Daniel Andrade] writes in to tell us about the Internet controlled entry system he’s setup at his new apartment, and while we imagine it’s not for everyone, we can’t deny it seems like it has improved his quality of life. Rather than giving all of his friends a copy of his key, he’s setup a system where anyone who has the appropriate link can “buzz” themselves in through the building’s existing intercom system.

Thanks to the old-school intercom setup, the hardware for this project is simple in the extreme. All [Daniel] needed was a relay to close the circuit on the door buzzer, and a way to fire it off. For his controller he chose the Photon from Particle, which is perhaps a bit overkill, but we all tend to work with what we’re personally comfortable with.

Most of the work went into the software, as [Daniel] ended up coming with two distinct ways to control the door lock over the Internet. The first method uses Blynk, which allows you to create slick visual interfaces for mobile devices. His second version is controlled with a POST request to a specific URL, which he likes because it gives him more flexibility as to how he can interact with the lock. Currently he has a simple web page setup that lets friends and family open the door by just clicking a button.

We’ve seen a similar setup using the Photon to open a garage door, and plenty of people have taken to using Blynk to control their home automation setups. All the tools are available for you to roll your own IoT gadgets, you just need to figure out what to do with the things…

How To Mash Up BLE, NodeJS, And MQTT To Get Internet Of Things

August 24, 2018 by Inderpreet Singh 10 Comments

We’re living in the world of connected devices. It has never been easier to roll your own and implement the functionality you actually want, rather than live with the lowest common denominator that the manufacture chose.

In a previous article I walked though a small python script to talk to a BLE light and used it to cycle through some colors. Now I want to delve deeper into the world of Internet Connected BLE devices and how to set up a simple Internet-Of-Things light. With this example in hand the sky’s the limit on what you can build and what it will be able to do.

Join me after the break as I demonstrate how to use NodeJS to bridge the digital world with the physical world.

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Welcome To The Internet Of Swords

August 16, 2018 by Tom Nardi 22 Comments

As has been made abundantly clear by the advertising department of essentially every consumer electronics manufacturer on the planet: everything is improved by the addition of sensors and a smartphone companion app. Doesn’t matter if it’s your thermostat or your toilet, you absolutely must know at all times that it’s operating at peak efficiency. But why stop at household gadgets? What better to induct into the Internet of Things than 600 year old samurai weaponry?

Introducing the eKatana by [Carlos Justiniano]: by adding a microcontroller and accelerometer to the handle of a practice sword, it provides data on the motion of the blade as it’s swung. When accuracy and precision counts in competitive Katana exhibitions, a sword that can give you real time feedback on your performance could be a valuable training aid.

The eKatana is powered by an Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit LE and LSM9DS0 accelerometer module along with a tiny 110 mAh LiPo battery. Bundled together, it makes for a small and unobtrusive package at the base of the sword’s handle. [Carlos] mentions a 3D printed enclosure of some type would be a logical future improvement, though a practice sword that has a hollow handle to hold the electronics is probably the most ideal solution.

A real-time output of sword rotation, pitch, and heading is sent out by the Adafruit Feather over BLE for analysis by a companion smartphone application. For now he just has a running output of the raw data, but [Carlos] envisions a fully realized application that could provide the user with motions to perform and give feedback on their form.

Incidentally this isn’t the first motion-detecting sword we’ve ever covered, but we think this particular incarnation of the concept might have more practical applications.