Intel Releases The Tiny Joule Compute Module

August 17, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 85 Comments

At the keynote for the Intel Developers Forum, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich introduced the Intel Joule compute module, a ‘maker board’ targeted at Internet of Things developers. The high-end board in the lineup features a quad-core Intel Atom running at 2.4 GHz, 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 16GB of eMMC, 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.1, USB 3.1, CSI and DSI interfaces, and multiple GPIO, I2C, and UART interfaces. According to the keynote, the Joule module will be useful for drones, robotics, and with support for Intel’s RealSense technology, it may find a use in VR and AR applications. The relevant specs can be found on the Intel News Fact Sheet (PDF).

This is not Intel’s first offering to the Internet of Things. A few years ago, Intel partnered up with Arduino (the Massimo one) to produce the Intel Galileo. This board featured the Intel Quark SoC, a 400MHz, 32-bit Intel Pentium ISA processor. It was x86 in an Arduino format. This was quickly followed by the Intel Edison based on the same Quark SoC, which was followed by the Intel Curie, found in the Arduino 101 and this year’s DEF CON badge.

We’ve seen plenty of Intel’s ‘maker’ and Internet of Things offerings, but we haven’t seen these platforms succeed. You could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in market research to determine why these platforms haven’t seen much success, but the Hackaday comments will tell you the same thing for free: the documentation for these platforms is sparse, and nobody knows how to make these boards work.

Perhaps because of the failures of Intel’s IoT market, the Joule differs significantly from previous offerings. Although it can be easily compared to the Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, and a hundred other tiny single board computers, the official literature for the Joule makes a comparison between it and the Nvidia Jetson easy. The Nvidia Jetson is a high-power, credit card-sized ‘supercomputer’ meant to be a building block for high-performance applications, such as drones and anything that requires video or a very fast processor. The Joule fits into this market splendidly, with demonstrated applications including augmented reality safety glasses for Airbus employees and highway patrol motorcycle helmet displays. Here, the Joule might just find a market. This might even be the main focus of the Joule – it can be integrated onto Gumstix carrier boards, providing a custom single board computer with configurable displays, connectors, and sensors.

The Intel Joule lineup consists of the Joule 570x and 550x, with the 550x being a bit slower, a Gig less RAM, and half as much storage. They will be available in Q4 2016 from Mouser, Newegg, and other Intel reseller partners.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Smart USB Hub And IoT Power Meter

August 2, 2016 by Moritz Walter 1 Comment

[Aleksejs Mirnijs] needed a tool to accurately measure the power consumption of his Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects, which is an important parameter for dimensioning adequate power supplies and battery packs. Since most SBC projects require a USB hub anyway, he designed a smart, WiFi-enabled 4-port USB hub that is also a power meter – his entry for this year’s Hackaday Prize.

[Aleksejs’s] design is based on the FE1.1s 4-port USB 2.0 hub controller, with two additional ports for charging. Each port features an LT6106 current sensor and a power MOSFET to individually switch devices on and off as required. An Atmega32L monitors the bus voltage and current draw, switches the ports and talks to an ESP8266 module for WiFi connectivity. The supercharged hub also features a display, which lets you read the measured current and power consumption at a glance.

Unlike most cheap hubs out there, [Aleksejs’s] hub has a properly designed power path. If an external power supply is present, an onboard buck converter actively regulates the bus voltage while a power path controller safely disconnects the host’s power line. Although the first prototype is are already up and running, this project is still under heavy development. We’re curious to see the announced updates, which include a 2.2″ touchscreen and a 3D-printable enclosure.

Squirrel Café To Predict The Weather From Customer Data

July 28, 2016 by Moritz Walter 13 Comments

Physicist and squirrel gastronomer [Carsten Dannat] is trying to correlate two critical social economical factors: how many summer days do we have left, and when will we run out of nuts. His research project, the Squirrel Café, invites squirrels to grab some free nuts and collects interesting bits of customer data in return.

Continue reading “Squirrel Café To Predict The Weather From Customer Data” →

Root On The Philips Hue IoT Bridge

July 26, 2016 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

Building on the work of others (as is always the case!) [pepe2k] managed to get root access on the Philips Hue Bridge v2 IoT light controller. There’s nothing unusual here, really. Connect to the device over serial, interrupt the boot process, boot up open firmware, dump the existing firmware, and work the hacker magic from there.

Of course, the details are the real story. Philips had set U-Boot to boot the firmware from flash in zero seconds, not allowing [pepe2k] much time to interrupt it. So he desoldered the flash, giving him all the time in the world, and allowing him to change the boot delay. Resoldering the flash and loading up his own system let him dump the firmware.

The “hacker magic” glossed over in the intro consisted of poking around until he found a script that was called on every boot. This is how [pepe2k] gets around not knowing the root password. The script compares the hash of the typed password with an environment variable, set with the hash of the correct password. Changing that environment variable to the hash of his favorite password (“root”) made him master of the box.

And just in case you’re one of the few Hackaday readers who doesn’t understand why we do these things, besides the fact that it’s just fun, consider Philips’ (eventually retracted) clampdown on the interoperability of this very device, or Google’s red bricks. The fatal flaw of IoT devices is that they place you at the whims of companies who may decide that they’re not making enough money any more, and shut them down. Keep your hacking skills sharp.

Thanks [Jan] for the great tip!

Pokemon Go Physical Pokeball Catches ‘Em All

July 25, 2016 by Moritz Walter 12 Comments

There’s something irresistible about throwing Pokeballs at unexpectedly appearing creatures. But wait. When did you actually, physically throw a Pokeball? Swiping over colored pixels wasn’t enough for [Trey Keown], so he built a real, throwable, Pokemon-catching Pokeball for Pokemon Go.

Continue reading “Pokemon Go Physical Pokeball Catches ‘Em All” →

Obsolescence As A Service

July 16, 2016 by Elliot Williams 70 Comments

Yet another Internet of Things service has left its customers in the lurch. IoT devices (mostly lightbulbs) ~~made~~ sold by Greenwave Systems stopped talking to the outside world on July 1. More specifically, the server to which they all connected (ahem, “the cloud”) has been turned off, which rules out using the bulbs with Internet-based services like IFTTT, which was a major selling point of the Things in the first place.

[Edit: We were contacted by Greenwave, and they pointed out that they merely sold the IoT devices in question. They are made by TCP, which is also responsible for cancelling the service. And TCP has a history of doing this sort of thing before.]

It’s not the first time we’ve seen IoT companies renege on their promises to provide service, and it’s surely not going to be the last. We’re preaching to the choir here, but when even Google is willing to take the PR hit to effectively brick your devices, the only protection that you’ve got against obsolescence is an open protocol.

At least the users of ~~Greenwave’s~~ TCP’s devices will continue to be able to control them from within the home. That, plus some clever hacking, will make them workable into the future. But it’s not like the convenience that was sold with the devices.

Boo to shady IoT companies! But thanks to [Adrian] for the tip.

Hackaday Prize Entry: A 400MHz Modem

June 24, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

The Internet of Things has been presented as the future of consumer electronics for the better part of a decade now. Billions have been invested, despite no one actually knowing what the Internet of Things will do. Those billions need to go somewhere, and in the case of Texas Instruments, it’s gone straight into the next generation of microcontrollers with integrated sub-GHz radios. [M.daSilva]’s entry to the 2016 Hackaday Prize turns these small, cheap, radios into a portable communicator.

This ‘modem for the 400 MHz band’ consists simply of an ATmega microcontroller, TI’s CC1101 sub-GHz transceiver, an OLED display, and a UHF power amplifier. As far as radios radios go, this is as bare bones as it gets, but with the addition of a USB to serial chip and a small program this radio can send messages to anyone or anything in range. It’s a DIY pager with a couple chips and some firmware, and already the system works.

[M.daSilva] has two use cases in mind for this device. The first is an amateur radio paging system, where a base station with a big power amp transmits messages to many small modules. The second use is a flexible mdoule that links PCs together, using Ham radio’s data modes. With so many possibilities, this is one of the best radio builds we’ve seen in this year’s Hackaday Prize.

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