Food Irradiation Detector Doesn’t Use Banana For Scale

June 28, 2022 by Kristina Panos 66 Comments

How do the potatoes in that sack keep from sprouting on their long trip from the field to the produce section? Why don’t the apples spoil? To an extent, the answer lies in varying amounts of irradiation. Though it sounds awful, irradiation reduces microbial contamination, which improves shelf life. Most people can choose to take it or leave it, but in some countries, they aren’t overly concerned about the irradiation dosages found in, say, animal feed. So where does that leave non-vegetarians?

If that line of thinking makes you want to Hulk out, you’re not alone. [kutluhan_aktar] decided to build an IoT food irradiation detector in an effort to help small businesses make educated choices about the feed they give to their animals. The device predicts irradiation dosage level using a combination of the food’s weight, color, and emitted ionizing radiation after being exposed to sunlight for an appreciable amount of time. Using this information, [kutluhan_aktar] trained a neural network running on a Beetle ESP32-C3 to detect the dosage and display relevant info on a transparent OLED screen. Primarily, the device predicts whether the dosage falls into the Regulated, Unsafe, or just plain Hazardous category.

[kutluhan_aktar] lets this baby loose on some uncooked pasta in the short demo video after the break. The macaroni is spread across a load cell to detect the weight, while [kutluhan_aktar] uses a handheld sensor to determine the color.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen AI on the Hackaday menu. Remember when we tried those AI-created recipes?

Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: RoenDi Smart Knob Thinks Outside The Box

June 27, 2022 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

When it comes to design decisions, we’re often advised to “think outside the box.” It’s generally good advice, if a bit abstract — it could really mean anything. But it appears that someone took it quite literally with this nifty little smart knob display and input device.

[Dimitar]’s inspiration for RoenDi — for “rotary encoder and display” — came from an unusual source: a car dashboard, and specifically, the multipurpose knobs that often crop up in a car’s climate control cluster. Designed for ease of use while driving while causing as little distraction as possible, such knobs often combine a rotary encoder with one or more indicators or buttons. RoenDi builds on that theme by putting a 1.7″ round LCD display in the middle of a ring attached to an Alps rotary encoder, allowing the knob to be customized for whatever you want it to represent. The backplane sports a powerful STM32 microcontroller with a lot of the GPIO pins broken out, so customization and interfacing are limited only by your imagination. The design is open source, so you can either build your own or support the project via Crowd Supply.

Unlike the haptic smart knob we’ve been seeing a bit about lately, which also features a round LCD at its center, RoenDi’s feedback is via the physical detents on the encoder. We think both devices are great, and they fill different niches in the novel input ecosystem.

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This Week In Security: IoT In The Hot Tub, App Double Fail, And FreeBSD BadBeacon

June 24, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 3 Comments

[Eaton Zveare] purchased a Jacuzzi hot tub, and splurged for the SmartTub add-on, which connects the whirlpool to the internet so you can control temperature, lights, etc from afar. He didn’t realize he was about to discover a nightmare of security problems. Because as we all know, in IoT, the S stands for security. In this case, the registration email came from smarttub.io, so it was natural to pull up that URL in a web browser to see what was there. The page presented a login prompt, so [Eaton] punched in the credentials he had just generated. “Unauthorized” Well that’s not surprising, but what was very odd was the flash of a dashboard that appeared just before the authorization complaint. Could that have been real data that was unintentionally sent? A screen recorder answered that question, revealing that there was indeed a table loaded up with valid-looking data.

Digging around in the page’s JavaScript comes up with the login flow. The page uses the Auth0 service to handle logins, and that service sends back an access token. The page sends that access token right back to the Auth0 service to get user privileges. If the logged in user isn’t an admin, the redirect happens. However, we already know that some real data gets loaded. It appears that the limitations to data is all implemented on the client side, and the backend only requires a valid access token for data requests. What would happen if the response from Auth0 were modified? There are a few approaches to accomplish this, but he opted to use Fiddler. Rewrite the response so the front-end believes you’re an admin, and you’re in.

This approach seems to gain admin access to all of the SmartTub admin controls, though [Eaton] didn’t try actually making changes to see if he had write access, too. This was enough to demonstrate the flaw, and making changes would be flirting with that dangerous line that separates research from computer crime. The real problem started when he tried to disclose the vulnerability. SmartTub didn’t have a security contact, but an email to their support email address did elicit a reply asking for details. And after details were supplied, complete radio silence. Exasperated, he finally turned to Auth0, asking them to intervene. Their solution was to pull the plug on one of the two URL endpoints. Finally, after six months of trying to inform Jacuzzi and SmartTub of their severe security issues, both admin portals were secured.

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Machine Learning Does Its Civic Duty By Spotting Roadside Litter

June 22, 2022 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

If there’s one thing that never seems to suffer from supply chain problems, it’s litter. It’s everywhere, easy to spot and — you’d think — pick up. Sadly, most of us seem to treat litter as somebody else’s problem, but with something like this machine vision litter mapper, you can at least be part of the solution.

For the civic-minded [Nathaniel Felleke], the litter problem in his native San Diego was getting to be too much. He reasoned that a map of where the trash is located could help municipal crews with cleanup, so he set about building a system to search for trash automatically. Using Edge Impulse and a collection of roadside images captured from a variety of sources, he built a model for recognizing trash. To find the garbage, a webcam with a car window mount captures images while driving, and a Raspberry Pi 4 runs the model and looks for garbage. When roadside litter is found, the Pi uses a Blues Wireless Notecard to send the GPS location of the rubbish to a cloud database via its cellular modem.

Cruising around the streets of San Diego, [Nathaniel]’s system builds up a database of garbage hotspots. From there, it’s pretty straightforward to pull the data and overlay it on Google Maps to create a heatmap of where the garbage lies. The video below shows his system in action.

Yes, driving around a personal vehicle specifically to spot litter is just adding more waste to the mix, but you’d imagine putting something like this on municipal vehicles that are already driving around cities anyway. Either way, we picked up some neat tips, especially those wireless IoT cards. We’ve seen them used before, but [Nathaniel]’s project gives us a path forward on some ideas we’ve had kicking around for a while.

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Insteon Gets Another Chance

June 18, 2022 by Arya Voronova 32 Comments

It would appear that, sometimes, miracles happen. A few days ago, an update graced the website of Insteon, a company whose abrupt shuttering we covered in detail two months ago. An entity described as “small group of passionate Insteon users” has bought what was left of the company, and is working on getting the infrastructure back up. Previously, there was no sign of life from the company’s APIs. Now, Insteon hubs are coming back to life — or perhaps, they’re Inste-online again.

We’ve explained that revival of these devices without acquiring the company IP would’ve been tricky because of stuff like certificate pinning, and of course, a pile of proprietary code. Buying a company that’s undergoing a liquidation is not exactly end-user-friendly, but it would seem that someone sufficiently business-savvy got it done. The new CEO, as reported by [CNX Software], is a member of an investment committee — it’s fair to assert that this would help. A more sustainable funding source rather than ‘sell hardware and then somehow provide indefinite services’ is promised; they are moving to a subscription model, but only for Insteon Hub users. Recurring payments don’t sound as bad when it comes to paying developers and covering operational costs, and we hope that this revival succeeds.

Nothing is mentioned about moving towards openness in software and hardware — something that protects users from such failures in the first place. The new company is ultimately vulnerable to the same failure mode, and may leave the users in the dark just as abruptly as a result. However, we have our fingers crossed that the updated business model holds, purely for users’ sake. At least, unlike with the Wink hub, Insteon’s transition to a subscription model is better than the Inste-off alternative.

We thank [Itay] for sharing this with us! Via [CNX Software].

Automated Blinds Can Be A Cheap And Easy Build

June 16, 2022 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

Blinds are great for blocking out the sun, but having to get up to open and close them grows tiresome in this computationally-advanced age. [The Hook Up] decided to automate his home blinds instead, hooking them up to the Internet of Things with some common off-the-shelf parts.

The basic idea was to use stepper motors to turn the tilt rod which opens and closes the blinds. An early attempt to open blinds with unipolar stepper motors proved unsuccessful, when the weak motors weren’t capable of fully closing the blinds when running on 5 volts. Not wanting to throw out the hardware on hand, the motors were instead converted to bipolar operation. They were then hooked up to DRV8825 driver boards and run at 12 volts to provide more torque.

With the electromechanical side of things sorted out, it was simple to hook up the motor drivers to a NodeMCU, based on the ESP8266. The IoT-ready device makes it easy to control the motors remotely via the web.

The build came in at a low cost of around $10 per blind. That’s a good saving over commercial options which can cost hundreds of dollars in comparison. We’ve seen other work from [The Hook Up] before too, like his creative Flex Seal screen build. Video after the break.

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Track Your Cat’s Weight Through This Internet-Connected Litter Box

June 3, 2022 by Robin Kearey 26 Comments

With feline obesity on the rise, keeping track of your cat’s weight is an important part of keeping them healthy. However, a weighing session can be anything from a routine job to a painful procedure, depending on your cat’s temperament. [Andy]’s cat Ellie is one of those who dislike being weighed, so in order to track her weight without drama [Andy] got creative and built an internet-connected weighing platform for her litter box.

The platform consists of two pieces of MDF held apart by two load cells, which are hooked up to an ESP8266. The ESP reads out the load cells and reports its findings to the Adafruit IO platform through its WiFi connection, sending updates to [Andy] whenever litter box use has been detected. The cat’s weight can be simply calculated by subtracting the weight of the unused litter box from the weight measured when it’s in use.

Getting reliable readings from the load cells was a bit of a challenge, since the measured weight fluctuated wildly as Ellie moved around the litter box. A combination of waiting for the readings to settle and using timeouts to discard the effect of brief movements resulted in reasonably stable measurements. The resolution was even good enough to measure the difference in litter weight before and after use. We’re not sure what’s the practical value of knowing how much your cat poops each time, but if the data is there you might as well log it.

[Andy] also imagines smart-home features of the IoT litter box: for example, he could run an air purifier or send in the Roomba after heavy usage. This is not even the first internet-connected litter box we’ve featured; we’ve seen one connected to the Thingspeak platform, as well as one that sends poop alerts through Twitter. If you’re not around to clean up the mess, an automatic fume extractor might come in handy.

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