Smartphone TV Remote Courtesy Of Homekit And ESP8266

September 16, 2016 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Good grief, this smartphone-to-TV remote really drives home how simple hardware projects have become in the last decade. We’re talking about a voltage regulator, IR LED, and ESP8266 to add TV control on your home network. The hardware part of the hack is a homemade two sided board that mates an ESP with a micro-USB port, a voltage regulator to step down fom 5 to 3.3 v, and an IR LED for transmitting TV codes.

Let’s sit back and recount our good fortunes that make this possible. USB is a standard and now is found on the back of most televisions — power source solved. Cheap WiFi-enabled microcontroller — check. Ubiquitous smartphones and established protocols to communicate with other devices on the network — absolutely. It’s an incredible time to be a hacker.

Television infrared remote codes are fairly well documented and easy to sniff using tools like Arduino — in fact the ESP IR firmware for this is built on [Ken Shirriff’s] Arduino IR library. The rest of the sketch makes it a barebones device on the LAN, waiting for a connection that sends “tvon” or “tvoff”. In this case it’s a Raspberry Pi acting as the Homekit server, but any number of protocols could be used for the same (MQTT anyone?).

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Commodore PET Mods At VCF West 2016

August 8, 2016 by Sonya Vasquez 24 Comments

Here at the Vintage Computer Festival, we’ve found oodles of odds and ends from the past. Some, however, have gotten a modern twist like [bitfixer’s] recent Commodore PET project upgrades.

First off is [bitfixer’s] Augmented Reality upgrade. By the power of two iPhones and one raspberry Pi, the user dons a Google-Cardboard-esque heads-up-display and can visualize a 3D, ASCII rendering of the world before them. Not only does this view show up in the HUD, however, it’s also streamed to a Raspberry Pi whch then serializes it info a video display on the Commodore PET.

28191391174_7186b4758d_z — TRON Legacy, can you tell??

This hack builds on some of [bitfixer’s] prior work getting ASCII video streaming up-and running. Of course, the memory on the Commodore PET is nowhere near capable of being able to process these images. In fact, streaming and storing the video data onto the PET’s memory would fill it up in under one second! Instead, [bitfixer] relies on some preprocessing thanks to the far-more-powerful (by comparison) Raspberry Pi and iPhone processors that are capturing the images.

Next off is [bitfixer’s] full-color video display on the same Commodore PET. Again, leveraging another RaspPi to encode and reduce the video to bitmap images, the Commodore PET simple grabs these images and streams them to the screen as fast as possible–at a beloved 5.8 frames per second.

Ever Buy Music From Apple? Use Linux? You Need This Tool

July 21, 2016 by Cameron Coward 38 Comments

Sure, you’re a hardcore superuser, but that doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy the finer things in life — like shiny squircles and getting every new app first. But, what’s an OS-indiscriminate person like yourself going to do when it comes time to purchase music? That’s where the recover_itunes tool shines, and if you’re a Linux user with an iPhone, it might just be your new best friend.

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IPhone Polarizing Camera Solves Filter Orientation Problem Using Flash

July 4, 2016 by Jenny List 6 Comments

One of last year’s Hackaday Prize finalists was the DOLPi, [Dave Prutchi]’s polarimetric camera which used an LCD sheet from a welder’s mask placed in front of a Raspberry Pi camera. Multiple images were taken by the DOLPi at different polarizations and used to compute images designed to show the polarization of the light in each pixel and convey it to the viewer through color.

The polarizer and phototransistor taped to the iPhone.

[Dave] wrote to tip us off about [Paul Wallace]’s take on the same idea, a DOLPi-inspired polarimetric camera using an iPhone with an ingenious solution to the problem of calibrating the device to the correct polarization angle for each image that does not require any electrical connection between phone and camera hardware. [Paul]’s camera is calibrated using the iPhone’s flash. The light coming from the flash through the LCD is measured by a phototransistor and Arduino Mini which sets the LCD to the correct polarization. The whole setup is taped to the back of the iPhone, though we suspect a 3D-printed holder could be made without too many problems. He provides full details as well as code for the iPhone app that controls the camera and computes the images on his blog post.

We covered the DOLPi in detail last year as part of our 2015 Hackaday Prize finalist coverage. You can also find its page on Hackaday.io, and [Dave]’s own write-up on his blog.

Robot Beats Piano Tiles

April 28, 2016 by Elliot Williams 21 Comments

Machines running out of control are one of the staples of comedy. For the classic expression, see Chaplin’s “Modern Times”. So while it starts out merely impressive that [Denver Finn]’s robotic fingers can play an iPad piano video game, it ends up actually hilarious. Check out the linked video to see what we mean.

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FBI Vs Apple: A Postmortem

March 30, 2016 by Elliot Williams 92 Comments

By now you’ve doubtless heard that the FBI has broken the encryption on Syed Farook — the suicide terrorist who killed fourteen and then himself in San Bernardino. Consequently, they won’t be requiring Apple’s (compelled) services any more.

A number of people have written in and asked what we knew about the hack, and the frank answer is “not a heck of a lot”. And it’s not just us, because the FBI has classified the technique. What we do know is that they paid Cellebrite, an Israeli security firm, at least $218,004.85 to get the job done for them. Why would we want to know more? Because, broadly, it matters a lot if it was a hardware attack or a software attack.

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App Control With Ease Using Blynk

March 10, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 33 Comments

App development is not fun for everyone, and sometimes you just want to control a device from your phone with minimal work. Blynk appears to be a fairly put-together library for not only hooking up any Arduino or esp8266 to a phone through WiFi, but also through the net if desired.

Install the app onto your iPhone or Android device. Install the libraries on your computer. Next, modify your Arduino source to either pass direct control of a pin to Blynk, or connect Blynk to a virtual pin inside your code for more advanced control. If you want to go the easy route, create an account, log into the app, and drag and drop the interface you’d like. If the idea of letting some corporation host your Arduino project sends shivers down your spine, there is also an option to host your own server. (Editorial snark: Yes, it requires a server. That’s the cost of “simplicity”.)

There have been a few times where we’ve wished we could add app control to our projects, but installing all the libraries and learning a new language just to see a button on a screen didn’t seem worth it. This is a great solution. Have any of you had experience using it?