microphone

106 Articles

Test Ideas Now With Sensors Already In Your Pocket

March 20, 2018 by 15 Comments

When project inspiration strikes, we’d love to do some quick tests immediately to investigate feasibility. Sadly we’re usually far from our workbench and its collection of sensor modules. This is especially frustrating when the desired sensor is in the smartphone we’re holding, standing near whatever triggered the inspiration. We could download a compass app, or a bubble level app, or something similar to glimpse sensor activity. But if we’re going to download an app, consider Google’s Science Journal app.

It was designed to be an educational resource, turning a smartphone’s sensor array into a pocket laboratory instrument and notebook for students. Fortunately it will work just as well for makers experimenting with project ideas. The exact list of sensors will depend on the specific iOS/Android device, but we can select a sensor and see its output graphed in real-time. This graph can also be recorded into the journal for later analysis.

Science Journal was recently given a promotional push by the band OK Go, as part of their OK Go Sandbox project encouraging students to explore, experiment, and learn. This is right up the alley for OK Go, who has a track record of making music videos that score high on maker appeal. Fans would enjoy their videos explaining behind-the-scene details in the context of math, science, and music.

An interesting side note. Anyone who’s been to Hackaday Superconference or one of the monthly Hackaday LA meetups will likely recognized the venue used in many of the OK Go Sandbox videos. Many of them were filmed at the Supplyframe Design Lab in Pasadena. It’s also nice to see AnnMarie Thomas (Hackaday Prize Judge from 2016 and 2017) collaborated with OK Go for the Sandbox project.

While the Science Journal app has provisions for add-on external sensors, carrying them around would reduce its handy always-available appeal. Not that we’re against pairing smartphones with clever accessories to boost their sensing capabilities: we love them! From trying to turn a smartphone into a Tricorder, to an inexpensive microscope, to exploring serious medical diagnosis, our pocket computers can do it all.

[via Engadget]

 

Repairs You Can Print: Better Cable Splicing With 3D Printed Parts

February 16, 2018 by 20 Comments

A while back, [Marius] was faced with a problem. A friend of his lives in the middle of a rainforest, and a microphone was attacked by a dirty, greasy rat. The cable was gnawed in half, and with it went a vital means of communication with the outside world. The usual way of fixing a five- or six-conductor cable is with heat shrink, lineman’s splices, insulating tape, and luck. [Marius] needed something better than that, so he turned to his 3D printer and crafted his own wire splice enclosure.

The microphone in question is a fancy Jenal jobbie with a half-dozen or so conductors in the cable. A junction box was the obvious solution to this problem, and a few prototypes, ranging from rectangular to fancy oval boxes embossed with a logo were spat out on a 3D printer. These junction boxes have holes on either end, and when the cable ends are threaded through these holes, the wires can be spliced, soldered, and insulated from each other.

This microphone had to hold up to the rigors of the rainforest and rats, so [Marius] had to include some provisions for waterproofing. This came in the form of a hot glue gun; just fill the junction box with melted hot glue, pop the cover on, and just wait for it to cool. Like all good repairs, it works, and by the time this repair finally gives out, something else in the microphone is sure to go bad.

It’s a great repair, and an excellent example of how a 3D printer can make repairs easy, simple, cheap, and almost as good as the stock part. You can check out a few videos of the repair below.

Continue reading “Repairs You Can Print: Better Cable Splicing With 3D Printed Parts” →

Repairs You Can Print: Fixing A Rat-Attacked Mic Cord

February 5, 2018 by 23 Comments

We’ve all been there — a steamy night in the rainforest of Papua New Guinea, sweaty slumber disturbed by the unmistakable sounds of gnawing. In the morning we discover that a rodent of unusual tastes has chewed the microphone cable of our transceiver right half in two, leaving us out of touch with base camp. If we had a nickel for every time that’s happened.

It may sound improbable, but that’s the backstory behind [Marius Taciuc]’s 3D-printed mic cord repair. Even with more mundane failure modes, the retractile cords on microphones are notoriously difficult to fix. Pretty much any of the usual suspects, like heat-shrink tubing or electrical tape, are going to do very little to restore the mechanical stability lost once that tough outer jacket is breached. [Marius]’s solution was to print as small an enclosure as possible to mechanically support the splice. The fit is tight, but there was just enough room to solder the wires and stuff everything back in place. Cable ties provide strain relief where the cord exits the splice, and a liberal squirt of hot glue pots the joint. It’s not perfect — we’ll bet the splice acts as a catch point and gets a little annoying after a while — but if it gets you back on the air fast and cheap, it probably makes sense.

[Marius] entered this rat-race beating hack into the Repairs You Can Print contest. Do you have an epic repair that was made possible by a 3D printer? Let the world know about it and you might just win a prize.

Continue reading “Repairs You Can Print: Fixing A Rat-Attacked Mic Cord” →

34C3: Microphone Bugs

January 1, 2018 by 32 Comments

Inspiration can come from many places. When [Veronica Valeros] and [Sebastian Garcia] from the MatesLab Hackerspace in Argentina learned that it took [Ai Weiwei] four years to discover his home had been bugged, they decided to have a closer look into some standard audio surveillance devices. Feeling there’s a shortage of research on the subject inside the community, they took matters in their own hands, and presented the outcome in their Spy vs. Spy: A modern study of microphone bugs operation and detection talk at 34C3. You can find the slides here, and their white paper here.

Focusing their research primarily on FM radio transmitter devices, [Veronica] and [Sebastian] start off with some historical examples, and the development of such devices — nowadays available off-the-shelf for little money. While these devices may be shrugged off as a relic of Soviet era spy fiction and tools of analog times, the easy availability and usage still keeps them relevant today. They conclude their research with a game of Hide and Seek as real life experiment, using regular store-bought transmitters.

An undertaking like this would not be complete without the RTL-SDR dongle, so [Sebastian] developed the Salamandra Spy Microphone Detection Tool as alternative for ready-made detection devices. Using the dongle’s power levels, Salamandra detects and locates the presence of potential transmitters, keeping track of all findings. If you’re interested in some of the earliest and most technologically fascinating covert listening devices, there is no better example than Theremin’s bug.

Continue reading “34C3: Microphone Bugs” →

Your Hard Disk As An Accidental Microphone

October 8, 2017 by 30 Comments

We’re used to attaching peripherals to our computers, when we have a need for them to interact with the world around them. An Arduino Uno needs a shield to turn on the lights, for example. Just sometimes though there is the potential for unintended interaction between a computer and the real physical world which surrounds it, and it’s one of those moments that [Alfredo Ortega] has uncovered in his talk at the EKO Party conference in Buenos Aires. He demonstrates how a traditional spinning-rust computer hard disk interacts with vibration in its surroundings, and can either become a rudimentary microphone, or be compromised by sound at its resonant frequency (PDF).

It seems that you can measure the response time of the hard drive head during a read operation without requiring any privilege escalation. This timing varies with vibration, so can be used to reconstruct the sound that the drive is facing. Thus it becomes a microphone, albeit not a very good one with a profoundly bass-heavy response. He goes on to investigate the effect of sound on the drive, discovering that it has a resonant frequency at which the vibration causes it to be unreadable.

Sadly the talk itself appears not yet to be online, but given that previous years’ EKO talks are on YouTube it is likely that when the dust has settled you will be able to see it in full. Meanwhile he’s posted a video demonstration which we’ve posted below the break.

Continue reading “Your Hard Disk As An Accidental Microphone” →

Quick And Dirty Blimp Mount For A Shotgun Mike

September 23, 2017 by 11 Comments

Sometimes you don’t have the hardware you need, and you can either do without or let the project’s needs inspire you to create an alternative. That’s pretty sweet, and it’s even sweeter when you find a solution that’s dirt cheap.

[Chu_st] created a sub-$10 blimp mount for his shotgun mike. It consists of a PVC pipe which attaches to the microphone’s shock mount. Plastic gardening grid is used for the shell, shaped by hand into the desired blimp shape and secured with zip ties and gaffer tape. [Chu_st] suggests using nylon stocking as a wind screen. The microphone itself attaches to a length of bicycle seat tube using a standard mic clamp.

For DIY microphone projects, we got you covered, with everything from a low noise floor microphone to one built out of a hard drive published previously.

Eavesdropping Via Headphones

December 18, 2016 by 22 Comments

We all know that speakers are microphones and microphones are speakers, right? If not, take a moment to plug your headphones into a microphone jack and yell into them. It’s not exactly hi-fi, but it works.

So it’s not a huge surprise that three security researchers in Israel have managed to turn the combination headphone and microphone input jacks that are present on most laptops into an eavesdropping device. (Paper here as PDF, with an obligatory demo video on YouTube, embedded below.) Speake(a)r is a neat proof-of-concept and a horrid pun. Continue reading “Eavesdropping Via Headphones” →