Hackaday Links: July 20, 2014

July 20, 2014 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Etch-a-Sketch spray-painted silver with electronics bolted onto the side? Sign us up! This art installation adds one thing that we don’t often see in these types of hacks, eerie audio.

If you’re still mining bitcoin you need to do it faster than anyone else… that’s pretty much how the whole thing works. [Lewin] has been using the Antminer USB ASIC and toyed around with overclocking to 2.2 GH/s (gighashes per second) but to make sure his hardware holds up to the overwork he hacked his own water cooling system for the dongle.

Smart phones are the best bang for your buck on portability and power. Better yet you can get slightly broken ones for a song. If you manage to find an Android device with a broken touch screen but functioning LCD try this trick to add a mouse to it. There must be another life for this in a future hack!

We have a love-hate relationship with this particular crowd-funding campaign. First this hate: It’s basically a 100% clip-art video presentation with an $800,000 ask. Yeah… good luck buddy. On the other hand, this is the type of stuff we actually want to see as crowd funding. The idea is to use modern materials and techniques to build [Nikola Tesla’s] Wardenclyffe Tower, which was designed and built to research wireless energy (both as a means of communication and actual energy transfer). It was never fully functional and ended up being demolished. Wouldn’t it be great if teams of highly skilled and motivated people took grand ideas like this, crossing every theoretical “t” and dotting every theoretical “i”, and then proposed a crowd funding campaign to build a test platform? Oh wait, that sounds very much like a government research grant. Anywhoo… check out the Global Energy Transmission’s campaign.

The Rabbit H1 Is A Stationary Mouse Replacement

July 4, 2014 by Rick Osgood 6 Comments

rabbit h1

[Dave] has some big plans to build himself a 1980’s style computer. Most of the time, large-scale projects can be made easier by breaking them down into their smaller components. [Dave] decided to start his project by designing and constructing a custom controller for his future computer. He calls it the Rabbit H1.

[Dave] was inspired by the HOTAS throttle control system, which is commonly used in aviation. The basic idea behind HOTAS is that the pilot has a bunch of controls built right into the throttle stick. This way, the pilot doesn’t ever have to remove his hand from the throttle. [Dave] took this basic concept and ran with it.

He first designed a simple controller shape in OpenSCAD and printed it out on his 3D printer. He tested it out in his hand and realized that it didn’t feel quite right. The second try was more narrow at the top, resulting in a triangular shape. [Dave] then found the most comfortable position for his fingers and marked the piece with a marker. Finally, he measured out all of the markings and transferred them into OpenSCAD to perfect his design.

[Dave] had some fun with OpenSCAD, designing various hinges and plywood inlays for all of the buttons. Lucky for [Dave], both the 3D printer software as well as the CNC router software accept STL files. This meant that he was able to design both parts together in one program and use the output for both machines.

With the physical controller out of the way, it was time to work on the electronics. [Dave] bought a couple of joysticks from Adafruit, as well as a couple of push buttons. One of the joysticks controls the mouse cursor. The other joystick controls scrolling vertically and horizontally, and includes a push button for left-click. The two buttons are used for middle and right-click. All of these inputs are read by a Teensy Arduino. The Teensy is compact and easily capable of emulating a USB mouse, which makes it perfect for this job.

[Dave] has published his designs on Thingiverse if you would like to try to build one of these yourself.

The Relay-Based Mouse Emulator

June 15, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

mouse

[Nixie]’s job involves using some test software that requires moving a mouse around, clicking a few buttons, checking if everything is okay, and repeating the process over and over again. This is obviously a solution for some keyboard macros, but in a fit of sadistic spite, the test software requires someone to move a mouse around the screen. What is [Nixie] to do? Make a mouse emulator and automate the whole thing, of course.

The Memulator, as [Nixie] calls the device, is the latest in a series of devices to increase productivity when testing. The first version was the mouse tumor, an odd-looking device that simply switched off the LED for an optical mouse, keeping the cursor in one spot while [Nixie] hammered a button repeatedly. The second version is more advanced, capable of moving the cursor around the screen, all without doing an iota of USB programming: [Nixie] is simply using a resistive touch pad, some relays and a few pots to turn buttons into cursor movements. It’s such a simple solution it almost feels wrong.

There’s some interesting tech here, nonetheless. For some reason, [Nixie] has a few cases of old, can-shaped soviet-era relays in this build. While using such cool, awesome old components in such a useful and productive build seems odd, if you’re trying to fix ancient software that’s so obviously broken, you might as well go whole hog and build something that will make someone in twenty years scratch their head.

Vertical video of the Memulator below.

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A Real Malware In A Mouse

March 31, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

mouseagain

After reading an April Fools joke we fell for, [Mortimer] decided to replicate this project that turns the common USB mouse into a powerful tool that can bring down corporations and governments. Actually, he just gave himself one-click access to Hackaday, but that’s just as good.

The guts of this modified mouse are pretty simple; the left click, right click, and wheel click of the mouse are wired up to three pins on an Arduino Pro Micro. The USB port of the ‘duino is configured as a USB HID device and has the ability to send keyboard commands in response to any input on the mouse.

Right now, [Mortimer] has this mouse configured that when the left click button is pressed, it highlights the address bar of his browser and types in http://www.hackaday.com. Not quite as subversive as reading extremely small codes printed on a mousepad with the optical sensor, but enough to build upon this project and do some serious damage to a computer.

Video of [Mort]’s mouse below.

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Malware In A Mouse

March 30, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

Keyloggers, in both hardware and software forms, have been around for a long, long time. More devious keyloggers are smart enough to ‘type’ commands into a computer and install Trojans, back doors, and other really nasty stuff. What about mice, though? Surely there’s no way the humble USB mouse could become an avenue of attack for some crazy security shenanigans, right?

As it turns out, yes, breaking into a computer with nothing but a USB mouse is possible. The folks over at CT Magazine, the preeminent German computer rag, have made the Trojan mouse (German, terrible Google translation)

The only input a mouse receives are button presses, scroll wheel ticks, and the view from a tiny, crappy camera embedded in the base. The build reads this camera with an Arduino, and when a certain pattern of gray and grayer pixels appear, it triggers a command to download a file from the Internet. From there, and from a security standpoint, Bob’s your uncle.

Looking through the camera inside a mouse is nothing new; it’s been done over the Internet and turned into the worst scanner ever made. Still, being able to process that image data and do something with it is very cool. Just don’t accept mouse pads from strangers.

Danke [Ianmcmill] for the tip.

PhotoTransistor Based Eye-Tracking

January 3, 2014 by Kevin Darrah 11 Comments

eyetrack

The applications of eye-tracking devices are endless, which is why we always get excited to see new techniques in measuring the absolute position of the human eye. Cornell students [Michael and John] took on an interesting approach for their final project and designed a phototransistor based eye-tracking system.

We can definitely see the potential of this project, but for their first prototype, the system relies on both eye-tracking and head movement to fully control a mouse pointer. An end-product design was in mind, so the system consists of both a pair of custom 3D printed glasses and a wireless receiver; thus avoiding the need to be tethered to the computer under control . The horizontal position of the mouse pointer is controlled via the infrared eye tracking mechanism, consisting of an Infrared LED positioned above the eye and two phototransistors located on each side of the eye. The measured analog data from the phototransistors determine the eye’s horizontal position. The vertical movement of the mouse pointer is controlled with the help of a 3-axis gyroscope mounted to the glasses. The effectiveness of a simple infrared LED/phototransistor to detect eye movement is impressive, because similar projects we’ve seen have been camera based. We understand how final project deadlines can be, so we hope [Michael and John] continue past the deadline with this one. It would be great to see if the absolute position (horizontal and vertical) of the eye can be tracked entirely with the phototransistor technique.

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How To Use The Kenetis KL25Z Freedom Board As An HID Mouse

August 7, 2013 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Eric] is interested in turning this Freedom development board into an air mouse by using the onboard accelerometer. But he had to work through the particulars of the USB HID mouse class before he could get that done.

This Freescale FRDM-KL25Z is one of the awesome ARM boards we looked at a year ago. Can you believe you can get this thing for like thirteen bucks? We suppose the gotcha is that the CodeWarrior IDE meant for use with them is not entirely free. But there is a free trial, and [Eric] shows how much easier it is to tailor the USB stack for your needs with it.

Don’t worry though. If you’re like us and use Open Source For The Win he’s got you covered as well. When you’re done reading his HID mouse writeup head on over to his six-part tutorial for building a free toolchain for the Kenetis boards.