Hacking Amazon Echo Through Its Remote

July 18, 2015 by Will Sweatman 27 Comments

This one’s crazy… literally one electronic device is talking to another. In spoken English. And it works.

We’ve covered several hacks for the Amazon Echo, but some might be surprised to learn that there is another piece of interesting hardware that comes along with it – a remote control. Wire in a Raspberry Pi to it, and you’ve given yourself a way to automate control of the Echo without ever taking the Echo itself apart. [Gamaral] did just this and gave his Echo some significantly enhanced capabilities.

He started off by identifying the power rails of the remote. Then he wires in a 3.3v voltage regulator and uses a 100 ohm resistor as a voltage divider to bring it down to the 1.8 volt logic level used by the Echo remote. A single wire runs from the Raspi GPIO to one of the tactile switches on the controller.

For software, the Raspi is running RPi buildroot with Espeak and a cron scheduler compiled in. This allows him to send commands to the Echo which makes it say just about anything he wants. But any voice commands accepted by the Echo should work. If you want to go outside of those boundaries check out the method of spoofing WeMo devices we saw the other day.

Be sure to check out the [gamaral’s] entertaining video below to see the hack in action.

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Arduino And IR Remote Turn Off Raspberry Pi

July 18, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

With all of the cool features on the Raspberry Pi, it is somewhat notable that it lacks a power button. In a simple setup, the only way to cut power to the tiny computer is to physically remove the power cord. [Dalton63841] found that this was below his wife’s tolerance level for electronics, and built a simple remote control for his Raspberry Pi.

[Dalton63841] started this project by trying to use the UART TX pin, but this turned out to be a dead-end. He decided instead to use an Arduino to monitor the 3.3V power rail on the Pi. When the Pi is shut down in software, the Arduino can sense that the Pi isn’t on any more and disconnect the power. The remote control is used to turn the Pi on. The Arduino reads the IR code from a remote and simply powers up the Pi. This is a very simple and elegant solution that requires absolutely no software to be installed on the Raspberry Pi.

We know that this isn’t the most technically complex project we’ve ever featured, but it is a good beginner project for anyone just getting started with a Pi, Arduino, or using IR. Plus, this could be the perfect thing to pair up with a battery-backup Raspberry Pi shutdown device that allows it to power itself down in a controlled way when a power outage is sensed.

LED Strip Notifies You Of The Light Show You’re Missing Outside

July 17, 2015 by Sarah Petkus 9 Comments

Unless you live way up in Canada, it’s not very likely that those gorgeous coronal mass ejections will collide with the atmosphere above your home. If they do, it’s a rare occurrence you wouldn’t want to miss. This is why [James] devised of a special alarm that would notify him when the Northern Lights may be visible in his neck of the woods. And what’s a better aurora alarm than a simulated aurora light show for your room?

[James] uses a Raspberry Pi to check data from Aurora Watch UK at Lancaster University for local activity. If the forecast reads that there may be some light above his home town in northern England, it triggers a NeoPixel LED strip to scroll through the color values of an actual aurora PNG image. This produces the same sporadic shifting of colors for a proximal ambient indoor lighting effect… though slightly less dramatic than the real thing. You can take a look at his Python script on github if you feel inspired.

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ProxyGambit Better Than ProxyHam; Takes Coffee Shop WiFi Global

July 16, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 17 Comments

Last weekend saw the announcement of ProxyHam, a device that anonymizes Internet activity by jumping on WiFi from public libraries and cafes over a 900MHz radio link. The project mysteriously disappeared and was stricken from the DEFCON schedule. No one knows why, but we spent some time speculating on that and on what hardware was actually used in the undisclosed build.

[Samy Kamkar] has just improved on the ProxyHam concept with ProxyGambit, a device that decouples your location from your IP address. But [Samy]’s build isn’t limited to ProxyHam’s claimed two-mile range. ProxyGambit can work anywhere on the planet over a 2G connection, or up to 10km (6 miles) away through a line-of-sight point to point wireless link.

The more GSM version of ProxyGambit uses two Adafruit FONA GSM breakout boards, two Arduinos, and two Raspberry Pis. The FONA board produces an outbound TCP connection over 2G. The Arduino serves as a serial connection over a reverse TCP tunnel and connects directly to the UART of a Raspberry Pi. The Pi is simply a network bridge at either end of the connection. By reverse tunneling a TCP connection through the ‘throwaway’ part of the build, [Samy] can get an Internet connection anywhere that has 2G service.

Although it’s just a proof of concept and should not be used by anyone who actually needs anonymity, the ProxyGambit does have a few advantages over the ProxyHam. It’s usable just about everywhere on the planet, and not just within two miles of the public WiFi access point. The source for ProxyGambit is also available, something that will never be said of the ProxyHam.

Combining Musical Hatred With Target Practice

July 16, 2015 by Rick Osgood 3 Comments

Not everyone can agree on what good music is, but in some cases you’ll find that just about everyone can agree on what is awful. That’s what the people over at Neo-Pangea discovered when they were listening to Internet radio. When one of those terrible songs hits their collective eardrums, the group’s rage increases and they just need to skip the track.

This is how Engineers act if the song is super-awful

Rather than use a web app or simple push button to do the trick, they turned the “skip” button into a NERF target. They call their creation the Boom Box Blaster and made a fantastic demo ~~film~~ video about it which is found after the break.

Inspired by a painting in the office, the target takes the form of a small hot air balloon. The target obviously needed some kind of sensor that can detect when it is hit by a NERF dart. The group tried several different sensor types, but eventually settled on a medium vibration sensor. This sensor is connected to an Arduino, which then communicates with a Raspberry Pi over a Serial connection. The Pi uses a Python script to monitor the Arduino’s vibration sensor. The system also includes some orange LEDs to simulate flames and a servo attached to the string which suspends the balloon from the ceiling. Whenever a hit is registered, the flames light up and the balloon raises into the air to indicate that the shot was on target.

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Virtual LCD Using Python

July 11, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 6 Comments

[Prashant Mohta] got hold of a Raspberry Pi, a 16×2 LCD display and got down to writing a simple game in Python. Pretty soon, he realized that it was cumbersome to have the Ras-Pi and LCD connected when all he wanted to do was write the code. So he wrote a simple Python module which renders the LCD on his computer display. A simple, quick, useful hack.

[Prashant]’s code relies on the use of Pygame, a set of Python modules designed for writing games. His code uses just two functions – one to define the LCD (characters and number of lines) while the other draws the characters on the screen by looking up an array. The code is just under 20 lines and available from his Github repo. It will be useful to those who are getting started on Python to help them understand some basics. Python is awesome and writing Python code is pretty simple.

This might draw some flak from the naysayers so if you’re commenting below on the merits, or not, of Python, just keep your comments civil and healthy. In the video below, unrelated to this hack, [Raymond Hettinger] talks about “What makes Python so Awesome”!

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Non-Invasive Smart Electricity Meter

July 11, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 44 Comments

There are a lot of ways to measure energy usage in the home, but most of them involve handling mains voltage. Not only that, but sometimes they require handling mains voltage before it gets through a breaker panel or fuse box, meaning that if you make a mistake there are a lot of bad things that can happen. [Yonas] has been working on this problem, and has come up with a non-invasive, safer way to monitor electricity consumption without having to work directly on live wires.

Please note that you should still not be working on mains voltage without proper training, but if you have the required know-how then the installation should be pretty straightforward. The project is based on the Spark Core, and uses clamp-on current sensors to measure energy use. The sensors wrap around the mains cable, meaning you don’t have to disconnect anything to hook them up. The backend runs on a LAMP server which could be a Raspberry Pi if you have one. [Yonas] runs it on a hosted server as a matter of preference.

All of the source code for this is available, and assuming you can get your hands on the current sensors this could be a great way to get started monitoring your energy usage in the house. Be sure to check out the video below for a demonstration of the operation of this device. Of course, if you have a gas line you’ll need this energy monitoring setup too.

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