THP Entry: A 6502 SBC Robot (On Multiple Boards)

August 16, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

SBC

Robots have always been a wonderful tool for learning electronics, but if you compare the robot kits from today against the robot kits from the 80s and early 90s, there’s a marked difference. There are fairly powerful microcontrollers in the new ones, and you program them in languages, and not straight machine code. Given this community’s propensity to say, ‘you could have just used a 555,’ this is obviously a problem.

[Carbon]’s entry for The Hackaday Prize is a great retro callback to the Heathkit HERO and robotic arms you can now find tucked away on a shelf in the electronics lab of every major educational institution. It’s a 65C02 single board computer, designed with robotics in mind.

The 6502 board is just what you would expect; a CPU, RAM, ROM, CPLD glue, and a serial port. The second board down on the stack is rather interesting – it’s a dual channel servo board made entirely out of discrete logic. The final board in the stack is an 8-channel ADC meant for a Pololu reflective sensor, making this 6502 in a Boe-bot chassis a proper line-following robot, coded in 6502 assembly.

[Carbon]’s video of his bot below.

The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

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Why Should You Enter The Hackaday Prize? Because [Ben Heck] Says So.

August 15, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

[Ben Heck] is well-known in the circles we frequent for being a consummate modder, tinkerer, builder, and hacker. We’ve seen his XBox 360 laptops, portabalized PS3s, the ultimate glue gun, and shutter shades that are too cool for [Kanye]. Now he’s telling us about something else that’s really cool – The Hackaday Prize.

All you need to be in the running for prizes that range from a thousand dollars in electronic components to milling machines to a trip to space is build a project that is open, connected (smoke signals count), and documented on hackaday.io. Think you don’t have time to submit an entry before the first round cutoff next week? You’re wrong. You can sit down and hit all the requirements in an hour. All you need is an idea at this point, and you have until November to actually build it.

Talking to Hackaday readers IRL gives us the impression that a lot of you have an idea for something cool and spaceworthy, but you just need a kick in the pants to write it down and start building it. Here it is. Go.

Astronaut Or Astronot: Somebody Won Something!

August 15, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

It’s time once again for our weekly installment of people complaining about our community voting system for The Hackaday Prize! The theme this week – as it was last week – is ‘too cool for Kickstarter’. We’re looking for projects that are so awesome they would never see any mainstream appeal. If you’re still wondering what we mean by that, if this amazing project doesn’t make the top ten in this round of voting, I’ll be terribly disappointed.

Just like last week, we’re trying to give away a goodie bag of programmers, dev boards, and essential bench tools (prize list here) to someone on hackaday.io who has voted for a project that is too cool for Kickstarter.

This week one of you got lucky. Because [Eric] is such a good sport and was kind enough to click a few buttons during this round of community voting, we’re sending him a boat load of dev boards, all the programmers he’ll ever need, a meter that will last him for the rest of his life, and a pretty good power supply. Awesome. Now go congratulate him.

There’s only five days left until the cutoff, so get your project into The Hackaday Prize. At this stage the requirements are extremely minimal, and you can knock everything out in a few hours.

THP Entry: A 433MHz Packet Cloner

August 14, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

ooklone The first generation of The Internet Of Things™ and Home Automation devices are out in the wild, and if there’s one question we can ask it’s, “why hasn’t anyone built a simple cracking device for them”. Never fear, because [texane] has your back with his cheap 433MHz OOK frame cloner.

A surprising number of the IoT and Home Automation devices on the market today use 433MHz radios, and for simplicity’s sake, most of them use OOK encoding. [Texane]’s entry for THP is a simple device with two buttons: one to record OOK frames, and a second to play them back.

Yes, this project can be replicated with fancy software defined radios, but [Texane]’s OOKlone costs an order of magnitude less than the (actually very awesome) HackRF SDR. He says he can build it for less than $20, and with further refinements to the project it could serve as a record and play swiss army knife for anything around 433MHz. Video demo of the device in action below.

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Hacklet #10 Cryptography And Reverse Engineering

August 8, 2014 by Adam Fabio 25 Comments

In honor of DEFCON, this week we’re looking at some cryptography and reverse engineering projects over at Hackaday.io Every hacker loves a hardware puzzle, and [Tom] has created a tool to make those puzzles. His Hardware Reverse Engineering Learning Platform consists of a shield with two ATmega328 chips and an I2C EEPROM. The two Atmel chips share a data bus and I2C lines. Right in the middle of all this is an ST Morpho connector, which allows an ST Nucleo board to act as a sniffer. The platform allows anyone to create a reverse engineering challenge! To successfully reverse engineer a board, it sure helps to have good tools. [coflynn] is giving that to us in spaces with The ChipWhisperer. ChipWhisperer is an open source security research platform. The heart of the system is a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA. The FPGA allows very high speed operations for things like VCC and clock glitching. ChipWhisperer is an entire ecosystem of boards – from LNA blocks to field probes. The entire system is controlled from an easy to use GUI. The end result is a powerful tool for hardware attacks. On the Encryption side of the house, we start by keeping the Feds at bay. The [Sector67] hackerspace has collectively created NSA AWAY. NSA AWAY is a simple method of sending secure messages over an insecure medium – such as email. A one-time use pad is stored on two SD cards, which are used by two Android devices. The message sender uses an Android device to encrypt the message. On the receive side, the message can be decoded simply by pointing an android device’s camera at the encrypted data. So easy, even a grandparent could do it! Next up is [Josh’s] Bury it under the noise floor. “Bury it” is an education for cryptography in general, and steganographic software in particular. [Josh] explains how to use AES-256 encryption, password hashing, and other common techniques. He then introduces steganography by showing how to hide an encrypted message inside an image. Anyone who participated in Hackaday’s ARG build up to The Hackaday Prize will recognize this technique. [yago] gives us encrypted voice communications with his ZRTP Hardphone. The hardphone implements the ZRTP, a protocol for encrypted voice over IP communications. The protocol is implemented by a Raspberry Pi using a couple of USB sound cards. User interface is a 16×2 Line character LCD, a membrane keypad, and of course a phone handset. Don’t forget that you need to build two units,or whoever you’re trying to call will be rather confused!

Finally we have the Mooltipass. Developed right here on Hackaday by [Mathieu Stephan] and the community at large, Mooltipass is a secure password storage system. All your passwords can be stored fully AES-256 encrypted, with a Smart Card key. Under the hood, Mooltipass uses an Arduino compatible ATmega32U4 microcontroller. UI is through a OLED screen and touch controls. That’s it for this week! Be sure to check out next week’s Hacklet, when we bring you more of the best from Hackaday.io!

Astronaut Or Astronot: Don’t Try To Record SQL Queries At DEFCON

August 8, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

It’s Friday morning and time for another round of Astronaut Or Astronot, the little lottery thing where we’re giving away lots of dev boards, programmers, and an awesome meter to someone on hackaday.io if they have voted in the latest round of voting.

There’s no video this week because, you know, DEFCON, but the person randomly chosen did not vote. Too bad.

This means the voting will continue next week, same time. If you want a chance to get your grubby mitts on a bunch of awesome gear, vote. Do it now.

Your 15 Days To Be Excellent

August 5, 2014 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

This is it. It’s time to step up and be a hardware hacker.

If you haven’t submitted your entry for The Hackaday Prize, get out that graph paper and mechanical pencil and start scribbling. The coming fortnight is your time to shine.

As of right now you have exactly fifteen days to tell us about your concept for an Open, Connected device. This doesn’t mean you have to finish the build, there’s time for that after the August 20th deadline. What you do need to do is describe your idea and explain how you plan to build a working prototype for the final deadline in early November.

I’ve appealed to your vanity — it’s hard to call yourself a hacker if you sit on the sidelines for this one! Now I’ll appeal to your want of recognition and the prizes that dreams are made of. Right now we haven’t quite crossed the 500 entry mark. When was the last time you had a chance as good as 1 in 500 for such a huge bag of booty?