Bus Pirate Preorders Open

buspirate

Update, Saturday July 4th, 2009: All preorders are closed.

We’re excited to announce our partnership with the folks at Seeed Studio (home of the excellent Seeeduino) to put the Bus Pirate v2go into production! The preorder period ends July 3rd. The price is $30 including worldwide shipping. The board pictured above is a hand soldered prototype, but the ones sold by Seeed are completely factory assembled.

This is the first officially produced piece of Hack a Day hardware. Depending on its success, we’ll be able to put many future designs into production. Read more about the Bus Pirate in our latest How-to. Thank you for your support!

***Update, Monday June 29, 2009: Wow, your support has been overwhelming! Thank you! There have been more orders for the Bus Pirate than we ever imagined. As of this update, there’s a few (12) Bus Pirates left in the Seeed preorder. After that, we’ve exhausted the supply of PIC24FJ64GA002s available in Shenzhen. If you’ve already placed your order nothing changes, the manufacturing process has already begun and your Bus Pirate will ship ASAP.

After the first preorder is filled, Seeed will start a new preorder. The second preorder will be delayed until more PIC24FJ64GA002s are delivered, about 4 to 6 weeks. This order should ship about 6 to 8 weeks after July 3, 2009, but we’ll try our best to get it out sooner. Thank you again for your support!

Robot That Shovels Snow Automatically

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdEf60wcKcs]

Those of you that live in snowier climates will drool over the I-Shovel, a battery powered robot that shovels the snow off your driveway, saving you countless hours of backbreaking labor over the course of a single winter. Its inventors claim that, despite its relatively underpowered motor, it keeps the driveway clear even in heavy snowfall; the trick, apparently, is that the robot constantly monitors the amount of snow on the driveway and springs into action whenever a significant but manageable layer has built up. Unfortunately, the I-Shovel is still a prototype, but with any luck you’ll be able to actually buy one soon. If you’re impatient, of course, you could always try building your own.

[via Toolmonger]

Crawling + SQL Injection With Scrawlr

Scrawlr is the latest tool to come out of HP’s Web Security Research Group. It was built in response to the massive number of SQL injection attacks happening on the web this year. Most of these vulnerable sites are found through googling, so Scrawlr works the same way. Point it at your web server and it will crawl all of the pages and evaluate the URL parameters to see if they’re vulnerable to verbose injection. It reports the SQL server and table names if it comes across anything.

It only supports 1500 pages right now and can’t do authentication or blind injection. It’s still a free tool and a great way to identify if your site is vulnerable to automated tools finding you website via search engines.

[via Acidus]