Thwomp Drops Brick On Retro Gaming

December 3, 2016 by Rich Hawkes 19 Comments

[Geeksmithing] wanted to respond to a challenge to build a USB hub using cement. Being a fan of Mario Brothers, a fitting homage is to build a retro-gaming console from cement to look just like your favorite Mario-crushing foe. With a Raspberry Pi Zero and a USB hub embedded in it, [Geeksmithing] brought the Mario universe character that’s a large cement block — the Thwomp — to life.

[Geeksmithing] went through five iterations before he arrived at one that worked properly. Initially, he tried using a 3D printed mold; the cement stuck to the plastic ruining the cement on the face. He then switched to using a mold in liquid rubber (after printing out a positive model of the Thwomp to use when creating the mold). But the foam board frame for the mold didn’t hold, so [Geeksmithing] added some wood to stabilize things. Unfortunately, the rubber stuck to both the foam board and the 3D model making it extremely difficult to get the model out.

Like [Han] in carbonite, that's a Rapsberry Pi Zero being encased in cement — Like [Han] in carbonite, that’s a Raspberry Pi Zero being encased in cement

Next up was regular silicone mold material. He didn’t have enough silicone rubber to cover the model, so he added some wood as filler to raise the level of the liquid. He also flipped the model over so that he’d at least get the face detail. He found some other silicone and used it to fill in the rest of the mold. Despite the different silicone, this mold worked. The duct tape he used to waterproof the Raspberry Pi, however, didn’t. He tried again, this time he used hot glue – a lot of hot glue! – to waterproof the Pi. This cast was better, and he was able to fire up the Pi, but after a couple of games his controller stopped working. He cracked open the cement to look at the Pi and realized that a small hole in the hot glue caused a leak that shorted out the USB port on the Pi. One last time, he thought, this time he used liquid electrical tape to waterproof the Pi.

The final casting worked and after painting, [Geeksmithing] had a finished cement Thwomp console that would play retro games. He missed the deadline for the USB Hub Challenge, but it’s still a great looking console, and his video has a lot of detail about what went wrong (and right) during his builds. There’s a great playlist on YouTube of the other entries in the challenge, check them out along with [Geeksmithing]’s video below!

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This Quick Hack Will Keep You Online During Your Next Power Outage

November 28, 2016 by James Hobson 56 Comments

The modern human’s worst nightmare: a power outage. Left without cat memes, Netflix, and — of course — Hackaday, there’s little to do except participate in the temporary anarchy that occurs when left without internet access. Lamenting over expensive and bulky uninterruptible power supplies, Youtube user [Gadget Addict] hacked together a UPS power bank that might just stave off the collapse of order in your household.

This simple and functional hack really amounts to snipping the end off of a USB power cable. The cable is then attached to a screw terminal to barrel connector adapter and plugged it into a pass-through power USB power bank. No, really — that’s all there is to it. [Gadget Addict] notes that while most modems and routers are designed to run off a 12V power supply, they still operate at 5V. He goes on to connect several router and router/modem combination units to the power bank. In each case the system appears to boot up and perform normally.

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Bringing USB Devices To The Apple Desktop Bus

November 20, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

During the development of the greatest member of the Apple II family, the Apple IIgs, someone suggested to [Woz] that a sort of universal serial bus was needed for keyboards, mice, trackballs, and other desktop peripherals. [Woz] disappeared for a time and came back with something wonderful: a protocol that could be daisy-chained from keyboard to a graphics tablet to a mouse. This protocol was easily implemented on a cheap microcontroller, provided 500mA to the entire bus, and was used for everything from license dongles to modems.

The Apple Desktop Bus, or ADB, was a decade ahead of its time, and was a mainstay of the Mac platform until Apple had the courage to kill it off with the iMac. At that time, an industry popped up overnight for ADB to USB converters. Even today, there’s a few mechanical keyboard aficionados installing Teensies in their favorite input devices to give them a USB port.

While plugging an old Apple keyboard into a modern computer is a noble pursuit — this post was written on an Apple M0116 keyboard with salmon Alps switches — sometimes you want to go the other way. Wouldn’t it be cool to use a modern USB mouse and keyboard with an old Mac? That’s what [anthon] thought, so he developed the ADB Busboy.

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DIY KVM Switch Lets You Use One Keyboard And Mouse With Multiple Computers

November 12, 2016 by James Hobson 36 Comments

Here’s a quick DIY hack if you happen to have multiple computers at home or at the office and are tired of juggling mice and keyboards. [Kedar Nimbalkar] — striving for a solution — put together a keyboard, video and mouse switcher that allows one set to control two computers.

A DPDT switch is connected to a female USB port, and two male USB cables — with the ground and 5V wires twisted together and connected to the switch — each running to a PC. [Nimbalkar] suggests ensuring that the data lines are correctly wired, and testing that the 5V and ground are connected properly. He then covered the connections with some hot glue to make it a little more robust since it’s about to see a lot of use.

Now all that’s needed is a quick press of the button to change which PC you are working on, streamlining what can be a tedious changeover — especially useful if you have a custom keyboard you want to use all the time.

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Duckhunting – Stopping Rubber Ducky Attacks

October 28, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 51 Comments

One morning, a balaclava-wearing hacker walks into your office. You assume it’s a coworker, because he’s wearing a balaclava. The hacker sticks a USB drive into a computer in the cube next door. Strange command line tools show up on the screen. Minutes later, your entire company is compromised. The rogue makes a quick retreat carrying a thumb drive in hand.

This is the scenario imagined by purveyors of balaclavas and USB Rubber Duckys, tiny USB devices able to inject code, run programs, and extract data from any system. The best way — and the most common — to prevent this sort of attack is by filling the USB ports with epoxy. [pmsosa] thought there should be a software method of defense against these Rubber Duckys, so he’s created Duckhunter, a small, efficient daemon that can catch and prevent these exploits.

The Rubber Ducky attack is simply opening up a command line and spewing an attack from an emulated USB HID keyboard. If the attacker can’t open up cmd or PowerShell, the attack breaks. That’s simple enough to code, but [pmsosa] has a few more tricks up his sleeve. Duckhunter has a ‘sneaky’ countermeasure feature, where one out of every 5-7 keystrokes is blocked. To the attacker, the ‘sneaky’ countermeasure makes it look like the attack worked, where in fact it failed spectacularly.

There are a number of different attacks similar to what the Rubber Ducky can accomplish. Mousejack performs the same attack over Bluetooth. BadUSB is a little more technical, allowing anyone with access to a device’s firmware to turn your own keyboard against you. Because of the nature of the attack, Duckhunter shuts them all down.

Right now the build is only for Windows, but according to [pmsosa]’s GitHub there will be Linux and OS X versions coming.

Raspberry Pi Zero As A USB Stick

October 24, 2016 by Elliot Williams 38 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Zero is small enough that it could almost be mistaken for a USB gadget, rather than a standalone computer. Maybe that was the inspiration that drove [Novaspirit] to completely “donglify” his Zero.

This is a great convenience hack if you’ve got a Zero just kicking around. With minimal soldering, he converted the Zero’s onboard female USB jacks into a male USB plug. From there on out, it’s all software, and the video (embedded below) takes you through all the steps on Windows.

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This Miniscule IR To HID Keyboard Hides In A Key Cap

October 17, 2016 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

Shards of silicon these days, they’re systematically taking what used to be rather complicated and making it dead simple in terms of both hardware and software. Take, for instance, this IR to HID Keyboard module. Plug it into a USB port, point your remote control at it, and you’re sending keyboard commands from across the room.

To do this cheaply and with a small footprint used to be the territory of bit-banging software hacks like V-USB, but recently the low-cost lines of microcontrollers that are anything but low-end have started speaking USB in hardware. It’s a brave new world.

In this case we’re talking about the PIC18F25J50 which is going to ring in at around three bucks in single quantity. The other silicon invited to the party is an IR receiver (which demodulates the 38 kHz carrier signal used by most IR remotes) with a regulator and four passives to round out the circuit. the board is completely single-sided with one jumper (although the IR receiver is through-hole so you don’t quite get out of it without drilling). All of this is squeezed into a space small enough to be covered by a single key cap — a nice touch to finish off the project.

[Suraj] built this as a FLIRC clone — a way to control your home-built HTPC from the sofa. Although we’re still rocking our own HTPC, it hasn’t been used as a front-end for many years. This project caught our attention for a different reason. We want to lay down a challenge for anyone who is attending SuperCon (or not attending and just want to show off their chops).

This is nearly the same chip as you’ll find on the SuperCon badge. That one is a PIC18LF25K50, and the board already has an IR receiver on it. Bring your PIC programmer and port this code from MikroC over to MPLAB X for the sibling that’s on the badge and you’ll get the hacking cred you’ve long deserved.

[via Embedded Lab]