The Rusty Nail Award For Worst WiFi Antenna

April 23, 2020 by Dan Maloney 34 Comments

In general, you get what you pay for, and if what you pay for is a dollar-store WiFi antenna that claims to provide 12 dBi of signal gain, you shouldn’t be surprised when a rusty nail performs better than it.

The panel antenna that caught [Andrew McNeil]’s eye in a shop in Rome is a marvel of marketing genius. He says what caught his eye was the Windows Vista compatibility label, a ploy that really dates this gem. So too does the utterly irrelevant indication that it’s USB compatible when it’s designed to plug into an SMA jack on a WiFi adapter. [Andrew]’s teardown was uninspiring, revealing just a PCB with some apparently random traces to serve as the elements of a dipole. We found it amusing that the PCB silkscreen labels the thru-holes as H1 to H6, which is a great way to make an uncrowded board seem a bit more important.

The test results were no more impressive than the teardown. A network analyzer scan revealed that the antenna isn’t tuned for the 2.4-GHz WiFi band at all, and practical tests with the antenna connected to an adapter were unable to sniff out any local hotspots. And just to hammer home the point of how bad this antenna is, [Andrew] cobbled together a simple antenna from an SMA connector and a rusty nail, which handily outperformed the panel antenna.

We’ve seen plenty of [Andrew McNeil]’s WiFi antenna videos before, like his umbrella and tin can dish. We like the sanity he brings to the often wild claims of WiFi enthusiasts and detractors alike, especially when he showed that WiFi doesn’t kill houseplants. We can’t help but wonder what he thinks about the current 5G silliness.

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Keep The Family At Bay While Working From Home With This WiFi Do Not Disturb Dongle

March 20, 2020 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Those who have been suddenly introduced to the wonderful world of working from home over the last couple of weeks may have experienced a bit of culture shock. Even with today’s open floorplan workspaces and less-formal expectations, work isn’t home. That’s especially true with young children in the house, who’ll probably respond to seeing mommy or daddy working from home much differently than [Bob] from accounting would at the office.

To smooth out the rough spots of transitioning to a full-time work-from-home setup, [Brian Lough] threw together this web-enabled “do not disturb” beacon for his office door. The original idea was to simply provide a red light and a green light to let the rest of the family know when [Brian] would be in a meeting, but in an example of scope creep that turned out to be useful, [Mrs. Lough] rewrote the spec to include a button on the family-facing side so that she could alert him that his presence is requested.

[Brian] went through a couple of prototype using both an ESP32 and an ESP8266. We were rooting for the ESP32, which [Brian] was leveraging for its built-in capacitive touch input. That would have eliminated a physical button, but alas, the ESP8266 made it into the final build, along with lots and lots of Blu-Tack. The video below details the build and the code, and features an adorable Irish lesson as a bonus.

Yes, a simple text message would probably have satisfied the specs, but where’s the sport in that? Then again, as [Brian] points out, this build seemed oddly familiar for a good reason.

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If Coffee == True {

March 7, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

Having a shared coffee maker in the workplace is both a blessing and a curse. It’s nice to have constant access to coffee, but it can be frustrating to find the coffee pot emptied right as you walk in to the break room. To solve this problem in their office, [Vitort] and co. built an IOT solution that notifies everyone of the current coffee status on a Slack channel.

This project wasn’t built just as a convenience for the office, either. It makes extensive use of AWS SNS, the simple notification system from Amazon Web Services because they wanted to learn to use this technology specifically. Besides the notification system, the device itself is based on a NodeMCU/ESP8266, communicating over WiFi, and is a simple push-button design which coffee drinkers push when a fresh pot is made, and then push again when the coffee is empty.

While relatively straightforward, this project is a good one to look at if you’ve been interested in AWS at all, especially the simple notification system. It’s a pretty versatile tool, and all of the code used in the project is available on the project page for your reading pleasure. If you’re more interested in the coffee aspect of this project, we have a special coffee maker for you too.

New Part Day: The Wi-Fi Stepper Gets Ideas Working Faster

February 10, 2020 by Donald Papp 38 Comments

Like most of us, I sometimes indulge in buying a part for its potential or anticipated utility rather than for a specific project or purpose. That’s exactly how I ended up with the WSX100 Wi-Fi Stepper, a single board device intended to be one of the fastest and easiest ways to get a stepper motor integrated into a project. Mine came from their Crowd Supply campaign, which raised money for production and continues to accept orders.

What’s It For?

The WSX100 Wi-Fi Stepper Driver (with motor), by Good Robotics

The main reason the Wi-Fi Stepper exists is to make getting a stepper motor up and running fast and simple, in a way that doesn’t paint a design into a corner. The device can certainly be used outside of prototyping, but I think one of its best features is the ability to help quickly turn an idea into something physical. When prototyping, it’s always better to spend less time on basic bits like driving motors.

In a way, stepper motors are a bit like RGB LEDs or LCD displays were before integrated drivers and easy interfaces became common for them. Steppers require work (and suitable power supplies) to get up and running, and that effort can be a barrier to getting an idea off the ground. With the Wi-Fi Stepper, a motor can be fired up and given positional commands (or set to a speed and direction) in no time at all. By sending commands over WiFi, there isn’t even the need to wire up any control logic.

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NFC For Your Home Automation

January 30, 2020 by Brian McEvoy 26 Comments

If home automation in the IoT era has taught us anything, it is that no one wants to run wires. Many of us rent, so new cabling is not even an option, even if we wanted to go that route. If you want a unique sensor, you have to build your own, and [tmkThings] wanted an NFC scanner at his front door. Just like arriving at work, he scans his credentials, and the door unlocks automagically.

Inside a little white box, we find an ESP8266 speaking Wifi attached to a PN532 talking NFC, and both are familiar names on these pages. The code, which is available on GitHub, links up with IFTTT and MQTT. For the security-minded, we won’t see this on your front door, but you can trigger your imagination’s limit of events from playing your favorite jams at the end of the day to powering down all the televisions at bedtime.

NFC hacks are great because they are instantly recognizable and readers are inexpensive, but deadbolt hacking is delightful in our books.

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36C3: All Wireless Stacks Are Broken

December 30, 2019 by Elliot Williams 29 Comments

Your cellphone is the least secure computer that you own, and worse than that, it’s got a radio. [Jiska Classen] and her lab have been hacking on cellphones’ wireless systems for a while now, and in this talk gives an overview of the wireless vulnerabilities and attack surfaces that they bring along. While the talk provides some basic background on wireless (in)security, it also presents two new areas of research that she and her colleagues have been working on the last year.

One of the new hacks is based on the fact that a phone that wants to support both Bluetooth and WiFi needs to figure out a way to share the radio, because both protocols use the same 2.4 GHz band. And so it turns out that the Bluetooth hardware has to talk to the WiFi hardware, and it wouldn’t entirely surprise you that when [Jiska] gets into the Bluetooth stack, she’s able to DOS the WiFi. What this does to the operating system depends on the phone, but many of them just fall over and reboot.

Lately [Jiska] has been doing a lot of fuzzing on the cell phone stack enabled by some work by one of her students [Jan Ruge] work on emulation, codenamed “Frankenstein”. The coolest thing here is that the emulation runs in real time, and can be threaded into the operating system, enabling full-stack fuzzing. More complexity means more bugs, so we expect to see a lot more coming out of this line of research in the next year.

[Jiska] gives the presentation in a tinfoil hat, but that’s just a metaphor. In the end, when asked about how to properly secure your phone, she gives out the best advice ever: toss it in the blender.

Zombies Ate Your Neighbors? Tell Everyone Through LoRa!

December 4, 2019 by Sven Gregori 24 Comments

As popular as the post-apocalyptic Zombie genre is, there is a quite unrealistic component to most of the stories. Well, apart from the whole “the undead roaming the Earth” thing. But where are the nerds, and where is all the apocalypse-proof, solar-powered tech? Or is it exactly this lack of tech in those stories that serves as incentive to build it in the first place? Well, maybe it doesn’t have to be the end of the world to seek for ways to cope with a collapse of our modern communication infrastructure either. Just think of natural disasters — an earthquake or hurricane causing a long-term power outage for example. The folks at [sudomesh] tackle exactly this concern with their fully open source, off-grid, solar-powered, LoRa mesh network, Disaster Radio.

The network itself is built from single nodes comprising of a battery-backed solar panel, a LoRa module, and either the ESP8266 or ESP32 for WiFi connectivity. The idea is to connect to the network with your mobile phone through WiFi, therefore eliminating any need for additional components to actually use the network, and have the nodes communicate with each other via LoRa. Admittedly, LoRa may not be your best choice for high data rates, but it is a good choice for long-range communication when cellular networks aren’t an option. And while you can built it all by yourself with everything available on [sudomesh]’s GitHub page, a TTGO ESP32 LoRa module will do as well.

If the idea itself sounds familiar, we did indeed cover similar projects like HELPER and Skrypt earlier this year, showing that LoRa really seems to be a popular go-to for off-grid communication. But well, whether we really care about modern communication and helping each other out when all hell breaks loose instead of just primevally defending our own lives is of course another question.