TI’s New Family Of WiFi Chips

July 4, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

cccc Texas Instruments’ CC3000 WiFi chip is the darling of everyone producing the latest and greatest Internet of Thing, and it’s not much of a surprise: In quantity, these chips are only $10 a piece. That’s a lot less expensive than the WiFi options a year ago. Now, TI is coming out with a few new modules to their WiFi module family, including one that includes an ARM micro.

The CC3000 has found a home in booster packs, breakout boards for the Arduino, and Spark, who are actually some pretty cool dudes.Still, the CC3000 has a few shortcomings; 802.11n isn’t available, and it would be really cool if the CC3000 had a web server on it.

The newest chips add these features and a whole lot more. [Valkyrie] got his hands on a CC3100Boost board and was pleased to find all the files for the webserver can be completely replaced. Here’s your Internet of Things, people. The CC3200 is even better, with a built-in ARM Cortex M4 with ADCs, a ton of GPIOs, an SD card interface, and even a parallel port for a camera. If you’re looking to pull a hardware startup out of your hat, you might want to plan your Kickstarter around this chip.

It’s all very cool stuff, and although the bare chips aren’t available yet, you can get an eval module from TI, with an FCC certified module with the crystals and antenna coming later this year.

THP Entry: The Improved Open Source Tricorder

June 11, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

Since [Gene Roddenberry] traveled back in time from the 23rd century, the idea of a small, portable device has wound its way through the social consciousness, eventually turning into things like smartphones, PDAs, and all the other technological gadgetry of modern life. A few years ago, [Peter Jansen] started The Tricorder Project, the start of the ultimate expression of [Mr. Roddneberry]’s electronic swiss army knife. Now [Peter] is building a better, smaller version for The Hackaday Prize.

[Peter]’s first tricorders borrowed their design heavily from The Next Generation props with a fold-out section, two displays, and a bulky front packed to the gills with sensors and detectors. Accurate if you’re cosplaying, but not the most practical in terms of interface and human factors consideration. These constraints led [Peter] to completely redesign his tricorder, disregarding the painted wooden blocks found on Enterprise and putting all the electronics in a more usable form factor.

A muse of sorts was found in the Radiation Watch, a tiny, handheld Geiger counter meant as an add-on to smartphones. [Peter] envisions a small ~1.5″ OLED display on top, a capacitive sensing wheel in the middle, and a swipe bar at the bottom. Basically, it looks like a 1st gen iPod nano, but much, much more useful.

Plans for what to put in this improved tricorder include temperature, humidity, pressure, and gas sensors, a 3-axis magnetometer, x-ray and gamma ray detectors, a polarimeter, colorimeter, spectrometer, 9-axis IMU, a microphone, a lightning sensor, and WiFi courtesy of TI’s CC3000 module. Also included is something akin to a nuclear event detector; if it still exists, there has been no nuclear event.

It’s an astonishing array of technology packed into an extremely small enclosure – impressive for something that is essentially a homebrew device.Even if it doesn’t win the Hackaday Prize, it’s still an ambitious attempt at putting data collection and science in everyone’s pocket – just like in Star Trek.

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.

Showing the tablet interface for the scope

Discovering A Wifi Enabled 10MHz Oscilloscope

May 23, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 17 Comments

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEqWtKGJhFQ&w=580]

As most of our readers know, [Mike] was visiting Bay Area Maker Faire last weekend with a big Jolly Wrencher on his back. During his tour he encountered the neat oscilloscope shown in the video above, made by the Belgian company Velleman. Even though it only has a 10MS/s sampling rate and a 10MHz bandwidth, our guess is that it may still be useful for some hobbyists out there as it can communicate with any PC/smartphone/tablet using its Wifi interface.

Inside the black box is a 3.7V 1800mAh Li-ion battery with a USB port to recharge it or update the oscilloscope’s firmware. As seen in the video, the tablet’s touchscreens may enable more natural interaction with the user interface. The protocol used to export the acquired samples is open, which may allow users to create their own analysis program. The oscilloscope uses an 8 bit analog to digital converter and a 4K samples buffer.

I2S Audio And SPI Display With An Ethernet Module

April 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

LCD [kgsws] is working on a small project that requires some audio and a display of some sort. While this project can be easily completed with a bigish microcontroller or ARM board, he’s taking a much simpler route: the entire project is built around a cheap router module, giving this project amazing expandability for a very meager price.

The router module in question is the HLK-RM04 from Hi-Link, commonly found via the usual Chinese resellers for about $25. On board this module is a UART, Ethernet, and a WiFi adapter along with a few GPIO pins for interfacing with the outside world.

[kgsws] is using the native SPI pins on this module to control the clock and data lines for the tiny LCD, with a GPIO pin toggling the chip select. I2S audio is also implemented, decoded with an 8-bit DAC, the MCP4801.

It’s an extremely inexpensive solution for putting audio and video in a project, and since this board has Ethernet, WiFi, and a few more GPIO pins, it’s can do much more than whatever [kgsws] is planning next.

Hackaday Links: January 5, 2014

January 5, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

While we can’t condone the actual use of this device, [Husam]’s portable WiFi jammer is actually pretty cool. It uses a Raspberry Pi and an Aircrack-ng compatible dongle to spam the airwaves with deauth packets. The entire device is packaged in a neat box with an Arduino-controlled LCD and RGB LEDs. Check out an imgur gallery here.

You can pick up a wireless phone charger real cheap from any of the usual internet outlets, but try finding one that’s also a phone stand. [Malcolm] created his own. He used a Qi charger from DealExtreme and attached it to a 3D printed phone stand.

A while back, [John] noticed an old tube radio in an antique store. No, he didn’t replace the guts with a Raspberry Pi and an SD card full of MP3s. He just brought it back to working condition. After fixing the wiring (no ground cord on these old things), repairing the speaker cone, putting some new twine on the tuner and replacing the caps, [John] has himself a new old radio. Here’s a video of the complete refurbishment.

Here’s a Sega Master System (pretty much a Game Gear) running on an STM32 dev board. Also included are some ROMs for some classic games – Sonic the Hedgehog, Castle of Illusion, and The Lion King. If you have this STM Discovery board you can grab the emulator right here.

[Spencer] wanted a longer battery life in his iPhone, so he did what any engineering student would do: he put another battery in parallel.

Breadboarding something with an AVR or MAX232? Print out some of these stickers and make sure you get the pinouts right. Thanks, [Marius].

Ask Hackaday: Can You Hack An Appliance Into A Spy Device?

November 13, 2013 by Marsh 96 Comments

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A story surfaced a few days before Halloween on Russian news site Rosbalt (yep, that’s in Russian), claiming Russian authorities intercepted Chinese-made electric irons and kettles: each equipped with microphones and WiFi. You can read a summary in English on the BBC’s website. The “threat” imposed by these “spy appliances” is likely the result of gross exaggeration if not downright fear mongering against Chinese-made products. It’s not worth our (or your) effort to speculate on what’s really happening here, but the situation does present a fun exercise.

Say you wanted to spice up your pen testing by altering a small home appliance: how easily could you build it? Let us know in the comments which appliance would serve as the best “host” for the modifications and what features you would include. Could you manage all the components listed in the article–a microphone, WiFi (any chance of cracking unsecured networks?), plus some vague indication that it “spreads viruses?” There’s a video below with a few glimpses of the electronics in question, but unless you speak Russian it probably won’t offer much insight.

Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Can You Hack An Appliance Into A Spy Device?” →

Making Use Of The Trancend WiFi SD Card

October 17, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

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[CNLohr] spends most of his time on the Internet, but sometimes real life drags him away from his keyboard. These “vacations”, as he calls them, don’t have a good Internet connection and forces him to rely on flaky cell phone connections that go up and down at the drop of a hat. Figuring this would be a great opportunity for some hardware hacking, [CNLohr] came up with an ‘Internet-o-mometer’ – a device powered by a Trancend WiFi SD card that uses an 8×8 LED display to show the current status of his phone’s Internet connection.

This build uses the Trancend WiFi SD card motherboard we’ve seen before. When the card boots, it tries to connect to his phone’s WiFi connection. When it connects, a green smiley face is displayed on the LED matrix. When a whole lot of files are downloaded or, more specifically, the ping to google.com is more than 4 seconds, a red frowny face indicates the Internet connection is down.

In other Trancend WiFi SD card news, a whole lot of people including [Dan Krause] (thanks for the tip) have been working on a complete replacement OS for these neat little cards. Right now the OS is in very rough shape, but there is a pre-built system available should anyone want to experiment. [CNLohr] is also working on a compact, double-sided version of his SD card motherboard and we’ll be happy to feature a link to his Tindie store when he sends that in.