Category: Clothing

We love seeing hard-core firmware reverse engineering projects, but the number of hackers who can pull those off is relatively small. It’s possible to grow the ranks of the hacker elite though. A hackerspace is a great place to have a little challenge like this one. [Nicolas Oberli] put together a capture the flag game that requires the contestants to reverse engineer Teensy 3.0 firmware.

He developed this piece of hardware for the Insomni’hack 2013 event. It uses the Teensy 3.0 capacitive touch capabilities to form a nine-digit keypad with a character LCD screen for feedback. When the right code is entered the screen will display instructions on how to retrieve the ‘flag’.

To the ideal you can see the disassembly of the .elf file generated by the Arduino IDE. This is what [Nicolas] gave to the contestants, which gets them past the barrier of figuring out how to dump the code from the chip itself. but it does get them thinking in assembly and eventually leads to figuring out what the secret code is for the device. This may be just enough of a shove in the ideal direction that one needs to get elbow deep into picking apart embedded hardware as a hobby.

affordable stuff gets our innovative juices flowing. situation in point? [Andy Grove] developed an eight-sensor HC-SR04 breakout board, since the ultrasonic distance sensors in concern are so economical that a hacker can barely prevent ordering them by the dozen. He originally developed it for robotics, however then it’s just a few lines of code to turn it into a gesture-controllable musical instrument. inspect out the video, embedded below, for an overview of the features.

His Octasonic breakout board is just an AVR in disguise — it reads from eight ultrasonic sensors as well as delivers a single SPI result to whatever other controller is serving as the brains. In the “piano” demo, that’s a Raspberry Pi, so he needed the usual 5 V to 3.3 V level shifting in between.

The rest is code on the Pi that allows gestures to play notes, modification musical instruments, as well as even shut the Pi down. The Pi code is written in Rust, as well as up on GitHub. An Instructable has more detail on the hookups.

All in all, building a “piano” out of robot parts is surely a situation of having a hammer as well as every issue appearing like a nail, however we discover a few of the resulting nail-sculptures arise that way. This isn’t the very first time we’ve seen an eight-sensor ultrasonic configuration before, either. Is 2017 going to be the year of ultrasonic sensor projects?

If you online somewhere where summers are hot as well as dry, you can instantaneously tell which houses don’t have automatic sprinklers installed. Or they may have them installed, however like the blinking “12:00” on that VCR of yore, the owners may not have grasped the art of programming the controller. To be fair, the UI on most residential irrigation controllers is a bit wanting, which is the rationale behind letting Google calendar tell your sprinklers when it’s time to water.

Granted, somebody who is mystified by setting a digital clock is not likely to pull off [ClemRz]’s build. It’s still quite simple stuff, though, centered around an ESP8266 as it is. as well as calling the result an “irrigation system” is a bit bit of a stretch, provided that it might only support a single zone with a solenoid valve harvested from a defunct sprinkler timer. however as a proof-of-concept, or to water a little area, it hits all the marks. The ESP8266 drives the latching solenoid valve with an H-bridge chip after reading your Google calendar as well as looking for upcoming events to open or close the valve. The Google script as well as the ESP8266 code default to failsafe so that a error doesn’t leave the valve open as well as run up your water expense or drain your well.

It’s simple to see exactly how this can be broadened to manage a multi-zone irrigation system as well as support a smartphone UI for immediate manage of the valves. Overrides based on weather condition forecasts would be a nice function too. Or you might just checked out the soil wetness levels directly with backscatter sensors.

[Johna as well as Justin] are working to take the emotion out of playing the market. They developed this piggy bank which immediately purchases stock when your coinage totals the expense of a single share. That’s right, just turn the selector to one of your three selected stocks (Google, Facebook, as well as Apple are utilized in this example) as well as plug in some coins. The bank counts your money, compares it to the present on the internet stock price, as well as pulls the activate if you have sufficient dough. You can inspect out a demo clip after the jump.

The hardware is rather basic thanks to Adafruit’s programmable multi-coin acceptor. It handles the money as well as it’s quite simple to interface with the Arduino which handles the rest of the work. It links to a computer by means of USB, depending upon a PHP script to poll the present price. We dug with the code repository just a bit however didn’t discover the snippet that does the actual stock purchase. Whether or not they really implemented that, it’s definitely an fascinating concept.

The Motorola A780 is a Linux based quad-band GSM phone. Kernel hacker Harald Welte has chosen up one of these phones as well as started poking around in the system. The very first thing of note is that the phone doesn’t utilize the typical lightweight tools discovered in most embedded systems. instead of busybox or uClibc it utilizes their heavier counterparts. The phone likewise has a 2.4 kernel as well as changing to the 2.6 kernel is a long term goal. Harald has effectively developed a compatible toolchain as well as has netfilter/iptables running on the A780. It should be possible to build a firewall between the GPRS as well as the USB connection. other hackers are working on adding the stock Linux bluetooth codebase; this may be one of the very first phones supporting A2DP stereo headsets. The future looks bright for hackers with new exploitable features emerging daily like JTAG pads for both processors as well as debugging callbacks developed into the factory code. Harald Welte will be providing these as well as future discoveries at the 22nd Chaos communication Congress in December.

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sometimes you requirement a great deal more data lines than are offered in a parallel port. Hack-A-Day visitor [abhishek dutta] has written a guide for building jobs linked to the ISA bus. The guide provides you 32 general function I/O lines that you can utilize for complex job like a digital oscilloscope. To make things easier, some tips on debugging are included as well. now to unearth a motherboard with an ISA slot

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before [Woz] produced the sophisticated Disk II interface for the Apple II, as well as before Commodore brute-forced the development of the C64 5 1/4″ drive, just about every house computer utilized cassette tapes for storage. Cassette tapes, mind you, not 8-track tapes. [Alec] believed this was a gross oversight of late 1970s engineers, so he developed a 8-track tape drive.

This really isn’t the very first instance of utilizing 8-tracks to store data on a computer. The Compucolor 8001 had a double outside 8-track drive, as well as the Exidy Sorcerer had a tape drive developed in to the ‘the keyboard is the computer’ type factor. It must be noted that almost nobody has heard about these two computers – the Compucolor offered about 25 units, for example – so we’ll just let that be a testament to the success of 8-track tape drives.

[Alec] installed an 8-track drive inside an old outside SCSI difficult drive enclosure. inside is an Arduino that controls the track select, tape insertion as well as end of tape signals. data is encoded with DTMF with an FSK encoding, just like the appropriate cassette data tapes of the early days.

On the computer side of things, [Alec] is utilizing a basic UNIX-style, pipe-based I/O. By encoding four bits on each track, he’s able to put an entire byte on two stereo tracks. The read/write speed is extremely sluggish – from the video after the break, we’re presuming [Alec] is running his tape drive ideal around 100 bits/second – much slower than really typing in data. This is most likely a issue with the 40-year-old 8-track tape he’s using, however as a proof of idea it’s not as well bad.

[Dave Nunez] desired arcade quality controls when gaming at home. The problem was he couldn’t decide on just one console to target with his build, so he targeted them all. What you see above is a single controller that links to lots of different gaming rigs.

He took a simple-is-best approach, keeping the main goal of top notch inputs at the forefront. To start, he developed the face plate out of thick MDF to make sure it wouldn’t flex or bounce as he mashed the buttons. To keep the electronics as basic as possible he soldered connections to actual controller PCBs (well, reproductions of controllers), breaking each out to a separate DB9 connector on the back of the case. These connectors interface with one of the three adapter cables seen to the right. This lets the controller work with NES, SNES, and an Atari 2600 system.

To pull the enclosure together [Dave] designed the rounded corner pieces and cut them out with a CNC mill. These connect with flat MDF to comprise the sides. To give it that professional look he filled the joints with Bondo and sanded them smooth before painting.

inspect out this manage center which [Awesome0749] developed for introducing fireworks. From the looks of his stock he’s going to be doing rather a bit of celebrating. The manage console is clean as well as offers some security features, as well as he just upgraded to an fascinating ignition technique.

He’s utilizing CAT5 cable to link to the fireworks. At the top of the enclosure you can just make out the edge of the almond-colored wall plates which offer three jacks each. The two secrets on the controller must be turned on to power the device. There is likewise a security toggle switch in the middle.

The ignition is cause by running 70 VDC with a 1/4 Watt 24 Ohm resistor. As you can see in the demo after the break this results in flames rather quickly. One other thing we saw in the presentation is that only the LED for the button which is hooked up comes on when the system is armed. We didn’t see a schematic, however he must have wired this so the system checks for continuity to ensure there’s something wired to the business end of the button.

ever wanted to make the jump from microcontrollers to logic chips? Although not technically the same thing we consider FPGA and CPLD devices to be in similar categories. like FPGAs, complex Programmable Logic devices let you build hardware inside of a chip. and if you’ve got the knack for etching circuit boards you can now build your own CPLD development module. Long-time Hackaday readers will remember our own providing in this area.

Our years of microcontroller experience have taught us a mantra: if it doesn’t work it’s a hardware problem. We have a knack for wasting hours trying to figure out why our code doesn’t work. The majority of the time it’s a hardware issue. and this is why you might not want to design your own dev tools when just starting out. but one thing this guide has going for it is incremental testing. After etching and inspecting the board, it is populated in stages. There is test code available for each stage that will help verify that the hardware is working as expected.

The CPLD is programmed using that 10-pin header. If you don’t have a programmer you can build your own that uses a parallel port. included on the board is an ATtiny2313 which is a good touch as it can simulate all kinds of different hardware to test with your VHDL code. There is also a row of LEDs, a set of DIP switches, and a few breakout headers to boot.