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Monday, December 30th, 2013
| Time | Event |
| 12:01a | Hackaday Links: December 29, 2013
Ikea picture frame plus old laptop equals a roll-your-own digital picture frame which [Victor] built. It runs Ubuntu and is more powerful and extensible than anything you could purchase outright. Our friend [HowToLou] sure loves the FlowRider. So much so that he’s trying to figure out how to make them less expensive to operate. He put together an example of how he thinks a standing wave can be created that follows the rider as they move along the surfing area. [Garrett] released an Arduino library that offers threading, debugging, and error handling. The usertools package can be downloaded from his Github repository. There’s only one way to gauge your Christmas cheer — hook yourself up to the XMeter built by [Geoff]. He’s the same guy who built a breathalyzer a couple of years back. It flashes images of holiday activities on a television while measuring galvanic response using a couple of DIY probes. And finally, play around with a virtual x86 system. [Fabian Hemmer] wrote the incredibly full-featured virtual machine in JavaScript. You can get your hands on the code via his GitHub repo. [Thanks Martin] Filed under: Hackaday Columns, Hackaday links   |
| 3:00a | Fubarino Contest: Splash Screen On System Reset
Here’s a Fubarino contest entry for all those homebrew computer nuts out there. [Danjovic] modified an NTSC/PAL display adapter to show an ASCII version of the Hackaday logo when his board first boots up. The build is based on [Daryl Rictor]‘s Video Display Adapter intended for use with homebrew computers, microprocessor projects, and any other minimalist digital setup that needs an NTSC or PAL video display. It’s a surprisingly simple circuit, made of a few logic ICs and an ATmega8. [Danjovic] modified this video display adapter with an easter egg: if one pin on the ATmega8 is shorted when the board is powered on, a neat Hackaday splash screen is displayed for several seconds before falling back to the stock display of a blinking cursor. [Dnajovic] converted the ASCII Hackaday logo with the help of a short Python script and loaded it onto the AVR with a small firmware change. Video of the boot screen in action below. This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!
Filed under: classic hacks, contests   |
| 6:01a | The Crowbox Turns Crows into a Cash Machine
[Joshua Klein] is intrigued by crows, and in particular, their intelligence. He’s devised a system that may be able to train wild crows into performing useful tasks, such as exchanging lost coins for treats. The idea started as a random conversation at a cocktail party almost 10 years ago, and now has become a reality. In fact, we actually mentioned this project’s beginnings 5 years ago! So far they have succeeded in training captive crows to exchange lost coins using the Crowbox to receive treats. The end goal however is to teach wild crows the same thing — once this is proven, it could be extended to other tasks, like search and rescue, sorting through discarded electronics, or even garbage collection! The project is opensource, and the Arduino driven Crowbox is looking for alpha-testers to help experiment with wild crows from different locals. The current community is rather small, so if you’re interested in the concept, please check it out. We’ve attached [Joshua's] excellent TED talk on the intelligence of crows after the break — if you’re not fascinated by crows yet, you will be!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXQAgzfwu Now while the end goal isn’t to have a murder of crows collecting money for you… actually that would be pretty cool. Filed under: Arduino Hacks   |
| 9:01a | Electric Snow Scooter
[Dane] decided he wanted to make a rather large electric scooter, capable of taking him through even the most inclement weather — that’s right, even snow. Well, after about 18 months of stop and go work it is finally complete — for now. It features an impressive 7kW brushless 3-phase motor, a massive lithium ion battery pack and more custom parts then you could shake a stick at! The frame started out as one of those big push scooters from the 80′s, in fact, it is the same as the one shown in Macklemore’s Thrift Shop video (pic)! But since then it has had many a modification done to it — it looks as though the front end is the only part that wasn’t touched! He’s got an incredible build log his website, so if you want to build your own (you will once you’ve seen the video after the break), it’s a great starting point.
Filed under: transportation hacks   |
| 12:00p | Using The Wii U Controller With Everything
It’s been just a bit over a year since the Wii U was released along with the extremely impressive Wii U controller. With a D-pad, analog sticks, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, camera and 6.2 inch touchscreen, this controller is ripe for a million and one projects ranging from FPV quadcopters and robots to things we can’t even think of yet. At this year’s Chaos Communication Congress, [booto], [delroth], and [shuffle2] demonstrated how they cracked open the Wii U controller’s encryption allowing for Wii U controller ‘emulation’ and giving us full documentation on how the whole thing works. The guys started on their reverse engineering journey by dumping all the flash chips found on the controller’s board. In those binary blobs, they found Nintendo used a truly ingenious way of obfuscating the WiFi keys used to connect the controller to the Wii: rotate left by three. To be fair to Nintendo engineers, it was secure until someone figured it out. Connecting the controller to a PC over WiFi is only half the battle, though. Initial information from the Wii U launch suggested Nintendo used Miracast for all the I/O between the controller and the console. This isn’t the case; instead the video, audio, camera, and button input are non-standard but very simple protocols. The hardest to break into was the video display for the touchscreen, but the guys discovered it’s pretty much H.264. After getting around some Nintendo weirdness, it’s possible to display video on the controller. The guys have put together a small, extremely alpha library that comes with all the demos, documentation, and reverse engineering information. There’s a large wish list of what this library should include, but now that the information is public, it might be the time to pick up a Wii U. Video of the talk below, here’s the presentation slides, and a demo of emulating a Wii U game pad on a PC.
Filed under: nintendo wii hacks   |
| 3:01p | DIY Incubator Cooks Bacteria… Or Yogurt!
Ever wonder what kind of fecal content is in your drinking water? Do you also like yogurt? If so, this DIY Bacteria Incubator is just for you! [Robin] is part of the BioDesign team for the Real-World project which is an interdisciplinary project featuring biology, electronics, and environmental sciences to bring together solutions for real world water problems. Since it’s a community oriented project they strive to keep it open-source and well-documented in order to share with everyone. The DIY Incubator is a rather simple tool that can be used to help analyze water for fecal contamination, which is a problem in many third world countries. It consists of a styrofoam box, a light bulb and a home-brew Arduino which provides the PID control of the heat. For bacterial analysis, regular coliform bacteria live at 35C, while fecal coliform prefer about 44C — if incubated at these temperatures the bacteria will make itself known very quickly (within about 24 hours). Oh and if you don’t want to find out how dirty your water is, you can also make yogurt instead. Check out a short demonstration of the incubator after the break.
Filed under: cooking hacks   |
| 6:01p | UFO-looking RGB LED RC Plane Lights Up the Night, Uses All the Acronyms
He used low-tack tape to lay out the LED strips on the fuselage, solder the connections, and test them. Once he was satisfied with the arrangment, he flipped the strips face down so the foam diffuses the light. The lights are powered by a 12V Li-Po battery he soldered to a deans connector. Finally, [Roballoba] covered and heat sealed everything with Doculam, a very cost-effective laminate that offers great protection and security. He used some LED corn lights as afterburners, which is a nice touch of realism. There is a video after the break where [Roballoba] shows us the connections up close and then runs through some light show options. Another video of a nighttime flight is waiting for you in the write up. Spent too much money on eggnog and a new console this year to be able to replicate this build? $30 will snag what you need for this smartphone-controlled paper plane we featured a few weeks back. You could always BeDazzle it.
Filed under: led hacks, toy hacks   |
| 9:00p | Hacking and Philosophy: Surveillance State
If you don’t live under a rock (though you may want to now) you probably saw yesterday’s article from Spiegel that revealed the NSA has its own catalog for spy gadgets. Today they released an interactive graphic with the catalog’s contents, and even if you’re not a regular reader of Hacking & Philosophy, you’re going to want to take a look at it. I recommend glancing over IRATEMONK, in the “Computer Hardware” category. As the article explains, IRATEMONK is
It isn’t clear whether the manufacturers are complicit in implanting IRATEMONK in their hardware, or if the NSA has just developed it to work with those drives. Either way, it raises an important question: how do we know we can trust the hardware? The short answer is that we can’t. According to the text accompanying the graphic, the NSA
We’re interested to hear your responses to this: is the situation as bleak as it seems? How do you build a system that you know you can trust? Are there any alternatives that better guarantee you aren’t being spied on? Read on for more.
As for alternatives, I want to pose one scenario as presented by [Hasan Elahi]. You’ve probably seen him on television or his TED talk; he’s the guy who flooded the FBI with data about himself. He came to my university to give a lecture on his experiences with the surveillance state and made some interesting points worth repeating. The first of which is that information is a commodity, and access to your personal life is valuable. By providing these agencies with large amounts of personal data, you’re essentially “flooding the market.” If everyone shared their data to this extent, he thinks the surveillance state couldn’t keep up (and if you haven’t seen [Elahi's] talk, it goes WAY beyond Facebook: he takes pictures of every meal he eats, every toilet he uses, every hotel room…everything). It’s an interesting idea, and if we truly are becoming a culture of sharing, such a future may be inevitable. Perhaps it’s possible to saturate cyberspace with information to the point where our true selves are buried in the noise, and I agree that information overload on a person/individual may paint a very strange misrepresentation—or no clear representation—which could work in your favor. For [Elahi], it’s about reclaiming a sense of control, and that’s something he definitely achieves. Toward the end of his TED talk he shares his server logs, pointing out which government agencies visit his site and when. Perhaps it’s an illusion of control, but [Elahi] is absolutely creating and hosting his own archive rather than wondering whether the government is doing so. (They probably are). Here’s where I break with this strategy: during his lecture at my university, [Elahi] seemed to suggest that interested governmental entities (NSA, FBI, etc.) sort through this data with people, who—when faced with the overwhelming mountain of pointless photographs—will give up trying to profile you. It’s not a person sorting through your data, though. It’s a machine, and it doesn’t care how many thousands of pictures are out there: that’s more material for it to use to make assumptions about you. Their data collection is automatic, global, and seemingly limitless. I suspect they’ll gladly integrate anything you provide and file it away for reference. Let us hear your responses in the comments: is it hopeless? has the list of manufacturers in the catalog influenced your future purchasing decisions? Filed under: Hackaday Columns   |
There are a ton of cheap RF transceiver boards available. [Martin] recently took a look at several of the most common ones and 
[Roballoba] decided to 
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