Wednesday, May 31
TechShop Announces New Partner Licensing Model, Closes Pittsburgh Location
The post TechShop Announces New Partner Licensing Model, Closes Pittsburgh Location appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Hijacking the Sonoff OTA Mechanism
ITEAD’s Sonoff line is a range of Internet-of-Things devices based around the ESP8266. This makes them popular for hacking due to their accessibility. Past projects have figured out how to reflash the Sonoff devices, but for [mirko], that wasn’t enough – it was time to reverse engineer the Sonoff Over-The-Air update protocol.
[mirko]’s motivation is simple enough – a desire for IoT devices that don’t need to phone home to the corporate mothership, combined with wanting to avoid the labor of cracking open every Sonoff device to reflash it with wires like a Neanderthal. The first step involved connecting the Sonoff device to WiFi and capturing the traffic. This quickly turned up an SSL connection to a remote URL. This was easily intercepted as the device doesn’t do any certificate validation – but a lack of security is sadly never a surprise on the Internet of Things.
After capturing the network traffic, [mirko] set about piecing together the protocol used to execute the OTA updates. After a basic handshake between client and server, the server can ask the client to take various actions – such as downloading an updated firmware image. After determining the messaging format, [mirko] sought to create a webserver in Python to replicate this behaviour.
There are some pitfalls – firmware images need to be formatted slightly differently for OTA updates versus the usual serial upload method, as this process leaves the stock bootloader intact. There’s also the split-partition flash storage system to deal with, which [mirko] is still working on.
Nevertheless, it’s great to see hackers doing what they do best – taking control over hardware and software to serve their own purposes. To learn more, why not check out how to flash your Sonoff devices over serial? They’re just an ESP8266 inside, after all.
Filed under: home hacks, news
Paul Allen showed off his new rocket-launching plane today, and it’s BIG
Vulcan Aerospace
Paul Allen's intriguing launch company, Vulcan Aerospace, has gone relatively quiet in recent years, and questions about the venture's viability have been increasing. But on Wednesday, the cofounder of Microsoft shared a new photo of the company's Stratolaunch airplane—the largest in the world—and it seems the company is moving forward.
The new plane is, in a word, bigly. The aircraft has 385-foot wingspan and, powered by six Boeing 747 engines, has a maximum takeoff weight of 1.3 million pounds. The Stratolaunch's wingspan is the largest in history, blowing away the previous record-holder (Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose) by 65 feet. Vulcan Aerospace says its Stratolaunch airplane will have an operational range of 2,000 nautical miles. Serving as a reusable first stage for rocket launches, the Stratolaunch system will be capable of delivering payloads to multiple orbits and inclinations in a single mission.
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Interview: Francesco de Comité Makes Math Visually Awesome
Francesco de Comité is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Sciences in Lille, France, where he researches the 2D and 3D representation of mathematical concepts and objects. He’s presented papers on a variety of topics including anamorphoses, experiments in circle packing, and Dupin cyclides. His current project involves modeling and 3D printing sea shells. He’ll be presenting a paper on the topic at Bridges Conference in July. You can find his projects on Flickr as well as on Shapeways.
Hackaday: One of your recent projects involves creating fractal patterns and warping them into biologically-correct sea shell shapes, which you then print.
FdC: Modeling seashell shapes is an old topic–Moseley, 1838, D’Arcy Thompson beginning of 20th century. A seashell can be defined as a curve turning around an axis, while translating in the direction of this axis (i.e. on a helicoidal trajectory), and growing in size at the same time. This was modeled for computers in the ’60s by David Raup.
Drawing patterns on seashells was described by Hans Meinhardt using a model of chemical reactions (activator-inhibitor), in the same spirit as Turing’s work on morphogenesis. Combining these two works, and using 3D printers instead of 2D renderers, we can build realistic seashells, either by copying existing shells, or inventing new ones. A 3D model is not just a juxtaposition of a huge number of 2D views: manipulating 3D models can help you understand the object, find details, and so on.
I was curious to see if making a 3D seashell was possible. Moreover, I show that this can be done with simple tools — well, except the 3D printer.
Can you tell us a little about the software and hardware involved?
All the process is done using Blender, and the programs are written in Python using Blender’s script facility. The 3D printer is a ZCorp ProJet 460, which uses a powder similar to sand, and which can output colored objects.
I have some math background, but I am more a programmer/computer scientist than a math scientist. In general, for all my works, I use maths already written by other people. Once I have coded an equation, a math concept, I can play and tune its parameters, and see what happens. We could call this ‘experimental maths’.
What was the biggest surprise or revelation you encountered while designing the shells?
3D printing is not an exact science. I made some misses, but it allows me to cut a 3D printed shell in half, and see how it was printed inside. Not exactly as I thought it would be. It gave me a better understanding of what my program was doing.
I’m reading (okay, skimming) Meinhardt’s book “The Algorithmic Beauty of Seashells” and I noticed the author included BASIC code for a seashell pattern simulator. Was that old code an example of the sort of research you had to translate into more “modern” formats?
This was a funny part of the project. In the 1990’s, the book was sold with a 3 1/2 floppy disk containing programs written in BASIC. The reader was able to generate the patterns described in the book, and test them with other parameters. Recent versions of the book don’t contain this disk anymore.
Then I found that a library in a university in Montpellier, France still had the disk. I contacted them, they found a floppy disk reader, installed it on a computer, and sent me a backup of the disk. This was the first part. I was not able to find a Basic interpreter to run the programs, so I decided to read the programs and translate them, first in Java/ImageJ to test the patterns, then in Python, to integrate them in the python script used in Blender to generate seashells.
It is disturbing to see that programs written less than 20 years ago are already difficult to use.
There is no link between the patterns and the shape of the shell. it looks like those are two independent processes — but I am not a biologist! In fact, you have several possibilities for putting a pattern on a shell: mapping an image on it (you consider the shell as a 2D twisted screen) This distorts the image strongly. Here is Mona Lisa (image to the right).
A lot of your projects seem to involve taking something digital and making a physical version. I can understand using a digitally controlled machine like a 3D printer, but you also do a lot of projects with cut paper, cardboard, and wire. What kind of challenges do you encounter translating your digital designs into such imperfect media?
Initially, my goal was to make mathematical concepts (curves, equations..) tangible/visible. I began with 2D images, then 3D printed objects. Trying to translate these concepts with other means came naturally. The final goal would be to build objects without using computers at all.
But I still need computers: I often create virtual versions of the objects before to build them in real world. You are right, I have to go from a perfect world to the real one. But I don’t believe this late one is imperfect; in fact the flexibility of real material is of great help, for building polyhedra with playing cards for example.
The challenge is more at the beginning of the process: how to use math to compute the right information I will need to build the object.
I am indebted to Magnus Wenninger for this part of my work. I am using his book “Polyhedron Models” in which he details models for building a lot of polyhedra; I just followed his instructions. Building a model takes 2 or 3 weeks (working in the evening only). The most complicated I tried to make was the 14th stellation of the icosahedron, but there are still a lot of models in the book I didn’t build.
One of your projects involves building digital models of Catalan solids using playing cards. What about using cards interested you as compared with (for instance) origami paper? Did you build any of the Catalan solids in real life?
The challenge is different : I generate virtual models (using Povray), varying the space between the cards, their angle, etc… When I like the model, I compute the cuts to be done in the cards, and build a template. The second part of the job is then to assemble the cards. I referred to George Hart’s work on Slide-Togethers.
The work is very different from origami. I am not able to invent origami models (just follow instructions).
Playing cards are a good material, they are at the same time rigid and flexible. Their glossy finish makes it easy to slide them one inside another.
Cyclides can be designed using only circles. It is a non-trivial object defined by the most trivial closed curve. These circles can be cardboard disks, 3D printed rings… Working for several years now on cyclides, I have a collections of functions and programs I can manipulate like tools to model new representations.
And when I meet some problem, I can go back to the torus, solve the problem there (it is often easier), and then transform it back to compute the solution on the cyclid. I think also that cyclid are appealing for other people, they are attractive because they seem simple at first sight, then one realizes that they are not.
Do you have any questions for [Francesco]? Leave them in comments.
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, Featured, Interviews
Friday Hack Chat: Audio Systems
Join us this Friday for a Hack Chat on Audio Systems. It’s going down June 2 at noon PDT (handy time zone converter thing).
[Dafydd] got his start in electronics in an application for a music degree. He mentioned he’d built a few guitar pedals, which landed him a call from the electronics department at York University. They told him he was a terrible musician, but that he might excel at electronics.
Many years later he’s still going strong with audio applications with Expat Audio, manufacturers of fine preamps. [Dafydd] is also the Audio Strategic Marketing Manager at Dialog, and spends his days arguing with engineers and doing his best to solve customer problems. [Dafydd] has been on The Amp Hour, and has published articles on audio systems.
For this Hack Chat, we’re going to be running the gamut of audio, electronics, and small business. The questions on audio mythbusting are sure to entertain, and we’ll also be discussing audio signal chains and small business production. Bring your questions and put them on the sheet to guide the discussion.
Here’s How To Take Part:
Log into Hackaday.io, visit that page, and look for the ‘Join this Project’ Button. Once you’re part of the project, the button will change to ‘Team Messaging’, which takes you directly to the Hack Chat.
You don’t have to wait until Friday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about
Filed under: Hackaday Columns
Hackers jailbreak permanent mods onto Super Mario World save files
The practice of hacking standard Super Mario World cartridges on stock Super Nintendo hardware has come a long way in a short time. Three years ago, it required a robot entering thousands of button presses per second to insert arbitrary code on top of the game. By last year, streamer SethBling was proving that this kind of code insertion was possible for a human acting with pixel-perfect precision.
Now, SethBling and others in the SMW hacking community have taken things a step further, permanently writing a full hex editor and gameplay mods onto a stock Super Mario World cartridge using nothing but standard controller inputs.
SethBling's ten-minute video explaining the entire "jailbreaking" process is a must-watch for anyone interested in the particulars of perpetually altering a 25-year-old game without any special hardware. In short, the jailbreak builds on an exploit discovered by Cooper Harrsyn that lets players write data directly to the small, 256-byte save files that are permanently stored on the Super Mario World cartridge.
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Additive + Subtractive = One Powerful Machine
It says it right on the title of the video below: it was bound to happen eventually. It’s only natural that somebody would stick a 3D printer extruder on the business end of a CNC machine. The long-awaited convergence of additive and subtractive manufacturing is here.
OK, that may be overstating things a bit, but we think [Chris DePrisco] is on to something here. Given the considerable investment he’s made in his DIY CNC machine, an enormous vertical machining center that looks a little like a homebrew Bridgeport, it was a no-brainer to take advantage of the huge XYZ stage. Mounting the Titan Aero extruder to the quill required some custom parts; fair warning that the video below is heavy on machining, but it’s not the seven hours of video he streamed when he milled the heated aluminum bed. Skip ahead to about the six-minute mark if you want to see the first prints and how he optimized the setup.
As we watched [Chris]’ video, we were struck by the potential for adding 3D printing to CNC milling machines. What we’d like to see is a setup where the spindle and the extruder work together to build more complex parts. Or maybe a tool-changing CNC that can pick up a spindle, an extruder, and maybe even a laser or plasma cutter head. Now that would be a powerful machine!
We’ve been here before, almost. With this CNC machine and a 3D printing pen.
[via r/CNC]
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, cnc hacks
The MakeShift Challenge: To the Bat Cave!
The post The MakeShift Challenge: To the Bat Cave! appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
We can now convert every film and TV show from the last 80 years into HDR
Bcom
Researchers at the French research institute Bcom, with the aid of a wunderkind plucked from a nearby university, have developed software that converts existing SDR (standard dynamic range) video into HDR (high dynamic range) video. That is, the software can take almost all of the colour video content produced by humanity over the last 80 years and widen its dynamic range, increasing the brightness, contrast ratio, and number of colours displayed on-screen. I've seen the software in action and interrogated the algorithm, and I'm somewhat surprised to report how good the content looks with an expanded dynamic range.
But garbage in, garbage out, right? You can't magically create more detail (or more colour data) in an image. Well, you can—Google produced detailed face images from pixelated source images—but philosophically it is no longer the same image. When a film is cropped for TV broadcast, or you receive a blocky low-bitrate stream from Netflix, or Flickr changes the JPEG profile on an uploaded photo... are those the same image as the artist/director/videographer intended? Or are they different?
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Review: The Droplit v2 Resin Printer
The post Review: The Droplit v2 Resin Printer appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Hacking an External Mic Port onto a Camera
A sub-$100 camera competing in the 4K market, the Akaso EK7000 has a few features typical for the range: wifi, 12MP photos at 30 frames per second, and the like. [Foxx D’Gamma] wanted to add an external mic jack to his camera, replacing the internal mic, which featured poor sound pickup due to being buried in the heart of the camera. [Foxx] spent a considerable amount of effort getting the enclosure apart, working gingerly to avoid damaging the display’s ribbon cable, which can’t be disconnected. He also had to deal with the button covers falling out when the case was opened.
[Foxx] desoldered the button mic and added the jack’s wires, and the next challenge presented itself: getting it back together again with the mic port looking good. He had to make sure the jack projected just the right amount from the housing, to ensure the external mic could plug in. Check out both videos below the break.
We’ve featured several cheap camera hacks recently on Hackaday: the ruggedized cheap camera, the cheap 360 degree camera, and the full-spectrum camera all come to mind. It’s a fertile field for not a lot of money!
Thanks, [Corrosive] for the tip.
Filed under: digital cameras hacks
Counterfeit Hardware May Lead To Malware and Failure
Counterfeit parts are becoming increasingly hard to tell the difference from the real deal, the technology used by the counterfeiters has come on leaps and bounds, so even the experts struggle to tell the real product from a good fake. Mere fake branding isn’t the biggest problem with a counterfeit though, as ieee.com reports, counterfeit parts could contain malware or be downright dangerous.
Way back in 2014 the FBI charged [Marc Heera] with selling clones of the Hondata S300, a plugin engine module for Honda cars that reads sensors, and depending on their values can change idle speed, air-fuel mixture and a plethora of other car/engine related settings. What, might you ask, is the problem, except they are obviously not genuine parts? According to Honda they had a number of issues such as random limits on engine rpm and occasionally failure to start. While the fake Hondata S300 parts where just poor clones that looked the part, anything connected to an engine control unit brings up huge safety concerns and researchers have shown that through ECU access, they could hijack a car’s steering and brakes.
It’s not just car parts being cloned, remember the fake USB-to-serial chips of FTDI-Gate? Entire routers are also being cloned, which doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that the cloners could configure your internet traffic to be redirected through their network for snooping. In 2010 Saudi citizen [Ehab Ashoor] was convicted of buying cloned Cisco Systems gigabit interface converters with the intention of selling them to the U.S Dept of Defense. While nothing sinister was afoot in [Ashoor]’s case other than greed, these routers were to be deployed in Iraq for use by the Marine Corps networks. They were then to be used for security, transmitting troop movements and relaying intelligence from field operations back to HQ.
So who are the cloners and why are they doing it? It is speculated that some of them may be state funded, as there are a lot of countries who do not trust American silicon. Circuits are reverse engineered and find their way to the international market. Then just like the FTDI-Gate case, cloners want to make profits from others intellectual property. This also brings up another question, if there is a mistrust of American silicon, nearly everything is made in China these days so why should we trust anything from there? Even analog circuits can be made to spy on you, as you can see from the piece we recently featured on compromising a processor using an analog charge pump. If you want to defend yourself from such attacks, perhaps look at previous Hackaday Prize finalist, ChipWhisperer.
Filed under: hardware, security hacks
Nest Cam IQ is a $300 indoor camera with a 6-core processor
Ron Amadeo
Nest is adding a third camera to its lineup, after the Nest Cam and Nest Cam Outdoor. The new Nest Cam IQ occupies a premium spot over the other two, and it is an indoor-only $300 "sort-of 4K" camera.
I say "sort-of 4K" because the Nest Cam IQ does have a 4K (8MP) sensor, but to reduce storage and wireless data needs, it only records in 1080p. The 4K sensor is used for a digital zoom feature, and with a fancy cloud-powered "enhance!" mode, Nest is promising a "12x digital zoom." Zooming happens automatically when the Nest Ca IQ detects a person, at which point the camera will start saving two video streams, one at full crop and one zoomed in. Recording two video streams at once means the IQ is doing a significant amount of on-board processing, which is powered by a surprisingly beefy six-core Qualcomm processor.
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Oddly Satisfying – Twist Containers
One of the great strengths of 3D printing is that it makes creating objects with certain geometries much easier than it would be with traditional subtractive machining methods. Things like thin-walled perfect spheres or objects with wild undercuts become trivial to make. A great case in point is these amazing 3D-printed twist vases.
The key concept behind the vases is that the shape of the container itself is the thread that binds the two halves together. [Devin] has built plenty over the years, continually experimenting with the design, making everything from a useful compact trash container to heavily-twisted, more artistic pieces. [Devin] says they’re incredibly satisfying to play with, and we’re inclined to agree – it’s particularly great to watch the higher-tolerance printed vases twist themselves closed under gravity.
Such designs aren’t actually all that new – there’s similar models on Thingiverse stretching all the way back to 2009. The great thing about the Internet as an ecosystem is that not only do many people often reinvent the same idea, they each give it their own unique twist (pun unintended).
Without 3D printing, it would be very difficult to create such vases. The tolerances of 3D printers these days make creating these sort of mating parts possible, though you can actually hear some of the vases making zipping sounds as they close due to the layer roughness. [Devin] takes the time in the video to walk through the process of actually designing a working twist vase, particularly with regards to the geometric parameters required for a successful part.
Files to make the vases are available on MiniFactory, including a trend-riding fidget toy based on the same concept. We’d love to see more projects following this trend, so if you iterate your own designs, be sure to let us know on the tip line. Meanwhile, check out these 3D printed transparent vases.
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks
Inside a Microswitch
We’ve taken a few microswitches apart, mostly to fix those pesky Logitech mice that develop double-click syndrome, but we’ve never made a video. Luckily, [Julian] did, and it is worth watching if you want to understand the internal mechanism of these components.
[Julian] talks about the way the contacts make and break. He also discusses the mechanical hysteresis inherent in the system because of the metal moving contact having spring-like qualities
We always have trouble holding the little plunger in place, so we liked [Julian’s] idea of holding it in with a spot of putty. If you want to know the reason he was playing with the switches to begin with, look at the second video. His 8-bit breadboard computer uses a switch like this to drive the single-step clock.
We did a detailed look at microswitches a not long ago, so if you want to dig into more details, that’s a good place to start. As for breadboard computers, we like them too.
Filed under: misc hacks, teardown
PS Vita Hacked To Accept Micro SD Instead Of Costly Memory Cards
Sony loves to have control of their own media formats: Beta, DAT, Minidisc, MemoryStick, Universal Media Disc, MemoryStick Micro, and more. When they released the PS Vita they used a format that was similar in shape to SD but not compatible. The higher capacity ones can be quite costly, However [thesixthaxis] Report there is a PS Vista Micro SD hack on the way.
PS Vita hacker [Yifan Lu]’s adapter replaces the 3G modem, allowing end users to plug a MicroSD card in its place. And this means using standard MicroSD memory cards instead of Sony’s overpriced proprietary memory. This is the coolest PS Vita hack since PS Vita’s Final Fantasy X.
Sounds like good news all round? Well, there are a few small caveats. In order to use the hack you need a 3G-capable Vita running HENkaku which means running firmware 3.60 or under. The adapter is still in prototype stage, but it’s available from the fully-funded Indiegogo campaign if you’re interested.
Filed under: handhelds hacks, playstation hacks
Tuesday, May 30
Making a Toolbox from a Single 2×4
The post Making a Toolbox from a Single 2×4 appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Decrypted: American Gods showed us who Wednesday really is
Starz
For the weirdest episode of American Gods so far this season, I was delighted to have on our podcast a guest whose job is to translate Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. Jackson Crawford teaches Old Norse at UC Berkeley and University of Colorado at Boulder, and he explains Norse culture and language delightfully on his YouTube channel. He joined us to discuss some of the myths behind the gods in this show.
Spoilers ahead and in the podcast! Also: my profound apologies for the sound in this episode. There were about a zillion technical problems on my end as I recorded this on the road, and our engineer Jennifer Hahn worked heroically to fix it. But it still sounds kind of echoey in places.
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