In this video from the recent Notacon 9 conference, EFF activists Trevor Timm and Parker Higgins present on the widespread and increasing use of drones by government. Aspects of recent drone hacks are highlighted, security flaws noted, as well as the growing popularity of DIY civilian drones. For more information on the use of drones […]
Author Archives: the machinegeek
DEFCON 20 badge features Parallax Propeller
DEFCON 20 is currently underway in Las Vegas and this year the electronic hackable badge is back! This year the badge is based on the Parallax Propeller P8X32A 32-bit multicore processor. “The badge features an infrared LED and receiver for badge-to-badge communication, a bank of eight LEDs for visual feedback and a USB circuit for […]
Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller
This hack was demonstrated by Cody Brocious, a Mozilla software developer, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. At risk are four million hotel rooms secured by Onity programmable key card locks. According to Brocious, who should be scolded for not disclosing the hack to Onity before going public, there is no easy […]
Installing Metasploit on Raspberry Pi
We like Irongeek’s recipe for installing Metasploit on the Raspberry Pi. He presents a simple straightforward install method to install Metasploit on his board running the Debian “wheezy” public beta. For those looking for something more, you may want to consider PwnPi, which is a Linux-based penetration testing dropbox distribution for the Raspberry Pi.
Renesas RL78 promo board meets TI CC3000 WiFi module
If you’re just receiving your Renesas RL78 promo board, here’s an article from the Renesas Rulz blog discussing how to interface it with the LS Research TiWi-SL based TI CC3000 WiFi board. As the post points out, “The primary hardware issue is level conversion. The RPB is a 5V design and the CC3000 module operates […]
Radio Shack contest: vote in the East-West Hackerspace Challenge
Radio Shack has announced a contest to decide which of two hackerspaces produced the more awesome project. RS says the voting is open through August 15, 2012 and one winner drawn at random from the voters will receive a $1,000 RadioShack Gift Card. Visit the contest voting page to view videos of the entries by […]
App note: creating a Freescale Tower module
The Freescale Tower is a modular development platform using interchangeable and reusable modules to integrate with Freescale MCU boards as well as a selection of over 50 peripheral modules by various manufacturers. In addition to using premanufactured modules, users can create their own custom boards. In this app note Freescale describes how to create your […]
ATTiny2313 controlling a HD44780 LCD via AVR-GCC
We came across Scott Harden’s brief article describing how to control an HD44780 LCD using an Attiny2313. After a number of unsuccessful attempts with other code he found this LCD library written by Martin Thomas for use with AVR-GCC. With a few mods to the code Scott produced the above results controlling his 2×20 LCD […]
Renesas promotion board for RL78/G13
Renesas is offering a free development board to those willing to register and give up some information about a potential project. They describe, “The YRPBRL78G13 is a promotion board for the new Renesas RL78 microcontroller family. It supports on-board debugging, flash programming, and is pre-programmed to work with the GUI provided on the included DVD […]
Raspbian-based SD card image released
Squonk points out Raspberry Pi’s announcement of the release of a Raspbian-based SD card image. The Raspberry Pi crew says, “This release replaces the existing Debian squeeze image as our recommended install. Notably, it is the first official image to take full advantage of the Raspberry Pi’s floating point hardware for, amongst other things, much […]
Free webinar: FPGA programming in C code
Newark/element14 and David Pellerin, co-founder of Impulse Accelerated Technologies, have teamed up to offer a free webinar on programming in C code on an FPGA using the Altera Cyclone development platform. They promise, “In 45 minutes you will learn how you can leverage distributed processing for a C code algorithm across your entire embedded system […]
The Woz’s backpack contents revealed!
Steve Wozniak (“The Woz”) has published this incredible list of the gear he carries in his travel backpack. Dozens of gadgets, cables, gizmos and accessories, only a portion of which are pictured above. Enough to fill seven bins at airport security. “You might think this is abnormal for me but, to the contrary, it’s customary.” […]
Levitating LED combines wireless power transfer + magnetic levitation
Chris Rieger is an Electrical Engineering student from the University of Queensland Australia, and has been experimenting with wireless power transfer and magnetic levitation. After studying the work of Jeff Lieberman, Eric Taylor, and others, Chris fine tuned his design to combine these two technologies to achieve the results depicted in this video. Visit Chris […]
Reverse engineering a home security system
Ken from OverEngineered writes us about his recent efforts in reverse engineering, I recently reverse-engineered the security system installed in my house and re-implemented the control board for it using a JeeNode (arduino-compatible with on-board RFM12 radio). Turn your whole house around with custom home renovation toronto. I created a post about the reverse-engineering here. […]
Nutshell: Netduino Go Touch Display visual designer
[nwazet has developed Nutshell, a visual screen designer for their Netduino Go Touch Display module. It’s purpose is to make the design of Netduino display module UI’s easier and more intuitive than coding it up line by line. You can use Nutshell without installing anything since the tool runs JavaScript in your web browser. Just […]
HOPE 9 conference live audio/video stream
The Hackers On Plant Earth conference, known as HOPE Number 9, is currently underway in New York City. The conference runs through July 15 and features speakers on a wide array of topics of interest to the hacker and open source community. The conference is sponsored by 2600 Magazine and occurs biennially in even numbered […]
Recycled VCR head is a page turner
Rohit is an engineer who often wades through lengthy PDF documents online. He found that scrolling through multiple pages with the mouse wheel had a way of wearing out his fingers, so he repurposed an old VCR head and a USB mouse, combining them into a jog wheel/spinner to scroll through long pages of text. […]
Arduino shield roundup
Squonk found this list of 288 Arduino shields, from 116 makers, including pictures, license and pinouts. Looks pretty comprehensive, and includes some we’ve never heard of. Via the contact form.
PSoC1 programmable embedded system-on-chip
Web Warrior draws our attention to the PSoC1 family of programmable embedded system chips by Cypress Semiconductor. “EASY PSOC1 is an inexpensive starter board for PSOC1 family featuring CY8C28433 chip. For newbies, PSOC1 is world’s first programmable embedded system-on-chip integrating configurable analog and digital peripherals, memory and microcontroller all on a single chip. You can […]
NXP RF component manual
NXP has released the 16th edition of their RF component manual. It covers the full line of NXP RF offerings including their core technologies QUBiC4 and LDMOS, GPS LNAs, medium power amplifiers, IF gain blocks, satellite LNB ICs and CATV modules, amplifiers (low noise, variable gain, medium power and high power Doherty amplifiers), mixers, IQ […]