Our friends at Adafruit have put together a detailed tutorial on construction of your own Internet of Things Camera. They combine the Arduino with their data logger shield outfitted with the Eye-Fi wireless SD card (first gen model) and a TTL Serial JPEG Camera shield. The result is a self-contained wireless monitoring camera with motion-sensing […]
Author Archives: the machinegeek
Chronos hacking update
JP Norair has been hacking away with the TI 433 MHz Chronos. My project is OpenTag, which is a 433 MHz centric IoT/M2M stack. It’s 433-centric because it implements DASH7 and because it makes design assumptions that multihop is not of great importance (at 433 MHz, it certainly isn’t). You can check the wiki, which […]
Free online DSP book
Squonk alerts us to a very interesting online resource. California Technical Publishing has posted a complete copy of The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing by Steven W. Smith, PhD. This 640 page volume covers all aspects of DSP and is both searchable online and downloadable. The site also includes links to software […]
Free Model Foundry: open source CPLD/FPGA simulation models
Here’s a site we found containing open source simulation models for system level verification of CPLD/FPGA devices. “Founded in 1995, Free Model Foundry (FMF) is dedicated to promoting standard modeling practices within the electrical engineering comunity. In particular, we support the use of VHDL, Verilog, and SystemVerilog modeling languages. They believe in free, open source […]
CORDIC for dummies
Drone writes: Here is a thread on the Parallax Propeller Forum discussing the downloadable document by forum user “Bean” called
Jameco power connector challenge
Jameco Electronics presents a challenge to correctly identify power connectors as male or female. While most connector genders are determined by common characteristics and become set in terminology, this is apparently not the case for barrel type power connectors. Jameco is conducting a survey to determine which of the above connectors should be characterized as […]
$5.00 simple oscilloscope using Picaxe and VB
Patrick Cambria posts this simple oscilloscope project using a Picaxe-08M microcontroller and a potentiometer. The Picaxe is programmed in BASIC and the entire MCU program follows: main: READADC10 1,B0 SERTXD(#B0,10) goto main The output from a potentiometer voltage divider is fed into an ADC pin of a PICAXE 08M then serially transmitted to a Serial […]
Free O’Reilly webcast: Developing Webbots and Spiders
O’Reilly is offering a free webcast on March 13, 2012, at 10:00 AM PT on the subject of Developing Webbots and Spiders: Using virtual robots to automate your work. Among the topics to be covered by this one hour presentation by author and DEFCON presenter Michael Schrenk include the basics of building a webbot, considering […]
Hacking the FPGA bitstream
Squok writes referring us to several documents he’s found regarding hacking the bitstream in secure FPGAs: In order to protect the intellectual property and to prevent fraud, e.g., by cloning an FPGA or manipulating its content, many current FPGAs employ a bitstream encryption feature, which is advertised by manufacturers as “making it virtually impossible for […]
MIME celebrates 20th anniversary
March 11, 2012 is the 20th anniversary of the first use of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) protocol. The MIME standard is the foundation of all email attachments and it was first used on March 11, 1992 by Nathaniel Borenstein, pictured above. So when you attach a zipped up load of docs to your […]
2011 DCC: Bluetooth for microcontrollers
This talk from the 2011 DCC conference held in Baltimore, MD, last September, covers the basics of using Bluetooth in microcontroller circuits. The presenter is John A. Hansen, amateur radio licensee W2FS, and is the developer of commercial amateur radio digital products with his TNC-X company. If nothing else, you’ll find out how Bluetooth got […]
Tiny CNC-bot for under $70
The developers over at Piccolo are working on a CNC-bot designed to draw small pictures, and which could be reprogrammed for other purposes. According to the developers, “We are currently refining the Piccolo prototype into an open-source design that is simple, quick to assemble, and easy to use, and is entirely composed of digitally manufactured […]
Oscilloscope USB connection reversed
András Veres-Szentkirályi is part of the H.A.C.K. hackerspace in Hungary. They acquired an affordable, slightly used UNI-T UT2025B digital storage oscilloscope. He wondered what useful information could be gained from sniffing the USB port using Wireshark on a Linux box. Andras writes: I managed to reverse engineer the USB connection of the Chinese digital storage […]
Draft: Propeller 2 code authentication and protection
Parallax is in the process of designing its next gen Propeller chip. Informally dubbed the Propeller 2, the design includes a 32-bit, general purpose multi-core microcontroller with 8 identical cogs, a 160 MHz planned maximum clock speed, core voltage 1.8 VDC with I/O pin voltage of 1.8 VDC–3.3 VDC, 92 I/O pins total with each […]
Analog Devices op amp selection guide
Ian Griffiths writes to inform us of this Op Amp Selection Guide available from Analog Devices. This 58-page PDF offers a complete overview of their product offerings. As Ian G. points out, “it has 3 pages devoted to different terms used for describing op-amp characteristics and different op-amp types to help those trying to select […]
Facepunch Reverse Engineering Challenge #1
Facepunch is conducting a software reverse engineering contest! “The FPREC is a week long challenge where you are provided with an executable to reverse engineer. There will be a goal, such as “access this website”, or “decrypt this file”. Hopefully, there’ll be rewards. To participate, go to the Facepunch website forum and follow the instructions […]
Remote controlled balancing robot using mbed MCU
Kristian Lauszus updates us on this remote controllable balancing robot project. In development of this project, Kristian created the PS3 Bluetooth Library both for Arduino and the FEZ Devices. However, not content with the performance of the FEZ, an mbed microcontroller, which is an ARM Cortex-M3 running 96MHz, has been incorporated into the latest design. […]
Propeller DTMF generator object
If you need to generate DTMF tones and have a Parallax Propeller chip handy, there’s an object for that! Thomas E. McInnes has coded up this DTMF generator object for the Propeller. Written in Spin, the object includes functions for dialing individual digits or a preprogrammed phone number, along with the required Synth object as […]
2011 DCC – Practical Software Radio
This talk is from the 2011 Digital Communications Conference (DCC) held last September in Baltimore, MD. The speaker is Matt Ettus who heads up Ettus Research, manufacturers of the USRP family of SDRs. His talk is an in depth technical explanation of “Why Things Don’t Always Match the Textbooks” in SDR. Matt is affiliated with […]
Reprogramming USB Webkey dongle using Bus Pirate
JJShortcut took one of the webkey USB devices his school was discarding and decided to reverse engineer it. The device plugs into the USB port on a PC and when its on-board button is pushed it opens the computer’s web browser, directing the user to a specific URL. He found that the heart of the […]