Hearst Publications’ “Electronic Products” Magazine presented their 2011 Product of the Year Award to Microsemi for their SmartFusion Intelligent Mixed Signal FPGAs. Microsemi Corporation (formerly known as Actel) manufactures the SmartFusion family of intelligent mixed signal FPGAs. The SmartFusion line integrates an FPGA, ARM® Cortex™-M3, and programmable analog, offering full customization and IP protection. A […]
Author Archives: the machinegeek
Intro to reverse engineering software
In his article, Discrete Cosine presents some basic information on reverse engineering hex files. A quick primer highlighting simple concepts about file analysis. If you’ve hacked hardware and wondered where to start with software, check this out.
Implantable RFID temperature sensors
Implantable RFID chips have been around for years. Since at least 2004 these devices have been capable of including GPS data, and manufacturers have been researching other measurement capabilities. Implantable health sensors may soon be a real option with the launch by PositiveID of its ‘Wireless Body Platform’. Initially the health sensor system was designed […]
Altera CPLD/FPGA Quartus II design tutorials
If you have an Altera development board, such as the MAX V CPLD board or the UP1, UP2 or DE series of board, Altera has a collection of free video tutorials covering many aspects of CPLD/FPGA circuit design and programming of devices using their Quartus II design software.
Arduino and GSM cellular tutorial
Tronixstuff has produced the first part of their tutorial series on using a GSM cellular modem with the Arduino. In this part they cover hardware interfacing and testing, sending a text message, and embedding data within a message. This segment is the latest is a series of Arduino tutorials posted by Tronixstuff.
Hacking passive automotive entry/starting systems
The Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich presents a paper documenting hacking techniques on Passive Keyless Entry and Start Systems (PKES). The hardware setup seems simple enough. The group states: The cable relay was performed with off-the-shelf coaxial cables. We built two 30 m cables that we combined for the 60 m relay tests. […]
Arduino talking to an I2C LCD display
StrangeParty demos how to use the Matrix Orbital 20×4 display with Arduino via I2C using the Wire library. The LK204-25 is a serial display, so connection to the Arduino requires just two wires to accept I2C commands and data. We expect this same procedure would work with other manufacturers’ I2C LCDs. Simple and useful if […]
Propeller game tutorial
The Gadget Gangster has released part one of a three part tutorial on Propeller game development. With these 8-core chips going from less than $1 per core it’s worth a look.
ADUCRF101: precision analog microcontroller with ISM band transceiver
Analog Devices, Inc. announces the release of the ADuCRF101, a fully integrated System On Chip (SOC) solution designed for low power wireless applications. The ADuCRF101 integrates a low power Cortex-M3 core from ARM. It is a 32-bit RISC machine, offering up to 1.25 DMIPS peak performance. The Cortex-M3 MCU also has a flexible 14-channel DMA […]
Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile
The Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security (CAESS) published a very detailed paper outlining the use, and potential for abuse of modern automotive embedded electronic control systems. Central to their work was the development of Carshark, a software tool for hacking the CAN bus on modern vehicles. (No, we do not know of site where […]
MHV AVR tools – a WinAVR alternative
Noting that WinAVR has been marked as inactive, Make Hack Void, a hackerspace crew from down under, has devised their own alternative: MHV AVR Tools. They also are working on MHVLib – an efficiency oriented library for AVR microcontrollers.
Simple GPS display using Attiny2313
In his project, Binu from avrprojects.info interfaces a ProGin SR-87 GPS module with an ATtiny2313 and 2×16 LCD to generate a running lat/long display. The device also will store one static location, and produce an audible alert each time that location is reached. (More locations could be provided for in code, but the project assumes […]
$20 fuel injector tester
If you’re into DIY auto maintenance, here’s a project for you. Fuel injectors are made up of a coil of wire which opens a valve when energized, basically an electronic solenoid valve. These can wear out and to diagnose them properly requires more than just applying 12 volts and listening for a click. Dino, a […]
Amazon cloud + 20 minutes = WPA cracked
According to thelocal.de a German hacker says he cracked the wireless LAN password of his neighbor in 20 minutes – using the cloud computing power available on Amazon in a demonstration which he says should sensitize people and businesses to security issues.
Beginners guide to open source AVR dev tools
Interactive Matter has produced a detailed tutorial on developing software for the Atmel AVR with AVR-Eclipse, AVR-GCC & AVRDude. Designed for beginners, following these steps will result in the installation of a full fledged IDE, with code completion, one click building, no make files and buttons to flash the AVR.
Hacking toy RC cars
Project Lab provides the details on how to produce a wireless robotics platform using a cheap RC toy vehicle, Arduino, XBee and Processing. The vehicle is completely controlled by the code running on the remote computer which allows very rapid prototyping of the code to tell the vehicle what to do and how to react […]
Xilinx free FPGA/CPLD design tutorials
The Arduino platform and bare microcontrollers are good ways to get started in developing embedded systems. But the way of the future is clearly CPLD and FPGA architecture. These devices are not simply a new type of chip, but a new and interesting design and development frontier. Their programs are developed using several methods, including […]
Attiny2313 based LAN cable tester
Vasilis Stergiopoulos has built a RJ45 LAN cable tester. The circuit was originally designed to use a 555 and 4017 IC, but Vasilis has published the schematic and source code in assembly for using the Attiny2313 instead. The Attiny2313 produces successive outputs at port D, where the LAN-cable is connected. If a straight cable is […]
PLUNIFY: programmable logic design simplified
A new site allows you to conduct programmable logic design with Xilinx and Altera devices “in the cloud.” PLUNIFY, currently in Beta, allows you to experiment with PLD development in your web browser without downloading any software. A free account is available allowing you to 1 GB of storage space and free online development tools […]
ADB to USB keyboard converter
If you have an Apple data bus (ADB) keyboard and want to connect it to your PCs USB port, geekhack has a Teensy based converter project. Source code at Github.