Posted May 9th 2008 9:00PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
[
John Peterson] showed us his
Puzzlemation, animated tile puzzle at Maker Faire. It was originally designed for the
Microchip 16-bit Embedded Control Design Contest. The puzzle is made from multiple modules each with an 8x8 LED grid. The tiles are battery powered and each one has
PIC24FJ64GA004 microcontroller. They sit on a tray with flat copper strips as a serial bus. The tray controller broadcasts the animation to the tiles. Each tile waits for its unique identifier and saves that portion of the animation. The tiles don't actually know what order they're in so once the animation is in motion you can figure out their proper order; rearranging them so the animation is correct. We've got a video of it in action after the break.
Continue reading Maker Faire 2008: Puzzlemation
Posted May 9th 2008 4:10AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
Today's episode of BoingBoing TV comes straight from Maker Faire. The first segement is about
RoboGames arena combat. The second segment covers a favorite exhibit of mine.
Western Warship Combat Club brought their 1/144th scale battleships to fight it out in a large pool. The RC boats fire ammunition up to 1/4-inch ball bearings and the even feature bilge pumps to keep them afloat. Scoring is based on where on the hull the strike happens. Here's a direct link to the
mp4.
Posted May 8th 2008 8:00PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
We made a point to stop by [garrett]'s booth at Maker Faire to to see what he had been working on. You may remember him from his
random caps locker shenanigans. He's just recently released the
ShiftBright RGB LED module which makes it easy to implement a string of individually addressable LEDs. The module is based on the Allegro A6281 3-Channel Constant Current LED Driver. The driver chip is capable of displaying a billion colors using an RGB LED. The 3x3mm package is mounted to the backside of the board while a bright common-anode RGB is mounted to the front. The modules are designed to be daisy chained together and are individually addressed using a serial interface. You can find
Arduino example code on the site and more info on
how the item was developed. Read on for close up images.
Continue reading Maker Faire 2008: ShiftBright RGB LED module
Posted Apr 22nd 2008 5:00PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
The second ToorCon Seattle got off to a quick start last Friday with a round of
Lightning Talks at the Public Nerd Area. Each talk was limited to 5 minutes and covered a broad range of topics. Some talks were just supplying a chunk of information while others were a call to action for personal projects. Here are a few of the talks that we found interesting.
Continue reading ToorCon Seattle 2008: Lightning talks
Posted Apr 7th 2008 5:05PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
[
Pete Edwards] and [
Fred Owsley] openly admitted that the title was the most thinly veiled audience-bait ever constructed. Nevertheless, they poured through a great talk covering the basics of
circuit bending and some of the pieces they had built over the years. Fred said that what attracts him to circuit bending is the hands on approach to something very scientific i.e. he can figure out how to construct an interesting circuit by rubbing his finger along the back of the board. As far as where to start: always a battery powered device and use the toy store as a last resort. You're going to tear the thing apart so why pay for it? Dumpster diving, garage sales, swap meets, and flea markets are all places to look. Parts don't need to be anything better than grab bag either. They suggested an easy first step is dropping the operating voltage of your device and seeing how it reacts. Pete and Fred had several examples of devices they've modified:
Speak & Spells,
Casio SA keyboards,
Barbi karaoke machines, and the
voice changing gas mask pictured above.
The
Bent Festival for circuit bending is coming up soon if you'd like to see more. You can also check out these links for more information on circuit bending.
Posted Apr 6th 2008 1:30PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
[Mark Doner] presented on how the
WISP he works for near Toledo is set up. His most important point was that 802.11 is garbage when it comes to the type of installations WISPs do. 802.11 expects the clients to adjust based on the traffic from other clients, but when all your clients are directional they won't see each other. Mark uses
Motorola's Canopy equipment, but he also mentioned
Trango and
Redline as other vendors. The radios operate in the 5.7GHz band which doesn't have any power restrictions so they can use refurbished Dish Network dishes when they're doing long shots. For customers that are nearly at the edge of service, they have 900MHz equipment as well. Heavy fog and freezing rain have proven to be the only weather that really affects the service. For back-haul between their towers they use
Dragonwave equipment. Each of the radios costs ~$350 and features GPS to determine distance and maintain sync with the AP. It was interesting to see how a good WISP operates as opposed to the flakey ones we've had to deal with in the past.
Posted Apr 6th 2008 6:00AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
[algormor] gave one of the more controversial talks at
Notacon. After receiving a few too many inspection slips and destroyed baggage he decided to find out what was going on behind the scenes. First, he purchased a cheap bag from Walmart with a zipable liner. To record the video, he purchased a
SwannGUARD MicroDVR. It's a palm-sized device that records 128x128 15fps video. It comes with a plastic cover that he mounted to the inside of the bag. A hole was cut for the video camera right above the badge holder. Since the camera is motion triggered, he could slide the badge up, covering the hole, to deactivate the camera. He's taken the bag on at least four trips. So... what did the footage show?
Continue reading Notacon 2008: The TSA Bagcam
Posted Apr 6th 2008 1:30AM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
The first talk we went to at Notacon was [
Sam Harmon]'s great introduction to
circuit bending, the process of modifying sound generating electronics to create new musical instruments.
Reed Ghazala is considered the father of circuit bending for his pioneering work starting in 1966. Sam pointed out that a "
prepared piano" could be considered the non-electric precursor to circuit bending. It involves the musician placing different types of material on the piano's components. Sam presented many different examples of where to start with circuit bending: the
Casio PT-10,
PAiA Theremax,
Atari Punk Console. He also mentioned a couple AVR projects:
AVRSYN and
todbot's Arduino work.
The session ended with [Thom Robertson] showing off the
Weird Sound Generator he built and his
GHX software for playing real music with a Guitar Hero controller.
Posted Apr 1st 2008 12:00PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
We're headed to Cleveland at the end of the week (we've heard rumors it rocks) and thought it would be good to list the events we're planning on hitting in the next five months.
- Notacon / Blockparty April 4-6 Cleveland, OH - This will be a first for us, but we're definitely excited, especially for the demoscene madness at Blockparty (like Trixter's MONOTONE PC speaker tracker).
- ToorCon Seattle April 18-20 Seattle, WA - In its second year, this small gathering is sure to be a blast just like last year.
- The Last HOPE July 18-20 New York, NY - Our first HOPE and the last one ever.. since the hotel is being torn down.
- Black Hat US August 2-7 Las Vegas, NV - If anything gets released this year, it'll be here.
- DefCon August 8-10 Las Vegas, NV - The first con we ever went to. It's not the best con, but it's always interesting.
- SIGGRAPH August 11-15 Los Angeles, CA - SIGGRAPH is where you need to be if you want to see cutting edge graphics and interaction projects. It's a favorite of ours and a nice break from computer security.
Anything we're missing?
UPDATE: Maker Faire May 3-4 San Mateo, CA - Can't believe we forgot it. Thanks [pt]!
Posted Feb 17th 2008 6:41PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: misc hacks, cons
I caught up with [Larry] from
pauldotcom.com and got a quick walk-through of his Shmooball gun. After several less successful attempts, this one worked pretty damn well and featured a distinctive sound that caused a notable glimmer of fear in the eyes of the speakers.
*cough*[renderman]*cough*. Read on for the secrets of the Shmooball gun.
Continue reading The 2008 Shmooball Gun
Posted Feb 16th 2008 6:45PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: cons
Today wrapped up with a talk on recovering data from solid state hard drives by [Scott Moulton]. The talk focused on the differences in data storage between SSD and platter technology. I did come away with a few interesting bits of knowledge. In an effort to extend device life, flash based drives store changed data to a new location, leaving the old data intact until a garbage removal subroutine gets around to clearing it out. Probably the best way to recover data from them will be altering or replacing the controller chip so you can access old data.
Yesterday I caught an interesting talk on recovering passwords from drive images by [David Smith]. He found that he could take a system image, strip out all the strings that were stored by various programs and use them to build a dictionary of possible passwords. By limiting string lengths and matching for known password policies, he was able to further filter his dictionary for likely passwords.
Posted Feb 15th 2008 7:35PM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: cons
[Syn Phishus] presented a pretty interesting talk. At $former_company he prepared and executed a rogue internal exercise designed to heighten awareness of phishing scams. (That is, attempts to gather personal information from users with trickery.) After noting a certain lack of effort on the part of security policy implementation, he put together an official looking email, set up a simple phishing site that
didn't actually store any collected information and set loose the dogs of war. OK, he actually sent it to a select group within the company without warning
anyone else ahead of time. He purposely didn't store any of the results to protect the foolish, but he estimates that maybe 10% of the recipients fell for it.
Posted Feb 15th 2008 5:31PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: cons
Back in August, [h1kari] presented an
analysis of the A5 crypto spec used in GSM systems. Almost all GSM conversations in the US and Europe are encrypted using this standard. At the time they were still in the planning stages of building their rainbow table of shift register states. Today we heard an update on the progress. The whole space is 2^58 in size and would take a standard PC 33,235 years to calculate. Not being patient people they built a box containing 68
express card based FPGAs. Each one is capable of doing 72 billion operations per second. So far they're one month into the 3 month process. Once the table is completed any person can crack a GSM conversation in 30 minutes using 1 FPGA and the 2TB table. They do have plans for building an optimal system that would be based on solid state drives and 16 FPGAs that should do the crack in just 30 seconds.
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