Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Shmoocon 2017: On Not Reverse Engineering Through Emulation

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Right now, I’m at Shmoocon, and it’s living up to all expectations. That’s a tall order — last year, the breakout talk was from [Travis Goodspeed] on his efforts to reverse engineer the firmware for a cheap Chinese radio. Four people in the room for that talk last year bought the radio on Amazon, and now there’s a legitimate open source project dedicated to building firmware and tools to support this radio.

Now that [Travis] has a few compatriots working on firmware for this radio, he has the same challenges as any other team. The project needs unit tests, and …read more

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Bring Your Palm VII To ShmooCon This Weekend

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We’re not even halfway through January, and already the conference season is upon us. This weekend, Hackaday will be attending Shmoocon at the Hilton in Washington, DC. I’ll be there getting the full report on Russian hackers, reverse engineering, and what the beltway looks like with an ice storm during morning rush hour.

What’s in store for Shmoocon attendees? The schedule looks really cool with talks on something like inline assembly in Python, tools for RF reverse engineering, manufacturing and selling a U2F token, emulating ARM firmware, and so much more. Want to attend Shmoocon? Too bad! Tickets sold out …read more

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The 3D printers of CES

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CES is over, and now we can take a step back, distance ourselves from the trade show booths, and figure out where 3D printing will be going over the next year.

The Hype Cycle is a great way to explain trends in fads and technological advances. VR and autonomous cars are very early on the Hype Cycle right now. Smartphones are on the plateau of productivity. 3D printing is head-down in the trough of disillusionment.

For this year’s CES, 3D printing is not even a product category. In fact, the official documentation I found at Prusa’s booth listed their company …read more

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CES2017: Which Internet of Thing is Best Internet of Thing?

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CES 2017 is finally over, but one question has yet to be answered: which Internet of Thing is Best Internet of Thing?

Astonishing new devices

CES is the Mecca for new, interesting, and innovative hardware. Every year, one device amazes the crowds with incredible engineering. This year it was something phenomenal: a laptop with multiple displays. The Thinkpad W701ds is a work of art. It’s a mobile workstation with two independent displays. Oh, yeah, the Razer thing.

Razer, manufacturer of computer peripherals that break far too easily, introduced a concept 3-screen laptop. Is it very, very cool? Yes. Is it …read more

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CES2017: Which Internet of Thing is Best Internet of Thing?

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CES 2017 is finally over, but one question has yet to be answered: which Internet of Thing is Best Internet of Thing?

Astonishing new devices

CES is the Mecca for new, interesting, and innovative hardware. Every year, one device amazes the crowds with incredible engineering. This year it was something phenomenal: a laptop with multiple displays. The Thinkpad W701ds is a work of art. It’s a mobile workstation with two independent displays. Oh, yeah, the Razer thing.

Razer, manufacturer of computer peripherals that break far too easily, introduced a concept 3-screen laptop. Is it very, very cool? Yes. Is it …read more

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CES2017: Astrophotography In The Eyepiece

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If you’ve never set up a telescope in your back yard, you’ve never been truly disappointed. The Hubble can take some great shots of Saturn, nebulae, and other astronomical phenomena, but even an expensive backyard scope produces only smudges. To do astronomy properly, you’ll spend your time huddled over a camera and a computer, stacking images to produce something that almost lives up to your expectations.

At CES, Unistellar introduced a device designed to fit over the eyepiece of a telescope to do all of this for you.

According to the guys at Unistellar, this box contains a small Linux …read more

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Hackaday Links: January 8, 2017

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What do you get when mindless automatons with no capacity for reason or logic converse? While you discuss that in the comments, here are two chatbots on Twitch. The highlights? A few hours ago they were doing the cutesy couple, “‘I love you more!’, ‘No, I love you more!’” thing. This was ended by, “Error, cannot connect to server.” Even robot love is not eternal.

3D printer nozzles wear out. Put a few hundred hours on a brass nozzle, and you’re not going to get the same print quality as when you started. This has led to stainless and silly-con …read more

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Hackaday Links: January 8, 2017

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What do you get when mindless automatons with no capacity for reason or logic converse? While you discuss that in the comments, here are two chatbots on Twitch. The highlights? A few hours ago they were doing the cutesy couple, “‘I love you more!’, ‘No, I love you more!’” thing. This was ended by, “Error, cannot connect to server.” Even robot love is not eternal.

3D printer nozzles wear out. Put a few hundred hours on a brass nozzle, and you’re not going to get the same print quality as when you started. This has led to stainless and silly-con …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Links: January 8, 2017→

CES2017: Complete Register Documentation For The C.H.I.P.

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Last October, Next Thing Co., makers of the popular C.H.I.P. platform unleashed the C.H.I.P. Pro, a very capable Linux system on a tiny board. The goal of the C.H.I.P. Pro is to be the brains of a project or product, similar to the Gumstix boards from an ancient era long before the Raspberry Pi.

Introduced alongside the C.H.I.P. Pro was a fantastic little device. The GR8 module is a complete Linux system on a chip, with an ARM Cortex-A8 processor and 256 MB of RAM, all on a relatively small BGA chip. This is a drop-in part that gives any …read more

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CES2017: Lulzbot Has the Best Names for Stuff

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Lulzbot is the poster child of the RepRap project. Everything they do is big-O Open. At CES, Lulzbot launched the MOARstruder, a tool head with a 1.2mm nozzle diameter. That pushes a lot of plastic out, allowing for faster print times. This is the same nozzle diameter as the largest E3D Volcano, and from the big prints sitting around the booth, the results are similar: you get faster prints at larger layer heights, and the layer lines become a design feature.

Also announced by Lulzbot this week is the release of Cura 2 (Lulzbot edition), a partnership with the Blender  …read more

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