Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Exposing Dinosaur Phone Insecurity With Software Defined Radio

Posted on by

Long before everyone had a smartphone or two, the implementation of a telephone was much stranger than today. Most telephones had real, physical buttons. Even more bizarrely, these phones were connected to other phones through physical wires. Weird, right? These were called “landlines”, a technology that shuffled off this mortal coil three or four years ago.

It gets even more bizarre. some phones were wireless — just like your smartphone — but they couldn’t get a signal more than a few hundred feet away from your house for some reason. These were ‘cordless telephones’. [Corrosive] has been working on …read more

Continue reading Exposing Dinosaur Phone Insecurity With Software Defined Radio→

Hackaday Links: June 4, 2017

Posted on by

Quick question: what was the first personal computer? We love pointless arguments over technological history, so let’s just go down the list. It wasn’t an IBM, and the guy who invented the personal computer said he didn’t invent the personal computer. The Apple I is right out, and there were some weird Italian things that don’t quite count. Here’s an auction for, “The first personal computer”, a MICRAL N, released in 1974. There’s an 8080 running at 500kHz with 16kB of RAM and ‘mixed memory’. This is an important bit of history that belongs in a museum, and the auction …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Links: June 4, 2017→

Hackaday Prize Entry: Refugee Reuniter

Posted on by

The world is dealing with a serious refugee crisis, and with that comes a problem: finding people. The Refugee Reuniter, a project entered into this year’s Hackaday Prize, is a possible solution to this problem. It’s a device that allows people to reconnect with their family, whether it’s children lost in transit to destination countries, or mothers and fathers reuniting.

The basic problem the Refugee Reuniter is trying to solve is tracking people. This is a whole ball of wax that involves privacy and technological concerns. Ideas put forward so far include GPS trackers, implantable RFID tags, and other such …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: Refugee Reuniter→

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Community Mesh Network

Posted on by

While the Internet of Things is here to stay, and will kill us all, there are a few places left on the planet that will remain unscathed during the robot uprising. These underserved communities still have a need for communications and networking, leading [hlew] to create a Community Engagement Mesh Network as an entry for The Hackaday Prize.

While there are many, many options available for DIY networking solutions out there today, [hlew] is leaning on some work done by some of [Bruce Land]’s students at Cornell. This project used simple and cheap nRF24 radio modules for a true mesh …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A Community Mesh Network→

Friday Hack Chat: Audio Systems

Posted on by

Join us this Friday for a Hack Chat on Audio Systems. It’s going down June 2 at noon PDT (handy time zone converter thing).

Every Friday, we gather round the campfire with the best in the business to tease out whatever secrets are stored in their mind. This is the Hack Chat, and this week, we’re going to be talking about audio systems with [Dafydd Roche]. Bring your low-distortion volume knobs and porcelain speaker cable risers, this is going to be a good one.

[Dafydd] got his start in electronics in an application for a music degree. He mentioned he’d …read more

Continue reading Friday Hack Chat: Audio Systems→

Microchip’s PIC32MZ DA — The Microcontroller With A GPU

Posted on by

When it comes to displays, there is a gap between a traditional microcontroller and a Linux system-on-a-chip (SoC). The SoC that lives in a smartphone will always have enough RAM for a framebuffer and usually has a few pins dedicated to an LCD interface. Today, Microchip has announced a microcontroller that blurs the lines between what can be done with an SoC and what can be done with a microcontroller. The PIC32MZ ‘DA’ family of microcontrollers is designed for graphics applications and comes with a boatload of RAM and a dedicated GPU.

The key feature for this chip is a …read more

Continue reading Microchip’s PIC32MZ DA — The Microcontroller With A GPU→

Hackaday Links: May 28, 2017

Posted on by

Boeing and DARPA are building a spaceplane. Right now it’s only a press release and a few concept images, but it looks like this is an air-launched system kind of like a Tristar/Pegasus, only much higher and completely unmanned. It’s a ton and a half to low earth orbit, with a goal of 10 flights in 10 days.

Up in Albany? There’s a new hacker con happening in a few weeks. Anycon is a hacking, infosec, and cyber security conference happening June 16 & 17th in Albany, NY. The organizers of this con ([Chris], and his company Leet Cybersecurity) are …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Links: May 28, 2017→

OpenSTF Dock Ready to Farm Clicks

Posted on by

Deep in the heart of a Chinese click farm — and probably used by the company your company hired to build an ‘app’ — is a magical device. Call it a Beowulf Cluster of Phones. Call it the farm. By any name, it’s a whole bunch of smartphones, smart watches, tablets, and other Smart Things all controlled remotely. This is OpenSTF, or a Smartphone Test Farm. You can build your own, but as with anything requiring a whole lot of cables and devices, if you don’t plan it well, it’s going to look like crap.

[Paul] needed an OpenSTF device …read more

Continue reading OpenSTF Dock Ready to Farm Clicks→

OpenSTF Dock Ready to Farm Clicks

Posted on by

Deep in the heart of a Chinese click farm — and probably used by the company your company hired to build an ‘app’ — is a magical device. Call it a Beowulf Cluster of Phones. Call it the farm. By any name, it’s a whole bunch of smartphones, smart watches, tablets, and other Smart Things all controlled remotely. This is OpenSTF, or a Smartphone Test Farm. You can build your own, but as with anything requiring a whole lot of cables and devices, if you don’t plan it well, it’s going to look like crap.

[Paul] needed an OpenSTF device …read more

Continue reading OpenSTF Dock Ready to Farm Clicks→

Hackaday Prize Entry: MakerNet

Posted on by

One of the biggest trends in whatever market ‘Maker’ stuff belongs to is the Legofication of electronics. Building electronics is hard, if you haven’t noticed. Anything that turns transmission lines, current loops, and RF wizardry into something a five-year-old can use has obvious applications to education. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Jeremy Gilbert] is building a fast, intuitive, modular way to explore electronics. It’s easier to use than the 100-in-1 Radio Shack spring clip kits, and you can actually make useful projects with this system.

MakerNet is [Jeremy]’s solution to the problem of complicated electronics, Arduinos connected to breadboards …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: MakerNet→