Author Archives: Brian Benchoff

Is Intel’s Management Engine Broken?

Posted on by

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” This law remains unassailable. However, recent claims have called into question a black box hidden deep inside every Intel chipset produced in the last decade.

Yesterday, on the Semiaccurate blog, [Charlie Demerjian] announced a remote exploit for the Intel Management Engine (ME). This exploit covers every Intel platform with Active Management Technology (AMT) shipped since 2008. This is a small percentage of all systems running Intel chipsets, and even then the remote exploit will only work if AMT is enabled. …read more

Continue reading Is Intel’s Management Engine Broken?→

The Raspberry Pi Becomes a SCSI Device

Posted on by

SCSI devices were found in hundreds of different models of computers from the 80s, from SUN boxes to cute little Macs. These hard drives and CDROMs are slowly dying, and with that goes an entire generation of technology down the drain. Currently, the best method of preserving these computers with SCSI drives is the SCSI2SD device designed by [Michael McMaster]. While this device does exactly what it says it’ll do — turn an SD card into a drive on a SCSI chain — it’s fairly expensive at $70.

[Gokhan] has a better, cheaper solution. It’s a SCSI device emulator for …read more

Continue reading The Raspberry Pi Becomes a SCSI Device→

New Part Day: The $239 Pi Clone

Posted on by

Linaro has announced a new ARM-based single board computer.

The HiKey 960, built in collaboration with 96Boards, gives the user 4 ARM Cortex-173 cores clocked at 2.4GHz, 4 ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz, a Mali GPU (ugh), 32GB of Flash storage, 3GB of LPDDR4, HDMI 1.2, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB 3.0 type A, PCIe on an M.2 connector, and a familiar 40-pin GPIO connector whose configuration is not published yet but is one we can make a very educated guess about. This is a powerful ARM-based single-board computer that’s the same size as a credit card.

This single board …read more

Continue reading New Part Day: The $239 Pi Clone→

Hackaday Links: April 30, 2017

Posted on by

This last week was SEFF, a week of electric-powered remote-controlled aircraft above 1700 feet of Bermuda grass in the middle of Georgia. [Damon Atwood] has been bringing his 16-foot-wingspan Emmaselle to SEFF for a few years now, and this year we’re getting a great video of the flight. This is, or was at one time, the 3rd largest electric RC on the planet. It’s flying on 11S, and is absolutely beautiful in the air.

Speaking of electric RC meetups, Flite Fest West is going on right now. Flite Fest East will be July 13th through the 16th. Here’s the link …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Links: April 30, 2017→

Logs For A Toilet

Posted on by

The Internet of Things, as originally envisioned in papers dating to the early to mid-90s, is a magical concept. Wearable devices would report your location, health stats, and physiological information to a private server. Cameras in your shower would tell your doctor if that mole is getting bigger. Your car would monitor the life of your cabin air filter and buy a new one when the time arrived. Nanobots would become programmable matter, morphing into chairs, houses, and kitchen utensils. A ubiquity of computing would serve humans as an unseen hive mind. It was paradise, delivered by ever smaller computers, …read more

Continue reading Logs For A Toilet→

Hackaday Prize Entry: A Double Action Keyboard

Posted on by

Mechanical keyboards are the in thing right now and building your own is at least two extra levels of nerd cred. This project, entered in the Hackaday Prize, is a DIY keyboard unlike you’ve ever seen. It is a fundamental shift in the ideas of how a computer keyboard can work. It’s a double action keyboard. Press a key lightly, and one character will show up on the screen. Press hard, and a different character will show up on the screen. You’ve never seen anything like this before.

[Jaakob] designed this keyboard so that each keycap would have two switches …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A Double Action Keyboard→

Hackaday Prize Entry: An Automated Still

Posted on by

We’ve seen plenty of Arduinofied home brewing setups, and kegerators are a fairly standard project for the types of people we hang out with. What we haven’t seen a lot of are home stills. There are unfortunate reasons for this. First off, distilling alcohol is illegal in a few parts of the world if you don’t have a license or tax stamp. Second, vapors explode. Third, wood alcohol is poison.

That said, [TegwynTwmffat’s] project for the Hackaday Prize is the coolest and the safest alcohol still we’ve ever seen. It’s fully automated, small, safe, and there are video game noises …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: An Automated Still→

Friday Hack Chat: The Hackaday Prize

Posted on by

Did you know Hackaday is hosting a fantastic contest to build hardware and software? It’s true! The Hackaday Prize will award hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hackaday community members for building the coolest hardware designed to make a difference in the world.

The Hackaday Prize has many ways to enter, focusing on several themes throughout this year. We’ll be discussing that and opening the floor to questions. Tomorrow, Friday, April 28, at noon, Pacific time, we’re hosting a Hack Chat for the Hackaday Prize over on Hackaday.io.

Our guest host for this chat is [Alberto], creator of the project …read more

Continue reading Friday Hack Chat: The Hackaday Prize→

Wherein The Mechanical Keyboard Community Discovers Motorized Linear Potentiometers

Posted on by

Deep in the bowels of the Digikey and Mouser databases, you’ll find the coolest component ever. Motorized linear potentiometers are a rare, exotic, and just plain neat input device most commonly found on gigantic audio mixing boards and other equipment that costs as much as a car. They’re slider potentiometers with a trick up their sleeve: there’s a motor inside that can set the slider to any position.

The mechanical keyboard community has been pushing the boundaries of input devices for the last few years, and it looks like they just discovered motorized linear pots. [Jack] created a motorized sliding …read more

Continue reading Wherein The Mechanical Keyboard Community Discovers Motorized Linear Potentiometers→

Hackaday Prize Entry: HID Dial

Posted on by

Microsoft has introduced a few interesting bits of hardware recently, and the most drool worthy by far is the Microsoft Surface Dial. What is this magical input device that will revolutionize creative work on a computer? Basically, it’s a Griffin PowerMate — a rotary encoder and button — an interface that really hasn’t changed in a decade and a half.

[K.C. Lee] figures a device this simple would make for a great Hackaday Prize entry, so he built a USB HID multimedia dial. It’s a rotary encoder and a button. This one lights up, though, making this a gamer USB …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: HID Dial→