Collaborate Disseminate
We all have our favorite text editor, and are willing to defend its superiority above all other editors by any means necessary. And then there’s Notepad. But what Notepad may lack in text manipulation features, it compensates with its inconspicuous qualities as a gaming platform. Yes, you read that correctly, …read more
In theory, you shouldn’t need any help to develop a software-defined radio (SDR) application. But in real life you really don’t want to roll your own code every time to read the IQ samples, perform various transformations on them, and then drive audio output. At worst, you’ll use some libraries …read more
When I began programming microcontrollers in 2003, I had picked up the Atmel STK-500 and learned assembler for their ATtiny and ATmega lines. At the time I thought it was great – the emulator and development boards were good, and I could add a microcontroller permanently to a project for a dollar. Then the ESP8266 came out.
I was pretty blown away by its features, switched platforms, except for timing-sensitive applications, and it’s been my chip of choice for a few years. A short while ago, a friend gave me an ESP32, the much faster, dual core version of the …read more
Continue reading Compiling NodeMCU for the ESP32 With Support for Public-Private Key Encryption
If your interest has been piqued by the inexpensive wireless-enabled goodness of the ESP8266 microcontroller, but you have been intimidated by the slightly Wild-West nature of the ecosystem that surrounds it, help is at hand. [Alexander] is creating a series of ESP8266 tutorials designed to demystify the component and lead even the most timid would-be developer to a successful first piece of code.
If you cast your mind back to 2014 when the ESP8266 first emerged, it caused great excitement but had almost no information surrounding it. You could buy it on a selection of modules, but there were no …read more
Continue reading Demystifying The ESP8266 With A Series Of Tutorials
Jason Wood delivers this technical segment on NMAP. Everyone loves using Nmap and the Nmap Scripting Engine. We don’t always write NSE scripts though. Writing scripts for can be a bit intimidating at first, but they aren’t too bad to get st… Continue reading NMAP Scripts With LUA and NSE – Paul’s Security Weekly #565
Recently, we covered how to use the Etherscan API to query data (a wallet balance) from the Ethereum blockchain with NodeMCU. It’s a very useful method for retrieving information from a blockchain on embedded systems where storage and memory are an issue.
It has some limitations though. Most notably, it’s polling the API at some interval to retrieve information whether it has changed or not. I would like to be able to receive data more efficiently than this, and quickly enough to make simple vending machines possible. While we’ve seen videos of Bitcoin-based Red Bull vending machines before, they required …read more
Continue reading Simple Ethereum Vending Machines with NodeMCU
Lightning storm detectors have been around for a surprisingly long time. The early designs consisted of a pair of metal bells and a pendulum. When there was a charge applied, for example by connecting one bell to the ground and the other to a lightning rod, the bells would ring when a lightning storm was close by. In the mid 18th century, these devices were only practical for demonstration and research purposes, but very likely represent the earliest devices that convert electrostatic charge to mechanical force. A bit over a hundred years later, the first lightning detector was considered …read more
Nothing says friendship like a reverse engineering challenge on unknown terrain as a birthday present. When [Rikaard] turned 25 earlier this year, his friend [Veydh] put together a Capture the Flag challenge on an ESP8266 for him. As a software guy with no electronics background, [Rikaard] had no idea what he was presented with, but was eager to find out and to document his journey.
Left without guidance or instructions, [Rikaard] went on to learn more about the ESP8266, with the goal to dump its flash content, hoping to find some clues in it. Discovering the board is running NodeMCU …read more
Continue reading Capture the Flag Challenge is the Perfect Gift
We’ll never cease to be amazed at the things people try to put on the Internet of Things. Some are no-brainers, like thermostats, security cameras, and garage door openers. Others, like washing machines and refrigerators, are a little on the iffy side, but you can still make a case for them. But an IoT air compressor? What’s the justification for such a thing?
As it turns out, [Boris van Galvin] had a pretty decent reason for his compressor hacks, and it appears that the IoT aspect was one of those “why not?” things. Having suffered the second failure of his …read more
Continue reading Repair Job Fixes Compressor, Gets in Online
[Nurgak] shows how one can use some of the great robotic tools out there to simulate a robot before you even build it. To drive this point home he builds the tutorial off of the easily 3D printable and buildable Robopoly platform.
The robot runs on Robot Operating System at its core. ROS is interesting because of its decentralized and input/output agnostic messaging system. For example, if you leave everything alone but swap out the motor output from actual motors to a simulator, you can see how the robot would respond to any arbitrary input.
[Nurgak] uses another piece of …read more
