Collaborate Disseminate
An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) isn’t something solely to have hooked up to your desktop PC. Your Raspberry Pi SBC might also benefit from it. Yet the available options aren’t too great, or are too expensive. This leads folk including [Joachim Baumann] to modify cheerfully cheap Chinese UPS HAT boards …read more
Continue reading Fixing A Cheap UPS HAT For Your Raspberry Pi With A Tiny Daemon
UPS is looking to all kinds of new-age vehicle technologies to step up its delivery game, with electric vans, e-bikes and drones that carry smaller packages all part of the mix. It is now expressing a keen interest in autonomous heavy haulers… Continue reading UPS puts autonomous delivery trucks to the test on Arizona highway
If you treat your Pi as a wearable or a tablet, you will already have a battery. If you treat your Pi as a desktop you will already have a plug-in power supply, but how about if you live where mains power is unreliable? Like [jwhart1], you may consider building …read more
Putting these toys back in the box after a decade of hype isn’t going to be easy, but these researchers are exploring the options. Continue reading As drones fill the skies, cybercriminals won’t be far behind
Recently I had the opportunity to do a teardown of a battery-backed LED bulb, and found some interesting details on how the device operated. Essentially, the bulb contained a low voltage DC uninterruptible power supply that would automatically switch between AC power and internal battery as needed. The implications of this seemed pretty exciting. For around $12 at big box retailers, this little bulb could be a cheap and convenient solution for providing fault tolerant power to microcontrollers and other low-power devices.
The teardown was a runaway success, with quite a bit of discussion of the UPS idea specifically. Some …read more
Continue reading Investigating the Tiny Salvaged UPS from a Lightbulb
Ok, now this is something special. This is a home network and security system that would make just about anyone stop, and with jaw hanging agape, stare, impressed at the “several months of effort” it took [timekillerjay] to install their dream setup. Just. Wow.
Want a brief rundown of the diverse skill set needed to pull this off? Networking, home security, home automation, woodworking, running two thousand feet(!) of cat 6a cable, a fair hand at drywall work for the dozens upon dozens of patches, painting, staining, and — while not a skill, but is definitely necessary — an amazingly …read more
Continue reading A Home Network, Security System, And A Hidden Room Behind A Bookcase
Over the last few years one thing has become abundantly clear: hackers love cramming the Raspberry Pi into stuff. From classic game systems to mirrors, there’s few places that haven’t been invaded by everyone’s favorite Linux SBC. From the inspired to the bizarre, we’ve brought such projects to your attention with minimal editorialization. As we’ve said before: it’s not the job of Hackaday to ask why, we’re here to examine how.
That said, some builds do stand out from the crowd. One such project is the “Pentesting BBU Dropbox” which [b1tbang3r] has recently posted to Hackaday.io. Noticing the battery …read more
Occasionally you run across a product that you just know is simply too good to be true. You might not know why, but you’ve got a hunch that what the bombastic phrasing on the package is telling you just doesn’t quite align with reality. That’s the feeling I got recently when I spotted the “LED intellibulb Battery Backup” bulb by Feit Electric. For around $12 USD at Home Depot, the box promises the purchaser will “Never be in the dark again”, and that the bulb will continue to work normally for up to 3.5 hours when the power is …read more
We know your shame. Like you, we wanted to save some scratch and bought the bottom-of-the-range UPS, only to discover that it is no use to man or beast as it lacks the power to perform any reasonable task. It’s now sitting in a corner, to gather dust as its batteries deteriorate.
Not so fast with the UPS abandonment! [rue_mohr] came up with a modification for a small APC UPS that turned it into something a little more useful. Removing the mains inverter from the picture with a few displaced wires and PCB mod, the UPS is now a 12V …read more
Continue reading Great Emergency Lights from Not-So-Great UPS
The next in the never ending series of malware downloaders is an email with the subject of UPS Ship Notification, Tracking Number 1Z51322Y3483221007 ( random numbers) pretending to come from UPS Quantum View <pkginfo26@ups.com> (random pkgino numbers) They use email addresses and subjects that will entice, persuade, scare or shock a … Continue reading → Continue reading Fake UPS Quantum View UPS Ship Notification, Tracking Number tries to deliver malware