A WiFi connection in today’s modern age is right beneath things like food, water, and air in terms of necessity. Many of our devices are constantly seeking out wireless connections. Besides a password protection, we have very little control over what devices connect to our home networks.
Enter The WiFi Deauther Monster. This unique wireless hacking tool from Travis Lin allows you to perform a WiFi deauth attack or even beacon and probe request flooding. The result? You can select a client you want to be disconnected from the network and poof! They’re gone.
This device was originally designed for spacehuhn’s project ESP8266_deauther, but it is now for sale on Tindie as well. The device works by leveraging a de-authentication frame in the 802.11 Wi-Fi protocol. It’s normally used to safely disconnect clients from a wireless network.
The management packets themselves are unencrypted, so all you need is the mac address of the Wi-Fi router and of the client device you wish to disconnect. There’s no need to be connected to the network yourself, nor do you need to know the password.
Of course, a device like this is meant only for testing purposes on your own network. The device ships ready to use, but it does not include a battery. You could use two 3500 mAh 18650 batteries to power the board for 70 hours, for example.
It can also be a great way to familiarize and protect yourself from these types of attacks in the future. At the very least, it could be fun to rule over your network with an iron fist.
All you need to do for the Bring-a-Hack is to RSVP.
If you’re quick you might also snag a ticket for the Hackaday Dublin Unconference — check the link above. Join Jasmine Brackett, Tindie Product Manager, along with Mike Szczys, Editor-in-Chief of Hackaday, Contributing Editor Jenny List, Supplyframe Director of Product Sophi Kravitz, and about 150 other people from the Hackaday and Tindie Community for a day and a night of hardware talks, food and drinks, hacks and projects. We’d love to see you at both or either.
Friday: Bring-A-Hack at TOG
Come hang out with Hackaday and Tindie night before the Hackaday Dublin Unconference. Thanks to TOG Hackerspace, we’re really pleased to host this Bring-a-Hack in the heart of Dubin on Friday evening.
Grab a small and easy to carry project you’d like to show off and come enjoy a tasty beverage and some light snacks on us. This is a great opportunity for visitors to Dublin or folks new to TOG to check it out and meet the members.
We’re looking forward to seeing what Dublin makers are working on, especially from local Seller PartFusion (who is also a TOG member and vouched for us for this event. Thank you!) and what’s new with AnalysisIR.
This event is open to anyone, so even if you can’t make it to the Unconference, we’d love to see you. RSVP on Eventbrite to let us know you’re coming.
Saturday: The Hackaday Dublin Unconference!
This is Hackaday’s first big event in Ireland and there’s going to be quite a turnout at the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar. It did sell out, but there have been a few cancellations, so you may still be able to bag a ticket. Tickets are free, thanks to DesignSpark brought to you by RS, the exclusive sponsor of the event.
If you’re excited about a project or idea you’re working on right now, come prepared with a 7-minute talk and put your name down! It’s you and other community members who step up that makes this a great event. The one last September in London was ‘epic‘.
The Raspberry Pi camera has allowed people to capture and process images, then process them using computer vision routines. There is only one camera port per Raspberry Pi port, a limitation that may pop up when delving into the computer vision world which benefits from eyes in many places at once.
While you could use multiple USB webcams, according to Raspberry Pi’s documentation, “the quality and configurability of the camera module is highly superior to a standard USB webcam.” At around $30 for an 8 megapixel sensor, the RPi camera isn’t going to break the bank, and it’s well supported ecosystem-wise. But there’s still that one-camera-per-board limitation.
One solution comes in the form of the IVPort V2 Raspberry Pi Camera Muliplexer. This device lets you switch between up to four Raspberry Pi V2 cameras with a single board, using 3 GPIO pins for control. You can also use several of these boards together with additional GPIO pins for up to 16 cameras feeding to one Pi. There’s also a less expensive dual version if you only need to use two cameras; this one only requires a single GPIO pin for operation.
As seen in the video below, if you’re using two of these in a stereoscopic arrangement, the left and right camera will only be off by a few hundredths of a second. While this will restrict some applications, for something like a multi-camera security feed where the exact time isn’t critical, it should be very useful. You can find more info on the setup at their GitHub repo.
Seller Canerdurmusoglu also offers a version compatible with the first RPi camera if you need or prefer that version.
The Flame Trench is a group of British and American students and professionals interested in model rocketry. While their portfolio certainly includes the rockets that you might have launched as a kid, some of their exploits involve rockets taller than a human, attempts to break altitude records, and even thrust vectoring via BPS Space with the end-goal of landing a model rocket vertically under power. You know, the kind of stuff SpaceX has been doing so successfully these days.
I got to catch up with member Ben Cartwright, who in addition to his experiments, operates a new Flame Trench Tindie store. Items for sale there include stickers for marking the center (or centre as he resides in the UK) of gravity and pressure for your model aeronautical equipment, as well as disk-shaped electronics prototyping platforms meant to fit inside the cones of model rockets.
As with many of us, Ben has always been interested in electronics in some respect. His dad started him off with model planes and helicopters as a young child, and since then the magic of invisibly moving electrons about to do his bidding had him hooked. After quite a bit of study, and discovering his love of space and rocketry along the way, he’s about to get a Master’s degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. After that, he has a job lined up at RAL Space (the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) upon graduation.
The Flame Trench Organization was looking at building hardware and kits to sell for the model rocketry community in the UK. Tindie was a perfect platform for selling this type of product. While their product offerings are currently limited to what’s seen below, they’ve got several exciting projects in the works, including flight computers, rocket altimeters, image sensors, and more.
Ben Cartwright and the Flame Trench are quite new to Tindie, having just opened in Mid-March of this year, but Ben describes it as “super simple to use,” and notes that the “quality of the content on there is fantastic!” Having listed a few things here myself, I’d wholeheartedly agree with it being easy to use. If you’ve ever written a blog post on WordPress, or put a project on Hackaday.io or similar, listing a product here is equally simple.
He does note that there’s currently not a lot on Tindie from the model rocketry community, but he hopes to change that. We’re looking forward to it, and invite anyone else who has a rocketry related gadget to sell to get it into a Tindie store of their own.
It’s always fun to get together (whether virtually or in real life) with those who share common interests, and swapping ideas could even save you from having to reinvent the wheel solid rocket engine! For a preview of the kind of projects that Flame Trench members take on, check out the BPSspace promo video below:
For another take on high altitude experimentation, you might also check out the CatSat1. While high altitude ballooning might not have the same kind of high speed excitement as model rocketry, getting a glimpse of the earth from far above using your own equipment has to be amazing as well.
Last year’s Easter Egg Hunt by RC2014 creator semachthemonkey was a massive success, and this year they’ve pulled in friends to make it bigger, better and eggier than before!
The Easter Bunny is busy hiding the parts of a discount code among many RC2014 products on Tindie. If you can find all the parts of the code this Sunday, you can use it to get an 18% discount on RC2014 computers and accessories from semachthemonkey, Ed Brindley, Tynemouth Software or Dtronixs through Monday.
What is RC2014?
RC2014 is a simple 8-bit Z80 based modular computer originally built to run Microsoft BASIC. It is inspired by the home built computers of the late 70s and computer revolution of the early 80s.
RC2014 Modules in full glory.
Anyone with basic soldering skills can build one, so it’s great for beginners and a wonderful introduction for anyone interested in Retro Computing. The build is well documented on RC2014.co.uk and there’s a strong community behind it.
It’s modular, customizable, and Open Source, so folk are constantly developing new modules to extend it. One of the latest releases is the ESP8266 Wifi Module shown below.
So hop to it to get the RC2014 set-up of your dreams at a fantastic price. We hope you have an awesome chocolate filled weekend!
While there were other games that came before it, Pac-Man is the game that cemented the image and feel of arcade games into our collective consciousness. At least that’s the way it seems to me… even if I much prefer Galaga.
If you do prefer Pac-Man, and would like to have it with you at all times in a satisfyingly small form factor. The OLEDiCADE from Pheonix Cnc, Oleduino hits both the video game nostalgia mark and one for custom electronics geeks like me! It can be played with one hand using the tiny joystick, and has a screen that’s only 56x28mm. Even with the small screen, Pac-Man (which scrolls up and down to display the entire maze) looks quite good. The device also features versions of Flappy Bird, Breakout, and even Octopus, giving you something to fiddle with when you need a quick distraction.
You can watch seller Hayri describe and play the game in the video below. He also shows off a 3D-printed case for it, which will be available sometime in the future.
For other tiny gaming options, you might also check out the impressive and versatile TinyPi, or even the Tiny Arcade cabinet—unquestionably the smallest video game that you can also see through. If you care to challenge me on my vintage arcade opinions facts, you can ping me @JeremySCook, or you can find Tindie at—you guessed it—@Tindie.
Despite the warnings of science fiction and modern movies, robotic technology continues to march forward. Since we’ve accepted our inevitable fate as servants of our robotic overlords, we might as well equip them with more sensors so they can navigate easier.
Ultrasonic sensors are a great way to provide robots with spatial awareness to help them navigate past doors and walls. They’re cheap, reliable, and easy to use. While it would be reasonable to assume that three sensors on the front, left, and right would be enough, this leaves a significant number of blind spots.
The corners of a rover like this ware what really matter and adding three sensors to each will facilitate great obstacle avoidance. Adding 12 HC-SR04 sensors is surprisingly inexpensive while providing great accuracy. The trade-off is that they require two pins each: one for the trigger and one for the echo. The Arduino must also handle the timing for all of this. It sounds like we’re getting close to a solution, but those I/O and timing requirements are asking a lot of a basic Arduino. But this new Tindie item has the solution.
His original design supported 8 sensors (we covered that one about a year ago), but it would only control two sensors per corner. The OctosonarX2 improves on his original design with the capacity for 16 sensors. A 16-pin version of the chip was available, so it made sense to offer a higher capacity.
The library handles the timing, and the hardware interrupts provide high accuracy results. Red Hunter also tests each unit using an Arduino test-bed and ships with separate pin headers.
Watching your robotic creation take flight is an incredible feeling, but watching it collide with something or crash can make your stomach turn. One common sensor you may reach for in a case like this is the VL53L0. But it only provides ranging to a distance of 2 meters. For many of us, this is just shy of a range we would be comfortable with.
Thankfully, a new sensor has appeared which doubles the range. The VL53L1 extends the accurate distance detection to 4 meters. It also uses a patented ranging technology that harnesses time-of-flight from a 940 nm laser.
This results in estimation independent of surface reflectivity and high accuracy in a variety of weather and environmental conditions. This breakout board sold by Pesky Products is designed to bring out all the best capabilities of the VL53L1 from ST Microelectronics.
This sensor includes the option to define multiple detection zones, which improve the obstacle detection. This feature alone makes it a useful sensor to have on both rolling and flying robot designs. And it’s quite small at 18 x 8 mm which makes it easy to integrate into any of your robotic projects. Check out the video below to see how this sensor can be used in other applications.
Arcade machines and emulators are a match made in heaven. Your typical arcade cabinet bulky and hard to move particle board monstrosity, but not this one. Thanos designed a compact and modern bartop arcade with a great look and a nice big screen.
The machine is based on Raspberry Pi 3 and features at a vibrant 10.1-inch screen with classic arcade controls. The Zero delay controller electronics also breathes new life into these retro titles with superb responsiveness.
The sleek enclosure is 3D printed with thick walls and a back power entry for computer-style plugs. The power supplies for the LCD and raspberry are both inside the cabinet. A large speaker on the side uses HiFi I2S DAC from the raspberry with adjustable volume.
The cover of the cabinet is magnetic for quick accessibility. Extra mounting holes are provided if you prefer to permanently close it. Additional games can be added using an external USB. The internal SD card is 32GB, but USB sticks up to 128GB are supported as well.
A USB hub is located inside of the cabinet to easily add and modify the game selection stored on thumb drives. The emulation software is RetroPie, which plays games from NES, SNES, Atari, PlayStation, Sega Genesis, GameBoy, and plenty others.
With a classic arcade stick and button layout, combined with a gorgeous HDMI display, this miniature arcade cabinet is a retro gamer’s paradise. Check out the video below for a closer look:
If you experiment with electronics whatsoever, a multimeter is pretty much the minimum you’ll need instrument-wise. This, however, only tells you some of the story. Sure, you’re reading 5 volts, but how steady is that reading? To really tell what’s going on, you’ll need an oscilloscope.
Fortunately, with advances in microelectronics, basic oscilloscopes no longer have to be large instruments that cost in the high hundreds or thousands of dollars, but can now be made small enough to slip into your pocket for around $100. While they may not replace professional equipment, for quick reference they can be quite useful.
If you’d rather spend even less money—but more time—then there are DIY kits that cost even less. One example is the DSO Shell Oscilloscope kit, listed for around $35. The device features a 12-bit sampling resolution, and a maximum bandwidth of 200KHz. It also has a rotary encoder for adjustments, and as the name implies, a nice housing to protect the instrument’s insides.
If you’ve never had an oscilloscope, the big question is whether a cheap unit like this is worth it, or should you pay a lot more for something more capable? If that sounds like you, then this review on Hackaday would be a great resource. On a related note, this article from Adafruit goes over why the frequency of a scope matters, which can be a major limitation in cheaper options like this.
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