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13:00
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Hack a Day
If you’ve purchased a piece of consumer electronics in the last few years, there’s an excellent chance that you were forced to use some proprietary application (likely on a mobile device) to unlock its full functionality. It’s a depressing reality of modern technology, and unless you’re willing to roll your own hardware, it can be difficult to avoid. But [krishnan793] decided to take another route, and reverse engineered his DDPAI dash camera so he could get a live video stream from it without using the companion smartphone application.
Like many modern gadgets, the DDPAI camera creates its own WiFi access point that you need to connect to for configuration. By putting his computer’s wireless card into Monitor mode and running Wireshark, [krishnan793] was able to see that the smartphone was communicating with the camera using some type of REST API. After watching the clear-text exchanges for awhile, he not only discovered a few default usernames and passwords, but the commands necessary to configure the camera and start the video stream.
After hitting it with the proper REST messages, an nmap scan confirmed that several new services had started up on the device. Unfortunately, he didn’t get any video when he pointed VLC to the likely port numbers. At this point [krishnan793] checked the datasheet for the camera’s Hi3516E SoC and saw that it supported H.264 encoding. By manually specifying that as the video codec when invoking VLC, it was able to play a video stream from port 6200. A little later, he discovered that port 6100 was serving up the live audio.
Technically that’s all he wanted to do in the first place, as he was looking to feed the video into OpenCV for other projects. But while he was in the area, [krishnan793] also decided to find the download URL for the camera’s firmware, and ran it through binwalk to see what he could find out. Not surprisingly the security turned out to be fairly lax through the entire device, so he was able to glean some information that could be useful for future projects.
Of course, if you’d rather go with the first option and build your own custom dash camera so you don’t have to jump through so many hoops just to get a usable video stream, we’ve got some good news for you.
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10:00
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Hack a Day
High volume commodity products are a foundation of hacking, we’ve built many projects around popular form factors like NEMA 17 stepper motors, 608 bearings, and 280 DC motors. Their high volume led to lower cost, which further increased popularity, and the cycle repeats. A similar thing happened to a style of single-cylinder diesel engine in China, and [Jalopnik] takes us through an exploration of these “Tuo La Ji” (tractor) machines.
Like many popular standards, circumstances elevated this style of engine to become more popular than its peers. Judging from the pictures, the idea is similar to NEMA 17 in that the core essence is a bolt pattern and an output shaft. Different manufacturers offer various capabilities within this space, and a wild assortment of machinery evolved to take advantage of this class of power source.
It starts with a set of wheels and handlebars to create a walk-behind farm tractor, something pretty common around the world. But this particular ecosystem grew far beyond that to many other applications, including full sized trucks with off-road capability that would embarrass most of the genteel SUVs cruising our roads today. They may not be fast, but they only needed to be faster and have longer endurance than beasts of burden to be effective as “a horseless horse”.
Due to factors such as poor crash safety, absence of diesel emission controls, and affordability of more powerful (and faster!) vehicles, these machines are a dying breed. But that won’t change the fact there was a fantastic amount of mechanical hacking ingenuity that had sprung up around this versatile engine building simple and effective machines. Their creativity drew from the same well that fed into these Indonesian Vespas.
Photo by [Brian Holsclaw] CC BY-ND 2.0
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16:00
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Hack a Day
When [Nishanth]’s Subaru BRZ came to a sudden halt, he was saddened by the wait to get a new engine installed. Fortunately, he was able to cheer himself up by hacking it into a car simulator in the mean time. This would have the added benefit of not being limited to just driving on the Road Atlanta where the unfortunate mishap occurred, but any course available on Forza and similar racing games.
On paper it seemed fairly straight-forward: simply tap into the car’s CAN bus for the steering, throttle, braking and further signals, convert it into something a game console or PC can work with and you’re off to the races. Here the PC setup is definitely the cheapest and easiest, with a single part required: a Macchina M2 Under the Dash kit ($97.50). The XBox required over $200 worth of parts, including the aforementioned Macchina part, an XBox Adaptive Controller and a few other bits and pieces. And a car, naturally.
The Macchina M2 is the part that listens to the CAN traffic via the OBD2 port, converting it into something that resembles a USB HID gamepad. So that’s all a matter of plug’n’play, right? Not so fast. Every car uses their own CAN-based system, with different peripherals and addresses for them. This means that with the Macchina M2 acquired, [Nishanth]’s first task was to reverse-engineer the CAN signals for the car’s controls.
At this point the story is pretty much finished for the PC side of things, but the XBox One console is engineered to only accept official peripherals. The one loop-hole here is the Adaptive Controller, designed for people with disabilities, which allows the use of alternative inputs. This also enables using a car as an XBox One controller, which is an interesting side-effect.
One final gotcha with the XBox version was that the Adaptive Controller doesn’t allow one to control the triggers from its USB port, so they had to use the 3.5 mm (analog) inputs on the controller via an additional circuit to add this functionality. With that out of the way, they were ready to try out some games.
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7:00
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Hack a Day
Diesel is a fuel that has had a mixed history, with varying levels of take-up by consumers around the world. In the world of transport, diesel engines have offered better fuel economy and torque than comparable gasoline engines. Particularly popular in Europe, diesel established a strong consumer base in both small commuter cars as well as heavy vehicles such as trucks and buses.
Despite this, the tide is turning, and for the average motorist, diesel’s days may be numbered. Why is this the case, and what are the potential alternatives vying for diesel’s crown?
Plenty of Pros, but Plenty of Cons
Diesel remains a fuel with a varied uptake around the world. It has enjoyed great popularity in Europe in small commuter cars.
Diesel is a hydrocarbon fuel with several advantages over gasoline. Its lack of volatility makes it workable to use in a compression-ignition mode, and diesel engines can be run with lean fuel-air ratios. It also has a higher volumetric energy density than gasoline, and thanks to low volatility, diesel engines can run at significantly higher compression ratios without risking detonation. These benefits allow diesel engines to produce significantly more torque than similarly sized gasoline engines, and they can offer fuel economy gains in excess of 15%.
Unfortunately, diesel also comes with its fair share of drawbacks. Diesel engines are typically poor when it comes to power to weight ratio, as their high compression ratio and torque output demands heavier materials in their construction. The major bugbear of the diesel engine, however, is its emissions. Despite greater fuel efficiency, carbon dioxide output from a diesel engine is often far worse than that of a comparable gas motor. Additionally, their lean-burning nature leads to production of high levels of oxides of nitrogen (NOx), which have major negative environmental effects. There’s also the problem of particulate pollution, which is responsible for respiratory harm in humans. Diesel automobiles rank significantly worse than gasoline vehicles in all these areas. It’s begun to cause figurative headaches for the industry, and literal headaches for the public.
Major Mistakes Create A Foreboding Future
Volkswagen was forced to buyback thousands of cars in the wake of the Dieselgate scandal. Customers who instead elected to have their cars fixed experienced degraded performance and decreased fuel economy.
Diesel was doing just fine, enjoying a renaissance in the early 2000s as automakers touted the fuel economy benefits of their latest technology. In principle, the NOx problem is solvable by using selective catalytic reduction, but this comes at an increased cost to manufacturers and performance hit when the driver floors it.
Cracks suddenly appeared when researchers uncovered the fact that many vehicles from the Volkswagen Auto Group were blatantly breaking emissions regulations. Among other tricks, the cars were found to be running different fuel/air mixtures and underdosing the NOx-scrubbing catalyst outside of testing conditions, providing more power at the expense of dramatically increased emissions. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of diesel cars were subject to recalls and buybacks. Recalled vehicles were subject to modifications to engine management software, which improved emissions at the cost of economy and performance. Almost overnight, the buying public learned that diesel wasn’t the eco-friendly panacea it had been made out to be. Diesels were suddenly seen to be dirty, polluting vehicles at the center of a major international scandal.
With the auto industry still dealing with the fallout years later, the image of diesel remains tainted. Cities are lining up to ban diesel cars from the streets, while Germany is putting cash incentives on the table to encourage owners of high polluting vehicles to trade up.
Solutions That Cause More Problems
A clogged DPF can cause loss of performance, engine damage, or even fire if not rectified in a timely fashion.
Attempts to make diesel engines cleaner have had side-effects. In efforts to meet ever tightening emissions standards, automakers have implemented new technologies, akin to the introduction of catalytic converters in petrol engines. Many vehicles are now fitted with a diesel particulate filter (DPF) in order to help reduce particulate outflows. These are fitted to the exhaust, and capture the particulate matter from the combustion process. Over time, these filters begin to become clogged with soot, increasing back pressure in the exhaust system and reducing engine performance. When this happens, the filter must be regenerated, a process in which the exhaust temperature is raised higher in order to burn off the soot. This can be achieved passively during high-speed highway driving as exhaust heat builds up, but many cars that are driven in stop-start urban environments must resort to other methods. This is referred to as active regeneration, where extra diesel is injected into the exhaust, or the engine is run at high RPM while stationary for a period of time.
DPF filters have proven problematic in practice. For many living in inner-city areas, diesels with DPFs fitted may be impractical, as the engine is forced to run active regeneration cycles regularly to make up for the lack of highway miles. Due to poor communications practices by dealerships, many owners are completely unaware of this quirk of modern diesel cars, leading to regular frustration with clogged DPFs. Further complicating the issue, some manufacturers have struggled to correctly develop regeneration routines in some vehicles, leading to consumer frustration and class action lawsuits.
The Aftermarket Isn’t Helping
A pickup truck rolling coal in a suburban driveway. Such pollution is linked to a long list of negative health effects.
Despite its flaws, diesel still has its diehard fans. The darling of those who regularly tow heavy loads or drive long highway miles, these drivers prize the torque delivery of a strong diesel engine. Tuning diesel engines has become a major aftermarket industry, with companies touting improved power delivery as well as better fuel economy from their products.
Of course, nothing comes for free, and gaining better performance often involves a trade-off somewhere else. More often than not, tuning a stock diesel engine results in a vehicle that is no longer emissions compliant. This has raised the ire of the EPA, which has brought down hefty penalties upon companies selling tuning gear. This is primarily due to tuners often using software and hardware tools to bypass emissions controls like oxygen sensors and particulate filters in the quest for more power.
At the extreme end of diesel tuning is the practice known as “rolling coal”. This involves tricking a vehicle’s ECU into dumping excessive amounts of fuel into the engine, in order to create large amounts of soot to pour from the exhuasts. This is done for fun, or to harass other road users. While it’s a pastime of a fairly small minority, it’s not winning diesel any fans, and has already been made illegal in state law in Maryland and Colorado. The EPA have long claimed the practice is a clear contravention of the Clean Air Act.
A Poor Outlook
Moving forward, the future doesn’t look rosy for diesel. The push to reduce carbon emissions promises to impact all fossil fuels. However, diesel, with its high output of NOx, particulates, and CO2, looks set to be consigned to the dustbin sooner than most. Efforts to clean up diesel engines have led to complicated emissions systems with dubious reliability and manufacturers attempting to skirt regulations. With electric vehicles rapidly gaining market share, and alternatives like hydrogen vying for relevance, conditions are tough. Worse, European and Asian countries are all planning to phase out fossil fuel vehicles entirely. In this fraught environment, it seems unlikely automakers will be willing to make the necessary investments to push diesel technology much further, leaving it to slowly wither away as regulations tighter. As always, time will tell.
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7:00
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Hack a Day
Potentially coming to a service station near you.
In every comment section, there’s always one. No matter the electric vehicle, no matter how far the technology has come, there’s always one.
“Only 500 miles of range? Electric cars are useless! Me, and everyone I know, drives 502 miles every day at a minimum! Having to spend more than 3 minutes to recharge is completely offensive to my entire way of life. Simply not practical, and never will be.”
Yes, it’s true, electric cars do have limited range and can take a little longer to recharge than a petrol or diesel powered vehicle. Improvements continue at a rapid pace, but it’s not enough for some.
To these diehards, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles may have some attractive benefits. By passing hydrogen gas through a proton-exchange membrane, electricity can be generated cleanly with only water as a byproduct. The technology holds a lot of promise for powering vehicles, but thus far hasn’t quite entered our daily lives yet. So what is the deal with hydrogen as a transport fuel, and when can we expect to see them in numbers on the ground?
Finally, A Clean Fuel?
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, as far as we currently understand it, and is present in great quantities in our oceans too. Readily available through the electrolysis of water and other chemical methods, it has yet to be used as a mainstream fuel. Hydrogen has many benefits, but also a few key drawbacks, and these all impact its potential use in vehicles.
Pros
Hydrogen can be produced relatively cleanly, if renewable energy is used.
Hydrogen is easy to find – every water molecule has two hydrogen atoms just sitting there, ripe for the taking. The simplest way to obtain it in pure form is through electrolysis, which can be a relatively clean process when powered by renewable sources of electricity. In many processes, it can also be used as a fuel while creating minimal pollution. When used to generate electricity in a fuel cell, the only byproduct is pure water. As the clock ticks down in the race to prevent irreversible climate crisis, these attributes make hydrogen a highly attractive choice for future energy needs.
As far as vehicles are concerned, being a liquid fuel, hydrogen has a big leg up on battery technologies. Refilling a tank can be achieved in a handful of minutes, something not yet possible with even the fastest charging electric vehicles. This promises to ease long trips and remove the spectre of range anxiety.
Cons
Storage of hydrogen for transport use requires placing it under immense pressure in specially designed tanks. The official engineering term is that it’s “a bit of a pain”.
Hydrogen is highly flammable, something that humanity usually prizes in its liquid fuels. However, combined with the difficulty of containing the tiny atoms, this flammability is an outsized risk when handling hydrogen. Additionally, to store hydrogen in a compact and practical way for transport and energy use requires placing it under immense pressure, further compounding the problem.
Thus far, hydrogen also faces the classic chicken-and-egg problem of infrastructure. There are few hydrogen vehicles on the road, so there is little incentive to invest in a network of hydrogen refuelling stations. Conversely, as there are few refuelling stations, there is little demand for hydrogen vehicles.
The problems extend to distribution, as well. Unlike electricity, which can be sent down simple wires, hydrogen has to be delivered through tankers or pipelines. For trucks, safe storage is a problem once more, along with the fact that carting hydrogen around necessarily takes energy. Pipelines pose further problems, as hydrogen tends to cause embrittlement in metals and requires special management to deliver safely. We’ve covered the topic before, discussing the potential for domestic use of hydrogen in the UK.
The Current State of Play
The Toyota Mirai.
The Hyundai Nexo.
There’s a long list of hangups holding hydrogen back from the mainstream. On top of this, the automotive industry has invested heavily in battery electric technologies. As the range of battery electric vehicles increases, and recharge times drop, the main competitive advantage of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is being eroded, all before they hit the marketplace in real numbers.
Despite this, there are hydrogen vehicles on the market today. Hyundai are currently selling their new Nexo fuel cell vehicle in Europe, with limited numbers reaching Australia and California. Toyota have been selling the Mirai in markets with suitable infrastructure since 2014, and Honda’s FCX Clarity has also been available on a series of limited lease programs since 2008. Automakers have thus far kept a tight leash on these vehicles, as it remains impractical to sell them in areas without hydrogen refuelling stations. Unlike electric vehicles, installing a refuelling station at a customer’s home isn’t really an option either, further limiting the rollout.
Prices of fuel cell vehicles are exceptionally high, too – with a Nexo SUV retailing around $60,000 USD. This is largely due to the high cost of the fuel cell technology, which relies heavily on platinum and doesn’t yet enjoy the benefits of economies of scale. While stunts like making a cup of tea with fuel cell exhaust are amusing, it seems that consumer demand remains too low to push wider acceptance.
Potential For The Future
If fuel cells ever become common in off-road vehicles, expect some truly compelling survivalist tales.
With EV recharging stations beginning to spread like wildfire, and ranges increasing with each new model, it may seem that battery EVs have an unassailable lead. With that said, there are still many edge cases where humble hydrogen may yet find its place in the market.
Battery EVs are great for urban commuters who travel only short distances each day. At the same time, for those stuck street parking on a regular basis, accessing charging infrastructure can be incredibly frustrating. Those with parking at their apartments may struggle to lobby for charger installation, too. For these people, the idea of a simple weekly fill up is far more palatable than spending an hour a week sitting at the service station.
Another area which may be well served by hydrogen is in larger vehicles. Buses and trucks often travel long distances in a single day. Drivers and operators don’t always have the time to take a vehicle out of commission to charge for hours, either. In these applications, hydrogen may serve as an easy way to reduce emissions. Additionally, many of these vehicles are operated out of depots serving many vehicles, which are already set up for refuelling. Installing hydrogen infrastructure on site would be relatively simple for a single refuelling point such as this.
There’s also the potential for fuel cells to act as a range-extender for battery electric vehicles. Whether as an add-on module, or an option at order time, it would be simple to integrate fuel cells into an electric vehicle to enable it to undertake longer trips without having to charge for excessively long periods.
While hydrogen doesn’t look like it will knock battery EVs out of the market any time soon, it may yet find its place in the market. Whether in heavy haulage, or as an alternative to batteries, it’s likely to be around for a while yet. Only time will tell!
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7:00
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Hack a Day
The history of automotive production is littered with the fallen badges of car companies that shone brightly but fell by the wayside in the face of competition from the industry’s giants. Whether you pine for an AMC, a Studebaker, or a Saab, it’s a Ford or a Honda you’ll be driving in 2019.
In the world of electric cars it has been a slightly different story. Though the big names have dipped a toe in the water they have been usurped by a genuinely disruptive contender. If you drive an electric car in 2019 it won’t be that Ford or Honda, it could be a Nissan, but by far the dominant name in EV right now is Tesla.
Motor vehicles are standing at the brink of a generational shift from internal combustion to electric drive. Will Tesla become the giant it hopes, or will history repeat itself?
How Far Have Electric Vehicles Come?
![The Citroën Berlingo électrique. Thilo Parg [CC BY-SA 3.0]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/1280px-Citroen_Berlingo_Electric.jpg?w=400)
The Citroën Berlingo électrique. Thilo Parg [CC BY-SA 3.0]To watch the development of electric vehicles over the last couple of decades has been to witness a quiet revolution from low-production oddities to serious contenders. In 1999 a French van, Citroën’s Berlingo électrique, would have represented the pinnacle of commercially available electric transport. It had nickel metal hydride batteries that gave it a range of about 60 miles, and a DC motor that gave it a top speed of about 50 miles per hour. It was a practical small local delivery van that was produced in small numbers to large customers, but your plumber or your local shop would not have considered it as a viable or affordable alternative to its fossil-fueled stablemates.
![the 2008 Tesla Roadster. Tesla Motors Inc. [Copyrighted free use]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/1280px-Roadster_2.5_windmills_trimmed.jpg?w=400)
So good they dumped one in space: the 2008 Tesla Roadster. Tesla Motors Inc. [Copyrighted free use]Around a decade after the Berlingo the electric vehicle was still an extremely niche product, but its technology had changed significantly. Lithium ion batteries and a brushless motor gave the 2008 Tesla Roadster sports car a range of 244 miles and a top speed of 125 miles per hour. In 2010 the mass-market first-generation Nissan Leaf came out with a 73 mile range and a top speed of 93 miles per hour.
In the decade since, a procession of models have appeared from multiple manufacturers, and typical models now approach the range and speed figures of their more traditionally-powered equivalents. Tesla has become the big fish in a small pond, and their prestige models are status symbols across the world. Their future seems assured, the automotive dinosaurs are left wallowing in an oil-rich swamp as the asteroid of global warming appears in the sky above them, and we’ll all be driving Model 3s and their successors in years to come. Right?
An Eventful Month In Electric Car Manufacture
![The VW e-Golf. Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz [CC BY 2.0]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/VW_e-Golf_LA_Auto_Show_2013.jpg?w=400)
The VW e-Golf. Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz [CC BY 2.0]Harking back to the fate of those Saabs and Studebakers at the top of the page, an observer might ask why the global giants have so far failed to take Tesla on by releasing more than just a token effort or a small car with a limited range. This summer it’s possible we’ve seen some early salvos in that battle, with a slew of announcements from those big manufacturers that herald a time in which their electric offerings become more serious contenders. BMW’s announcement of the long-awaited electric Mini is hardly seismic, Jaguar Land Rover’s conversion of their Castle Bromwich plant to electric production should make you sit up and take notice, while if Ford and VW’s signing of a global deal to share electric car technology doesn’t catch your attention, nothing will.
The Minis are something of a boutique offering and Jaguar may take some of Tesla’s market with their electric executive saloon cars, but the deal between Ford and VW has the potential to be a game changer. Between them the two manufacturers reach into almost every market across multiple brands, and though the current electric Golf has failed to make a significant impact the prospect of its technology, finding its way into cars such as the Ford Focus as well as the VW marques can not fail to change your daily driving.
There Will Be No Tesla Gremlin
![The first Tesla Gigafactory. Planet Labs, Inc. [CC BY-SA 4.0]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/1024px-Teslas_Gigafactory_on_2017-08-08_by_Planet_Labs.jpg?w=400)
The first Tesla Gigafactory. Planet Labs, Inc. [CC BY-SA 4.0]Given the prospect of those electric Fords and Volkswagens, with no doubt a rush of similar mass market machines from other manufacturers, was this the moment at which someone ate Tesla’s lunch?
Producing the innovative and glamorous car the customer wants to buy is no longer enough when there are plenty of good-enough cars that they can afford to buy, if this were not the case we’d still be able to walk onto a lot and buy a new Saab or a Studebaker (Neither the post-1963 Avanti nor the promise of a future Saab-derived NEVS car count in this context). Will the customer want a Tesla, but walk instead into the Jaguar dealer or worse still for Tesla, the Ford dealer for an electric Mondeo?
Perhaps they will, but even then would that spell the end for Tesla? The key lies in their diversification, for instead of taking the battle onto Ford or VW’s home turf with a competitor to the Focus and Golf they have instead become as much an alternative energy company as a car company. The famous Gigafactories do not produce cars, instead they churn out batteries, Powerwalls, and solar products. Meanwhile Tesla’s mark can be found on the road outside their own cars, like VW they have licensed their technology. Mercedes-Benz and Smart electric vehicles produced by Daimler carry Tesla-designed parts, as do the electric Toyota Rav4s. There will be no Tesla equivalent of the AMC Pacer or Gremlin to be the butt of jokes in future decades, instead there will be a drivetrain technology and energy company that also produces some cars. Maybe someone hasn’t eaten Tesla’s lunch, but it’s certain that their helping has just become a little smaller.
Every step we take towards an electric Golf or an electric Focus becoming ubiquitous on our roads is also a step towards their parts becoming as common as those of internal combustion engines. Imagine a world in which a large lithium-ion battery is as easy to find and as easy to recycle as a 12V lead-acid car battery, or in which a car-size induction motor is as common as a washing machine motor. The prospects for hacking with these parts seem limitless but in the near term we’re strapped by a lack of stock. Perhaps Tesla’s lunch may be being eaten, but if a few crumbs end up on our tables that can’t be bad!
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Hack a Day
Carburettors versus electronic fuel injection (EFI); automotive fans above a certain age will be well versed in the differences. While early EFI systems had their failings, the technology brought with it a new standard of reliability and control. By the early 1990s, the vast majority of vehicles were sold with EFI, and carburettors became a thing of the past.
The Mazda Miata was no exception. Shipping in 1989, it featured not only multiport fuel injection, but also a distributorless ignition system. Consisting of two coilpacks in a wasted spark configuration, with computer-controlled timing, the system was quite advanced for its time, especially for a budget sports car.
Despite the Miata’s technological credentials, those in the modified car scene tend to go their own way. A man by the name of Evan happened to be one such individual and decided to do just this — scrapping the EFI system and going with a retro carb setup. It was around this point that this I got involved, and mechanical tinkering ensued.
But why?
It’s true that the Miata’s stock EFI system is perfectly capable of doing its job, and is also capable of handling some mild engine modifications without too much trouble. Those building for higher power levels will usually replace the ECU, injectors and fuel pump in time, but the general architecture of the system is kept intact.
However, this is not to say that carburettors don’t have their merits. Due to the Miata’s engine layout, it’s possible to fit a set of twin carbs with the right manifold, and have a very short intake runner length. This has the benefit of both reducing intake restriction for more power, as well as greatly improving throttle response. Given the restrictions inherent in the standard intake and air flow meter, there are significant gains to be made here. Additionally, such a setup can increase induction noise considerably, which is a big plus point to those who enjoy the symphony of a naturally aspirated engine. Finally, having a unique build is a great way to score some solid attention at Cars and Coffee, even in the face of expensive Italian competition, and this can’t be discounted.
Alternatively, just refer to the title of this article!
But… This Engine Wasn’t Designed for a Carburettor
Obviously, fitting carburettors to a car never designed to have them takes some doing. It’s made all the more complex due to the Miata’s computer-controlled ignition system. This means that modifications to both the fuel and ignition systems are required in order to pull off the modification.
The work required has been documented by Norman Garrett, in the Mazda Miata Performance Handbook, from the era when print still reigned supreme (pages 79-82). The first step is to remove a whole bunch of hardware that is no longer required. The original intake manifold, intake piping and air flow meter are all removed, as they are not compatible with the carburettor install.
With that done, the carburettors can be mounted to the engine. This requires a special manifold designed specifically for the application. Mazdaspeed manufacture a suitable part for both the 1.6 and 1.8 litre Miata engines, which allow twin Weber carbs to be fitted, and this is what our project used.
The fuel system in an EFI car usually runs at between 30 and 70 PSI, far above the 7 PSI required for the average carburettor. To solve this, a fuel pressure regulator must be fitted that is specifically designed for carburettor use. This can be installed in the engine bay near the carbs, as there’s plenty of space with the original intake hardware removed.
A basic op-amp inverter circuit. Note that only one op-amp of the LM324 is used. Credit: Mazda Miata Performance Manual
There’s also the matter of ignition. Timing advance is computer controlled, based on the signals from the cam angle sensor and the air flow meter, which give the ECU the ability to calculate the load on the engine. With the air flow meter deleted, it’s no longer possible for the ECU to know how much timing to run. This can be left as-is, but without a proper timing curve, the engine is giving up performance.
Normally this would be handled by a distributor. Due to the design of the Mazda B6 and BP engines, it’s not practical to switch to a classic distributor-based setup. Instead, there are two common methods used to spoof the air flow meter signal to the ECU, enabling it to properly control the timing. A throttle position sensor can be installed onto the throttle linkage of the carburettors, with the throttle position standing in for air flow as a load signal.
Alternatively, a manifold air pressure sensor can be installed, sensing the vacuum in the inlet port. This signal can then be inverted, similarly emulating the original air flow meter closely enough to serve as a good reference for engine load. Depending on your tastes, you may prefer the mechanical complexity of the throttle position sensor, or the electronic complexity of the MAP sensor route. This author favored the former, but the owner favored the latter, and thus we set about building an inverter circuit for the car.
Like any major engine modifications, there’s also a litany of additional tasks to be done to get things up and running. On this build, the throttle cable required modification, and the lack of vacuum available from the carburettor manifold meant the brake booster was no longer as effective. Like any big project, expect pitfalls along the way.
Electronic Pitfalls: Wrong Side of the Connector
The diagram in question, showing the connections to the air flow meter of the car. Reading this backward caused some issues for the author. Credit: Mazda Miata Performance Manual
I was primarily involved in the electronic side of the build, whipping up an op-amp circuit to invert the MAP sensor signal, as designed by Norman Garrett. As per the schematic, this relies on an LM324 op-amp to do the work. Only a single op-amp of the four available is used, set up in an inverting configuration with a gain of 1; i.e. simple inversion, with no amplification. This is intended to be used with a common GM 3-bar map sensor, which is readily available either new or used, having been used in millions of cars worldwide.
After whipping up the circuit on some perfboard, we struggled to get things operating reliably. After trying to power the circuit from the 5 volt line in the air flow meter connector, we gave up and used a 7805 regulator with the Miata’s 12 V auxiliary feed in the engine bay. Unfortunately, despite this, we still had issues. The circuit was simply outputting either 0V or 5V all the time, rather than cleanly inverting the MAP signal.
With little idea of the root cause, the circuit was rebuilt with scrap parts, substituting an LF356 op-amp. This worked in limited bench testing, but again began to play up when connected to the car. As is the way, several hours of frustration ensued until it was realised that we’d read the diagrams backwards. As drawn in the Mazda Miata Performance Handbook, the AFM connector is shown from the side of the air flow meter itself, not the wiring loom in the car. With this oversight rectified, we were able to get the circuit running, and the signals inverting nicely. Without a dyno or any high-end diagnostics available on the Miata ECU, it was difficult to determine how much of an effect the circuit has, but we proceeded to take the car out for a test drive.
Performance: Your Foot Makes the Engine Soar
In short, driving a carby Miata is an absolute hoot, above and beyond the stock model. There’s a touch more power on tap, of course. But above all else, the snap of the throttle is intoxicating, with the engine surging ahead with the slightest twitch of the pedal. Induction noise is also gleefully present, and combined with a good exhaust system, the raspy bark is to die for.
Obviously, there are also some notable drawbacks to the setup. It’s unlikely to pass emissions rules in jurisdictions where that matters, and cold start performance would be diminished in areas where frost and snow are a regular occurrence. There was also the issue of a small flat spot in the powerband around 4000 rpm. Without the time to conduct proper A/B testing, we were unable to track down a definite culprit. Suspicions lay around the carburettor intake setup sacrificing mid-range torque for top end power, or the op-amp substitution causing issues as the LF356 is not a rail-to-rail part like the LM324.
Regardless of the tradeoffs, the final product was a dream to drive, and had the underhood looks and soundtrack to match. For those daily driving, it might not be the best choice, but for the weekenders who want to impress at the local car shows with some old school charm, it’s a heck of a way to go.
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Hack a Day
[Mastro Gippo] recently purchased a wall mounted charger for his electric car that looked great and had all the bells and whistles he wanted. There was only one problem: the thing burned up on him. Looking to find out how this seemingly high-end piece of hardware gave up the ghost so easily, he took it apart and tried to figure out where things went wrong. While he’s not looking to sling any mud and actually name the company who produced the charger, he certainly has some choice words for whoever green-lit this particular design.
With the charger open, there’s little doubt that something became very toasty inside. A large swath of the PCB has a black char mark on it, and in some places it looks like the board burned right through. After a close examination, [Mastro] is of the opinion that the board heated up to the point that the solder actually liquified on some connections. This conductive flow then shorted out components below it, and things went from bad to worse.
But where did all the heat come from? [Mastro] was stunned to see that a number of the components inside the charger were only rated for 30 amps, despite the label for the product clearly stating it’s good for up to 32A. With components pushed past their limits, something had to give. He wonders how such a device could have made it through the certification process; an excellent question we’d love to know the answer to.
The worst part is, it looks like the designers might have even known there was an overheating issue. [Mastro] notes that there are heatsinks bolted not to a component as you might assume, but directly to the PCB itself. We’ve seen what happens when designers take a cavalier attitude towards overheating components, and the fact that something like an electric vehicle charger was designed so poorly is quite concerning.
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Hack a Day
We’re all familiar with the “Black Box” used on commercial aircraft, the flight data recorder which captures the minutia of each and every flight on the off-chance that it’s needed in the event of an accident. But even in less dire circumstances, the complete record of the aircraft’s performance versus what was commanded of it by the pilot can be used to fine tune performance or detect faults before they become serious.
As a data engineer for professional motorsports, [Jussi Luopajärvi] knows similar recorders can be just as useful for vehicles stuck here on terra firma. His entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize, TestLogger, aims to bring that same kind of technology to the world of RC racing. The gadget allows the driver to easily record a wealth of data about the vehicle during races, giving them valuable insight into the vehicle’s performance.
So what kind of variables are there to record on a 1/8th or 1/12th scale car? Don’t be fooled by their diminutive wheelbases, the modern RC car relies on an impressive amount of technical wizardry that benefits from a close eye.
Right now, [Jussi] says TestLogger can record not only obvious elements like battery level and throttle, but also more esoteric variables such as steering input, individual drive wheel speed, angular velocity, and even g-force in three dimensions. There’s also support for a trackside IR beacon that allows TestLogger to record lap times.
All of the data is stored on TestLogger’s SD card in standard CSV files, which makes it easy for us hacker types to parse and analyze. But for those who are more interested in driving than delimiting, there’s also a very slick website that will let users upload and compare their data. This complete user experience gives TestLogger a very professional feel, and we can’t wait to see where [Jussi] takes it from here.
With powerful microcontrollers available for a song, we expect this kind of detailed data collection is only going to become more common.
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Hack a Day
Before I got a license and a car, getting to and from high school was an ordeal. The hour-long bus ride was awful, as one would expect when sixty adolescents are crammed together with minimal supervision. Avoiding the realities going on around me was a constant chore, aided by frequent mental excursions. One such wandering led me to the conclusion that we high schoolers were nothing but cargo on a delivery truck designed for people. That was a cheery fact to face at the beginning of a school day.
What’s true for a bus full of students is equally true for every city bus, trolley, subway, or long-haul motorcoach you see. People can be freight just as much as pallets of groceries in a semi or a bunch of smiling boxes and envelopes in a brown panel truck. And the same economic factors that we’ve been insisting will make it far more likely that autonomous vehicles will penetrate the freight delivery market before we see self-driving passenger vehicles are at work with people moving. This time on Automate the Freight: what happens when the freight is people?
Running Scared
There’s a saying in the investment game: the trend is your friend. Investors have a lot of sayings like that, mostly aimed at convincing themselves that they have the slightest clue about what’s going to happen with a given company’s stock, when it’s all pretty much up to chance in the absence of inside information. The trends in investing patterns can still be useful, though, because they tend to point out how people are thinking. That can be a handy tool for investors and non-investors alike.
So it was with interest that I stumbled upon an article about the potential impact of self-driving cars on the airline industry. On the face of it, you’d think that there would be no risk to airlines from cars, especially in the United States. But the article points out that US domestic carriers like Southwest depend on routes that average 757 miles (1218 km) and last about two hours. People gladly pay for these flights, enduring the indignities of modern air travel that begin hours before the flight and potentially end days after landing in the form of jet lag. And they do so precisely because the alternative is worse – to most people, at least; I for one vastly prefer long-distance driving to flying. I’m weird like that.
But fast forward to a future where fully autonomous vehicles are an everyday thing, and battery capacities have increased enough that an electric vehicle can cover the same distance as the average Southwest flight. We’re actually not far from that now – a Tesla once did 670 miles on one charge. Or, forget the batteries and consider an internal-combustion self-driver. Either way, a vehicle plying the roads is obviously not going to beat a jet airliner for speed, but it doesn’t have to because it can drive all through the night. And the passengers, unencumbered by the need to drive, can simply sleep the trip away, to arrive in the morning as if by magic, fresh and relatively unharried, at least compared to their TSA-probed counterparts at the airport.
Not convinced that airline executives should be quaking in their wingtips at a self-driving future? Then take a look at this map:
New York to Chicago, while you sleep: areas covered by a theoretical 12-hour overnight trip by a self-driving vehicle. Source:
Towards Better Questions
Each circle is about how far one can drive from San Francisco, Austin, or New York overnight – roughly 11-12 hours. Yes, it’s difficult to drive in the ocean, and these are straight-line distances that don’t take the location of highways into account. But still, it shows just how much of the country can be covered with a reasonable overnight drive. And the promise of having slept through it all without having been sealed in an aluminum tube full of unhappy people and their germs might just be a reason for panic in the corporate suites of regional air carriers.
The Night Bus
The idea of sleeping the night away while traveling might sound like it would need to wait for true autonomous vehicles, but it’s actually a service that’s already available. An overnight bus service called Cabin was launched in 2017, offering a premium overnight travel experience that whisked passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles while they slept. The idea was to use traditional human-piloted motorcoaches outfitted with sleeping compartments falling somewhere between cozy and claustrophobic, depending on your leanings. You’d get on the bus late in the evening, zonk out in your rack, and hop off the bus as fresh as a daisy in the morning.
As anyone who has experienced the marginally maintained roads of nearly every major city in the US can imagine, it didn’t quite pan out. The experience of jolting through the night to the roar of a mighty diesel was less than restful, and Cabin was forced to shut down operations to retool its fleet of sleep coaches. But the fact that they didn’t just fold completely shows there’s still demand for a lower-cost regional transportation option, and that offering an overnight trip is attractive to enough people to make the idea worth investing in.
People Moving on Demand
As for a future, fully autonomous version of Cabin, I’d say that self-driving motorcoaches carrying large numbers of passengers on regional routes are not likely to catch on, at least in the USA, for the same reason that bus lines and passenger rail have never caught on in here: lack of flexibility. Being stuck showing up at a bus depot at a specific time to take the sleepy bus isn’t much different than having to show up at the airport two hours before a 90-minute flight. If a plane offers a choice of departure and arrival times, chances are good that people will choose to fly rather than sleep-drive.
But, imagine smaller self-driving vehicles, perhaps the size of a large van, with four or so bunks and a small comfortable seating area that could be booked for travel on demand. Businesses might jump at the chance to have teams taken safely to meetings overnight, or to use travel time for working. Families might love to have an autonomous van come up the driveway for a pajama-clad trip to Disneyworld. College students could team up for a cheap spring break trip, pool long rides home for the holidays, or just go on a road trip with consequence-free drinking and driving.
All that said, from the point of view of the passengers, where the vehicle is driven by a computer or by a human matters not. All they know is that they’re not driving, and they’re free to nap or read or work while the miles peel away. But to the company providing the service, eliminating the costs associated with hiring large numbers of human drivers is probably a good argument for investing in autonomous vehicles. Providing the freedom of sleeping, working, or partying during the trip would just be a way to add value and attract the customers needed to justify the expense of automating the people-freight.
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Hack a Day
The average motorist has a lot to keep track of these days. Whether its how much fuel is left in the tank, how much charge is left in the battery, or whether or not the cop behind noticed them checking Twitter, there’s a lot on a driver’s mind. One thing they’re not thinking about is tires, theirs or anyone else’s for that matter. It a testament to the state of tire technology, they just work and for quite a long time before replacements are needed.
There hasn’t been a major shift in the underlying technology for about fifty years. But the times, they are a changing — and new tire technology is claimed to be just around the corner. Several companies are questioning whether the pneumatic tire is the be-all and end all, and futuristic looking prototypes have been spotted at trade shows the world over.
It’s Been A Long Innings For The Pneumatic Tire
John Dunlop’s first pneumatic tyre, built for a bicycle.
Pneumatic tires first came into existence in the 19th century, and were first fitted to an automobile by Andre Michelin in 1895, with mixed results. Over the next few decades, the technology rapidly matured, with advancements coming thick and fast.
Fast forward over 100 years later, and pneumatic tires continue to rule the roost. The last major sweeping technological change was the switch from bias-ply to radial construction, with the vast majority of automakers abandoning the former by the 1970s. In the intervening time, there have been steady, continuous improvements to tire compounds and tread designs, but little that the average consumer would notice on a day to day basis.
The only remaining service task for the pneumatic tire is ensuring it has air in. Failing to do so causes premature wear on the tire and can lead to blowouts. To avoid complication of neglectful car owners, several manufacturers have been developing designs for tires that don’t use air at all.
The Newcomer Is a Return to Spokes
The vast majority of airless designs follow a similar theme. An outer ring is fitted with a rubber tread, which connects to the hub with a series of polymer spokes. The weight of the vehicle hangs from the top of the ring, placing the spokes in tension. Bridgestone and Sumitomo have both displayed prototype designs, but it’s Michelin that have been making the biggest public push for the technology.
Michelin recently announced its new Uptis design which has a chevron shape to the spokes. The company and plans to launch the product in partnership with GM as soon as 2024. It’s been a long road getting to this point, with Michelin first going public with their Tweel prototype way back in 2005. Initial prototypes suffered with noise and vibrations, but were promising enough to get the development ball rolling.
Airless tires have been of great interest for military applications.
There have been other obscure players, too. Resilient Technologies debuted an airless setup for military applications back at SEMA in 2009, though little has been heard since. Going back even farther, however, is the Martin Elastic tire, developed way back in the 1930s and tested on Jeeps of the era.
Thus far, none of these concepts have made it to the automotive market. To understand why, we should first look at why anyone would want to develop airless tires in the first place.
A Concept That Shows Promise
The benefits of the airless tire have been touted far and wide by manufacturers. There are a number of bountiful fruits that the technology has to offer.
The most obvious is that punctures, flats, and blowouts will become a thing of the past. Not only does this have the direct benefit of reducing inconvenience, but it also means that luggage space is freed up because it will no longer be necessary to carry a spare tire, and a boost to mileage as that dead weight is eliminated. Tire pressure monitoring systems will also no longer be a necessity. Huge numbers of tires are thrown away each year due to this very reason, well before the tread or other components are worn out. Getting rid of this problem promises to improve tire longevity significantly.
One of the main benefits is lateral stability. In standard radial tires, it’s not possible to improve lateral stiffness without affecting other properties of the tire. Stiffening the tire in this way can lead to the tire offering a harsh ride, particularly over bumpy surfaces. However, due to the construction of the airless designs, the tire can be made to be forgiving in the vertical axis, while being stiff from side-to-side. This has the benefit of making handling far more sharp, which is of particular interest for sporting and high-performance applications.
The contact patch of an airless tire is another point of interest. Unlike air-filled tires, which by necessity bulge out at the sides with air pressure, the contact patch of an airless tire can be far more consistent and flat. By having no air, it no longer rests on the driver’s shoulders to ensure their tires are sitting at the correct pressure to maintain the proper contact patch.
Another boon of the technology is wear. Despite tire pressure monitors now being widespread, and manufacturers trying to educate drivers about proper tire rotation practices, very few consumers take good care of their tires. Running under or overinflated can prematurely wear a set of tires, but with airless design, this isn’t an issue. Additionally, manufacturers claim that it should be possible to easily and safely replace the tread on such designs, with little to no degredation in performance. This would have huge sustainability ramifications; current estimates are that 1.5 billion tires are discarded each year. Any improvements in the recyclability of tire components could have a major impact.
There are more fantastical possibilities, too. Having an airless design brings the possibility of perforating the tire to create channels for water to flow away. By no longer requiring the water to be pushed out from under the tire. Developments in this area could greatly reduce the chance of aquaplaning when driving through standing water. Since aquaplaning can lead to total loss of control of a vehicle, any improvements in this space have the potential to save money and lives.
Of course, until the rubber quite literally hits the road, this is all heresay. While Michelin have been shipping Tweel products for several years now, they’re limited to low-speed rugged applications, like skid-steer loaders and ride-on lawnmowers. Getting airless tires ready for the highway is going to take some time yet.
What’s The Big Hold Up?
Despite the concept first hitting the news back in 2005, and successful test runs at Hot Rod Power Tour in 2013, we still haven’t seen these products hitting passenger cars en masse just yet. There are several engineering problems to be solved before airless designs are ready for the mainstream.
One of the major issues that is readily apparent at a glance is the potential for debris to become lodged in the spokes. In order to function properly, the spokes must be able to flex freely, Hard objects could quickly damage the spokes if caught up inside, sand, mud, or snow could clog them, causing the wheels to become unbalanced.
Michelin’s new Uptis design is slated to hit the streets in 2024. Research and development has led to significant differences in its design compared to the earlier Tweel project.
Speed has been a particular sticking point for the Michelin designs, with most of their current Tweel products being limited to low-speed operation. Their upcoming Uptis designs are diverging significantly from their earlier Tweel prototypes in an attempt to better meet the needs of passenger vehicles, which are heavier and travel much faster than UTVs and lawnmowers. Any viable design will have to be able to withstand hours of high-speed highway driving without overheating, delaminating, or otherwise failing — and tire companies have had problems getting it right even with conventional designs.
While an airless tire, by definition, can’t puncture or run flat, it has its own unique set of problems. Spokes can be cut, torn, ripped or otherwise damaged, reducing the life of the tire. Currently, very little data exists on these failures due to the prototype nature of the technology. There’s also the possibility of delamination of the tread and outer ring, and other failures related to the unique construction of the tires. It’s important to solve these problems before the tires are put into service with the general public. To do this requires a great amount of testing, which necessarily takes a great amount of time.
Consumer opinion will likely take some time to come around to the idea, Pneumatic tires have been de rigeur for over a century, and airless designs are a radical departure from what has come before. It will likely take significant effort on the part of manufacturers to help customers grow accustomed to the quirks of the new technology. There will be inherent, unforseen limitations, and the designs may not be suitable to fit to existing vehicles.
It’s unlikely that these issues are unsolvable. However, to overcome these problems, and to take a new design to the point where it is ready to face the wild outside world takes a huge amount of engineering effort. Michelin appears to be leading the field, and have been slowly grinding away on the project since the late 1990s.
While nobody can say if these airless tires will ever take off, I want to see an increasing pace of testing and development than we have observed over the past decade. The technology has matured further with each public prototype that has been revealed. It’s clear that there are significant gains to be had, justifying the continued investment into the concept. I eager to know what comes next, and can’t wait to try out the latest tires on the road.
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Hack a Day
Who hasn’t thought of sticking a couple of solar panels onto an electric car’s roof to keep its battery at 100% charge while it’s parked out in the sun? While usually deemed impossible due to the large number and weight of PV solar cells required to get the necessary amount of energy, this hasn’t kept Toyota’s engineers from covering one of their Prius cars with 34+% efficient solar cells.
Some may remember the solar roof option which Toyota previously offered years ago. That system produced a mere 50 W and was only used for things like running the AC fans, indirectly extending the battery charge. In 2016 Toyota brought back this system, in a much improved version. This upped the power output to 180 W, allowing it to power all secondary electronics in the Prius, even allowing it to add a few extra kilometers (roughly 6.1 km/day) to the Prius’ range if one were so inclined.
This newest prototype pretty much goes for broke, reminding us of the cars used in the World Solar Challenge, such as the Dutch Stella and Stella Lux positive-energy solar cars by the team at the University of Eindhoven. Who coincidentally have done a spin-off, setting up a company to produce the Lightyear One, which at least on paper sounds amazing, and potentially may never have to plug it in.
With super-efficient solar cells producing about 860 W of power, the Toyota prototype Prius should be able to add roughly 44.5 kilometers to the car’s range. Maybe not as amazing as the Lightyear One, but Toyota has what appears to be a working prototype. With this additional range added just by having the car parked or driving in the sunshine, it could make it a very interesting proposition for a lot of people, depending on how much it’d add to the total cost of the car.
Admittedly, the current Prius prototype looks rather rough: the solar cells don’t blend in well with the rest of the car. But maybe that’s what’s so reassuring about Toyota’s efforts. Their engineers are improving performance and features as PV solar and other technologies improve, without a lot of focus on glossy CGI renders and marketing.
Would you be interested in adding nearly 50 km of range to your (hybrid) electric vehicle with a PV solar option like this? How much would you pay for it? Or would you rather get some 25+% efficient cells and glue them on your current electric car? Have you, or someone you know, ever blended PV solar and cars like this before? Please let us know in the comments.
Hat tip to [Qes] for sending in this tip!
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16:00
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Hack a Day
The common automotive scrap yard is a land of plenty for the enterprising hacker., where many items that would be prohibitively expensive elsewhere can often be had for a song. This isn’t just limited to strictly automotive parts either, as the modern vehicle is full of all kinds of hardware. [Nikita] managed to salvage a pair of audio amplifiers from an old Volvo, and put them to good use. It’s a great idea if you’re looking for cheap audio hardware!
The amplifiers are from a Volvo 760 made in 1984. There’s one rated at 40 watts per channel, and a smaller device rated at 25 watts per channel – likely to drive the front and rear speakers from separate amps. The amplifiers take 12 volts nominally, as one would expect. After some initial testing with a car battery and unsticking old relays, things began to crackle into life.
With the hardware now functioning, it was simply a case of bolting the amplifiers into a frame, hooking them up to a converted ATX power supply, and wiring up some connectors for speakers and audio input. With a few bits and pieces invested, [Nikita] now has a good quality amplifier to run audio in the workshop.
There’s plenty of useful hardware you can score down at the wreckers, and we see these parts used in hacks all the time – from peculiar milling machines to automated watering systems.
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7:00
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Hack a Day
By and large, automakers have spent much of the last century trying to make cars quieter and more comfortable. Noise from vehicles can be disruptive and just generally annoying, so it makes sense to minimise it where possible.
However, the noise from the average motor vehicle can serve a useful purpose. A running engine acts as an auditory warning to those nearby. This is particularly useful to help people avoid walking in front of moving vehicles, and is especially important for the visually impaired.
Electric vehicles, with their near-silent powertrains, have put this in jeopardy. Thus, from July 1st, 2019, the European Union will enforce regulations on the installation of noise-making devices on new electric and hybrid vehicles. They are referred to as the “Acoustic Vehicle Alert System”, and it’s been a hot area of development for some time now.
They’re making the cars louder now?
It might seem like a waste of effort and energy, but safety is a serious businses. Monash University reported in 2018 that 35% of vision impaired persons surveyed had experienced collisions or near-miss incidents with electric or hybrid vehicles. This promises to be a growing problem as the take-up of electric cars increases, so it’s no surprise that laws are coming in to effect to deal with the problem.
The European Union ratified its guidelines for Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems, or AVAS, way back in 2014, giving automakers plenty of time to comply with the directive. The intention is for electric and hybrid vehicles to emit artificially generated noise when travelling at low speeds, for the purpose of warning pedestrians and other vulnerable road users of the vehicle’s presence and activity.
While there is no strict specification of the sound to be made, the intention is that a vehicle should make a sound similar in nature to that of its gasoline-powered equivalent. This is in order to make the system intuitive for all road users. It would obviously be confusing and dangerous if large trucks sounded like small hatchbacks, and vice versa, so cars are considered by category and weight class.
To warn pedestrians, synthesized sounds are created that respond to vehicle behaviour.
The official requirements make for interesting reading. The sounds emitted are intended to vary in volume and pitch, depending on vehicle behaviour. There are minimum requirements, enforced by a test regime, to ensure the systems meet the spirit and the letter of the regulations. The minimum sound level is 56 dB(A) as measured in the test, and the AVAS must be active at speeds below 20km/h. Above that, road noise from the tyres is considered to be loud enough to warn pedestrians. The AVAS is also expected to make sound when the vehicle reverses. Sound must be continuous, and the maximum sound level is restricted to 75 dB(A) – around about the same as a toilet flushing, or an average gasoline-fueled car. Outside of this, and some specifications on mandatory minimum frequency sweeps with relation to speed, automakers have plenty of scope to personalise the sound to suit their brand.
What’s It Like, Then?
It’s not the first time automakers have intentionally made cars louder with synthesized sound; sports models have been doing it for a while now, much to the chagrin of diehard automotive purists. However, rather than directly replicating the sound of an internal combustion engine, car companies have employed crack teams to develop unique and compelling sounds to usher in the age of electrification.
Jaguar’s first electric vehicle, the I-Pace, launched in 2018. Significant resources were spent on AVAS development.
As you’d expect, most have gone with a very science fiction, spaceship-like sound. Some have been working on the technology longer than others; there’s video of an early Audi e-tron project from way back in 2011, 3 years before the EU decided to enact the AVAS legislation. Nissan have had their Leaf on the road making sounds for almost that long, while Jaguar launched their system with their all-electric I-Pace. Most automakers have stuck to a fairly futuristic theme, while putting their own twist on the sound.
Would you trust these guys to build you an acoustic warning system? Me neither.
Electric trailblazers Tesla are yet to reveal the noise their vehicles will make after the July deadline, and Volkswagen are similarly playing their cards close to their chest.
We’d be surprised if they go with anything too outlandish. The fact that it has taken this long for regulations to come in is a testament to the inertia of goverments and big business interests. Still, it’s been a topic of some thought for a while now, given that electric vehicle noise was a key plot component of a mindblowing Kevin James film from 8 years ago. If the EU had moved quicker by about a decade, we could have avoided The Dilemma (2011) entirely.
Is It A Big Deal?
Fundamentally, it’s a useful technology to keep pedestrians safe, and as the technology is only active at low speed, it’s unlikely to bother anyone too much on a day-to-day basis. Unlike your straight-piped Fox body project car, your AVAS isn’t going to wake the neighbours or send the neighbourhood cats scrambling up a tree. With the legislation being largely done and dusted 5 years ago, and with the US set to enforce similar regulations in the next few years, it’s pretty much a closed matter. Expect there to be minor regional differences in requirements, similar to the variances in indicators and automotive lighting the world over. Overall though, the average punter will barely notice the technology – other than noting that these new whizz-bang cars do sound awful fancy, don’t they? Change, it is ever thus!
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7:01
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Hack a Day
Engineers are, for the time being, only human. This applies even more so to executives, and all the other people that make up a modern organisation. Naturally, mistakes are made. Some are minor, while others are less so. It’s common knowledge that problems are best dealt with swift and early, and yet so often they are ignored in the hopes that they’ll go away.
You might have heard the name Takata in the news over the last few years. If that name doesn’t ring a bell you’ve likely heard that there was a major recall of airbag-equipped vehicles lately. The story behind it is one of a single decision leading to multiple deaths, scores of injuries, a $1 billion fine, and the collapse of a formerly massive automotive supplier.
Cost Savings Led to Airbag Failure, Injury, and Loss of Life
Takata Corporation began manufacturing airbags in 1988, initially using sodium azide as the propellant. This was difficult to handle safely, and so in the 1990s, production switched to tetrazole, a safer alternative. However, this came at a high price, so research was undertaken to find an alternative.
Takata made the decision to switch to using ammonium nitrate as a propellant. Prone to breaking down under hot and humid conditions, it can become unstable, leading to airbag modules exploding rather than safely inflating in a crash. In these cases, the airbag igniter case can rupture, spraying metal fragments throughout the vehicle. This can lead to serious injury or even death for occupants of the vehicle.
The properties of ammonium nitrate were well known; other airbag manufacturers had long ruled out its use due to its stability issues. Engineers warned in the late 1990s that the material was unsafe for the application, long before the parts in question were installed in vehicles. In spite of this, Takata forged ahead, winning contracts with major automakers. As the years went on, millions of airbags with ammonium nitrate propellant would be installed in vehicles worldwide, and the timebombs began ticking.
Event Zero Was Just The Beginning
The first rupture of a Takata airbag was in May 2004, occurring in a 2002 model year vehicle in Alabama. According to the 2016 NHTSA report, Takata was first notified of the event in 2005. A month later, a Takata engineer presented their conclusions based on the limited data available to them.
Photos from Event 0, the first noted case of a Takata airbag rupture. Source: NHTSA report
Based on photos of the aftermath, there was significant rust inside the inflator, which appeared to be present prior to the airbag firing. The cause of the problem appeared to be due to overpressure caused by the propellant, rather than substandard strength in the inflator casing material. After further research, Takata concluded the problem was likely due to improper sealing on the airbag components, and further action was not taken.
It would not be until 2007 that Takata learned of further dangerous airbag failures. By this time, millions more airbags had been installed in cars worldwide that included the dangerous inflators. Takata increased its research into the defects, searching for the root cause of the problem. This included a focus on investigating propellant density, as well as exploring whether there was a problem with poor seals on airbag components. In August 2009, the company had still not found a concrete cause of the fault, and enlisted the assistance of two independent outside companies, Fraunhofer and BakerRisk, to investigate the problem.
A Fault Tree Analysis document from within Takata shows that the investigation ruled out a fundamental chemistry issue early in the investigation. Source: NHTSA report
The investigation continued to go in circles for years. New failure events continued to crop up, with airbags from production lots outside the initial batches found to have problems. Key to the investigation was the “Stokes” press, which was suspected of producing low-density inflator materials which were more likely to cause ruptures. Engineers chased their tails trying to determine which airbags were produced on which press. Production lot numbers proved to be an unreliable record of which airbags were produced on which equipment, frustrating efforts to determine the cause of the problem.
Years went by, with teams investigating all manner of leads. In 2013, Takata were notified of the first case of an inflator failure from a batch manufactured outside the initial 2000-2002 period of interest. These were referred to as “Beta” failures, and began to highlight the broader issue at play. Fraunhofer’s continuing research began to show that instead of manufacturing issues, the problem was most likely caused by moisture and temperature cycling. At this point, the number of affected cars began to spiral out of control, as it became clear that few-to-none of Takata’s ammonium nitrate inflators were safe in the long term.
Early fault tree analysis from Takata shows that engineers were quick to rule out chemistry issues with their product. Instead, there was a strong focus on finding a manufacturing variability issue instead. While the investigation took its course, Takata factories continued to pump out ammonium nitrate inflators in their millions. This compounded the issue, as each new car sold with defective airbags would later become subject to a recall, requiring parts to be replaced.
A Two-Pronged Problem
Honda are the most closely associated manufacturer with the problem, however cars across over 10 manufacturers are now subject to recall.
Identifying the root cause of the issue was just the first, and easiest, step of the process. To solve the problem once and for all, millions upon millions of cars, from a huge number of manufacturers, would need to have their airbags replaced. The effort required to achieve this is truly Herculean in scope, and it has been far from smooth sailing thus far.
For cars with a single owner from new, it is a relatively simple task for dealers to contact the owner and send out a recall notice. However, with cars sold on the used market, records are poor to non-existent. Trying to educate the entire car-owning public that their car may be packing a dangerous explosive device is a difficult and expensive task. Car companies have taken out advertisements in newspapers, at stadiums, and gone so far as hiring private detectives to track down owners. Websites and other services have been created in various countries to allow motorists to check their Vehicle Identification Numbers against databases of recalled vehicles. Despite this effort, and the fact that recalls have been ongoing since 2008, the message isn’t always getting through. And that’s only half the problem.
Parts Were Slow to Materialize for Recall Service
It’s one thing to know that your car could potentially have a defective and dangerous airbag installed. It’s another thing entirely to get the problem rectified. Parts availability has been a continual problem during the recall process. Owners have been told that they will be notified to bring their car in “when parts are available”, and told to avoid using the front seats in the meantime. Obviously, this is of cold comfort to drivers who rely on their cars for transport on a daily basis.
The unprecedented volume and scope of the industrywide Takata airbag inflator recalls have created unique replacement parts challenges for all vehicle manufacturers and global parts suppliers. At NHTSA’s request, Ford issued safety recalls for vehicles with certain Takata inflators even though replacement inflators with a different propellant would not be available for months or even years; in the meantime, new inflators are being redesigned and manufactured.
-Statement from Ford Motor Company, 2018
Given that cars were produced with defective inflators for well over a decade, it’s not a problem that has an easy fix. Airbag manufacturing is a niche industry, and production capacity exists to serve the demand for new vehicle production each year, and to maintain spare parts inventory. It simply isn’t possible to produce several years worth of new airbags for older vehicles overnight. This leaves many drivers with a difficult decision to make — to hope that their airbag is safe, or acquire another vehicle, often at their own expense.
This Isn’t a Small Fix
Unfortunately for Takata, and millions of drivers around the world, the problem wasn’t a short-lived manufacturing error. The choice to use ammonium nitrate was a fundamental design flaw, meaning entire product lines were affected. This meant that the problem wasn’t as simple as correcting a production line error, and cranking out more parts. Airbags for hundreds of different models would have to be redesigned, tested, and put into production.
Ford is currently engaged in the complex and lengthy process of developing replacement nonammonium nitrate-based airbag inflators from alternative suppliers. Airbag inflators are highly engineered and unique to each model and model year. In addition to the lengthy design and revalidation process, the scarcity of global production capacity from inflator suppliers is contributing to a delay in global replacement parts availability.
-Statement from Ford Motor Company, 2018
Unsurprisingly, this caused headaches, if not migraines, for automotive companies the world over. Focus was placed on replacing parts in older cars first, in areas with high heat and humidity. The airbag industry is highly concentrated, however AutoLiv, TRW, and Daicel have stepped up to the plate, devoting their own resources to the effort to get replacement parts out in the field.
A statement from Ford’s website. Manufacturers are taking the recall seriously, but are struggling to effectively reach the public.
For many people, the fix still hasn’t come fast enough. As recently as 2016, vehicles were still being sold with defective inflators, with automakers admitting that these would have to be recalled by 2018. With the Takata airbags becoming more dangerous over time, the thinking is that these cars would likely be safe enough while resources are devoted to fixing riskier older vehicles. Owners of cars from certain manufacturers have been lucky enough to receive loan cars, while others continue to drive around, in the hopes that nothing goes wrong.
The Fallout
In 2016, Bloomberg reported over 13 people had died, and 100 had been injured, due to the defective Takata inflators. By 2017, Takata had filed for bankruptcy, with the cost of the recall and related liabilities exceeding $10 billion. The company was bought out by Key Safety Systems, with the aim being to keep the factories open and churning out replacement airbags with as minimal disruption as possible.
Millions of cars remain unrepaired in the US, with similarly worrying numbers elsewhere. Parts shortages continue to frustrate the repair effort, and many owners remain unaware of the dangers lurking behind their dashboard. Deaths continue to stack up, with the most recent case being a 2002 Honda Civic claiming the life of an Arizona man in June 2018. The vehicle in question had been under recall for over 3 years, with no repairs undertaken in that time.
Hindsight Is A Wonderful Thing
Producing airbag inflators with a dangerous propellant was a mistake, and one that would have dire consequences. However, the bigger mistake was ignoring the problem at every turn when it came to light. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of Takata to avoid facing the problem early on, millions more cars would ship with defective parts, and many more drivers and passengers would be placed in danger. This further complicated the efforts required to solve the issue.
Industry bodies and automakers continue to find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place — trying to get the word out to customers, while simultaneously tell them they must wait until replacement parts are available. It’s a painful communication problem with no easy solution. The major lesson going forward would be to stamp out spot fires before they become raging, uncontrollable conflagrations that threaten lives the world over. With Takata only pleading guilty in 2017, it’s clear that the problem could have been avoided entirely if early warnings had been heeded. It’s rare that a single engineering decision can lead to such a quagmire of pain and misery, but in concentrated industries with few suppliers, the stakes can be much higher.
Going Forward
The Takata airbag debacle will be an example case taught in business and engineering classes for decades to come. The very earliest warnings were ignored, and by the time the real problem became apparent 15 years later, the damage was already done. The biggest automotive recall in history is still in progress, and the after effects will likely be felt for some time yet. In the meantime, check your own vehicle, and advise your friends and family to do the same. And, as ever, if you’re warned by an engineer that you’re making the wrong decision, it might just pay to listen, in both dollars and lives.
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13:00
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Hack a Day
For the average motorist, the speedometer and the fuel indicator are the primary gauges of interest. Owners of performance or modified cars tend to like having more information on the way the car is running. [JustinN1] is firmly in that camp, and built some WiFi-enabled gauges for his Subaru WRX STi.
The gauges run on the ESP32 platform, chosen for its WiFi hardware and its ease of use with the Arduino platform. This makes programming a snap, and interfacing to a smartphone easy. OLED displays were chosen for their good visibility in both day and night conditions, which is important for automotive applications.
[JustinN1] developed both a boost/vacuum gauge and an oil pressure gauge, both useful for keeping an eye on what the engine is doing. Measuring boost is as simple as using an off-the-shelf analog air pressure sensor. The oil pressure sensor is a resistive part, and must is hooked up through a resistor divider to create an analog voltage for the ESP32 to read.
Code is on Github, and there’s even a version that displays a grinning face when you get into higher boost levels. There are also a series of housings to suit various mounting choices, to help give the gauges a more finished look. We’ve seen other gauge builds too, like this gear indicator for a Suzuki motorcycle. Video after the break.
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13:00
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Hack a Day
Carburettors were king for decades, until the onward march of technology brought electronic fuel injection to the fore. During their final years, a handful of automakers experimented with computer control of the humble carb, trying to squeeze out every last bit of efficiency and reduce pollution as much as possible. [NeXT] happened to own a vehicle fitted with AMC’s Computerized Engine Control system, and decided to see what made it tick.
This was easier said than done due to choices made by Ford, who manufactured the engine computer for AMC. Unlike modern ECUs which usually feature a metal case fitted with rubber gaskets, the CEC computer was potted in epoxy. [NeXT] was able to de-pot the circuit board by placing it in a stock pot of boiling water, and then slowly peeling the epoxy away.
With the potting removed, it was possible to begin reverse engineering the board. The main microcontroller is an Intel 8049, of the MCS-48 family. The board uses through-hole technology, and only features a handful of other small ICs.
It’s always interesting to look back at forgotten technologies and see how things were done in decades past. [NeXT] hopes to keep working on the project, intending to dump the ROM from the CEC module and build a replacement computer with an Arduino. It’s possible to build your own ECU from scratch, so we’re looking forward to seeing [NeXT]’s AMC Eagle running on modern silicon real soon.
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16:00
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Hack a Day
Radio control cars have always been fun, it’s true. With that said, it’s hard to deny that true speed was unlocked when lithium polymer batteries and brushless motors came to the fore. [Gear Down For What?] built himself a speedy RC car of his own design, and it’s only got two wheels to boot (Youtube link, embedded below).
The design is of the self-balancing type – if you’re thinking of an angry unmanned Segway with a point to prove, you’re in the ballpark. The brains of the machine come thanks to a Teensy 3.6, which runs the PID loops for balancing and control. An MPU6050 gyroscope & accelerometer provide the necessary sensing to enable the ‘bot to keep itself upright in varied conditions. Performance is impressive, with the car reaching speeds in excess of 40 MPH and managing to handle simple ramps and bumps with ease. It’s all wrapped up in a 3D printed frame which held up surprisingly well to many crashes into tripods and tarmac.
Such builds are not just fun; they’re an excellent way to learn useful control skills that can serve you well in industry and your own projects. You can pick up the finer details of control systems in a university engineering course, or you could give our primer a whirl. When you’ve whipped up your first awesome project, we’d love to hear about it. Video after the break.
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13:00
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Hack a Day
Video games, while entertaining to be sure, are a great way to experience things that could not easily be recreated in real life. Shooting aliens on a giant ring in space is an obvious example, but there are some more realistic examples that video games make much more accessible, such as driving a race car. You can make that experience as realistic as you want, too, and can even go as far as using a real car as your controller.
All modern cars use a communication system to allow their various modules to talk to one another. Fuel injection, throttle position, pedal positions, steering wheel angle, and climate control systems can all communicate on the CAN bus, and by tapping into that information the car can be used as a controller for a video game. Once you plug in to the OBD-II port on a car, you’ll need a piece of software to decode all of that information. [Andrew] uses uinput, a tool that allows Linux machines to take any input signal and map it in any way that can be programmed.
The build also includes the use of an integrated pico projector, allowing the car to be parked and turned into a simulator at any time. It’s similar to another project which used a Mazda instead of a Chevrolet Volt, but it just goes to show how straightforward it can be to take information from the CAN bus of a modern car.
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1:00
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Hack a Day
Over the past few decades of evolution, cars have grown to incorporate a mind-boggling number of electric components. From parking distance sensors, to the convenience of power locks and windows, to in-car entertainment systems rivaling home theaters. Normally this interconnected system’s complexity is hidden between exterior sheet metal and interior plastic trim, but a group of students of Volkswagen’s vocational training program decided to show off their internal beauty by building the Volkswagen eGon exhibit.
Seeing a super minimalist Volkswagen electric Golf on the move (short Twitter video embedded below) we are immediately reminded of circuit sculptures. We saw some great projects in our circuit sculpture contest, but the eGon shows what can be done with the resources of a Volkswagen training center. Parts are bolted to the car’s original structure where possible, the rest were held in their representative positions by thin metal tube frames. At this scale, they look just like the brass rods used in small circuit sculptures! Certain component enclosures were replaced with transparent pieces, or had a window cut into them for visibility.
This exhibit was built for IdeenExpo, an event to expose students to science and technology. Showing them what’s under the cover in this “see-through car” with internal components tagged with QR codes pointing them to additional information. The number of electronic modules inside a car is only going to continue rising with the coming wave of electric and/or self-driving cars. Even if the timing of their arrival is debatable, we know we’ll need brain power helping to answer questions we don’t even know to ask yet. The eGon is doing a great job attracting attention and inviting bright young minds to participate.
Ok. Rechnung ohne den Bernd gemacht 
Minister @althusmann: „Wir haben mal gerade das Programm geändert. Auto fahre hier ich.“ Sry, Azubi Justin 
du darfst bestimmt noch auf der @ideenexpo 2019 hinters Steuer. @volkswagen pic.twitter.com/e5N9GQFLbh
— NiedersachsenMetall (@NiedersachsenME) May 3, 2019
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10:00
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Hack a Day
Ah, Facebook. Only you could mess up email verification this badly, and still get a million people to hand over their email address passwords. Yes, you read that right, Facebook’s email verification scheme was to ask users for their email address and email account password. During the verification, Facebook automatically downloaded the account’s contact list, with no warning and no way to opt out.
The amount of terrible here is mind-boggling, but perhaps we need a new security rule-of-thumb for these kind of situations. Don’t ever give an online service the password to a different service. In order to make use of a password in this case, it’s necessary to handle it in plain-text. It’s not certain how long Facebook stored these passwords, but they also recently disclosed that they have been storing millions of Facebook and Instagram passwords in plain-text internally.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has been called out for serious privacy shenanigans, either: In early 2018 it was revealed that the Facebook Android app had been uploading phone call records without informing users. Mark Zuckerberg has recently outlined his plan to give Facebook a new focus on privacy. Time will tell whether any real change will occur.
Cyber Can Mean Anything
Have you noticed that “cyber” has become a meaningless buzz-word, particularly when used by the usual suspects? The Department of Energy released a report that contained a vague but interesting sounding description of an event: “Cyber event that causes interruptions of electrical system operations.” This was noticed by news outlets, and people have been speculating ever since. What is frustrating about this is the wide range of meaning covered by the term “cyber event”. Was it an actual attack? Was Trinity shutting down the power stations, or did an intern trip over a power cord?
The Car that Runs Windows
Do you drive a 2015 Hyundai Tucson? The good news is that you probably have a very hackable infotainment center. The bad news is that you have a very hackable infotainment center that is running Windows CE. [James] has shared some of his ongoing research on Twitter, and it’s as entertaining as it is worrying. The jawdropping revelation is that when a flash drive is plugged in, the infotainment system automatically executes “HyundaiUpdate.exe” without any verification. Keep in mind that the first high profile vehicle exploit was pulled off through the infotainment center, as well.
Java Deserialization Zero-Day
What happens when a cloud provider gets hit by a ransomware attack? That’s what some users of Oracle’s WebLogic Server get to decide after a severe 0-day vulnerability surfaced in the wild, CVE-2019-2725. It all boils down to how Java does deserialization, unpacking flat data back into objects. While outside data must always be viewed with suspicion, Java has a long-standing problem with deserialization, in that the serialized data can overwrite other variables in scope during deserialization. There is an obvious security weakness here, but a fix in the Java language would break untold deployed applications.
The short story is that a server that exposes WebLogic is vulnerable, and likely already compromised with a ransomware attack. Oracle has already released an emergency patch fixing this particular issue.
Check out the presentation below for a detailed introduction to Java deserialization attacks:
Errata
Last time we discussed the ShadowHammer attack, and since then Kaspersky Lab has released their technical report of their findings. There are some more juicy details contained there, so go check it out.
Remember, send us your tips for the next installment of This Week in Security.
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22:00
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Hack a Day
Many electric cars feature a timer capability that allows the owner to set which hours they want the vehicle to start pulling a charge. This lets the thrifty EV owner take advantage of the fact that the cost of electricity generally goes down late at night when the demand is lower. The Renault Zoe that [Ryan Walmsley] owns has this feature, but not only does it cost him extra to have it enabled, it’s kind of a hassle to use. So being an enterprising hacker, he decided to implement his own timer in the charger itself.
Now controlling high voltages with a lowly microcontroller might sound dangerous, but it’s actually not nearly as tricky as you might think. The charger and the vehicle actually communicate with low-voltage signals to determine things like the charge rate, so it turns out you don’t need to cut into the AC side of things at all. You just need to intercept the control signals between the two devices and modify them accordingly.
Or do you? As [Ryan] eventually realized, he didn’t need to bother learning how the control signals actually worked since he wasn’t trying to do anything tricky like set the charge rate. He just wanted to be able to stop and start the charging according to what time it was. So all he had to do was put the control signal from his car through a relay controlled by a Particle Photon, allowing him to selectively block communication.
The charger also had an optional key lock, which essentially turns the controller off when the contacts are shorted. [Ryan] put a relay on that as well so he could be absolutely sure the charger cuts the juice at the appropriate time. Then it was just a matter of getting the schedule configured with IFTTT. He mentions the system could even be tweaked to automatically control the charger based on the instantaneous cost of electricity provided by the utility company, rather than assuming overnight is always the most economical.
We’ve seen a fair amount of electric car hacking, but with only a few exceptions, the projects always steer clear of modifying the actual chargers themselves. In general hackers feel a lot safer playing around in the world of DC, but as [Ryan] has shown, safely hacking your EV charger is possible if you do your homework.
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8:30
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Hack a Day
Car enthusiasts can find themselves in a pickle if they’re into cars from the 80s and 90s. These vehicles are much beloved by some, but one can find themselves having to fork out immense amounts of money for repairs and out-of-production parts. Once a car passes that 15 year milestone, suddenly manufacturer support can start to dry up. Even just getting a set of keys can be a problem.
Modern cars tend to use a small chip implanted in the key as a security measure. This chip functions similarly to an RFID chip, being energised by the car’s reader when the driver turns the key in the ignition. If the chip returns the right code, the computer allows the car to start. Getting a new key cut and recoded is expensive, particularly on older cars. Naturally though, there’s a way to hack around the problem.
The trick is to perform surgery on an existing good key, to extract the working chip inside. This chip can then be permanently affixed to the immobilizer’s antenna in the steering column. This allows the driver to use any properly cut “dumb” key to start the car, as the chip will always provide the right signal at startup. It takes some finesse to avoid damaging the delicate chip inside and to know where to look – but with a little work, it’s achievable by even the novice hacker.
It’s a simple hack that can save hundreds of dollars, and is a great way to keep your modern classic on the road for cheap. You can always take things a step further though, and CNC yourself a key from scratch if you’re so inclined.
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If you don’t live in a former Eastern Bloc country, odds are that you’ve never seen a Lada driving around your neighborhood. This car is ubiquitous in Russia and its neighboring countries, though, and for good reason: price. Lada gave many people access to affordable transportation who otherwise would have …read more
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The amount of technology in modern cars is truly staggering. Heated seats, keyless entry, and arrays of helpful cameras are all becoming increasingly common in all but the cheapest of models. [mathisox] drives a slightly older Volkswagen van, which has been converted into a camper. Unfortunately, it lacks a proper …read more
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Hack a Day
Pen testing isn’t about evaluating inks. It is short for penetration testing — someone ensuring a system’s security by trying to break in or otherwise attack it. A company called Pen Test Partners made the news last week by announcing that high-end car alarm systems made by several vendors have …read more
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In 2016, a Tesla Model S T-boned a tractor trailer at full speed, killing its lone passenger instantly. It was running in Autosteer mode at the time, and neither the driver nor the car’s automatic braking system reacted before the crash. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigated …read more
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Despite most of the common gauges remaining the same over the last 60 years, the automotive dashboard of days past used very different technology to those today. Cable driven speedometers were common, along with mechanical drive for the odometer, too. Fuel and temperature gauges were often wired directly to their …read more
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Hack a Day
At the turn of the 21st century, it became pretty clear that even our cars wouldn’t escape the Digital Revolution. Years before anyone even uttered the term “smartphone”, it seemed obvious that automobiles would not only become increasingly computer-laden, but they’d need a way to communicate with each other and …read more
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Hack a Day
Now that nearly every car on the road comes with an electronic key fob, people are desperate to find ways to repair these indispensable little gadgets without coughing up potentially hundreds of dollars at the dealership. There’s a whole market for replacement shells which you can transplant your (hopefully) still functional electronics into, but if you’re going to go through the trouble of putting the electronics into a new case, why not make it special?
That’s what [Michicanery] was thinking when he decided to build his own custom key fob. The end result is an utterly magnificent feat of engineering …read more
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Hack a Day
While Chevrolet’s innovative electric hybrid might officially be headed to that great big junkyard in the sky, the Volt will still live on in the hearts and minds of hackers who’d rather compare amp hour than horsepower. For a relatively low cost, a used Volt offers the automotive hacker a fascinating platform for upgrades and experimentation. One such Volt owner is [Jared Stafford], who’s recently made some considerable headway on hacking his hybrid ride.
In an ongoing series on his blog, [Jared] is documenting his efforts to add new features and functions to his Volt. While he loves the car …read more
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It’s a story as old as time: you need to swap between your custom license plates, but you can’t find a screwdriver and you’re already running late for a big meeting at the Business Factory. You called AAA to see if they could come out and do it for you, but as luck would have it something must be wrong with your phone because the line was disconnected as soon as you explained the situation. As if life in the First World couldn’t get any more difficult.
Luckily, a company called Reviver Auto has come up with a thoroughly modern …read more
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Hack a Day
These days, the electronics hobbyist is lucky to have access to a wide range of ready-made modules that enable sensors, screens, and microcontrollers to all be linked up with ease. However, this manner of working generally ends up with a project that becomes more of a PCB salad than a finished product. Oftentimes, it’s possible to find something off the shelf that’s close to your requirements, and repurpose it to work. That’s exactly what [Aaron] did.
[Aaron] wanted to install a display in his classic Jeep to display the time and some basic parameters. A screen and a microcontroller were …read more
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A month ago General Motors announced plans to wind down production of several under-performers. At the forefront of news coverage on this are the consequences facing factories making those cars, and the people who work there. The human factor associated with the closing of these plants is real. But there is also another milestone marked by the cancellation of the Volt. Here at Hackaday, we choose to memorialize the soon-to-be-departed Chevrolet Volt. An obituary buried in corporate euphemisms is a whimper of an end for what was once their technological flagship car of the future.
2006: Gas-Electric Hybrids Hit Their
…read more
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A vintage British sportscar is a wonderful thing. Inimitable style and luxury, beautiful curves, and a soundtrack that could make even Vinnie Jones shed a tear. However, even under the most diligent maintenance schedule, they are known, above all, for their unreliability. As the value of such cars is tied heavily to their condition as unmodified examples, owners are typically reluctant to make modifications to remedy these issues.
However, things are starting to change. Cities across the world are enacting measures to ban fossil fuel vehicles from their streets, and sales of such vehicles are similarly going to be banned …read more
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Hack a Day
Anyone who has an interest and/or career in manufacturing would have heard of Kaizen, generally a concept to continuously improve your process everywhere. Under that huge umbrella is Karakuri Kaizen, encouraging workers on the factory floor to adopt a hacker mentality and improve their own work stations. It is right up our alley, manufacturer or not, making this overview by Automotive News an entertaining read.
Karakuri could be translated as “mechanism”, but implies something novel in the vein of English words gadgets, gizmos, or dare we say it: hacks. Karakuri has a history dating back to centuries-old wind-up …read more
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While cars are slowing becoming completely computer-controlled, road vehicles have been relying on computers since the 1970’s. The first automotive use of computers was in engine control units (ECUs) which came along as fuel injection systems started to replace carburetors.
[P1kachu]’s 1997 Subaru Impreza STi, like most cars of this vintage, uses an ECU and provides a diagnostic connector for external communications. [P1kachu]’s Subaru hacking project includes building a diagnostic interface device, dumping the ECU’s firmware, and reverse engineering the binary to understand and disable the speed limiter. If this looks familiar, it’s because we just covered the infotainment hacks …read more
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If you ever doubt the potential for catastrophe that mucking about with electric vehicles can present, check out the video below. It shows what can happen to a couple of Tesla battery modules when due regard to safety precautions isn’t paid.
The video comes to us by way of [Rich], a gearhead with a thing for Teslas. He clearly knows his way around the EV world, having rebuilt a flood-soaked Tesla, and aspires to open an EV repair shop. The disaster stems from a novelty vehicle he and friend [Lee] bought as a side project. The car was apparently once …read more
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The toothed belt that turns the camshaft in synchronization with the crankshaft on many motor vehicle engines is something of an under-appreciated component. Unless you are unlucky enough to ave had one fail and destroy your engine, it’s probably something you’ve never given a second thought to outside of periodic service intervals.
For something to perform such a task over so many thousands of miles of motoring it must be made of pretty strong stuff. Even when a belt is life-expired it is still in good physical shape, and [Crispyjones] saw the potential in a used Subaru belt to make …read more
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If you’ve been to the right events, you’ve seen them before – the cars with an external cage that let the car complete a somersault in the forward direction under heavy braking. They’re impressive, but it’s possible to take things even further. Enter [mastermilo82] and the RollKa.
The RollKa follows on from the RollGolf, which was a straightforward roll car build. Built around a Ford Ka, it eschews the external cage for a more radical design. The Ka has been shortened, and designed to fit within two enormous steel rims which wrap around each side of the car. Additional idler …read more
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This clever precomputation attack was developed by a group of researchers at KU Leuven in Belgium. Unlike previous key fob attacks that we’ve covered in the past which have been essentially relay attacks, this hack precomputes a ton of data, looks for a collision in the dataset, and opens the door. Here’s how it works.
Tesla opted not to design their own key fob system, but licensed a product based on Texas Instruments’ DST40 Cipher. A vehicle using this system broadcasts a radio message containing the car’s unique identifier. If the key fob is in range, it will respond to …read more
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It seems as if everyone has finally decided to stop pretending that standing in front of a desk for 8+ hours was something anyone actually wanted to do, and once again embrace the classic adjustable office chair. But whether you’re writing code in a cubicle or are one of those people who apparently makes a living by having people watch them play video games, one thing is certain: your chair needs to be cool enough to make up for the years shaved off your life by sitting in it all day.
Case in point, these chairs that were made out …read more
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Hack a Day
Sometimes, you move to a new city, and things just aren’t going your way. You’re out of cash, out of energy, and thanks to your own foolishness, your car’s battery is dead. You need to jump-start the car, but you’re feeling remarkably antisocial, and you don’t know anyone else in town you can call. What do you do?
It’s not a problem, because you’re a hacker and you have a cordless drill in the back seat of your car. The average drill of today tends to run on a nice 18 volt lithium battery pack. These packs are capable of …read more
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Old cars can be fun, and as long as you drive something that was once moderately popular, mechanical parts can be easy enough to come by. Things like filters, spark plugs, idle air solenoids – they’re generally available for decades after a car is out of production as long as you know where to look. However, plastics can be much harder to come by. 20 to 30 years into a car’s lifetime, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a radio surround or vent trim in as-new condition – they’ve all long ago succumbed to the sun and air like …read more
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A great place to get your feet wet with the data-network-wonderland that is modern-day automobiles is the Car Hacking Village at DEF CON. I stopped by on Saturday afternoon to see what it was all about and the place was packed. From Ducati motorcycles to junkyard instrument clusters, and from mobility scooters to autonomous RC test tracks, this feels like one of the most interactive villages in the whole con.
The Obvious: CAN Bus Hacking
When I think of car hacking, CAN bus is the first thing that pops to mind. CAN is the protocol used for the data network …read more
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When working on classic vehicles, and especially when modifying them outside of their stock configurations, things can get expensive. It’s a basic principle in economics: the rarer something is the more money somebody can charge you for it. But if you’ve got the skills and the necessary equipment, you can occasionally save yourself money by custom-fabricating some parts yourself.
After changing the gear ratio in his 1971 Ford F100, [smpstech] needed to adjust his speedometer to compensate. Unfortunately, a commercial speedometer reducer and the new cables to get it hooked up to his dash would have run into the hundreds …read more
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Automotive components that have a hidden secondary function are usually limited to cartoons and Michael Bay movies, but this project that [Jesus Echavarria] created for a client is a perhaps as close as we’re likely to get in the near future. The final product certainly looks like a standard automotive relay, but a peek inside the 3D printed case reveals a surprisingly complex little device. It’s still technically a relay, but it uses a PIC microcontroller to decide when it should activate.
[Jesus] was given the task of creating a device that would fit into the relay box of a …read more
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Most new cars have GPS, rear cameras, and all the other wonders an on-board system can bring. But what if you have an old car? [Fabrice Aneche] has a 2011 vehicle, and wanted a rearview camera. He started with a touch screen, a Raspberry Pi 3, and a camera. But you know how these projects take on a life of their own. So far, the project has two entries in his blog.
It wasn’t long before he couldn’t resist the urge to add a GPS. But that’s no fun without maps. Plus you need turn-by-turn directions. [Fabrice] did a lot …read more
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With the incredibly low cost of software defined radio (SDR) hardware, and the often zero cost of related software, there’s never been a better time to get into the world of radio. If you’ve got $30 burning a hole in your pocket, you’re good to go. But as with any engrossing hobby that’s cheap to get into, you run the risk of going overboard eventually.
For example, if the radio gear inside your car approaches parity with the Kelly Blue Book value of said vehicle, you may have been bitten by the radio bug. In the video after the break, …read more
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Oxford is a city world-famous for its university, and is a must-see stop on the itinerary of many a tourist to the United Kingdom. It features mediaeval architecture, unspoilt meadows, two idylic rivers, and a car plant. That’s the part the guide books don’t tell you, if you drive a BMW Mini there is every chance that it was built in a shiny new factory on the outskirts of the historic tourist destination.
The origins of the Mini factory lie over the road on a site that now houses a science park but was once the location of the Morris …read more
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In one bad week in March, two people were indirectly killed by automated driving systems. A Tesla vehicle drove into a barrier, killing its driver, and an Uber vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian crossing the street. The National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary reports on both accidents came out recently, and these bring us as close as we’re going to get to a definitive view of what actually happened. What can we learn from these two crashes?
There is one outstanding factor that makes these two crashes look different on the surface: Tesla’s algorithm misidentified a lane split and actively …read more
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Anyone old enough to have driven before the GPS era probably wonders, as we do, how anyone ever found anything. Navigation back then meant outdated paper maps, long detours because of missed turns, and the far too frequent stops at dingy gas stations for the humiliation of asking for directions. It took forever sometimes, and though we got where we were going, it always seemed like there had to be a better way.
Indeed there was, but instead of waiting for the future and a constellation of satellites to guide the way, some clever folks in the early 1970s had …read more
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Hack a Day
Manual transmissions! Those blessed things that car enthusiasts swear by and everyone else pretends no longer exists. They’re usually shifted by using the gearstick, mounted in the centre console of the car. Swapping out the knob on the gearstick is a popular customization; you can have everything from 8-balls to skulls, to redback spiders mounted in epoxy, sitting proud atop your gearstick. It’s rare to see anything new under the sun, but [John Allwine] came up with something we’d never seen before.
[John]’s design leans heavily on the unique ability of additive manufacturing to produce complex hollow geometries that are …read more
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Old cars are great. For the nostalgia-obsessed like myself, getting into an old car is like sitting in a living, breathing representation of another time. They also happen to come with their fair share of problems. As the owner of two cars which are nearing their 30th birthdays, you start to face issues that you’d never encounter on a younger automobile. The worst offender of all is plastics. Whether in the interior or in the engine bay, after many years of exposure to the elements, parts become brittle and will crack, snap and shatter at the slightest provocation.
You also …read more
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The Tesla Model 3 has been available for almost a year now, and hackers and tinkerers all over the world are eager to dig into Elon’s latest ride to see what makes it tick. But while it’s considerably cheaper than the Model S that came before it, the $35,000+ USD price tag on the new Tesla is still a bit too high to buy one just to take it apart. So for budget conscious grease monkeys, the only thing to do is wait until somebody with more money than you crashes one and then buy the wreckage cheaply.
Which is …read more
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Hack a Day
If you have a car that is getting on in years, it may be missing some of the latest frills and features that the latest models sport. [Muris] has a slightly dated Audi A3 8P which did not have an AUTO setting for the headlights. In the newer models, this feature turns on the headlights when the ambient light falls below a threshold level (overcast conditions or when going through a tunnel), or when the windshield wipers are turned on. The light sensor is integrated behind the rear view mirror in a special mount, requiring an expensive windshield upgrade if …read more
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While you’d be hard pressed to find any serious figures on such things, we’d wager there’s never been a vehicle from a TV show or movie that has been duplicated by fans more than the Staff Jeeps from Jurassic Park. Which is no great surprise: not only do they look cool, but it’s a relatively easy build. A decent paint job and some stickers will turn a stock Wrangler into a “JP Jeep” that John Hammond himself would be proud of.
While no less iconic, there are far fewer DIY builds of the highly customized Ford Explorer “Tour Vehicles”. …read more
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Hack a Day
If you’ve been on the Earth for a couple of decades or more, or have just grown up riding around in some older metal, you’d know that cars can be incredibly noisy. If you’re unfamiliar, buy yourself a nice car like a 2000 Honda Civic, strip out all the carpet and interior panels, and go for a drive. Huge amounts of research and development have gone into making modern cars as quiet and comfortable as possible. Through the correct use of sound deadening materials and techniques, a car can be made much quieter and audio quality from the sound system …read more
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Hack a Day
It used to be that you could pop the hood and with nothing more than flat head screwdriver, some baling wire, and tongue held at the optimal angle, you could fix anything that ailed your car. But today, for better or for worse, the average automobile is a rolling computer that runs on gasoline and hope (if it even still has a gasoline engine, that is). DIY repairs and maintenance on a modern car is still possible of course, but the home mechanic’s toolbox has needed to evolve with the times. If you want to do anything more advanced than …read more
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Old cars are great. They represent a different time, reflecting the state of society at the point of their design and manufacture, and can charm and delight while also providing useful transport. Except, well… old cars are great, except when they’re not.
With my Volvo 740 hitting its thirtieth birthday and cresting over 200,000 miles, to say its a little worse for wear is an understatement. The turbo dadwagon has suffered transmission issues, and cold starting woes… but most frustrating is the sudden spike in fuel use. After some work, my humble daily driver had slid from using an acceptable …read more
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Frankencars are built from the parts of several cars to make one usable vehicle. [Jim Belosic] has crossed the (finish) line with his Teslonda. In the most basic sense, it is the body of a Honda Accord on top of the drive train of a Tesla Model S. The 1981 Honda was the make and model of his first car, but it wasn’t getting driven. Rather than sell it, he decided to give it a new life with electricity, just like Victor Frankenstein.
In accord with Frankenstein’s monster, this car has unbelievable strength. [Jim] estimates the horsepower increases by a …read more
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Playing the bagpipes is an art that takes a significant effort to master, both in keeping a constant air supply through balancing blowstick and bag and in learning the finger positions on the chanter. This last task we are told requires constant finger practice, and a favorite place for this is on the steering wheel as a would-be piper drives. [DZL] therefore took this to the next level, placing touch sensors round a car steering wheel that could be interpreted by an Arduino Pro Mini to produce a passable facsimile of a set of bagpipes via an in-car FM transmitter. …read more
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After nearly 30 years since the first episode of Transformers aired, someone has finally done it. A company named Brave Robotics out of Japan has created a true transformer robot that is half remote control car and half remote control bipedal robot. According to the Brave Robotics’ site, this creation is the result of more than 10 years. [...]
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We hope [Kabir's] driving skills are top-notch because the camera stuck to the front of this toy is a high-ticket item. It’s ironic, since the donor toy for this hacked RC car only cost about five bucks. It had been gathering dust in the dark reaches of his bedroom until he sat down and gave [...]
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[Kurt] wanted an electric car, and always wanted to drive a Porsche. Killing two birds with one stone, he decided to combine these wishes and convert a 2002 Porsche 911 into an electric vehicle. After removing the engine, fuel tank, exhaust, radiator, and all the other things that make an internal combustion engine work, [Kurt] installed [...]
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[João Ribeiro] is an electronics engineer by day, but in his free time he likes to ply his trade on everyday items. Recently he’s been integrating his own microcontroller network to unlock and start his car via RFID. In addition to the joy of pulling apart the car’s interior, he spent time designing his own [...]
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SecDocs
Tags:
wireless Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 21th (21C3) 2004 Abstract: This talk will cover methods for discovering the hidden capabilities of Infra-Red remote controls, as well as brute forcing single function controls such as garage door openers or car alarm systems. It will look at the 'why' as well as the 'how', and opens up some interesting possibilities for future research into other similar technologies such as RF car alarms etc. Major Malfunction spends a lot of time travelling. Consequently he spends a lot of time in Hotels. Hotels have Pay-Per-View. Hotels have infra-red remote controlled TVs. And so, to while away the hours, MMIrDA was born... Infra Red is all around us. Most of us will use an Infra Red controller on more or less a daily basis, to change the TV channel, or open a car or garage door, but how often have you thought about how it actually works? This talk will describe not only how to analyse the signals being sent by your remote, but also how to use that information to find hidden commands and reveal functions you didn't even know your systems had. You will learn how to brute force garage doors, car doors, hotel pay-per-view TV systems, take over LED signs, vending machines and even control alarm systems, using cheap or home made devices and free software.
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10:40
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SecDocs
Tags:
wireless Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 21th (21C3) 2004 Abstract: This talk will cover methods for discovering the hidden capabilities of Infra-Red remote controls, as well as brute forcing single function controls such as garage door openers or car alarm systems. It will look at the 'why' as well as the 'how', and opens up some interesting possibilities for future research into other similar technologies such as RF car alarms etc. Major Malfunction spends a lot of time travelling. Consequently he spends a lot of time in Hotels. Hotels have Pay-Per-View. Hotels have infra-red remote controlled TVs. And so, to while away the hours, MMIrDA was born... Infra Red is all around us. Most of us will use an Infra Red controller on more or less a daily basis, to change the TV channel, or open a car or garage door, but how often have you thought about how it actually works? This talk will describe not only how to analyse the signals being sent by your remote, but also how to use that information to find hidden commands and reveal functions you didn't even know your systems had. You will learn how to brute force garage doors, car doors, hotel pay-per-view TV systems, take over LED signs, vending machines and even control alarm systems, using cheap or home made devices and free software.
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This juicy hunk of printed circuits is an open source controller for the peripherals of an electric car. It’s the product of a capstone project working on a vehicle aimed at urban commuting. There wasn’t a suitable non-proprietary module for controlling a car’s peripherals so the team built their own. As far as we can tell [...]
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SecDocs
Authors:
Adam Laurie Marcel Holtmann Martin Herfurt Tags:
bluetooth Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005 Abstract: This talk will provide an overview of all currently know Bluetooth exploits, as well as live demonstrations, including Bluebugging, Snarfing, Dumping, PIN cracking and Car Whispering. Since the last trifinite group presentation at 21C3 a lot has happened in the Bluetooth hacking world. New vulnerabilities have come to light, including some that, unlike previous issues, attack the Bluetooth fundamentals themselves, such as pairing and cryptography. In addition to these, other new attacks such as BlueSmack, BlueSnarf++, BlueBump and Car Whisperer have been developed. In the rapidly expanding world of Bluetooth, it seems the opportunities for mischief abound, and this is a target rich environment for the White and Black Hat hacker alike. In this talk we will present live demonstations of tools such as Car Whisperer, which allows an attacker to connect to vehicle car kits and listen in to conversations via the microphone, and/or inject sound into the car speakers... Provide your own useful traffic bulletins! How often have you wanted to reach out and pass your compliments on the excellent manouver the guy in front of you just made? Now you can do all of that and more... In May, 2005 Shaked & Wool published a theoretical attack on the Bluetooth pairing process. In this talk we will show that the theory is a reality, and present the combined techniques of BlueDumping, BlueSpooofing and PIN cracking, leading to the all-new eavesdropping attack dubbed BlueDropping. This is a brand new attack, never seen in public before, and disclosed for the first time at 22C3. Using this technique, it is possible to monitor and record any and all data and/or voice traffic within a Bluetooth piconet. New tools such as BloooverII will also be released.
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8:41
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SecDocs
Authors:
Adam Laurie Marcel Holtmann Martin Herfurt Tags:
bluetooth Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005 Abstract: This talk will provide an overview of all currently know Bluetooth exploits, as well as live demonstrations, including Bluebugging, Snarfing, Dumping, PIN cracking and Car Whispering. Since the last trifinite group presentation at 21C3 a lot has happened in the Bluetooth hacking world. New vulnerabilities have come to light, including some that, unlike previous issues, attack the Bluetooth fundamentals themselves, such as pairing and cryptography. In addition to these, other new attacks such as BlueSmack, BlueSnarf++, BlueBump and Car Whisperer have been developed. In the rapidly expanding world of Bluetooth, it seems the opportunities for mischief abound, and this is a target rich environment for the White and Black Hat hacker alike. In this talk we will present live demonstations of tools such as Car Whisperer, which allows an attacker to connect to vehicle car kits and listen in to conversations via the microphone, and/or inject sound into the car speakers... Provide your own useful traffic bulletins! How often have you wanted to reach out and pass your compliments on the excellent manouver the guy in front of you just made? Now you can do all of that and more... In May, 2005 Shaked & Wool published a theoretical attack on the Bluetooth pairing process. In this talk we will show that the theory is a reality, and present the combined techniques of BlueDumping, BlueSpooofing and PIN cracking, leading to the all-new eavesdropping attack dubbed BlueDropping. This is a brand new attack, never seen in public before, and disclosed for the first time at 22C3. Using this technique, it is possible to monitor and record any and all data and/or voice traffic within a Bluetooth piconet. New tools such as BloooverII will also be released.
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8:41
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SecDocs
Authors:
Adam Laurie Marcel Holtmann Martin Herfurt Tags:
bluetooth Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005 Abstract: This talk will provide an overview of all currently know Bluetooth exploits, as well as live demonstrations, including Bluebugging, Snarfing, Dumping, PIN cracking and Car Whispering. Since the last trifinite group presentation at 21C3 a lot has happened in the Bluetooth hacking world. New vulnerabilities have come to light, including some that, unlike previous issues, attack the Bluetooth fundamentals themselves, such as pairing and cryptography. In addition to these, other new attacks such as BlueSmack, BlueSnarf++, BlueBump and Car Whisperer have been developed. In the rapidly expanding world of Bluetooth, it seems the opportunities for mischief abound, and this is a target rich environment for the White and Black Hat hacker alike. In this talk we will present live demonstations of tools such as Car Whisperer, which allows an attacker to connect to vehicle car kits and listen in to conversations via the microphone, and/or inject sound into the car speakers... Provide your own useful traffic bulletins! How often have you wanted to reach out and pass your compliments on the excellent manouver the guy in front of you just made? Now you can do all of that and more... In May, 2005 Shaked & Wool published a theoretical attack on the Bluetooth pairing process. In this talk we will show that the theory is a reality, and present the combined techniques of BlueDumping, BlueSpooofing and PIN cracking, leading to the all-new eavesdropping attack dubbed BlueDropping. This is a brand new attack, never seen in public before, and disclosed for the first time at 22C3. Using this technique, it is possible to monitor and record any and all data and/or voice traffic within a Bluetooth piconet. New tools such as BloooverII will also be released.
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12:01
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Hack a Day
We love seeing repairs and always marvel at the ability to track down the problem. [Todd] seems to have a knack for this. He was met with a lot of adversity when trying to get the Vacuum Fluorescent Display working on his car stereo. A lot of persistence, and a little bit of taking the [...]
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7:00
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Hack a Day
[Chet] is showing off the Bluetooth controller upgrade for this RC car. The donor vehicle is a rather inexpensive Porche which he purchased to make sure he didn’t start hacking up his more expensive toys. He took a bit different route than the IOIO RC truck we saw earlier in the week, but the concept [...]
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6:30
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Hack a Day
Inspired by the many autonomous rovers such as Curiosity and the self-driving Google car, [Rohit] decided to build his own by taking an off-the-shelf remote control car and adding his own electronics. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find the datasheet for the chip used to receive radio signals and drive the motors, so he ended up building his [...]
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5:01
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Hack a Day
[Jon] wrote in to tell us about his programmable RC car, and the Howto guide that he’s made. According to him, this project can be constructed with $9 worth of parts plus an Arduino and a small toy car. So around $50 if you’re starting from scratch. At it’s core, this project is about using [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
As an engineer at Spectrum Design in Minneapolis, [Carl] works with clients to get their product out to the masses. When designing a new USB-powered device, one client thought it would be a great idea to include a USB car charger with the device. The client promptly ordered a few thousand car chargers from China and everything [...]
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4:01
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Hack a Day
[Noah Farrington] sent in his latest hack over at his intensely interesting blog; converting a racing wheel arcade controller to a remote control for his RC car. He picked up the arcade controller for free, and decided it would be much cooler to control an RC car he had handy with it. He elected not [...]
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14:01
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Hack a Day
Nope, no microcontroller here, just a full-blown cellphone used as the brains of this little robot. The secret behind how it works is in the sounds the phone makes. The touch tones, known as DTMF, are monitored by the circuit mounted on the front half of the chassis and are responsible for driving the motors. [...]
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11:00
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Hack a Day
[Gustaf] has been playing around with machine vision for a while and sent in his latest project in on our tip line. It’s a video based car radar system that can detect cars in a camera’s field of vision while cruising down the highway. Like [Gustaf]‘s previous experiments with machine vision where he got a computer to [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
So if you had to launch a car through these goal posts how would you do it? Certainly not with a slingshot (although we might have gone with a steam-powered catapult a-la an aircraft carrier). That maroon car with the white stripe is about to make the flight thanks to a very powerful pneumatic launcher. [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
This is a robot that any Transformers enthusiast will love. Sure, the car looks just a bit boxy, but you’ll forget all about that when you see it unfold into a bipedal robot (translated). [Zak Sawa] is responsible for the creation. He pull off the build using 22 servo motors which let the car transform, and [...]
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14:15
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Hack a Day
If the kids have lost interest in that RC car or truck you bought them over the holidays, [Randy Sarafan] from Instructables has a few ideas that might help make the toys fun again, while teaching your kids a bit about electronics in the process. In his writeup, he shows how to swap out the [...]
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11:37
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Hack a Day
[KonaStar] shows us that adding some light to you car interior isn’t very hard. It’s just a matter finding some unused space and routing the cables so that they’re out of sight. Here he’s added LED lighting to the footwells and glove box of his car. He managed to find some depressions in the molded [...]
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8:36
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Hack a Day
While his wife was out-of-town [James] jumped at the opportunity to do some snooping around with her Chevy Tahoe’s parking assist sensors. We can understand how pulling parts out of someone’s car would make them none too happy. But we find it hilarious that it’s a leased company car he’s tinkering around with. But we’re [...]
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7:00
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Hack a Day
If you’ve ever wanted your own self-driving car, this is your chance. [Sebastian Thrun], co-lecturer (along with the great [Peter Norvig]) of the Stanford AI class is opening up a new class that will teach everyone who enrolls how to program a self-driving car in seven weeks. The robotic car class is being taught alongside a [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
After taking the Stanford Machine Learning class offered over the Internet last year, [David Singleton] thought he could build something really cool. We have to admit that he nailed it with his neural network controlled car. There’s not much to the build; it’s just an Android phone, an Arduino and a toy car. The machine [...]
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14:30
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Hack a Day
[Achu Wilson] was watching TV when he saw an ad for Volkswagen’s latest Passat, which happens to come equipped with a park assist mode. This essentially allows the car to park itself with little to no user interaction. While these systems come as a pricey add-on option, he figured he could build something similar in [...]
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15:01
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Hack a Day
[Dave] just can’t seem to get enough of modifying his new car. Where he lives, it’s typically dark on his ride home from work and he finds himself dropping things on the floor of his car all too often. Nissan decided not to include lighting in the Juke’s foot well or glove box, so [Dave] decided [...]
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Hack a Day
Siri can make appointments, tell you the weather, but now she can start your car as well! After we showed you how Siri could be hacked to use a custom proxy and execute custom commands, we knew it wouldn’t be long before additional hacks would start rolling in. [Brandon Fiquett] thought it would be great [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
[Anthony Pray] had his car stereo stolen. When thinking about replacing it he realized the he and his wife never used it for anything other than an Auxiliary connection to play songs from their cellphones. So instead of buying a head unit he pulled an unused home audio amplifier out of a dark corner of [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
[Nathan], a member of the DangerousPrototypes forums, was looking for a project he could use to enter the 7400 logic competition they are holding. His kids had a small ride on police car, but the light bar on top contained no lights, and the car made no sounds when his children were in pursuit of [...]
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10:04
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Hack a Day
[Steve] has an older third generation VW Golf, and as those who have owned one surely know, the beloved VR6 engine is wonderful but finicky. He says that the VR6 is particularly picky when it comes to oil temperature, so his daily routine involves hitting the MFA switch five times upon starting his car to [...]
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23:18
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Packet Storm Security Exploits
Car Portal version 2.0 suffers from a remote SQL injection vulnerability that allows for authentication bypass. This is the same vulnerability that affected version 1.0.
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23:18
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Packet Storm Security Recent Files
Car Portal version 2.0 suffers from a remote SQL injection vulnerability that allows for authentication bypass. This is the same vulnerability that affected version 1.0.
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23:18
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Packet Storm Security Misc. Files
Car Portal version 2.0 suffers from a remote SQL injection vulnerability that allows for authentication bypass. This is the same vulnerability that affected version 1.0.
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10:01
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Hack a Day
[Sid] makes a few PCBs a month and the hardest part of his fabrication process is always drilling the through-holes. He has a PCB hand drill that usually results in a sore index finger. After a few unsuccessful attempts of using a full-size electric drill and not wanting to invest in a commercial solution, [Sid] [...]
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6:00
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Hack a Day
Forget the Tesla Roadster, we want an electric car like [John Wayland’s] White Zombie! If it wasn’t plastered with sponsor stickers and the like, you would never realize that this otherwise unassuming ‘72 Datsun 1200 is an absolute beast of a car. The gas engine that used to provide a mere 69 horsepower was swapped [...]
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4:04
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Hack a Day
[Roofus] had an older car, and unfortunately his stereo’s cassette player just wasn’t doing it for him. He always wanted to simply get into his car, pull out his cell phone, and have his music ready to play without any fuss. After messing around with all sorts of different tape adapters, he got fed up [...]
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11:17
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Hack a Day
R.I.P sand-colored radio-controlled truck. Your life ended with a bang and in doing so, saved some lives. This little work-horse is a hack that [Ernie Fessenden] put together and sent to his brother [Sergeant Chris Fessenden] who is on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. [Chris'] team is trained to be on the lookout for roadside bombs, [...]
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15:01
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Hack a Day
[Garnet Hertz], a professor and “artist in residence” at UC Irvine, built a drivable Outrun arcade cabinet for an experiment in augmented reality. The old fiberglass and wood cabinet was hacked up and the motors, wheels, and drive train from an electric golf cart were stuffed inside. The original steering wheel and pedals were used [...]
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11:38
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Hack a Day
Here’s a rover project that has plenty of power (translated) to go places. This is true not only of its locomotive capability, but processing power as well. The RC car used here (translated) is not overly expensive, but offers a lot of versatility. It’s got front and rear steering via two servo motors, as well as independent [...]
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14:13
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Hack a Day
Last year, when [Alex] was asked by his friend [Martin] to help him out with building some LED POV modules for a race car, his response was a enthusiastic “YES!” [Martin’s] goal was to involve fans more deeply in the race, so he decided that the POV modules would carry messages from fans on-board, printing [...]
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6:03
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Hack a Day
[Rajendra’s] car had just about all the bells, whistles, and gauges he could dream of, but he thought it was missing one important item. In an age where cars are heavily reliant on intricate electrical systems, he felt that he should have some way of monitoring the car’s battery and charging system. To keep tabs [...]
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8:08
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Hack a Day
[Dino's] project of the week is a backup alarm for your car. This is a feature that has become popular on many large vehicles like SUVs where visibility is an issue when moving in reverse. But it doesn’t sound like he was motivated by the need to have this in his own car. Instead, he [...]
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8:12
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Hack a Day
For an upcoming road trip, [Patrick] needed a small variable power supply. Instead of lugging around a bench supply, [Patrick] did the sensible thing and reverse engineered a cell phone charger to fit his requirements. After cracking open an old Kyocera car charger, [Patrick] found a small PCB with completely labeled, all through-hole components – [...]
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15:00
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Hack a Day
For his first project using the TI Launchpad [VOJT4] built a lap timer and counter for slot cars. For us it’s always hardest to come up with the idea of what to build and we think he found a great one here. Each time a car passes the finish line of the track it trips [...]
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5:08
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Hack a Day
This autonomous remote control-style car from Cornell students was designed for a senior level engineering course there. It’s main “sensor” is a low-res webcam style camera. As shown in the video after the break, this car does quite well staying within two black lines on a white surface using it’s vision processing. It also has [...]
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16:30
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Hack a Day
Instructables user [Kaeru no Ojisan] enjoys constructing R/C kit cars and wanted to build one that could be driven using a PC racing wheel he had on hand. Not satisfied with simply guiding it with the racing wheel, he added a web cam to the car so that he can monitor its location from the [...]
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12:08
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Hack a Day
[Mariano] owns a late 90’s Jeep Wrangler, and had no idea just how easy it was to steal. Unfortunately for him, the guy who made off with his Jeep was well aware of the car’s vulnerabilities. The problem lies in the ignition – it can be broken out with a screwdriver, after which, the car [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
When [Roberto] bought his Mini Cooper, he opted to forgo the factory GPS system as it was over priced and didn’t have the best of reputations. He decided that he still needed GPS in his car, so he committed himself to install a TomTom unit in a way that would not detract from the car’s [...]
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13:35
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Hack a Day
R/C cars can be tons of fun, but sometimes the fun runs out after awhile. [Gaurav] got bored of steering around his R/C car with its remote, so he built an interface that lets him control the car using two different motion-detecting devices. He built an HTML5 application for his iPad, which allows him to [...]
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1:00
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Hack a Day
So you’ve swapped out your car’s motor or added new tranny. Perhaps you’ve rewired your ancient VW bus from 6v to 12v. Do you think that makes you a car expert? [Orismar de Souza] might beg to differ. The homeless Brazilian native has spent the last four years of his life building a car from [...]
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5:05
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Hack a Day
In 2009, [Dr. Stefan Savage] and his fellow researchers published a paper describing how they were able to take control of a car’s computer system by tapping into the CAN Bus via the OBD port. Not satisfied with having to posses physical access to a car in order to hack the computer system, they continued [...]
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6:48
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Hack a Day
Google’s showing off this autonomous car at the TED convention right now, but the hardware has already made automated trips from San Fransisco to Los Angeles. According to the commentary in the video after the break, the scene above shows the car “hauling Prius ass” on a closed course. The car learned this route while being driven [...]
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10:03
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Hack a Day
The AutoNOMOS labs project has found a new way to maneuver its vehicles, your brain. We have looked at a previous version that uses a mostly computerized van under remote control from an iPhone. This one however, named “Brain Driver”, places the operator in the driver’s seat with an EEG strapped to their head. Going [...]
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10:29
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Hack a Day
This collection of model vehicle hacks adds obstacle avoidance in an attempt to make them autonomous. At the front end you’ll find two PCBs which use IR approximation to monitor the road ahead. We’re not familiar with this particular use of these IR receivers (TSOP1738) which we’re used to seeing in remote control receiver applications [...]
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10:07
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Hack a Day
[Kevin Sandom] built this boat using a radio controlled toy car. The two pontoons are recycled from Styrofoam packaging material using some thick wire to connect them and provide a framework for the propulsion and control circuitry. The motor itself is a hobby outboard, which really only required [Kevin] to develop a method for steering. [...]
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11:24
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Hack a Day
This hack’s old as dirt to be sure, but new to us and a great accomplishment. The plane above, which is meant to fly without an operator, has been given RC control thanks to parts from that little car. The transmitter and receiver pair are the obvious transplant, but how do you add steering to [...]
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10:05
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Hack a Day
Here’s an interesting take on augmenting a car’s dashboard. [Daniel] is using a button blank to house a 1″ OLED display in his Jetta. It shows auxiliary data such as boost pressure and several sets of temperature readings. The display itself has a tiny little circuit board with a PIC 24 to drive it. A [...]
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14:17
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Hack a Day
We must find out where you can acquire these industrial robots pictured above. Sure, you expect car companies like BMW to have a few lying around, which they used to make into a Twitter message writing robot. But Bungie, a video game company, to have one as part of an advertisement for Reach? The former [...]
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13:00
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Hack a Day
[Ben's] added some nice goodies to his Volvo in the form of an in-dash computer. The system monitors two pressure sensors for boost and vacuum, as well as reading RPM, O2, and exhaust directly. All of this is tied into the touch interface running on an eeePC 900A. But our favorite feature is that the [...]
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11:00
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Hack a Day
[Dave] pulled the head unit out of his dashboard to add an iPod input. He took a much more invasive route than the other hack we saw a few days ago. He actually patched into the audio lines going from the Dolby reader head chip to the amplifier. The first step was to trick the [...]
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11:00
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Hack a Day
[Elrik] converted an RC car so that it can be controlled with an Android phone. He wisely uses the accelerometer for steering with a button for forward and another for reverse. There’s even control for the headlights. The car itself has had a servo retrofit for steering but it’s the Bluetooth module that catches our [...]
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8:43
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Hack a Day
This security system called G-spot requires that you touch a special place on the car prior to attempting to start it. This is pretty slick as it could be completely un-obvious and doesn’t require any special fobs or minor surgery. With the right placement, no one would ever notice that you had touched it. [via [...]
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16:10
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Hack a Day
Well, maybe the title is not so true. This “Porsche” GT3‘s construction is a bit unorthodox, the chassis looks to be aluminum tubing, with bicycle tires and other man-powered parts for propulsion. The body is entirely plastic and tape, yeah…gold…foil…tape. Hey, when you really really want to turn someones head. Regardless, the car even comes [...]
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7:02
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Hack a Day
[Arkos] gutted an RC car from his childhood and made it into a dog-taunting remote platform. An Arduino replaces the original circuitry with a Bluetooth module for connectivity. He uses an Xbox 360 controller and has added a small speaker to act as a siren. But for our money it’s the camera that makes this [...]
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15:03
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Hack a Day
Okay, we lied, we totally want one of these too. The CMT 380X Blackbird is one wicked hybrid car! Looking like it just rolled off the set of the next Batman film, the Blackbird is the brainchild of Electronic Arts Chief Creative Director [Richard Hilleman]. Starting from a kit car base — the Factory Five [...]
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9:00
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Hack a Day
Tomorrow a team of researchers will present their paper on Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile (PDF) at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy. Much like the racing simulators we’ve seen they’re exploiting the ODB-II port to get at the vehicle’s Controller-area network, or CAN-bus. We’re not surprised at all that they can [...]
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7:00
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Hack a Day
[andrew_h] has put together this slick anti theft device for his car. The RFID immobiliser is used to keep the car from starting unless you swipe an RFID tag. Depending on how well you hide it, and how well the person stealing the car knows you, they would have no reason to suspect that they [...]
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12:40
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Hack a Day
This video game controller is a factory fresh VW. Much like the racing simulator from earlier in the week, the video game data is being displayed on the instrument panel. This takes us to a much higher level now because control for the game is taken from the car’s CANbus using and ODB-II connector. If [...]
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6:12
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Hack a Day
[Alex Rosiu] picked up this instrument cluster from a 1992 BMW. After some trial and error he’s hooked it up for use with a racing simulator. You can see how amazingly well it works in the video after the break. An Arduino Mega takes incoming data from the PC and actuates the appropriate indicators on [...]
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15:00
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Hack a Day
If you’re into ham radio and want it when you’re on the go give this antenna mount a try. [Cirictech] started with a design from the November 2009 issue of QST and added his own fabrication touches. Everything except the antenna itself is available from the hardware store for just a few bucks, and you [...]
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7:27
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Hack a Day
[Michael] designed this display board to mimic the appearance of a police car pulling you over. It resides in the rear window of his car (facing forward) as the controller board measures the speed of the vehicle. An Arduino grabs NMEA data from a GPS module and compares it with a table of speed limits. [...]
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6:11
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Hack a Day
…and wins. Well, 3rd in class, but still surprisingly well for such a cheap entry. This is truly a show that with enough elbow grease and headlight fluid anything can be accomplished money just makes it a ton easier.
Everything from the roll cage to the 5 minute gas tank fix was fabricated by [Bill Caswell]. [...]
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7:06
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Hack a Day
[Steve] let us know about his MultiDisplay car monitoring system. Unlike traditional systems that rely on interfacing with the OBD-II protocol and existing car computer, the MultiDisplay uses an Arduino and custom shield with a combination of sensors; including temperatures, pressures, throttle, Boost, and etc. The data collected can then be displayed on a 20×4 [...]
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7:25
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Hack a Day
[Dave] Had been working on a cell phone activated remote start for his car for a while when we posted the GSM car starter. While both do carry out the same job, we feel that there is enough good information here to share. He’s gone a pretty simple way, by connecting the vibrator motor leads [...]
After hitting it with the proper REST messages, an ![The Citroën Berlingo électrique. Thilo Parg [CC BY-SA 3.0]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/1280px-Citroen_Berlingo_Electric.jpg)
![the 2008 Tesla Roadster. Tesla Motors Inc. [Copyrighted free use]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/1280px-Roadster_2.5_windmills_trimmed.jpg)
![The VW e-Golf. Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz [CC BY 2.0]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/VW_e-Golf_LA_Auto_Show_2013.jpg)
![The first Tesla Gigafactory. Planet Labs, Inc. [CC BY-SA 4.0]](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/1024px-Teslas_Gigafactory_on_2017-08-08_by_Planet_Labs.jpg)
