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298 items tagged "computer"
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22:00
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Hack a Day
Over the years we’ve seen a number of homebrew 6502 computers assembled with little more than a breadboard, a sack full of jumper wires, and an otherworldly patience that would make a Buddhist Monk jealous. Anyone who takes the time to assemble a fully functional computer on a half-dozen breadboards lined up on their workbench will always be a superstar in our book.
While we’re still too lazy to attempt one of these builds ourselves, we have to admit that the Vectron 64 by [Nick Bild] looks dangerously close to something you might be able to pull off within a reasonable amount of time. It’s still an incredible amount of work, but compared to some of the other projects we’ve seen, this one manages to keep the part count relatively low thanks to the use of a simple 16×2 LCD for output and user input provided by a PS/2 keyboard. You won’t be playing Prince of Persia on it, but at least you might be able to finish it in a weekend.
The computer is clocked at 1 MHz, and features 32KB RAM
along with 32KB EEPROM. That should be enough for anyone. [Nick] also points out he tried to use era-appropriate 7400 series ICs wherever possible, so no worries about historical revisionism here. If you’re looking for a design that somebody could have potentially knocked together back in the 1970s, this one would get you fairly close.
The astute reader might notice there’s no removable media in this build, and may be wondering how one loads programs. For that, [Nick] allowed himself a bit of modern convenience and came up with a scheme that allows an Arduino (or similar microcontroller) to connect up to the computer’s 28C256-15 EEPROM. With a Python script running on your “real” computer, you can write a new ROM image directly to the chip. He’s included the source code for a simple program which will write whatever you type on the keyboard out on the LCD, which should give you a good framework for writing additional software.
If you’re looking for a bigger challenge, don’t worry. We’ve covered 6502 breadboard computers that will make your eyes water. Incidentally, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a similar LCD used for one of these computers, so looks like there’s no shame in sneaking in modern parts where it makes sense.
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13:01
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Hack a Day
From the title, you might think this post is going to be some lame story about someone plugging in some RAM and maybe updating a BIOS. That’s where you’d be wrong. [Downtown Doug Brown] has a much more interesting and instructive story.
[Doug] found his motherboard was rated for 8 …read more
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4:00
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Hack a Day
About a year ago when Hackaday and Tindie were at Maker Faire UK in Newcastle, we were shown an interesting retrocomputer by a member of York Hackspace. The Gigatron is a fully functional home computer of the type you might have owned in the early 1980s, but its special trick …read more
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4:00
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Hack a Day
Ever get that funny feeling that things aren’t quite what they used to be? Not in the way that a new washing machine has more plastic parts than one 40 years its senior. More like “my laptop can churn through hundreds of gigaflops, but when I scroll it doesn’t feel …read more
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1:00
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Hack a Day
Case modding exploded in the late 1990s, as computer enthusiasts the world over grew tired of the beige box and took matters into their own hands. The movement began with custom paints and finishes on existing cases, with competitions and bragging rights then taking over to further push the state …read more
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13:00
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Hack a Day
An essential tool of many sysadmins is a portable terminal ready to plug into an ailing rack-mounted server to administer first aid. At their simplest, they are simply a monitor and keyboard on a trolley, but more often they will be a laptop pre-loaded with tools for the purpose. Sysadmins …read more
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10:00
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Hack a Day
George Mallory, a famous English mountaineer, once suggested that it was of no use to climb mountains. Instead, he posited, the only reason to climb a mountain is because it is there. Likewise, when you become an expert in nurse call systems like those found in hospitals, you may find …read more
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7:01
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Hack a Day
It’s never been harder to repair your electronics. When the keyboard in your shiny new MacBook dies, you’ll have to send it to a Genius. When the battery in your iPhone dies, you’ll have to break out the pentalobe screwdrivers. Your technology does not respect your freedom, and this is …read more
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10:00
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Hack a Day
Don’t get me wrong. Like most people, there’s nothing I enjoy more than solving a long, involved math problem by hand. But, sometimes, a few pages of algebraic scratches on paper is just a means to an end. I find this especially true during electronic design sessions, be it circuit …read more
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10:01
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Hack a Day
It won’t replace your beloved Rasbperry Pi, but it’s worth saying hello to this “Strawberry Jam”, straight out of Japan. It’s an equally delicious way to get people interested in the basics of coding.
My hackerspace friend Jim is a lucky bloke, for last year he was able to take an extended holiday through a succession of East Asian countries. We were treated to online pictures of beautiful scenery and beaches, city lights, and of course exciting tech destinations such as hardware markets and hackerspaces. On his return he tossed a package on the table in front of me and …read more
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13:01
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Hack a Day
We missed this Blackhat talk back in August, but it’s so good we’re glad to find out about it now. [Christopher Domas] details his obsession with hidden processor instructions, and how he discovered an intentional backdoor in certain x86 processors. These processors have a secondary RISC core, and an undocumented procedure to run code on that core, bypassing the normal user/kernel separation mechanisms.
The result is that these specific processors have an intentional mechanism that allows any unprivileged user to jump directly to root level access. The most fascinating part of the talk is the methodical approach [Domas] took to …read more
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7:01
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Hack a Day
Filesystems for computers are not the best bet for embedded systems. Even those who know this fragment of truth still fall into the trap and pay for it later on while surrounded by the rubble that once was a functioning project. Here’s how it happens.
The project starts small, with modest storage needs. It’s just a temperature logger and you want to store that data, so you stick on a little EEPROM. That works pretty well! But you need to store a little more data so the EEPROM gets paired with a small blob of NOR flash which is much …read more
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4:00
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Hack a Day
The original Xbox, released in 2001 by Microsoft, was notable for being built out of largely off-the-shelf PC components. With a custom Pentium III CPU and IDE peripherals, the console was much closer to a contemporary desktop computer than any of the dedicated game consoles which had come before it. Which of course makes perfect sense if you think about it. Microsoft would want to use technology they were intimately acquainted with on their first foray into gaming market, and if there’s anything Microsoft knows better than forced system updates, it’s x86 computers.
But for their follow-up system, the Xbox …read more
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4:00
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Hack a Day
As a layperson reading about some branches of mathematics, it often seems like mathematicians are just people who really like to create and solve puzzles. And, knowing that computer science shares a lot of its fundamentals with mathematics, we can assume that most computer scientists are also puzzle-solvers as well. This latest project from [tom7] shows off his puzzle creating and solving skills with a readable file which is also a paper, which is also a compiler for C programs, which can also play music.
[tom7] started off with the instruction set for the Intel 8086 processor. Of the instructions …read more
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4:00
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Hack a Day
If you have an eye for obscure Microsoft products, you may be aware of the Microsoft PixelSense, a table-sized horizontal touchscreen designed as a collaborative workspace. It’s a multi-user computer with no traditional keyboard or mouse, instead multiple users work with documents and other files as though they were real documents on a table. It’s an impressive piece of technology, and it was the first thing that came to mind when we saw [Anitomicals C]’s dual screen portable computer. It has a form factor similar to a large laptop, in which the touchscreen folds upwards to reveal not a conventional …read more
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19:00
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Hack a Day
The electricity on the power grid wherever you live in the world will now universally come to you as AC. That is to say that it will oscillate between positive and negative polarity many times every second. The frequency of 50 or 60Hz just happens to be within the frequency range for human hearing. There’s a lot more than this fundamental frequency in the spectrum on the power lines though, and to hear those additional frequencies better you’ll have to do a little bit of signal processing.
We first featured this build back when it was still in its prototyping …read more
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Hack a Day
If you’ve never seen an IBM AS/400 machine, don’t feel bad. Most people haven’t. Introduced in 1988 as a mid-range server line, it used a unique object-based operating system and was geared specifically towards business and enterprise customers. Unless you’re a particularly big fan of COBOL you probably won’t have much use for one today, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth playing around with if the opportunity presents itself.
So when a local IT company went belly up and was selling their old hardware, including a late 90’s era IBM AS/400e Series, [Rik te Winkel] jumped at the chance …read more
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Hack a Day
This hardware badge is a computer programmed with Lisp. You can write your own programs right on the badge using the built-in keyboard, as long as you know Lisp.
If there’s one thing we really like to see, it’s people advancing their own projects based on inspiration from others. The Lisp Badge by [David Johnson-Davies] is a perfect example. With an interface inspired by [Voja Antonic’s] hardware design for the 2018 Hackaday Belgrade Conference Badge, this version is an upgrade of an earlier single-board Lisp machine, now sporting an integrated keyboard.
Unlike the Belgrade badge, which is programmed in BASIC, …read more
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Hack a Day
An old laptop or desktop computer that’s seen better days might still have a little bit of use left in it for a dedicated task. Grabbing a lightweight flavor of Linux and running a web server, firewall, or Super Nintendo emulator might get a few more years out of it. You can also get pretty creative repurposing obsolete single purpose machines, as [Kristjan] did with some old Cisco server equipment.
The computer in question isn’t something commonly found, either. It’s an intrusion detection system meant to mount in a server rack and protect the server itself from malicious activity. While …read more
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Hack a Day
People love their tech, and feel like something’s missing when it’s not there. This is the story of one person’s desire to have the venerable trackpoint in their new keyboard.
[Klapse] loves a Lenovo old-style non-chicklet keyboard, so, despite the cost, five were ordered. They very quickly ended up with keys that didn’t work, although the trackpoints still did. After buying a sixth which ended up the same, [Klapse] decided that maybe giving up on the Lenovo keyboards was the best idea. A quick stop at a local store scored a fill-in mechanical keyboard, but in the back of [klapse]’s …read more
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Hack a Day
Over on the Cloudflare blog, [Marek] found himself wondering about computer memory, as we all sometimes do. Specifically, he pondered if he could detect the refresh of his SDRAM from within a running program. We’re probably not ruining the surprise by telling you that the answer is yes — with a little more than 100 lines of C and help from our old friend the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), [Marek] was able to detect SDRAM refresh cycles every 7818.6 ns, lining right up with the expected result.
The “D” in SDRAM stands for dynamic, meaning that unless periodically refreshed by …read more
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Hack a Day
[John Whittington] failed to win a bid for an old VT-220 serial terminal on eBay, so he decided to make his own version and improve it along the way. The result is the Whitterm-220 (or WT-220) which has at its core a Raspberry Pi and is therefore capable of more than just acting as a ‘dumb’ serial terminal.
The enclosure is made from stacked panels of laser-cut plywood with an acrylic plate on the back for labels and connectors, where [John] worked paint into the label engravings before peeling off the acrylic’s protective film. By applying paint after laser-engraving but …read more
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Hack a Day
The greatest hardware hacks of all time were simply the result of finding software keys in memory. The AACS encryption debacle — the 09 F9 key that allowed us to decrypt HD DVDs — was the result of encryption keys just sitting in main memory, where it could be read by any other program. DeCSS, the hack that gave us all access to DVDs was again the result of encryption keys sitting out in the open.
Because encryption doesn’t work if your keys are just sitting out in the open, system designers have come up with ingenious solutions to prevent …read more
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Hack a Day
The failed launch of Soyuz MS-10 on October 11th, 2018 was a notable event for a number of reasons: it was the first serious incident on a manned Soyuz rocket in 35 years, it was the first time that particular high-altitude abort had ever been attempted, and most importantly it ended with the rescue of both crew members. To say it was a historic event is something of an understatement. As a counterpoint to the Challenger disaster it will be looked back on for decades as proof that robust launch abort systems and rigorous training for all contingencies can save …read more
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Hack a Day
[Frank Adams] liked the keyboard on his Lenovo ThinkPad T61 so much that he decided to design an adapter so he could use it over USB with the Teensy microcontroller. He got the Trackpoint working, and along the way managed to add support for a number of other laptop boards as well. Before you know it, he had a full-blown open source project on his hands. Those projects can sneak up on you when you least expect it…
The first step of the process is getting your laptop keyboard of choice connected up to the Teensy, but as you might …read more
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Hack a Day
As far as computer architectures go, ARM doesn’t have anything to be ashamed of. Since nearly every mobile device on the planet is powered by some member of the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) family, there’s an excellent chance these words are currently making their way to your eyes courtesy of an ARM chip. A userbase of several billion is certainly nothing to sneeze at, and that’s before we even take into account the myriad of other devices which ARM processors find their way into: from kid’s toys to smart TVs.
ARM is also the de facto architecture for the …read more
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Hack a Day
One of the first things we learn about computers is the concept of binary ones and zeroes. When we dig into implementation of digital logic, we start to learn about voltages, and currents, and other realities of our analog world. It is common for textbooks to use flow of water as an analogy to explain flow of electrons, and [Glen Anderson] turned that conceptual illustration into reality. He brought his water computer to the downtown Los Angeles Mini Maker Faire this past weekend to show people the analog realities behind their digital devices.
[Glen]’s demonstration is a translation of another …read more
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Hack a Day
For hackers, cheap (and arguably disposable) consumer hardware makes for a ready supply of free or low-cost components. When you can walk into a big box store and pick up a new low-end laptop for $150, how many are going to spend the money to repair or upgrade the one they have now? So the old ones go to the bin, or get sold online for parts. From an ecological standpoint our disposable society is terrible, but at least we get some tech bargains out of the deal.
Case in point, the dirt cheap 32 GB eMMC SSDs [Jason Gin] …read more
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Hack a Day
Have you ever had one of those moments, when you’re rummaging through your spare parts heap, and have a rather bizarre project idea that you can’t quite get out of your head? You know, the ones that have no clear use, but simply demand to be born, of glass and steel and silicon?
This time, the stubborn idea in question was sort of like a solar-rechargeable LED throwie, but instead of a blinking light, it has a fully cloud-accessible embedded Linux server in the form of a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. Your choice of embedded Linux board should work …read more
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Hack a Day
Another day, another vulnerability. Discovered by [Kevin Backhouse], CVE-2018-4407 is a particularly serious problem because it is present all throughout Apple’s product line, from the Macbook to the Apple Watch. The flaw is in the XNU kernel shared by all of these products.
This is a buffer overflow issue in the error handling for network packets. The kernel is expecting a fixed length of those packets but doesn’t check to prevent writing past the end of the buffer. The fact Apple’s XNU kernel powers all their products is remarkable, but issues like this are a reminder of the potential downside …read more
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Hack a Day
You’ve no doubt heard about the “hardware implants” which were supposedly found on some server motherboards, which has led to all sorts of hand-wringing online. There’s no end of debate about the capabilities of such devices, how large they would need to be, and quite frankly, if they even exist to begin with. We’re through the looking-glass now, and there’s understandably a mad rush to learn as much as possible about the threat these types of devices represent.
[Nicolas Oberli] of Kudelski Security wanted to do more than idly speculate, so he decided to come up with a model of …read more
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Hack a Day
We often lament that the days of repairable electronics are long gone. It used to be you’d get schematics for a piece of gear, and you could just as easily crack it open and fix something as the local repairman — assuming you had the knowledge and tools. But today, everything is built to be thrown away when something goes wrong, and you might as well check at the end of a rainbow if you’re searching for a circuit diagram for a new piece of consumer electronics.
But [Robson] writes in with an interesting story that gives us hope that …read more
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Hack a Day
Even if you aren’t a vintage computer aficionado, you’re probably aware that older computer hard drives were massive and didn’t hold much data. Imagine a drive that weighs several pounds, and only holds 1/1000th of what today’s cheapest USB flash drives can. But what you might not realize is that if you go back long enough, the drives didn’t just have lower capacity, they utilized fundamentally different technology and relied on protocols which are today little more than historical footnotes.
A case in point is the circa 1984 Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) drive which [Michał Słomkowski] was tasked with recovering …read more
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Hack a Day
It’s not Apple IIs, and it’s not Raspberry Pis. The most important computing platform for teaching kids programming is the Texas Instruments graphing calculator. These things have been around in one form or another for almost three decades, and for a lot of budding hackers out there, this was the first computer they owned and had complete access to.
As hacking graphing calculators is a favorite for Maker Faires, we were pleased to see Cemetech make it out to this year’s World Maker Faire in New York last weekend. They’re the main driving force behind turning these pocket computers with …read more
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Hack a Day
The IBM 1401 is a classic computer which IBM marketed throughout the 1960s, late enough for it to have used transistors rather than vacuum tubes, which is probably a good thing for this story. For small businesses, it was often used as their main data processing machine along with the 1403 printer. For larger businesses with mainframes, the 1401 was used to handle the slower peripherals such as that 1403 printer as well as card readers.
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA has two working 1401s as well as at least one 1403 printer, and recently whenever the …read more
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Hack a Day
To say that the Commodore 64 was an important milestone in the history of personal computing is probably a bit of an understatement. For a decent chunk of the 1980s, it was the home computer, with some estimates putting the total number of them sold as high as 17 million. For hackers of a certain age, there’s a fairly good chance that the C64 holds a special spot in their childhood; perhaps even setting them on a trajectory they followed for the rest of their lives.
At the risk of showing his age, [Clicky Steve] writes in to tell us …read more
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Hack a Day
We’ve mentioned previously the challenges that come with maintaining vintage computers which in some cases are pushing 40 years old. Components, even high quality ones, eventually fail and need to be replaced. Now if it’s a fairly popular vintage machine, replacement parts usually aren’t too hard to come by. But what if you’re dealing with a machine that’s not just vintage, but was also such a commercial flop that parts are scarce?
Such is the life for anyone who owns one of the 500,000 IBM PCJrs that Big Blue managed to get out of the door during the year or …read more
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Hack a Day
We are probably all familiar with computing history to the extent that we know the earliest computers were surprisingly simple devices. While early electronic machines such as Colossus or ENIAC were hugely complex racks of tubes, once expressed as a schematic or as a network of logic gates they would be relatively straightforward for today’s electronic engineer to understand their operation. Those who have made an in-depth study of computing history may have heard of the work of Konrad Zuse in the mid-20th century, his relay-based machines predate their fully electronic cousins by several years.
A relay-based computer can be …read more
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Hack a Day
[Martin Malý] has put together a sweet little 8085-based single board computer called OMEN. He needed a simple one for educational purposes, and judging by the schematic we think he’s succeeded.
Now in its fourth iteration, it has a 32K EEPROM, 32K of memory, one serial and three parallel ports. In the ROM he’s put Tiny BASIC and Dave Dunfield’s MON85 Serial Monitor with Roman Borik’s improvements. His early demos include the obligatory blinking LED, playing 8-bit music to a speaker, and also a 7-segment LED display with a hexadecimal keyboard. There is also a system connector which allows you …read more
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Hack a Day
Recently I was given a somewhat crusty looking ThinkPad T400 that seemed like it would make a good knock around machine to have on the bench, if it wasn’t for the fact the person who gave it to me had forgotten (or perhaps never knew) the BIOS password. Cleaning the machine up, putting more RAM in it, and swapping the wheezing hard drive for an SSD would be a relatively cheap way to wring a few more years of life from the machine, but not if I couldn’t change the boot order in BIOS.
Alright, that’s not entirely true. I …read more
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Hack a Day
Despite becoming common over the last few years USB-C remains a bit of a mystery. Try asking someone with a new blade-thin laptop what ports it has and the response will often include an awkward pause followed by “USB-C?”. That is unless you hear “USB 3” or maybe USB 3.1. Perhaps even “a charging port”. So what is that new oval hole in the side of your laptop called? And what can it really do? [jason] at Reclaimer Labs put together a must-read series of blog posts in 2016 and 2017 plumbing the depths of the USB 3.1 rabbit hole …read more
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Hack a Day
Every year, we demand our computers to be ever faster, capable of delivering progressively more eye-watering graphics and doing it all as reliably as ever. Unfortunately, sometimes, new designs miss the mark. [Cloakedbug] was having issues with voltage regulator temperatures on an ASUS Strix VEGA 64 — one of the latest RADEON graphics cards on the market — and decided to investigate.
Right away, issues were apparent; one of the main thermal pads was making poor contact with the FETs it was intended to carry heat for, and was poorly sized to boot. In a show of poor quality, the …read more
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Hack a Day
There was a time when computers were far too expensive to let mere students use them. In those days, we wrote fake programs for fictitious machines and checked them by hand. That wasn’t fun, but it did teach you to think about the algorithm. You weren’t worried about how many tabs to indent code in the editor, or checking your social media feed, or changing the track on your Spotify playlist. Maybe that was the idea behind Computer Science Unplugged. The site is aimed at educators and gives them lesson plans to teach kids about computer concepts through activities that …read more
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Hack a Day
We feature hundreds of projects here at Hackaday, and once they have passed by our front page and disappeared into our archives we often have no opportunity to return to them and see how they developed. Sometimes of course they are one-off builds, other times they wither as their creator loses interest, but just occasionally they develop and evolve into something rather interesting.
One that is taking that final trajectory is [Just4Fun]’s Z80-MBC, a single board computer with only 4 ICs, using an Atmel microcontroller to simulate the Z80 support chips. It has appeared as a revised version, on a …read more
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Hack a Day
As William Gibson once noted, the future is already here, it just isn’t equally distributed. That’s especially true for those of us with disabilities. [Abishek Singh] wanted to do something about that, so he created a way for the hearing-impaired to use Amazon’s Alexa voice service. He did this using a TensorFlow deep learning network to convert American Sign Language (ASL) to speech and a speech-to-text converter to interpret the response. This all runs on a laptop, so it should work with any voice interface with a bit of tweaking. In particular, [Abishek] seems to have created a custom bit …read more
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Hack a Day
We’ll go out on a limb and assume that anyone reading these words is probably familiar with the classic ping command. Depending on which operating system you worship the options might be slightly different, but every variation of this simple tool does the same thing: send an ICMP echo request and wait for a response. How long it takes to get a response from the target, if it gets one at all, is shown to the user. This if often the very first step to diagnosing network connectivity issues; if this doesn’t work, there’s an excellent chance the line is …read more
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Hack a Day
Today’s entry comes to us from [Robert Tomsons], who was kind enough to document this crushing tale of woe so that we might all learn what true heartbreak is. If you’ve ever toiled away at getting that perfect surface finish with body filler, this one is going to hurt. In fact, you might just want to hit that “Back” button and head to safety now. There’s probably a pleasant story about some 3D printed thing being used with a Raspberry Pi of some sort that you can read instead.
For those of you brave enough to continue on, today we’ll …read more
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Hack a Day
Between smartphones and tablets, computing is becoming increasingly mobile in nature. It used to be that everyone had a desktop computer, then laptops became the norm, and now many people don’t have anything beyond their mobile device. Unless you’re the kind of person who actually needs the power and versatility offered by a “real” computer, mobile devices are simply a more convenient option to browse the web and consume content.
But what if your needs are somewhere in the middle? You want an x86 computer and full operating system, but you also want something that’s more mobile than a tablet? …read more
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Hack a Day
Today’s CPUs are so advanced that they might as well be indistinguishable from magic, right? Wrong! Fundamentally, modern CPUs can be understood logically like any other technology, it’s just that they’re very fast, very small, and very complex, which makes it hard to get to grips with their inner workings. We’ve come a long way from the dawn of the home computer in the 80s, but what if there was something even simpler again, built in such a way as to be easily understandable? Enter the DDL-4-CPU, courtesy of [Dave’s Dev Lab].
The DDL-4 is a project to build a …read more
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Hack a Day
Ever wonder why keyboard number pads and telephone dials have reversed layouts? Theories abound, but the most plausible one is that, shrug, it just happened that way. And now we’re stuck with it.
Well, that answer’s not good enough for [Jesse], so he punched up his own keyboard design that combines the golden years of function-rich Sun and IBM keyboards with Ma Bell’s DTMF number arrangement. That’s right, Sundial has 24 function keys total, and the number pad matches Ma Bell’s all the way down to the asterisk/zero/octothorpe pattern on the bottom row. How do we know what the …read more
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Hack a Day
With a BASIC interpreter and free run throughout their hardware, home computers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 used to be a pervasive way to light that hacker fire. With the advent of cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, devices purpose built to emulate these classic systems have become fairly commonplace. [uli] built a device in this vein called the BASIC Engine which is driven by a microcontroller and a handful of hardware peripherals. Like other examples it can be attached to a keyboard, programmed in a BASIC, play video and sound, etc. But digging into the …read more
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Hack a Day
Have you ever heard the old axiom that if you want to design a simple system, ask yourself if your grandmother could use it? Maybe that was on Wired’s mind because they asked a quantum computing expert — particularly IBM’s [Dr. Talia Gershon] — to explain what exactly quantum computing is at 5 levels. In the video they shot, which you can see below, [Dr. Gershon] talks to a younger child, a teenager, an undergraduate computer science student, a graduate student, and then a physicist.
We enjoyed some of the analogies of spinning pennies and the way she was able …read more
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Hack a Day
How small could you make a computer? In a way, that’s a question that requires that a computer be defined, because you could measure the smallest computer simply in terms of the smallest area of silicon required to create a microprocessor. So perhaps it’s better to talk about a smallest working computer. Recent entries in the race for the smallest machine have defined a computer as a complete computer system which holds onto its program and data upon power-down, but this remains one that is hotly debated. You might for instance debate as to whether that definition would exclude machines …read more
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Hack a Day
What do you do when you’re into trackball mice, but nothing out there is affordable or meets all your murine needs? You build one, of course. And if you’re like [Dangerously Explosive], who has a bunch of old optical mice squeaking around the shop, you can mix and match them to build the perfect one.
The mouse, which looks frozen mid-transformation into a rodential assassin, is a customized work of utilitarian art. Despite the excellent results, this project was not without its traps. [Dangerously] got really far into the build before discovering the USB interface chip was dead. Then he …read more
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Hack a Day
Have you ever been watching a TV show or a movie and spotted a familiar computer? [James Carter] did and he created a website to help you identify which old computers appear in TV shows and movies. We came across this when researching another post about an old computer and wondered if it was any old movies. It wasn’t.
You can search by computer or by title. There are also ratings about how visible, realistic, and important the computer is for each item. The database only contains fictional works, not commercials or documentaries. The oldest entry we could find was …read more
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Hack a Day
The question of whether to use a mouse versus a trackball is something of a Holy War on the level of Vi versus Emacs. We at Hackaday want no part of such things, use whatever you want, and leave us out of it. But we will go as far as to say that Team Trackball seems to take things mighty seriously. We’ve never met a casual trackball user: if they’ve got a trackball on their desk then get ready to hear all about it.
With that in mind, the lengths [LayeredDesigns] went to just to add a couple extra buttons …read more
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Hack a Day
Most of us accumulate stuff, like drawers full of old cables and hard drives full of data. Reddit user [BaxterPad] doesn’t worry about such things though, as he built an impressive Network Attached Storage (NAS) system that can hold over 200TB of data. That’s impressive enough, but the real artistry is in how he did this. He built this system using ODroid HC2 single board computers running GlusterFS, combining great redundancy with low power usage.
The Odroid HC2 is a neat little single board computer that offers a single SATA interface and runs Linux. [BaxterPad] acquired sixteen of these, and …read more
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Hack a Day
Among the rows of digital dinosaurs, one blinking front panel stood out. It certainly looked the part of a retro computer; with banks of blinking LEDs and multicolored paddle switches. But upon closer inspection, the laser cut wooden front panel betrays the fact that this machine is an impostor. It may have the appearance of a machine from the heady days where home computers looked like they could have doubled as a prop on the bridge of Kirk’s Enterprise, but it’s actually a product of much more modern provenance.
It’s called the Cactus, a love letter to the homebrew …read more
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Hack a Day
There are a number of companies now providing turn-key computers that meet the Free Software Foundation’s criteria for their “Respects Your Freedom” certification. This means, in a general sense, that the computer is guaranteed not to spy on you or otherwise do anything else you didn’t explicitly ask it to. Unfortunately these machines often have a hefty premium tacked on, making it an unpleasant decision between privacy and performance.
Freedom-loving hacker [SolidHal] writes in to tell us about his quest to create a FSF-compliant laptop without breaking the bank. Based on a cheap Asus C201 Chromebook, his custom machine checks …read more
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Hack a Day
It’s difficult to convey in an era when a UNIX-like operating system sits in your pocket, how there was once a time when the mere word was enough to convey an aura of immense computing power. If you ran UNIX, your computer probably filled a room, and you used it for Serious Stuff rather than just checking your Twitter feed. UNIX machines may still perform high-end tasks, but Moore’s Law has in the intervening years delivered upon its promise, and your phone with its UNIX-like OS is far more powerful than that room-sized minicomputer of the 1970s. A single chip …read more
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Hack a Day
Getting bounced to a website by scanning a QR code is no longer an exciting feat of technology, but what if you scanned the ingredient list on your granola bar and it went to the company’s page for that specific flavor, sans the matrix code?
Bright minds at the Columbia University in the City of New York have “perturbed” ordinary font characters so the average human eye won’t pick up the changes. Even ordinary OCR won’t miss a beat when it looks at a passage with a hidden message. After all, these “perturbed” glyphs are like a perfectly legible character …read more
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Hack a Day
Whether or not you personally agree with all the ideals of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), you’ve got to give them credit: they don’t mess around. They started by laying the groundwork for a free and open source operating system, then once that dream was realized, started pushing the idea of replacing proprietary BIOS firmware with an open alternative such as Libreboot. But apparently, even that’s not enough, as there’s still more freedom to be had. We’re playing 4D Libre Chess now, folks.
To flash your libre boot firmware on your libre OS running computer without any proprietary funny business, …read more
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Hack a Day
A combination of cheap USB HID capable microcontrollers, the ability to buy individual mechanical keys online, and 3D printing has opened up a whole new world of purpose-built input devices. Occasionally these take the form of full keyboards, but more often than not they are small boards with six or so keys that are dedicated to specific tasks or occasionally a particular game or program. An easy and cheap project with tangible benefits to anyone who spends a decent amount of time sitting in front of the computer certainly sounds like a win to us.
But this build by [r0ckR2] …read more
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Hack a Day
Many readers will be familiar with interfacing I2C peripherals. A serial line joins a string of individual I2C devices, and each of the devices has its own address on that line. In most cases when connecting a single device or multiple different ones there is no problem in ensuring that they have different addresses.
What happens though when multiple identical devices share an I2C bus? This was the problem facing [Sam Evans] at Mindtribe, and his solution is both elegant and simple. The temperature sensors he was using across multiple identical boards have three pins upon which can be set …read more
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Hack a Day
[Tim aka tp69] built a completely silent desktop computer. It can’t be heard – at all. The average desktop will have several fans whirring inside – cooling the CPU, GPU, SMPS, and probably one more for enclosure circulation – all of which end up making quite a racket, decibel wise. Liquid cooling might help make it quieter, but the pump would still be a source of noise. To completely eliminate noise, you have to get rid of all the rotating / moving parts and use passive cooling.
[Tim]’s computer is built from standard, off-the-shelf parts but what’s interesting for us …read more
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Hack a Day
If you doubt the power of the Hackaday community, check this one out. Stalwart reader and tipster [starhawk] has pitched in to help a friend in need, someone he met through Hackaday.io. Seems this friend’s current living arrangements are somewhat on the cramped side, and while he’s in need of a PC, even a laptop would claim too much space.
So with a quick trip to the store and a few items from the junk bin, [starhawk] whipped up an all-in-one PC the size of a tablet for his friend. As impressed as we are by the generosity, we’re more …read more
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Hack a Day
You’ve seen printers with scanners in them, printers with copiers in them, even ones with the ancient technology known as “facsimile” built-in. But have you ever seen a printer with a full gaming computer built into it? No? Well, you still haven’t, technically. There’s no printer to be had anymore inside this re-purposed HP Photosmart 6520 case, but it’s probably the closest we’re going to get.
[Jacob Lee] wrote in to share this awesome build with us, which sees the motherboard, graphics card, ATX power supply, and hard drives all fit seamlessly into the shell of a disused “All-in-one” style …read more
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Hack a Day
As [Matt] from [DIY Perks] was about to assemble a new PC, he decided to take a unique direction when it came to building a case. Despite the appearance of a woodworking piece with weird industrial radiators, there is actually a full-fledged, high-end PC hidden inside.
Those radiators are a pair of almost-the-biggest-you-can-buy heatsinks — one of which has been modified to fit the graphics card. Separating the graphics card’s stock cooling fan unit cut down significantly on noise and works with the stringent space requirements of the build. Those fans however keep other components on the card cool, so …read more
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Hack a Day
“We want to put water right into your processor.” If that statement makes you sweat, that is good. Sweating is what we’re talking about, but it’s more involved than adding some water like a potted plant. Sweating works naturally by allowing liquid to evaporate, and that phase change is endothermic which is why it feels cool. Evaporative coolers that work in this way, also known as swamp coolers, haven’t been put into computers before because they are full of sloshy water. Researchers in South Korea and the United States of America have been working on an evaporative cooling system mimicking …read more
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1:00
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Hack a Day
If the computer you have isn’t particularly fast, there’s a well-documented way to get more out of it. You just need more of the same computer, and you can run your tasks on them all at the same time. Building computer clusters is an effective way of decreasing the time it takes for computers to solve certain problems, even if the computers themselves aren’t top-of-the-line hardware. Of course, with cheap enough hardware, people will build clusters out of just about anything, including the ESP32.
For this project, [Wei Lin] admits that this isn’t really a serious attempt at building speedy …read more
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13:00
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Hack a Day
Collecting old CPUs and firing them up again is all the rage these days, but how do you know if they will work? For many of these ICs, which ceased production decades ago, sorting the good stuff from the defective and counterfeit is a minefield.
Testing old chips is a challenge in itself. Even if you can find the right motherboard, the slim chances of escaping the effect of time on the components (in particular, capacitor and EEPROM degradation) make a reliable test setup hard to come by.
Enter [Samuel], and the Universal Chip Analyzer (UCA). Using an FPGA to …read more
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4:00
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Hack a Day
Imagine how hard it could be to add a touch screen to a Mac laptop. You’re thinking expensive and difficult, right? How could [Anish] and his friends possibly manage to upgrade their Mac with a touchscreen for only a dollar? That just doesn’t seem possible.
The trick, of course, is software. By mounting a small mirror over the machine’s webcam, using stiff card, hot glue, and a door hinge. By looking at the screen and deciding whether the image of a finger is touching its on-screen reflection, a remarkably simple touch screen can be created, and the promise of …read more
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10:01
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Hack a Day
I was fortunate enough to visit the Trenton Computer Festival last weekend. The show struck a very interesting mix of new and old, commercial and educational. Attendees were writing programs in BASIC on an Apple I (courtesy of the Vintage Computer Federation) not more than five feet from where students were demonstrating their FIRST robot.
The one-day event featured over fifty demonstrations, talks, and workshops on topics ranging from a crash course in lock picking to the latest advancements in quantum computing. In the vendor room you could buy a refurbished laptop while just down the hall talks were being …read more
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19:00
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Hack a Day
AI is quickly revolutionizing the security camera industry. Several manufacturers sell cameras which use deep learning to detect cars, people, and other events. These smart cameras are generally expensive though, compared to their “dumb” counterparts. [Martin] was able to bring these detection features to a standard camera with a Raspberry Pi, and a bit of ingenuity.
[Martin’s] goal was to capture events of interest, such as a person on screen, or a car in the driveway. The data for the events would then be published to an MQTT topic, along with some metadata such as confidence level. OpenCV is generally …read more
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16:00
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Hack a Day
As far as hobbies go, auditing high security external hard drives is not terribly popular. But it’s what [Raphaël Rigo] is into, and truth be told, we’re glad it’s how he gets his kicks. Not only does it make for fascinating content for us to salivate over, but it’s nice to know there’s somebody with his particular skill set out there keeping an eye out for dodgy hardware.
The latest device to catch his watchful eye is the Aigo “Patriot” SK8671. In a series of posts on his blog, [Raphaël] tears down the drive and proceeds to launch several attacks …read more
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22:00
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Hack a Day
[Rory Johnson] writes in to tell us about PlyTop Shell, a Creative Commons licensed design for a laser cut wooden laptop that he’s been working on since 2016. It’s designed to accommodate the Raspberry Pi (or other similarly sized SBCs), and aims to provide the builder with a completely customizable mobile computer. He’s got a limited run of the PlyTop up for sale currently, but if you’ve got the necessary equipment, you can start building yours while you wait for that new Pi 3B+ to arrive.
Originally [Rory] was working on a 3D printed design, but quickly ran into problems. …read more
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16:00
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SecuriTeam
Computer Associates XCOM Data Transport is prone to a remote arbitrary command-execution vulnerability because it fails to properly validate user-supplied input.
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5:01
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Hack a Day
[Quinn Dunki] pulled together many months worth of work by interfacing her GPU with the CPU. This is one of the major points in her Veronica project which aims to build a computer from the ground up. We’ve seen quite a number of posts from her regarding the AVR-powered GPU. So far the development of [...]
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5:00
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Hack a Day
[Bruce Land], professor at Cornell, is a frequent submitter to our tip line. Usually he sends in a few links every semester from undergraduate electronics courses. Now the fall semester is finally over and it’s time to move on to the more ambitious master’s projects. First up is a head-mounted eye tracker, [Anil Ram Viswanathan] [...]
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15:01
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Hack a Day
This desk is also a computer case. From this view it may not seem like much, but the build log has hundreds of images which could be called metal fabrication porn. The desk surface is made of wood, but all of the other parts were crafted from stainless steel. The three components that weren’t fabricated [...]
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14:01
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Hack a Day
[David] is serving up files on his home network thanks to this Frankenstein’s monster of a Network Attached Storage device. It looks like he raided all the good bits from his parts bin to bring it all together. The case is a tin box which may have been for a card/board game or some holiday [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
This sexy beast is [DeFex's] new silent home theater PC. To give you an idea of scale, that motherboard is a Mini ITX form factor. Mounted below it is the solid state drive which is an SLC version chosen because they tend to last longer than the MLC variety. This distinction comes with a price [...]
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6:00
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Hack a Day
[Paul] had been kicking around his idea of a perfect computer desk for some time, and when given the opportunity to remodel his office decided it was time to build his dream computer case. The desk itself is made of hickory with a formica top to match the other workbenches in [Paul]‘s workspace, The two largest drawers [...]
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13:30
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Hack a Day
Cardboard box computer [Alistair] chapman had a Laptop with a broken screen sitting in his parts bin. He knew he had an LCD panel on hand that would probably work with it, but it wouldn’t fit in the case. His solution was to transplant all the computer parts into a cardboard box from a motherboard. [...]
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11:30
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Hack a Day
This one’s a riot! [Nico] got a new computer and didn’t want to change the six power supply cords he had strategically placed around his home and at work. So he just added a second charging jack that accepts a different style connector. First off the laptop is used — but it’s new to him. So cracking [...]
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12:01
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Hack a Day
This is the WHICH, the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell. It is the oldest functioning digital computer and thanks to a lengthy restoration process you can go and see it in person at The National Museum of Computing in Milton Keynes (Northwest of London in the UK). The system was first put into [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
[Tom] is doing a little show and tell with his latest .NET Micro framework based project. He managed to get a prompt-based computer running on a FEZ Cobra board. A USB keyboard serves as the input device. To give himself a familiar way to navigate and execute programs [Tom] mimicked the functionality of DOS. Above [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
[Tom] is doing a little show and tell with his latest .NET Micro framework based project. He managed to get a prompt-based computer running on a FEZ Cobra board. A USB keyboard serves as the input device. To give himself a familiar way to navigate and execute programs [Tom] mimicked the functionality of DOS. Above [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
[Armin] recently pulled out his Commodore 64 and looked back on the projects he did as a kid. The surprising thing is that we’re not talking quite as far in the past as you might image. He was 13 in 2002 and the family didn’t have a PC. But more than a decade before his [...]
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3:01
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Hack a Day
For those of you that like to play dance games, but [DDR] for the [PS2] uses too modern hardware for your tastes, [Hardsync] may be for you. Although the chiptune-style music coming out of the [C64] may not appeal to everyone, one would have to imagine that a game like this could have been a [...]
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6:00
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Hack a Day
Classic computers are just up [Jeff]‘s alley, so when he looked for a new project for his Pocket Mini Computer, he looked at one of the earliest microcomputers available: the COSMAC VIP, a 1.76 MHz beast from 1977. The COSMAC VIP was a single-board educational computer released by RCA in 1977. Priced at just a [...]
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7:04
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Hack a Day
[Darknezz] sent us a set of photos and some details about his damaged laptop motherboard turned into a server. A client brought him a Dell 1525 on which nothing was showing up on the LCD screen. The HDMI and VGA still worked, and he traced the problem to no signal coming out of the motherboard. [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
[Andrew Gibiansky] has just started a tutorial series called Computing with Transistors. It’s purpose is to pull back the many veiled layers between high level languages and the controlling of electrons. And fittingly this first post starts off by explaining voltage source, load, and current. Don’t be thrown by its simplicity though. [Andrew] quickly moves [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
The folks at the London-based startup GoCardless have a pool table at their office. Being the techies they are, they decided to build a system that automatically scores games. The results, while not fully complete, are still pretty impressive for something whipped up during a 48 hour hackathon. The automated score keeper uses a webcam [...]
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17:00
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SecuriTeam
Computer Associates ARCserve Backup is prone to a remote code-execution vulnerability and a denial-of-service vulnerability.
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8:01
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Hack a Day
[Doped Boron] wrote in to tell us about this waterfall swing by [Dash 7]. Naturally, we had no idea what a “waterfall swing” was. Shown at the World Maker Faire in 2011, the device is a swing set capable of accommodating one or two people using it at a time. What makes it interesting, is [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
Hone your fundamental understanding of computer systems by completing this online course called NAND to Tetris. The idea is to develop each fundamental unit that goes into making computer programs a reality. This starts with logic gates, which are put together into modules that eventually become a functioning computer. From there you need an operating [...]
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14:01
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Hack a Day
It can be really hard to warm up to coding in Assembly. But this tutorial looks to make it understandable and (almost) easy. It focuses on programming a game for the ZX Spectrum. But you won’t need the hardware on hand as you can just use the ZX Spin emulator as you work your way [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
[Optec] want his own triple monitor setup built to his specifications. It turns out to have been a pretty easy project thanks to his mastery of stock materials. The image above is just a bit dim, but if you look closely you can see the strut channel which makes up the monitor frame. When it [...]
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12:25
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SecDocs
Authors:
Andreas Lange Tags:
games Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005 Abstract: Andreas Lange will show the very early computer games before they became a commercial product. If you ever want to know, what was really the first game this session will be the right one for you. Andreas Lange will present the hidden history of early computer games - a story that is only now beginning to be told. While mainstream history usually starts with the space shooter Computer Space, which was programmed at M.I.T. in 1962, the rich games history began much earlier. It is surprising to discover just how strong the contemporary aspects of commerce, science and entertainment were way back then. Want to know what the first game was really like? This is the session for you.
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21:54
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SecDocs
Authors:
Andreas Lange Tags:
games Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005 Abstract: Andreas Lange will show the very early computer games before they became a commercial product. If you ever want to know, what was really the first game this session will be the right one for you. Andreas Lange will present the hidden history of early computer games - a story that is only now beginning to be told. While mainstream history usually starts with the space shooter Computer Space, which was programmed at M.I.T. in 1962, the rich games history began much earlier. It is surprising to discover just how strong the contemporary aspects of commerce, science and entertainment were way back then. Want to know what the first game was really like? This is the session for you.
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4:22
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Packet Storm Security Exploits
Sites designed by S&S Computer Imaging suffer from a remote SQL injection vulnerability. Note that this finding houses site-specific data.
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15:01
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Hack a Day
Do you think you could travel for the entire summer and leave your laptop at home? [Gef] did just that. With the help of his Kindle he used a Raspberry Pi as his travel computer. This was an easy association to think up, since he planned to bring the Kindle along as his reading material [...]
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7:00
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Hack a Day
A few days ago when I posted a homebrew Motorola 68000 computer spectacular, I briefly mentioned a truly spectacular homebrew computer built by [Simon Ferber]. When I posted a link to a Youtube demo of his 68k board, he was working on a website to document the architecture design, hardware, and software. That website is now [...]
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21:28
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SecDocs
Authors:
David Göthberg Tags:
P2P Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005 Abstract: About p2p-algorithms for fully distributed, totally serverless, fully scalable peer-to-peer systems. Not about specific p2p-softwares. This will only be a very brief overview of p2p-algorithms. This talk is about p2p-algorithms for fully distributed, totally serverless, fully scalable, globally searchable, robust, efficient peer-to-peer systems. These algorithms make it possible to make millions or even billions of computers work together in an organised manner without any central servers, without any computer being a boss over the others. We can now make applications such as filesharing, chat, instant messaging, Internet telephoning, radio and TV (sent from a single home user computer to a billion nodes), distributed calculation systems and many more applications. Since this talk is rather short we will not talk about specific p2p-softwares, encryption, stealth or anonymity. But we will mention some never before published stuff. The talk will be held by David Göthberg who has researched p2p-algorithms since 1997 and full time since the year 2000. Before that he used to work with Internet communication and computer security in embedded systems. (Internet in cars and other machinery.) David has now finished his research and is now working on building a p2p-programming library. So that other programmers can build advanced p2p applications easily, without having to spend years on research first. David's p2p-programming library will be available free of charge for anyone making free software. If you want more information from David before or after the congress take a look at www.pjort.com/projects/ or chat with "Mole2" in the channel #p2p-hackers on the IRC-network irc.freenode.net.
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9:01
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Hack a Day
If you’re going to build your own computer, it probably wouldn’t do you well to exactly emulate the computer you’re looking at right now. The modern x86 and x64 chips that power your desktop or laptop contain hundreds of individual instructions, and the supposed RISC CPUs found in ARM-powered devices contain nearly as many. No, [...]
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6:48
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SecDocs
Authors:
David Göthberg Tags:
P2P Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005 Abstract: About p2p-algorithms for fully distributed, totally serverless, fully scalable peer-to-peer systems. Not about specific p2p-softwares. This will only be a very brief overview of p2p-algorithms. This talk is about p2p-algorithms for fully distributed, totally serverless, fully scalable, globally searchable, robust, efficient peer-to-peer systems. These algorithms make it possible to make millions or even billions of computers work together in an organised manner without any central servers, without any computer being a boss over the others. We can now make applications such as filesharing, chat, instant messaging, Internet telephoning, radio and TV (sent from a single home user computer to a billion nodes), distributed calculation systems and many more applications. Since this talk is rather short we will not talk about specific p2p-softwares, encryption, stealth or anonymity. But we will mention some never before published stuff. The talk will be held by David Göthberg who has researched p2p-algorithms since 1997 and full time since the year 2000. Before that he used to work with Internet communication and computer security in embedded systems. (Internet in cars and other machinery.) David has now finished his research and is now working on building a p2p-programming library. So that other programmers can build advanced p2p applications easily, without having to spend years on research first. David's p2p-programming library will be available free of charge for anyone making free software. If you want more information from David before or after the congress take a look at www.pjort.com/projects/ or chat with "Mole2" in the channel #p2p-hackers on the IRC-network irc.freenode.net.
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6:48
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SecDocs
Authors:
David Göthberg Tags:
P2P Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 22th (22C3) 2005 Abstract: About p2p-algorithms for fully distributed, totally serverless, fully scalable peer-to-peer systems. Not about specific p2p-softwares. This will only be a very brief overview of p2p-algorithms. This talk is about p2p-algorithms for fully distributed, totally serverless, fully scalable, globally searchable, robust, efficient peer-to-peer systems. These algorithms make it possible to make millions or even billions of computers work together in an organised manner without any central servers, without any computer being a boss over the others. We can now make applications such as filesharing, chat, instant messaging, Internet telephoning, radio and TV (sent from a single home user computer to a billion nodes), distributed calculation systems and many more applications. Since this talk is rather short we will not talk about specific p2p-softwares, encryption, stealth or anonymity. But we will mention some never before published stuff. The talk will be held by David Göthberg who has researched p2p-algorithms since 1997 and full time since the year 2000. Before that he used to work with Internet communication and computer security in embedded systems. (Internet in cars and other machinery.) David has now finished his research and is now working on building a p2p-programming library. So that other programmers can build advanced p2p applications easily, without having to spend years on research first. David's p2p-programming library will be available free of charge for anyone making free software. If you want more information from David before or after the congress take a look at www.pjort.com/projects/ or chat with "Mole2" in the channel #p2p-hackers on the IRC-network irc.freenode.net.
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5:00
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Hack a Day
Robots can easily make their way across a factory floor; with painted lines on the floor, a factory makes for an ideal environment for a robot to navigate. A much more difficult test of computer vision lies in your living room. Finding a way around a coffee table and not knocking over a lamp present [...]
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6:54
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Hack a Day
Even though the Raspberry Pi has, from the very beginning, been touted as an educational computer, we’ve seen neither hide nor hare of coursework, lesson plans, or even computer sciencey tutorials using the Raspi. We’re guessing academia works at a much slower pace than the average hardware hacker, but [Alex Chadwick] at Cambridge University has [...]
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13:00
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Hack a Day
We’ve seen our share of homebrew computers over the years. Usually, these bare-bone systems use a small, early 80s-era microprocessor such as the Z80 or 6502. These little 8-bit machines are awesome, but somewhat limited in their capability. [BigDumbDinosaur] sent in a computer he’s been working on for a few years now featuring the infamous [...]
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14:00
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Hack a Day
In 1975, [D. L. Slotnick], CS professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faced a problem: meteorologists were collecting a lot more data than current weather simulations could handle. [Slotnick]‘s solution was to build a faster computer to run these atmosphere circulation simulations. The only problem was the computer needed to be built quickly and cheaply, [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
You can do some neat stuff to the way your Ford Focus Mk2 works, but first you have to gain access to the data system. If you know some Russian, and don’t mind a bit of dongle rewiring, this guide will have you hacking the car’s CAN bus in no time. It was written by [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
[Michael Chen] liked the sound he was getting out of these Corsair SP2200 computer speakers, with one big exception. They were giving off some unpleasant crackling sounds. He figured this might be as easy as replacing a faulty potentiometer, but soon found out the fix was going to be more complicated than that. All said [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
Years and years ago, someone gave me this book as a gift. [John Knittel], a co-author thought I might find it amusing. The book, titled The Dangers of Computer Hacking, is a grade school level breakdown of, well, computer hacking and the dangers thereof. At the time, I thought it was rather fun and amusing. [...]
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13:07
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Hack a Day
It’s no secret that learning how to program is very hard, and teaching it doubly so, requiring the student to wrap their head around very unorthodox concepts. [Ubi de Feo] over at the Amsterdam tech collective Hello, Savants! has a unique solution for taking someone who knows nothing of programming and turning them into a computer aficionado capable of deftly [...]
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8:02
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Hack a Day
[Łukasz Kaiser] programmed a computer to play Tic-tac-toe. That doesn’t sound very remarkable until you realize he never told his computer the rules of Tic-tac-toe. The computer learned the rules by itself after watching a video of two people playing the game (link to actual paper - PDF warning). [Łukasz] wrote a small program in C++ to recognize [...]
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4:01
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Hack a Day
The D16/M is a 16-bit computer built using HCMOS logic chips. It’s a thing of beauty from every angle thanks to the work [John Doran] put into the hobby project. But he didn’t just take pictures of the build and slap them on a webpage. He took the time to publish a remarkable volume of [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
This piece of furniture begs the question, why think of a desk and a computer case as separate things? It combines Ikea furniture with electronic hardware to create the ultimate command center. First the obvious parts: there’s a nook for the computer case that hangs just below the desktop off to the side, and the twin displays are mounted [...]
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21:27
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SecDocs
Authors:
Johannes Grenzfurthner Tags:
music Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 24th (24C3) 2007 Abstract: A talk (with examples) by monochrom, presented by Johannes Grenzfurthner Bourgeois culture was paralyzed and finally overrun by modern technologies which broke through the traditional class barriers. It went into a panic and produced these very stupid technophobic manifestos and images e.g. of “the computer”. Pop music discovered and explored the computer not only as a musical instrument but also as something to sing and reflect about in a less aversive way. In doing so it influenced the conception people had of computers. The public image of computers was shaped by groups such as Kraftwerk as well as through obscure Schlager songs such as France Gall's “Computer No. 3”. Not only was that image influenced by high culture computer panic but also by naïve technomania, and so it delivered the very dialectics of the computer as a means of cultural technology in capitalist society.
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21:27
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SecDocs
Authors:
Johannes Grenzfurthner Tags:
music Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 24th (24C3) 2007 Abstract: A talk (with examples) by monochrom, presented by Johannes Grenzfurthner Bourgeois culture was paralyzed and finally overrun by modern technologies which broke through the traditional class barriers. It went into a panic and produced these very stupid technophobic manifestos and images e.g. of “the computer”. Pop music discovered and explored the computer not only as a musical instrument but also as something to sing and reflect about in a less aversive way. In doing so it influenced the conception people had of computers. The public image of computers was shaped by groups such as Kraftwerk as well as through obscure Schlager songs such as France Gall's “Computer No. 3”. Not only was that image influenced by high culture computer panic but also by naïve technomania, and so it delivered the very dialectics of the computer as a means of cultural technology in capitalist society.
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7:02
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Hack a Day
If you’re in possession of a Raspberry Pi, you may want to check out the new Chromium support for your tiny pocketable computer. With its terrifically minimal hardware requirements, the Chromium OS seems like just the thing for this $35 computer. The new Raspberry Pi supported Chromium build comes from the fruitful desktop of [Hexxeh], [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
Being a $35, full-fledged Linux computer, the Raspberry Pi brings a lot to the table. There’s one problem, though: this computer doesn’t come with a keyboard, mouse, display, or even a battery. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to add these devices with the help of a Motorola LapDock and turn a RasPi into a fully portable computing [...]
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21:35
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SecDocs
Authors:
Mark Vogelsberger Tags:
engineering numeric processing Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 24th (24C3) 2007 Abstract: The evolution of structure in the Universe is one of the hottest topics in Cosmology and Astrophysics. In the last years the so-called $\Lambda$-CDM-model could be established also with great help of very large computer simulations. This model describes a Universe that consists mainly of dark components: 96% are made of dark energy and dark matter. Ordinary matter made up of baryons give only 4% to the total content of the Universe. The talk will present recent results with the main focus on computational methods and challenges in that field. A state-of-the-art computer code for running these calculations will be presented in detail.
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21:35
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SecDocs
Authors:
Mark Vogelsberger Tags:
engineering numeric processing Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 24th (24C3) 2007 Abstract: The evolution of structure in the Universe is one of the hottest topics in Cosmology and Astrophysics. In the last years the so-called $\Lambda$-CDM-model could be established also with great help of very large computer simulations. This model describes a Universe that consists mainly of dark components: 96% are made of dark energy and dark matter. Ordinary matter made up of baryons give only 4% to the total content of the Universe. The talk will present recent results with the main focus on computational methods and challenges in that field. A state-of-the-art computer code for running these calculations will be presented in detail.
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11:01
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Hack a Day
Here’s a 3D printed electromechanical computer built by [Chris Fenton] over at NYCResistor. It uses plastic registers printed on a Makerbot, a bunch of pogo pins, and business-card sized punch cards capable of storing 32 bits of instructions and data. In case you’re wondering, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen [Chris]‘ FIBIAC. Since the last [...]
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15:01
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Hack a Day
Most bits of a computer we take for granted today – the mouse, hypertext, video conferencing, and word processing – were all invented by one team of researchers at Stanford in the late 60s. When the brains behind the operation, [Douglas Engelbart], showed this to 1000 computer researchers, the demo became known as The Mother [...]
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21:31
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SecDocs
Authors:
Sergey Bratus Tags:
hacking Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 27th (27C3) 2010 Abstract: Although most academics and industry practitioners regard "hacking" as mostly ad-hoc, a loose collection of useful tricks essentially random in nature, I will argue that hacking has in fact become a "distinct research and engineering discipline" with deep underlying engineering ideas and insights. Although not yet formally defined as such, it are these ideas and insights that drive the great contributions that hacking has been making to our understanding of computing, including the challenges of handling complexity, composition, and security in complex systems. I will argue that hacking uncovers and helps to understand (and teach) fundamental issues that go to the heart of Computer Science as we know it, and will try to formulate several such fundamental principles which I have learned from hacker research. At some point I realized that I was learning more about what really matters in computer science from hacker conventions, Phrack, Uninformed, and other hacker sources than from any academic source. Moreover, it wasn't just about exploits and vulnerabilities, it was about how systems were really designed, as opposed to how developers thought and students were taught they were. Then I realized that the reason for vulnerabilities that kept on giving were quite deeply theoretical and involved, e.g., theory of computation and information theory. Very little of this was quoted or understood in the academic publications.
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21:31
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SecDocs
Authors:
Sergey Bratus Tags:
hacking Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 27th (27C3) 2010 Abstract: Although most academics and industry practitioners regard "hacking" as mostly ad-hoc, a loose collection of useful tricks essentially random in nature, I will argue that hacking has in fact become a "distinct research and engineering discipline" with deep underlying engineering ideas and insights. Although not yet formally defined as such, it are these ideas and insights that drive the great contributions that hacking has been making to our understanding of computing, including the challenges of handling complexity, composition, and security in complex systems. I will argue that hacking uncovers and helps to understand (and teach) fundamental issues that go to the heart of Computer Science as we know it, and will try to formulate several such fundamental principles which I have learned from hacker research. At some point I realized that I was learning more about what really matters in computer science from hacker conventions, Phrack, Uninformed, and other hacker sources than from any academic source. Moreover, it wasn't just about exploits and vulnerabilities, it was about how systems were really designed, as opposed to how developers thought and students were taught they were. Then I realized that the reason for vulnerabilities that kept on giving were quite deeply theoretical and involved, e.g., theory of computation and information theory. Very little of this was quoted or understood in the academic publications.
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21:28
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SecDocs
Authors:
Sergey Bratus Tags:
hacking Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 27th (27C3) 2010 Abstract: Although most academics and industry practitioners regard "hacking" as mostly ad-hoc, a loose collection of useful tricks essentially random in nature, I will argue that hacking has in fact become a "distinct research and engineering discipline" with deep underlying engineering ideas and insights. Although not yet formally defined as such, it are these ideas and insights that drive the great contributions that hacking has been making to our understanding of computing, including the challenges of handling complexity, composition, and security in complex systems. I will argue that hacking uncovers and helps to understand (and teach) fundamental issues that go to the heart of Computer Science as we know it, and will try to formulate several such fundamental principles which I have learned from hacker research. At some point I realized that I was learning more about what really matters in computer science from hacker conventions, Phrack, Uninformed, and other hacker sources than from any academic source. Moreover, it wasn't just about exploits and vulnerabilities, it was about how systems were really designed, as opposed to how developers thought and students were taught they were. Then I realized that the reason for vulnerabilities that kept on giving were quite deeply theoretical and involved, e.g., theory of computation and information theory. Very little of this was quoted or understood in the academic publications.
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8:01
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Hack a Day
If you’ve ever thought about getting down to bare metal and building a homebrew computer from scratch [Garth Wilson] put up a great primer to the 6502, the same CPU found in Apple ][ computers, BBC Micros, Vic-20s, and the venerable Commodore 64 (a 6510 in the C64, but it's close enough). In his guide [...]
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5:01
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Hack a Day
Very rarely do we see an Instructable so complete, and so informative, that it’s a paragon of tutorials that all Instructables should aspire to. [8 Bit Spaghetti]‘s How to Build an 8-bit computer is one of those tutorials. [8 Bit Spaghetti]‘s build began on his blog. He originally planned to build a 4-bit computer but decided a [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
If you had a machine that could print complex mechanical parts in an hour or so, what would you do? [Chris] is doing the coolest thing we can imagine and is building an electromechanical computer from 3D printed parts. You may remember [Chris] from his efforts to getting his tiny, 1/10th scale Cray-1 supercomputer up and [...]
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16:01
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Hack a Day
[Kyle] has been hard at working building an 8-bit computer from the ground up. He’s using a set of logic IC’s for the various components, and some NVRAM chips to store the control words. What you see above is the roadmap for his instruction set. He’s just started writing them to the chips, making the [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
You’re going to want to do some stretching before undertaking a soldering project like this one. We’re betting that the physical toll of assembling this 4-bit discrete processor project is starting to drive [SV3ORA] just a bit crazy. This small piece of electronic real estate is playing host to 62 transistors so far, and he’s not [...]
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11:01
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Hack a Day
As a kid, [Boisy] cut his teeth on the TRS-80 Color Computer. It was a wonderful machine for its day, featuring a relatively powerful Motorola 6809 CPU. Although his CoCo was theoretically more powerful than its Commodore and Apple contemporaries, the graphics and sound capabilities of [Boisy]‘s first love paled in comparison to his friends 6502-based [...]
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12:30
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Hack a Day
[Julian Skidmore] has been busy improving the Fignition, a tiny AVR-powered educational computer, to support loading programs from a cassette tape. We first saw the Fignition after the BBC decided to cover an old-school hacker dedicated to improving computer education with a simple ‘bare-metal’ computer. [Julian]‘s Fignition harkens back to the days of very simple computers [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
What if you could add gesture recognition to your computer without making any hardware changes? This research project seeks to use computer microphone and speakers to recognize hand gestures. Audio is played over the speakers, with the input from the microphone processed to detect Doppler shift. In this way it can detect your hand movements [...]
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12:01
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Hack a Day
[Quinn Dunki's] homebrew computer project is moving up another evolutionary rung. She needs a more versatile user interface and this starts with the data output. Up to this point a set of 7-segment digits has served as a way to display register values. But her current work is aimed at adding VGA output to the [...]
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21:42
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SecDocs
Authors:
Cory Doctorow Tags:
warfare Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 28th (28C3) 2011 Abstract: The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race. The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to "secure" anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society. And general purpose computers can cause harm -- whether it's printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs. The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other "trust" mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can't inspect or terminate, that run without users' consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don't want them to. The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression. Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.
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21:42
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SecDocs
Authors:
Cory Doctorow Tags:
warfare Event:
Chaos Communication Congress 28th (28C3) 2011 Abstract: The last 20 years of Internet policy have been dominated by the copyright war, but the war turns out only to have been a skirmish. The coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race. The problem is twofold: first, there is no known general-purpose computer that can execute all the programs we can think of except the naughty ones; second, general-purpose computers have replaced every other device in our world. There are no airplanes, only computers that fly. There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals. There are no radios, only computers with fast ADCs and DACs and phased-array antennas. Consequently anything you do to "secure" anything with a computer in it ends up undermining the capabilities and security of every other corner of modern human society. And general purpose computers can cause harm -- whether it's printing out AR15 components, causing mid-air collisions, or snarling traffic. So the number of parties with legitimate grievances against computers are going to continue to multiply, as will the cries to regulate PCs. The primary regulatory impulse is to use combinations of code-signing and other "trust" mechanisms to create computers that run programs that users can't inspect or terminate, that run without users' consent or knowledge, and that run even when users don't want them to. The upshot: a world of ubiquitous malware, where everything we do to make things better only makes it worse, where the tools of liberation become tools of oppression. Our duty and challenge is to devise systems for mitigating the harm of general purpose computing without recourse to spyware, first to keep ourselves safe, and second to keep computers safe from the regulatory impulse.
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16:24
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Hack a Day
We’ve enjoyed seeing the development progress of Veronica, [Quinn Dunki's] 8-bit computer project. It started out on a breadboard, then moved to edge-connected PCBs, and now [Quinn] has given Veronica a body of her own. The donor is a Philco Model 42-327T and was produced in 1942. It was chosen because it is non-functional and [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
Because his computer is gradually turning into an all-inclusive media display device, [Shawn] figured a remote to control the volume and a video playlist would be a reasonable addition. TV remotes for computers have been around for years, but [Shawn] decided to go the DIY route and build his own computer remote. For the build, [...]
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16:01
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Hack a Day
[Richard] sent in a link to the Python controlled microcontroller he’s been working on. Unlike the previous portable Python boards we’ve seen, [Richard] thinks his pyMCU isn’t best used autonomously. This board is meant to be used only when connected to a computer and to serve as a bridge between the digital world of computers and our [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
Any self-identified geek that spent some time in the 80s will tell you how they used to type out programs into their ‘microcomputer’ with BASIC. It was a simpler time when a computer’s raison d’etre was simply being a BASIC interpreter. These days are long past us now; you can’t simply turn on a computer and [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
Any self-identified geek that spent some time in the 80s will tell you how they used to type out programs into their ‘microcomputer’ with BASIC. It was a simpler time when a computer’s raison d’etre was simply being a BASIC interpreter. These days are long past us now; you can’t simply turn on a computer and [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
One of the perks of writing for Hackaday is that we often find hacks that we’ve been meaning to do ourselves. Here’s one that will let us fix our borked ASUS computer monitor buttons. [Silviu] has the same monitor we do, an ASUS VW202, and had the same problem of stuck buttons. We already cracked [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
For a computer that debuted in the early 80s the MSX was a very respectable machine. Of course these were the days that superimposing graphics over a video was an amazing feat, but [Danjovic] and [Igor] are still having fun with their boxen. They designed a software interface for the Wii Nunchuck (translation) on their trusty MSX computer. [...]
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6:01
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Hack a Day
Who wouldn’t want to build a computer out of relays? We do, but we’ve got too many projects on our plate already. It looks like [rory] has his priorities in order because his build is one of the most amazing we’ve ever seen. We’ve seen [Harry Porter]‘s amazing relay computer and we’re familiar with [Konrad Zuse]‘s WWII era endeavours. [...]
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15:27
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Hack a Day
[Roel] had read that people won the DARPA shredder challenge, but that their technology was kept a secret, interested in this concept he also remembered an episode of the X-Files where they had reconstructed shredded paper using a computer system. Unlike most computer based TV show BS this did not seem to be too far [...]
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10:01
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Hack a Day
[Quinn Dunki] has been busy through the holidays giving her 6502 processor-based computer a place to live. The most recent part of the project (which she calls Veronica) involved designing and etching a mainboard for the device. In the picture above it’s the vertical board which is right at home in the backplane [Quinn] also [...]
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14:00
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Hack a Day
The worst computer keyboard, ever [Gerardus] found an old BBC Master Compact computer for $15. The only problem is the computer didn’t have a keyboard. It’s not a problem if you can make a keyboard out of an old breadboard. It’s not a Model M, but it works. Emergency ribbon cable repair [Thomas] works in [...]
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9:01
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Hack a Day
[Bob Alexander] wrote in to share a hobby of his that we thought was pretty timely considering the new year is quickly approaching. For several years now he has put together a custom calendar for himself, including both dates he finds important along with sweet pictures of vintage computer equipment. Friends and family found his [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
[Nirav] painted this masterpiece by hand… with a little help from a computer. He calls it the semi-automatic paintbrush because you do need to move it over the canvas by hand, but a computer decides when to dispense the ink. He’s using a piece of hardware we looked at back in September called the InkShield [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
[Victor] likes to watch movies on his laptop, but the tiny speakers in his machine don’t do [John Williams] and other perfectly fine soundtracks justice. To pump up the jams a little bit, [Victor] got a pair of Trust Mila 2.0 speakers for Sinterklaas. Unfortunately, these speakers were terrible – noise everywhere, tinny output and [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
If you are considering repurposing some old computer equipment to create music, be aware that the bar has been raised just a tad. YouTube user [BD594] spent some time sifting through his bin of used electronics and put together a 5-piece band that plays a pretty awesome rendition of The Animals’ “House of the Rising [...]
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14:01
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Hack a Day
When it came time to try out some old-school computing [Quinn Dunki] grabbed a 6502 processor and got to work. For those that are unfamiliar, this is the first chip that was both powerful, affordable, and available to the hobby computing market back in the 1970′s. They were used in Apple computers, Commodore 64, and [...]
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10:02
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Hack a Day
[Peter] was tired of crawling behind his desktop computer to switch between headphones and speakers. We feel his pain, as the headphone port on our computer speakers has its own demonic hum rendering the jack useless to us. His solution was to build this output selector board, then control it via the network. A relay [...]
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14:01
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Hack a Day
A few nights ago, [Chris Fenton] was hanging out at NYC Resistor putting in some time on his electromechanical computer project. You might remember [Chris] from his tiny Cray that he’s putting an OS on. It seems [Chris] is going back in time about 150 years and has set his sights on a 3D printed [...]
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12:57
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Hack a Day
It’s not that touchscreen keyboards are horrible, but it’s nearly impossible to touch type on an iPad or other tablet keyboard. A team at the Media Computing Group at Aachen University figured out how to put a series of electromagnets underneath a display to provide haptic feedback for touchscreens. They showed off their tech at [...]
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7:01
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Hack a Day
Desperately in need of a graduation paper, [Andrei] decided to build a few computer controlled recon vehicles (PDF warning), and we’re really impressed with the minimalist approach [Andrei] took. The Computer Operated Recon Entity (C.O.R.E.) mk. I is based around a laptop. Instead of an Arduino, [Andrei] used a car stereo amp to control the [...]
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6:01
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Hack a Day
Wood and electronics don’t generally mix nowadays, but if you yearn back to a time when radios and the like had a nice wooden finish, this wooden computer case may be for you. Combine that with a Wooden keyboard enclosure, and maybe even a LCD monitor stand and you’ll have a setup that should fit [...]
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1:08
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SecDocs
Authors:
Fabian Mihailowitsch Tags:
keylogger Event:
Hashdays 2010 Abstract: Hardware keyloggers are tiny devices that are plugged between a computer keyboard and a computer. They are available for PS/2 as well as USB keyboards. Once plugged, they are able to record all key strokes and store them using an internal memory. Thereby the main focus is to stay undetected. Most manufacturers promote their models cannot be detected by software and thus have an advantage over software based keyloggers. However that's not correct. Hardware keyloggers make slight changes to the interaction between the keyboard and the computer. These changes can be detected by software and used to determine whether a hardware keylogger is present. During this talk various techniques will be presented to detect hardware keyloggers theoretical and practical. Finally a PoC tool will be released, that implements these described techniques.
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16:02
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Hack a Day
So you bought yourself a Neato XV-11 and your floors have never been cleaner. The only problem is that you want to hack around with the hardware without losing your floor-sweeping minion. [Hash] found a solution to the issue by building a computer inside of the dustbin module. You can see at the center of [...]
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18:00
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Hack a Day
In part one I showed you that you could install a linux distro on a new computer and transplant it into a 386 computer in a short amount of time and with little effort. Now it is time to move on to bigger and beefier machines like 486′s, Pentiums and better. I am going to [...]
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6:01
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Hack a Day
[Alexis] sent in a single board computer he’s been working on. The project goal of his build was making it easily reproducible. From looking at the schematics, it’s one of the simplest fully-functional computers we’ve seen. The build runs CP/M 2.2 off of two 3.5 inch floppies. This opens up a lot of options as [...]
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4:05
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Hack a Day
If you find a crusty old IT guy and give him half a chance, he’ll probably regale you with stories of how things were done “in the old days” where no one had their own computer and everyone worked on mainframe-connected dumb terminals. [JSTN] yearned for a true to life terminal display that he could [...]
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8:01
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Hack a Day
[M. Eric Carr] came up with an interesting build for the 555 contest earlier this year, and we’re pretty sure that it would have kicked the winner of the complex category off the throne if it were completed. Although it’s a few months late, we’re happy to feature at least part of his 555-based computer [...]
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7:04
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Hack a Day
Instructables user [Jan] likes to keep close tabs on his computer’s memory usage, but wanted something more interesting to look at than the standard resource manager. He preferred to have an external display available that would show his computer’s status with a quick glance, and thus this system monitor was born. His status panel contains [...]
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8:00
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Hack a Day
[Frank], like many people, has a soft spot in his heart for the Commodore 64. He prefers to play his C64 games on his computer nowadays, but likes using his old school Competition Pro rather than some modern controller with remapped buttons. The only problem with using the controller is that his new computer doesn’t [...]
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5:01
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Hack a Day
[Hasith] sent in this project where he goes through the process of designing a one instruction CPU in Verilog. It may not win a contest for the coolest build on Hack A Day, but we really do appreciate the “applied nerd” aspect of this build. With only one instruction, an OISC is a lot simpler [...]
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13:36
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Hack a Day
[Bill's] worked on his homebrew computer for almost a decade. He didn’t start with a Z80 processor like a lot of the projects we’ve seen, but instead build the CPU itself from 74-series TTL chips and a ridiculous amount of wire wrapping to connect it all. The video after the break shows off the functionality. [...]
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7:02
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Hack a Day
[James] built himself a robotic band from obsolete computer parts. The band needed something to play, and [Marilyn Manson]‘s Beautiful People fit the bill. While it’s not the Rock-fire Explosion, having the [James]‘ band cover [Marilyn Manson] is nearly as terrifying. [James]‘ original plan was to cover Mad World, but the stepper motors were drowning [...]
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10:30
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Hack a Day
There’s something quite satisfying about building your own computer. Nowadays, constructing your own desktop PC is relatively easy, so if you really want to get your hands dirty, you have to take a step back in time and give some vintage hardware a spin. [YT2095] has spent a good portion of the last two months [...]
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15:01
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Hack a Day
The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Labs just put up a post on the giant mechanical binary computer they brought to last month’s Maker Faire. As a faithful reproduction of the Digi-Comp II from the 1960s, every operation is powered by balls falling onto levers. Unlike the original, the larger version is powered by billiard [...]
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6:01
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Hack a Day
[Michael Chen] found himself in possession of a thoroughly broken laptop. The hinges connecting the screen to the body of the computer were shot, and the battery was non-functional. After a bit of thinking he decided that it wouldn’t take much to resurrect the hardware by turning it into a desktop machine. At the core of this [...]
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12:42
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Hack a Day
If you think that your water cooled rig is pretty sweet, check out this creation by Dutch PC enthusiast [Peter Brands] (Google Translation). With his computer tweaked as far as he could imagine, he decided to spruce up his office a bit. In the process, he ended up tweaking his computer just a little bit [...]
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18:37
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Packet Storm Security Recent Files
This file documents law enforcements provision related to computer security that the white house is trying to get put into place. It mandates a minimal 3 year sentence for any hacker that damages critical infrastructure.
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18:37
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Packet Storm Security Misc. Files
This file documents law enforcements provision related to computer security that the white house is trying to get put into place. It mandates a minimal 3 year sentence for any hacker that damages critical infrastructure.
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4:02
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Hack a Day
[Ameres Valentin] writes in to let us know about his DIY particle accelerator model. The model, made mostly out of old computer stuff, mimics a linear high-energy particle accelerator which use drift tubes to toss particles around. Drift tubes work by first attracting a particle (in this case, ball bearing) until it crosses a charged [...]
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4:16
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Hack a Day
Due to computer issues I had to rob some parts from my “electronics” computer, which wasn’t bad, since I was not working on anything at the time and I felt a software project itch. I also wanted to do something with my Apple //c, which resides on my computer desk, so this ghetto brute force [...]
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13:01
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Hack a Day
How this one missed us, we’ll never know. [GG] built himself a retro-styled Z80 nanocomputer over two years using all 1980′s tech. Laid out on one of the largest pieces of perfboard we’ve ever seen on a project, the computer uses a vintage Z80 CPU running at 2.5MHz, 8K ROM, 16K RAM, RS-232 and Parallel [...]
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12:09
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Hack a Day
Take a moment to think about how many old or damaged computer motherboards you have tossed away over the years. Sure we try to repurpose everything we can, but reclaiming electronic components from complex devices can be overly time consuming if you don’t have the proper means of doing so. Ideally, if we were to [...]
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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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12:01
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Hack a Day
[Mark Fickett] finished his own interesting take on a bicycle computer. These wristwatch-sized devices normally mount to the handlebars and give feedback for current speed, trip distance, and many have options like cadence and heart rate. [Mark's] has fewer features but it’s clean, simple, and does more than you’d think. He used some denim to [...]
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10:15
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Hack a Day
When prototyping a project using an Arduino, there are a few things that are pretty much required equipment. A computer for generating sketches is typically one of those things, but [Adam] over at Teague Labs is looking to change all that with his current project, the Computerless Arduino. Instead of using a computer to alter [...]
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14:12
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Hack a Day
This analog computer can multiply, divide, square numbers, and find square roots. It has a maximum result of ten billion with an average precision of 2-3%. [Miroslav's] build recreates something he saw in a Popular Electronics magazine. It uses a resistor network made up of three potentiometers with a digital multimeter is an integral part [...]
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14:00
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Hack a Day
Well, no. Many of us who went to school and have degrees in various computer related fields instantly think of ENIAC as the first “computer”, but we’re all wrong. We know some of you are already familiar with the Atanasoff-Berry computer, and we are too… now. However, when we learned about it, it was long [...]
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14:00
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Hack a Day
We’re not sure whether to call this an Etch-a-Sketch upgrade or a computer interface downgrade but either way it’s unique. [Martin Raynsford] added a familiar red frame to his computer monitor with classic white knobs that control horizontal and vertical cursor movement. There’s even the click option by pressing the buttons in and, as you can see [...]
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12:00
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Hack a Day
Remember when CGA came out and made monocrome monitors look horrible? Well CGA is crap, VGA is where it’s at. Wait… weren’t there a couple of standards in between those two? Take a walk down memory lane and relive the evolution of computer display technology. You’ll start with displays that are more or less CRT [...]
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17:08
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Packet Storm Security Exploits
Computer Associates ARCserve D2D r15 Web Service Apache Axis2 world-accessible servlet code execution vulnerability proof of concept exploit.
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17:08
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Packet Storm Security Misc. Files
Computer Associates ARCserve D2D r15 Web Service Apache Axis2 world-accessible servlet code execution vulnerability proof of concept exploit.
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9:00
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Hack a Day
Gather round and hear the story of how a hacker outsmarts a criminal. [Zoz] was robbed and they got his desktop computer. Gone, right? Nope. Because of a peculiar combination of his computer’s configuration, and the stupidity of the criminal, he got it back. He shares the tale during his Defcon 18 talk (PDF), the [...]
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12:00
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Hack a Day
[Peter Skaarup's] been re-living the past by playing old-school games in DOSBox. He’s using a mouse as the controller but longed for the auto-fire button that many joysticks used to have. Instead of looking around for a gamepad with this feature he decided to add an auto-fire button to the mouse. He incorporated a PIC 10F200, along with [...]
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5:00
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Hack a Day
[Matt Sarnoff] is designing his own 8-bit computer from scratch. This means not only designing the hardware but also writing his own kernel and custom libraries. Since we last saw this 8-bit machine hes added both video and sound output which has allowed him to start developing some software for his computer (see it play Conways game [...]
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7:28
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Hack a Day
This is Zusie, a computer built out of electromechanical relays. [Fredrik Andersson] picked up a lot of about 100 telephone exchange circuit boards, each with about 16 relays on them. After getting to know a heat gun really well he ended up with 1500 working relays with which to play. The machine runs slowly, it [...]
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13:51
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Hack a Day
We’re rather surprised at how popular it has become to build your own motorcycle computer. [Mario Mauerer] tipped us off about his shiny motorcycle computer (translated) for his Yamaha XTZ 750. It uses an ATmega644 microcontroller to pull a variety of data together and display it on this white LED backlit display. He connected a [...]
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11:00
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Hack a Day
This contraption lets you decorate your cake at the push of a button. It’s a stretch to call it computer aided as this is purely a mechanical monster, but we still enjoy the apparatus and see its CNC potential (we’re still waiting for that pizza printer to hit the market too). An icing syringe has [...]
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11:00
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Hack a Day
[SXRguyinMA] built a replacement top bezel for his computer case. He wanted to add vents that would automatically open or close based on the cooling needs of the computer. With some careful measurements he modeled the parts in Sketchup and sent out for them to be cut from styrene with a water jet cutter. The [...]
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5:34
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Hack a Day
[Enigma-penguin] built a tablet computer out of a Core2Duo Macbook circa 2007. The battery exploded, damaging the case and a few components inside. But there was hope for a new life as a tablet computer. He removed the screen and tested to make sure the computer would still function without it by using the video [...]
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12:00
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Hack a Day
This is an 8-bit computer and Famicom clone that [133MHz] bought for $2. It plays Nintendo games and using an 80-in-1 cartridge it has a rudimentary operating system and set of applications. Seeing a standard DB25 port on the back [133MHz] wondered if he could make the system talk to a printer. His first step [...]
While we’re still too lazy to attempt one of these builds ourselves, we have to admit that the Vectron 64 by [Nick Bild] looks dangerously close to something you might be able to pull off within a reasonable amount of time. It’s still an incredible amount of work, but compared to some of the other projects we’ve seen, this one manages to keep the part count relatively low thanks to the use of a simple 16×2 LCD for output and user input provided by a PS/2 keyboard. You won’t be playing Prince of Persia on it, but at least you might be able to finish it in a weekend.