Canal Rubber Mug

Canal Rubber is one of those indispensable supply stores here in nyc, one of the last remaining useful resources in lower Manhattan. I was just picking up some rubber sheeting today (a quick – but hot – bike ride away) and spotted this beauty behind the counter. They’ve faithfully reproduced the storefront sign on a coffee mug! They just got their first batch of them made and I think its gorgeous.

Don’t accept Mice from Strangers…

I think we’ve all been reading about the increasing onslaught of hacker penetration that has been going on lately. In a new angle on possible techniques, This piece in the Register describes how computer penetration testing firm Netragard successfully gained access into one of their clients’ PCs. They were forced into a unique solution by their client’s demand that they try to gain access without using the more common network-related intrusion methods (social media, telephony, etc). They also couldn’t break in & use the computers either, so an unobtrusive hardware solution was arrived at. In the photo above you’ll see their method in the underside of a common Logitech mouse. Inside is a Teensy USB development board (such as I have posted about before) along with a USB flash drive. Since the Teensy can be seen by your PC as a keyboard device they were able to program the device to execute keyboard commands that installed nasty intrusion software into the PC hard drive which within a few days remotely connected to Netragard’s servers through the internet.

To get the hardware into the company, they packaged the mouse with fake promotional documents and sent it to an employee, who of course tried it out.

How relevant is this type of intrusion? Check out this article over at Bloomberg. In particular:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran a test this year to see how hard it was for hackers to corrupt workers and gain access to computer systems. Not very, it turned out.

Staff secretly dropped computer discs and USB thumb drives in the parking lots of government buildings and private contractors. Of those who picked them up, 60 percent plugged the devices into office computers, curious to see what they contained. If the drive or CD case had an official logo, 90 percent were installed.

!!!

via Adafruit

iCufflinks – nice

Adafruit industries is quickly becoming one of my favorite resources for electronics and in particular for electronics related knowledge.

They also make stuff. Like these nifty LED cufflinks – iCufflinks – that they’ve just released. The LED inside pulses just like your mac’s sleep indicator, which they say is “reverse engineered.” I admire anybody who admits to reverse engineering Apple tech without worrying about Steve Jobs’ long arm of the lawyer…

Anyway they’re the first tasteful example of wearable electronics. Period.

via Crunchgear

Trash Hack

I’ve been away from the blog for a bit – been doing some nifty stuff which I’ll relate when I can. In the meantime this is one thing I did over the weekend:

Sometimes I even make things for my own home. I’ve been slowly renovating our new apartment in Brooklyn, including making all the kitchen cabinetry. In a small kitchen its a challenge to design for best space use, and the question “what to do with all those friggin corner cabinets?” always comes up. After long debate I put a lazy susan in one and a slide-out trashcan in the other. See how fancy that drawer is? Yes there will be a front finish panel over it (maybe white – or a shade of red…)

For some reason we got a trash can that has an infrared lid opener. This was partly because it fit PERFECTLY and partly because a friend has one and after thinking it a bit silly we decided it was kind of nifty. So we ordered one from Amazon – a Nine Stars DZT-42-1. (as an aside I would like to mention how expensive simple trash cans can be if you need very particular dimensions to fit in cabinets – so I didn’t feel bad with the price of this one)

Trash can worked right out of the box fine & dandy – wave your hand in front and the lid opens smartly (inside is an IR distance sensor with circuitry). Only problem was (and I have to say I anticipated this) that when it is put in the drawer and slid closed, the electronics senses the cabinet closing around it and tries to open the lid. Well, nothing is easy so out comes my Arduino and assorted electronics gear to try to fix this. Its really a simple problem so I was able to come up with several working ideas which are not worth going into but my basic premise is as it always is when I do a project:

Find the simplest solution that will look awesome.

So first of all, it has to be all contained in the lid of the trash can. No wires coming out, nothing to get caught or broken when changing trash bags. Also – it has to work from the 6V battery pack in the trash unit. And of course power consumption should be kept to a minimum and it should look seamless.

The more I thought about it the more I was over-designing with the Arduino. Why use 600,000 – 1 MILLION transistors to do the job that ONE transistor can do? So I threw it away (not really!) and turned to a good old analog circuit. The most basic thing straight out of a Forrest Mims electronics workbook from my childhood: a simple light sensitive switch with a few resistors, a diode, a photoresistor and an NPN Transistor. Pull out the drawer, light hits the can and turns on the hand sensor with a relay. Bada bing:

See the photoresistor to the left of the interface. There is also a hole in the side to adjust a trim pot for light/dark sensitivity.

I’d be very happy if I was doing this for a client, simple solution and seamless integration.

IPod Oscilliscope

Want one of these. Wow.

via notcot

Awesome USB Interfacing

It is not easy to create a seamless USB interface device using the Arduino environment. From my somewhat limited experience with Arduino (and Mac OS X in my case), any USB interfacing you do will be read as a serial device, making it a clunky method to create devices as essential as keyboards or game controllers.

It looks like those days may be over though.  There’s an awesome example over at the Make website of a new development/interface board called  Teensy USB. They hacked the Staples “Easy” button to insert synonyms to the word “awesome” in any document being written.

Both models have an AVR ATMEGA processor, and it looks to be quite compatible with the Arduino environment and many software platforms. Arduino compatability is achieved through the Teensyduino add-on  and the microcode loading software –  Teensy Loader – is available for Mac OS X, Linux, Win XP & Win 7/Vista.

Sadly I have not yet been able to try this but I can already think of a few projects in which I WOULD have used it.  More soon….

(via slashdot)

Learning to Code

I’ve got a project coming that requires some sort of mac user interface that communicates via bluetooth & Twitter (whew!).  Soooo, for the past few days I’ve been smacking my head against my laptop as I attempt to learn something new about programming. It’s been a looooong time since college when I learned Pascal, and I can really feel it as I wade through Java & Objective C. All those brackets!! Arrgh.

On the plus side, there are many websites that have been helping a great deal – here’s one of them. Cocoalab has a wonderful Objective C tutorial – “Become an XCoder” that walks you thorough the basics and even holds your hand as you make a simple OS X application or two. The PERFECT starting point for someone who wants to begin programming on the Mac.

Note though that the PDF version of the tutorial is a bit out of date and documents a now outdated Xcode. But the HTML pages have been updated to reflect a newer version of the Apple software. This is only important as you try to link various objects in your programs.

brandontreb Developers Blog

Doing research for a software/hardware related job (first one in quite awhile…. maybe the economy IS picking up…) and found this very helpful blog with some extremely helpful posts. Specifically, I’m looking into a project that requires me to develop code that will send Twitter posts depending on such & such actions. Found this site via  his blog postings regarding developing Twitter apps.

Couldn’t find an “about” link though – so I don’t know who this mysterious fellow is though.

Zimoun Sound Sculptures

Really nice!

via Boooooom

Fastener Conversion

I have to find a machine screw that fits into a threaded hole. 8-32 fits but does not thread correctly, so its probably a metric thread. Searching the web, I snagged this table from the Elgin fastener website. So it looks like I’ll have to get a M4 x .07 screw. Putting the table on my blog is a good way of knowing where I can find it!