If you’re enjoying a Western Canadian summer, two of the best ways to do so involve a hammock, or a boat. Seeking to improve on this mighty duo with a hammock-boat combo, [Jarrett] describes his progress at Vancouver Hack Space. The boat he chose was a one-person catemaran with an aluminium frame and what appear […]
We often think of SIM cards as simple data storage devices, but in reality a SIM card is a miniature Universal integrated circuit card, or smart card. Subscriber data isn’t a simple text string, but a program running on the smart cards tiny processor, acting as a hardware cryptographic token. The presence of this tiny […]
What’s in your crypto wallet? The simple answer should be fat stacks of Bitcoin or Ethereum and little more. But if you use a hardware cryptocurrency wallet, you may be carrying around a bit fat vulnerability, too. At the 35C3 conference last year, [Thomas Roth], [Josh Datko], and [Dmitry Nedospasov] presented a side-channel attack on […]
We’re going to go out on a limb here and say that the controller for Steel Battalion on the original Xbox is the most impressive video game peripheral ever made. Designed to make players feel like they were really in the cockpit of a “Vertical Tank”, the controller features dual control sticks, three pedals, a gear […]
For many of us, ad hoc projects end up having a certain permanence to them. Think of the number of Raspberry Pis and RTL-SDRs that are just dangling from a USB cable under a desk or stuffed behind a monitor, quietly going about their business. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Some projects, though, […]
Counting frequency is one of those tasks that seems simple on the face of it, but actually has quite a bit of nuance. There are two obvious methods, of which the first is to count zero crossings for some period. If that period is one second you are done, otherwise it’s a simple enough case […]
There are a few common lessons that get repeated by anyone who takes on the task of assembling a few hundred PCBs, but there are also unique insights to be had. [DominoTree] shared his takeaways after making a couple hundred electronic badges for DEFCON 26 (that’s the one before the one that just wrapped up, […]
With the winter months not far off, [Ben Brooks] was looking for a way to help circulate the heat from his wood-burning fireplace throughout his home. Rather than go with a commercial solution, he decided to come up with his own automated air circulation system powered by the mesh networking capabilities of one of his […]
Many moons ago, in the shadowy darkness of the 1990s, a young Lewin visited his elder cousin. An adept AMOS programmer, he had managed to get his Amiga 500 to control an RC car, with little more than a large pile of relays and guile. Everything worked well, but there was just one problem — […]
State-of-the-art welding machines aren’t cheap, and for good reason: pushing around that much current in a controlled way and doing it over an entire workday takes some heavy-duty parts. There are bargains to be found, though, especially in the most basic of machines: AC stick welders. The familiar and aptly named “tombstone” welders can do […]