We Fixed the Glitch

Around the first of the year our contract manufacturer contacted us about an urgent problem with HackRF One production. They'd had to stop production because units coming off the line were failing at a high rate. This was quite a surprise because HackRF One is a mature product that has been manufactured regularly for a few years. I continued to find surprises as I went through the process of troubleshooting the problem, and I thought it made a fascinating tale that would be worth sharing.

The reported failure was an inability to write firmware to the flash memory on the board. Our attention quickly...

«Сезам откройся» Или Intel RealSense и ResNet на страже фруктов

Не секрет, что в современном высокотехнологичном мире от нас требуется постоянно подтверждать свою личность и права доступа — паролями, бесконтактными метками, отпечатками пальцев и так далее. Можно это делать и с помощью визуального отпечатка — лица пользователя. Достаточно посмотреть на наш гаджет, как он понимает — что перед ним авторизованный пользователь, и снимает блокировку экрана.

Мы решили реализовать подобную схему с помощью подручных материалов и open source решений. В качестве физического объекта, который будет обладать соответствующей "избирательностью к открытиям", был выбран сейф.

Все подробности под катом.

Osmocom Review 2017

As 2017 has just concluded, let's have a look at the major events and improvements in the Osmocom Cellular Infrastructure projects (i.e. those projects dealing with building protocol stacks and network elements for mobile network infrastructure.

I've prepared a detailed year 2017 summary at the osmocom.org website, but let me write a bit about the most note-worthy topics here.

Once upon a time, we implemented everything needed to operate a GSM network inside a single process called OsmoNITB. Those days are now gone, and we have separate OsmoBSC, OsmoMSC, OsmoHLR, OsmoSTP processes, which use interfaces that are interoperable with non-Osmocom implementations (which is what some...

34C3 and its Osmocom GSM/UMTS network

At the 34th annual Chaos Communication Congress, a team of Osmocom folks continued the many years old tradition of operating an experimental Osmocom based GSM network at the event. Though I've originally started that tradition, I'm not involved in installation and/or operation of that network, all the credits go to Lynxis, neels, tsaitgaist and the larger team of volunteers surrounding them. My involvement was only to answer the occasional technical question and to look at bugs that show up in the software during operation, and if possible fix them on-site.

34C3 marks two significant changes in terms of its cellular network:

the new post-nitb Osmocom stack was...

Very good offer for books and videos from Packt Pub. On eBook $5

Packt Publishing has a new offer, for $5 you can get a lot of eBooks and videos.
Click here for a list. There are over 4000 books and over 1000 videos to choose from.

www.apertus.org: AXIOM Team Talk Volume 13.2

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=F44rWJGSZ5A

AXIOM Beta USB 3.0 plugin module If you've been following the project you'll know that, where recording data is concerned, the AXIOM Beta has relied solely on external, off-the-shelf, HDMI recorders and all the pros and cons that are known to be inherent with those devices up to now. With the USB 3.0 plugin module, however, any computer with USB 3.0 connectivity can be used as an AXIOM Recorder. This will allow us to define format/container/metadata/etc. of uncompressed raw 4k footage for the first time. The software for this is in development and first tests have showed the data exchange between...

New book on how to made a complete ready-to-sell home automated system with ESP8266

I've been busy in the latest months writing a book  to cover some key aspects of the ESP8266 ecosystem, the chip, the cloud and a mobile application.
The book will teach you and will give you a ready-to-sell solution for an IoT product.
You will discover how to work with the GPIOs on the ESP8266, how to build your basic thermostat for your house, how to control it from your mobile with your own cloud system based on MQTT.
Securing the data using authentication at the broker level and SSL is explained in a special chapter. 
Real-time communication has a dedicated chapter where you...

BME280 and ESP8266

Latest environmental sensor from Bosh is the BME280 which can measure:
temperature humidity pressure
and can be found in mobile phones (Nexus 5). There are rumors  that the BMP280 is a BME280 which couldn't be calibrated for humidity, but I have no confirmation on this.
BME280
Can be used for:
Indoor navigation (based on changing the measured altitude - pressure) Outdoor navigation Weather forecast Home application control Context awareness ( change room detection)   Internet of Things.
Temperature precision is ± 1 C degree in 0-60C range.
Can be found in multiple modules, from SPI connectivity to I2C.
Make sure that if you are using the I2C version  to change the I2C address to 0x76. ( Default...

Самодельный текстовый лазерный проектор

В этой статье я рассажу о том, как сделать достаточно простой лазерный проектор из подручных деталей.

www.apertus.org: One week with the AXIOM Team

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/cdbENj-ml_4

Last week, apertus° community member davidak, from Germany, visited Vienna and participated in a number of AXIOM related activities in the course of one week ranging from hardware assembly, software development and building ergonomic enclosure evaluation prototypes, to shooting with the AXIOM Beta.
Davidak on various AXIOM duties in Vienna.
Shooting the Signs of Autumn in a Vienna Park Of course, nobody wants to work on the AXIOM project without taking the camera for a spin, and so, even though the weather wasn't great (typically autumn), we did. There was only one development prototype at hand but we made the most of it!...