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.

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.

Getting air quality with ESP8266 and Amazon Alexa

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WvbpKBgGWjM/0.jpg

If last week I've managed to get the temperature and humidity with ESP8266 and Alexa, now it's time to integrate the air quality sensor GP2Y1010AU0F from Sharp.
The GP2Y1010AU0F it is a compact optical dust sensor that has an infrared emitting diode and a phototransistor that are diagonally arranged. It detects in fact the reflected light of the present dust in the air. It is effective to detect very fine particle like cigarette smoke and it can distinguish from the house smoke from the house dust.
GP2Y1010AU0F sensor. It has 6 pins and the electronic inside is split in two parts, the IRED emitting part and...

Getting temperature from ESP8266 over MQTT with Amazon Alexa

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/QQ5jtqvm_HQ/0.jpg

With the help of the Iotcentral.eu platform now I can get room temperature or outside temperature with just an ESP8266 and a temperature sensor like DHT22 or DS18B20 or BMP280.
The Alexa is questioning the iotcentral.eu server that will ask my local broker that will publish a message the the ESP8266 to ask the temperature for my room. The values for temperature and humidity will travel the other way around to Alexa, that is so nice and is letting me know about them.
On Iotcentral.eu you will find also a demoapp ( source code on git) for a plug, but you can...