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Showing posts from 2019

Interactive (Touch) Musical Christmas Tree

In this video I should how to build a capacitive touch Christmas tree that allows you to play music just by touching the ornaments. All it takes is a little bit of Python code, a Raspberry Pi, and a Bare Conductive Pi Cap. Get ready to rock around the Christmas tree!

ESPlay Micro: Open Source ESP32 Game Console

Today we'll take a look at the ESPlay Micro, an open source game console built around the ESP32 WROVER SoC. Aside from being a lightweight game console for retro emulation these boards also make for a great development platform to learn low level systems programming. The hardware and software are both open source and pretty straightforward. PS: these would make for an awesome Christmas present for anyone into gaming or making. Makerfabs: https://www.makerfabs.com/esplay-micro.html Source code: https://github.com/pebri86/esplay-retro-emulation Hardware: https://github.com/pebri86/esplay_micro_hardware Hackaday: https://hackaday.io/project/166707-esplay-micro Instructables: https://www.instructables.com/id/ESPlay-Micro-Retro-Game-Console-MicroPython/

Testing 4 Raspberry Pi Gaming Platforms

I've been looking to update my home media center recently and decided to survey the landscape of Raspberry Pi gaming/media platforms. This video compares the four best ones I've been able to find which are: RetroPie, Recalbox, Lakka, and Steamlink.

Always Secure Your localhost Servers

Recently I was surprised to learn that web browsers allow any site you visit to make requests to resources on localhost (and that they will happily allow unreported mixed-content ). If you'd like to test this out, run an HTTP server on port 8080 (for instance with python -m http.server 8080 ) and then visit this page. You should see "Found: HTTP (8080)" listed and that's because the Javascript on that page made an HTTP GET request to your local server to determine that it was running. Chances are it detected other services as well (for instance if you run Tor or Keybase locally). There are two implications from this that follow: Website owners could potentially use this to collect information about what popular services are running on your local network. Malicious actors could use this to exploit vulnerabilities in those services. Requests made this way are limited in certain ways since they're considered opaque , meaning that the web page isn't able

Arduino-friendly 240x320 LCD Display Tutorial (ILI9341)

Have you ever needed to add a UI to any of your embedded projects? For instance, maybe you want to display a sensor reading graph or build your own handheld gaming system. In this video I'll take a look at some cheap 240x320 color LCD display devices that you can add to almost any microcontroller or Single Board Computer project.

Nordic nRF52840-Dongle (2.4GHz RF Development Board)

Recently I've gotten into low-power RF technology and have become quite the fan of the nRF52 SoC for that reason. Of all the BLE-capable chips I've used so far these ones reign supreme in terms of functionality and ultra-low power consumption. One of the more interesting boards I've seen powered by them is the nRF52840 dongle , directly from Nordic Semiconductor. It's tiny, well constructed, and supports a very nice set of specs: 64 MHz Cortex-M4F 1 MB Flash 256 KB RAM 2.4 GHz Transceiver (supports Bluetooth 5 with long range) In this video I introduce the Nordic nRF SDK for programming these dongles:

Exploring Sub-GHz Radio With RTL-SDR and GQRX

Today I took a look at some hardware for working with sub-GHz radio transmissions, especially FM. All of which came in a previous HackerBoxes box. My favorite item was definitely the RTL-SDR dongle! I could play around with this thing for hours surfing the radio waves and listening to weird broadcasts. There's even a Python library named pyrtlsdr for working with these devices so you can scan/record radio transmissions programmatically:  https://github.com/roger-/pyrtlsdr Next I'm going to solder together the FM transceivers included in the box and play around with writing Arduino firmware for them. Those things should work similar to the LoRa modules I've been using but they trade in the long range for increased bandwidth. Should be good for streaming data locally and still have much better range than most home WiFi or Bluetooth. Here's a video overview of the hardware included in HackerBox 0034 as well as a demo of the RTL-SDR dongle using GQRX to visually and