LED Lamp PCBs Arrived
I ordered the parts for it yesterday, and almost screamed when several of the components were out of stock. But I found some shady sources to get the extra parts from.
Defcon talks posted online
The defcon talks from this year are available now:
http://www.defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-18-archive.html
I think the other stuff like the code for the badges will be posted soon.
-Rez
LED Lamp PCB Round 2
I have been busy working on iphone contract work lately, but a few days ago I made a new pcb for the lamp circuit, and payed to have it made. The lead time is 8 days, but probably more with shipping.
This is a zoomed out view, hopefully I didn't miss any details and this won't blow up in my face when I assemble it. This is the moment for the lamp, if this works then the hardest part is over.
Trying not to get my hopes up.
-Rez
Defcon 18 summary
I like....hacking conferences.
First off, I did not participate in the Crack Me If You Can contest. I had all my code ready as well as some dictionaries, however the competition was ungodly. My home-brewn code was singlethreaded, and would take 4 days to go through a 2gb dictionary on my machine. The winners of this contest had 11 people with off the shelf software, and quad-core or greater with sli latest-gen gpu crunching power. I think the stats were that 60% of the hashes were cracked within 48 hours average across all teams.
I unfortunately did not get to participate in the badge hacking contest either. I arrived on the first day to registration at maybe 3:30pm, and they had just sold out all of the hackable badges at 2:00pm. So they gave me a paper badge. Luckily on the closing ceremony some extra 9 came in, and I got one. It's weird that Kingpin(the guy who designs the badges) doesn't like the arduino(referred to it as retarduino). Arduino is my first, but now I will have to try out the microcontroller on the badge and see what non arduino mcs are all about.
Altogether the talks this year were more mediocre than Defcon 17. Amongst these there were some gems however, and DC18 had more less shiny gems than DC17's less more shiny gems.
But the bad talks were baaaaaaad. There were guys giving python talks that admitted on stage that they only started learning python a week before their talk. There was a girl who demonstrated how to rip songs from internet websites........which any 'retarduino' as kingpin puts it, can do with 5 minutes of googling. Then there was a guy who just read off his slides which were a million pages long with no demonstration at the end. He basically theorycrafted.
Now, EFF is cool but the amount of EFF pimping was too much. I donated a little bit, but it seemed around every corner I was getting asked to donate and then being scowled/shunned for not giving more money.
So, one of the things EFF was doing to raise money during defcon was giving 50$ mowhawk haircuts. At the ending ceremony some EFF spokesperson(I think it was Kellie Brownell) was like "thanks for the money, we are SOO grateful", and someone in the audience yelled "wheres your mowhawk?" Then the audience started chanting "do it on stage, do it on stage," the EFF spokesperson said she would get one later and disappeared with haste. Everyone with a mowhawk in the audience, of which there were many, quickly realized how hard they were trolled. I lol'ed.
The How I Met Your Girlfriend talk was an all around 10. Every point made had a purpose, and it all fit together very nicely.
That said, there were many script based attacks. I'll be dipping my toe in this area from piqued curiosity.
There was an increase in talks relating to radio technology. DCFlux's moonbouncer was really cool, and the talk on how to intercept cellular GSM data. This defcon (18) was more useful from the hardware hacking side. Lots of "Oh I didn't think it would work but I never thought to look at it that way." Talks this year were waay more practical and elegant.
One thing that I didn't like though was the no camera policy was changed. You are now allowed to take 'public' photos, which means anybody can photograph anybody else at defcon.
-Rez
Phonophrenic in App Store
I already found 3 bugs, and will be submitting a patch shortly.
-Rez
My Descent
This is the second year I am going to Defcon, and for the past few days I have been trying to get up to speed on cracking hashes for a contest. I've never done this before.
My first reaction was to try brute force, so I whipped up a program in OSX to do it, but it became evident that the process would take too much time..
My second try was to do rainbow tables, but they can take longer. I cracked for three days and only got one password out of a practice hash list.
So now I am just going to gather all the dictionaries that I can and use them. The contest is Crack Me If You Can, and contestants will have two days to crack 53,000 hashes. The person who has cracked the most at the end wins.
The competition is totally hardcore though.
Leaving the 29th and coming back the 1st or 2nd.
-Rez
Phonophrenic in review
I reaally hope they approve this, because I went out of the way on the aesthetics, which for me is a total chore.
This is the app I was talking about that will replace Song Lottery, it gets random keywords from wikipedia, then searches the net for songs to stream to the device based on those keywords.
The icon is a bit bright, but that is to compensate for my ipod's dim screen. Not sure, but the colors are different on the device. The difference is about 20 brightness units in GIMP.
-Rez
LED Lamp R&D Done
This is a picture of an 15v 1A led being run from my switching regulator which is connected to 120v. All of the R&D on the lamp is done, now I just have to make the pcb, test the pcb circuit, then make the led mcpcb, test the led mcpcb, then make the case and I am done with the lamp.
-Rez
iOS4 codesigning
Apple changed code-signing without updating the documentation. My clients reported problems, so I had to scour forums to find out what the problem was.
The first thing to mention, is that an app cannot be codesigned for ad hoc and appstore distribution at the same time anymore. You will need to get your provisioning profiles again.
I got things working back to normal by doing these two tasks.
-Rez
Song Lottery Axed
I removed Song Lottery from sale on the app store today. It turned out to be another in my long list of tankers haha. My idea behind Song Lottery was to help people find random music on the iTunes Store then take commisions, but the achilles heel turned out to be making the affiliate links working.
They don't work unless opened in a browser, which makes for a tacky user experience. I did everything I could to make a direct launch url from the app, but then they don't register for commissions.
So I left the app online without affiliate links, but as you can see from the ratings the user's were probably looking for free music, instead of to discover new music. Checking periodically and seeing it rated an average of two stars just became too much of an eyesore, even though there were people who rated it 5 stars.
So this may seem grim, but there is some good news. I have found a way to give users the ability to listen to full length random songs, at the consequence of a slightly smaller selection. The premise of Song Lottery will be resurrected in a new app.
-Rez
Buck Regulator Working So Far
With another rs232 board, 3 optocouplers, and two more leds fried, as well as another order from Digikey I have the buck regulator working up to 30v.
Some things I learned, a valley fill circuit really doesn't help with 120hz ripple at low wall voltages(<30). Also it is a lot simpler to just use a large input cap for the wall voltage so far from what I have seen.
Another thing that I found out is that even though the ground side of the leds is floating half the time, that is actually where you should connect the differential amplifier ground lead. The voltage will read as much as is dropping across the leds. It was confusing for me because the line wouldn't move until I came around 30% of rated current, but that is actually how it works. As you increase the voltage, the scope will read higher, until it reads spec volts at spec amps.
Now all I have to do is get it working at 120v, which just requires a 120v linear regulator, and 120v rated caps.
-Rez
More Lamp GUI Progress
I got the majority (Read: hard part) of work done on the lamp's BIOS. Got a bit lazy taking pix but there will be more later. Glad that phase is done because the wires are starting to pop out on that arrangement.
In these screens you can see the scheduling GUI. The user can move through 9000 slots and specify when to turn on the lights, at what intensity, what color, and on what day.
Now, for the circuit to work I just have to get the switching regulator working again. Well, it never worked fully to begin with, but I have plans to fix that. Upon ordering parts, everything was out of stock, end of lifed, or had it's price changed, and that was frustrating. Luckily I somehow spent all day finding suitable parts, and they should be arriving next week.
-Rez
LED Lamp BIOS GUI progress
I just got done writing the Set Time function to set the lamp's clock. It took all of two days just for this. Programming the BIOS GUI is very slow and low level compared to what I am used to!
-Rez
LED Lamp resumed
The programmable led lamp project is alive and well.
This is the logic circuit. It will control the LED psus, and allow the user to specify the lamp's behavior. Right now I am writing the GUI to tie all of the individually working circuits together. That would be the LCD, atmega1280, clock, and external memory.
-Rez
Nails in the coffin for custom pc case
I axed the elance custom pc case project a few days ago.
There were several things that went wrong.
1. Provider asked for extra money outside of the contract amount, and put my project on back burner when I said no.
2. Provider changed and deviated from the criteria despite reminders, then told me his version was better consistently.
3. Asked for milestones to be funded before they were met.
4. Provided and submitted new funding projects which I had to disapprove.
There are more, but this list is enough..
So I decided to cut my losses. I read that Red Beard from Corsair had the same issues when designing the 800d. Mainly that the designer he hired decided to go in his own direction as well. But, Red Beard worked through that issue I think.
If I had to do it over, I would not do one project to get a prototype. I would do two, one project to have the case designed in Solidworks, and then another to materialize the Solidworks design into real life. Second, don't pay anything upfront. Always have a milestone, even a small one so you can fold if your provider isn't what they presented themselves to be.
I plan to do it this way when I get around to the case for my led lamp.
-Rez