Search results for: “controls”

  • Solved: Control Raspberry Pi media center (Kodi) with Roku TV’s remote over HDMI CEC

    TL;DR if you already figured out the documented stuff: Enable 2-way CEC (keypresses from TV remote to attached device) in the Roku secret menu: Quickly (within ~ 5 seconds) press Home 5 times, rewind, down, fast forward, down, rewind, and “Enable CEC Remote Control”. The options for viewing local content on my new Roku TV…

  • Solved: Mazda (JCI) Infotainment crashes when playing OGG Vorbis files

    The Fix (Tl;dr): The Mazda Connect (a.k.a. “JCI infotainment” or Johnson Controls Infotainment, etc.) firmware available as of 1/2016 has a problem with long tags in Ogg Vorbis files, specifically the tags used for album/cover art. Vorbis files containing cover art will likely cause the radio to freeze and then reboot. To fix this, you…

  • Free IoT Telemetry using DNS Tunneling and Other Peoples’ WiFi (Part 1)

    Well, it happened. Despite all my talk about “Internet of Things” hype being teh suck and not ready for primetime yet, I’m now an official IoT Hero. I suppose I should actually do something about that. Today, we explore cheap-as-free data exfiltration for mobile IoT gadgets using a trick known as DNS tunneling. Internet of…

  • Fun with 3D Printing: Print a Parametric Peristaltic Pump

    So, I’ve been playing around with the Lulzbot we got at work. Inspired by emmett’s sweet planetary gear bearing design, I adapted the design to be not a bearing but a peristaltic pump. Like the original bearing design, the pump prints as a single piece – no assembly required! – with captive rollers and no…

  • Notes to myself: Lulzbot TAZ n00b guide

    A work in progress… Critical Specs: Bed size / Build envelope: 298mm (X) * 275mm (Y) * 250mm (Z) Nozzle diameter: 0.35mm (shipping default; others available) Filament diameter: The TAZ’s extruder expects 3mm filament. However, not all off-the-shelf filament will be exactly this diameter; the discrepancy could affect print quality in severe cases (see notes…

  • Rez Trance Vibrator mystery LEDs, and how to control them

    So, a friend of a friend recently managed to buy the original Rez, complete with new-in-box Trance Vibrator. But the peripheral didn’t work – it would be detected, but otherwise not do anything. Knowing I had produced a compatible open source version of this hardware, she brought it over for a look. The motor was…

  • DIY-Spy: a homebrew 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum analyzer

    I was reading the Thinkgeek catalog a while back and an interesting gadget caught my eye: “Wi-Spy”, a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer on a USB stick. Coming from the world where “spectrum analyzer” refers to a big benchtop box with a name like Le Croyright, we can’t afford those Agilent on it, my first thought was,…

  • House wiring, A Beautiful Mind style

    Our power went out sometime in the last couple days’ raging thunderstorms and reset all the computers/clocks in the house, so I figured before I reset them, this was an excuse to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: map out the breaker box. (Exciting, ya? Well, this anti-electrocution research is…

  • Dark Roast and the Coffee Pod Conspiracy

    Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do! Who leaves Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the martians under wraps? We do! We do! For the last half-year or so, I and many co-workers have been using a Senseo single-serving coffee machine that someone randomly stuck in the…

  • Your cellphone battery implements SHA-1, film at 11.

    I read an article in EDN yesterday that came as a mild shocker, hashing and cryptography chips designed for embedding in….batteries. Yes, batteries. Specifically, rechargeable battery packs used in cellphones, laptops, cameras and similar consumer devices, allowing the device to reject “unauthorized” replacement batteries. Yes folks, slapping in a replacement battery pack for some discontinued…

  • Whispers from dark eyes, she takes the poison

    Shit chefs, stirring vigorously, and drama drama drama (S* v. N*, with the help of ???.) An ex from long ago popped up today on AIM, and I finally found out what I knew all along. (That modelling a relationship as a linear control system isn’t as stupidstupid as it sounds, and that even this…

  • Closedloop

    Anyway, as the days grow visibly shorter and that general blahness sets in, I’m sort of absentmindedly examining the entrails of my last relationship. (Ha, that even predates this bloggg. Wow, that’s been a while.) It’s all there. The external disturbances. The oscillatory impulse response. Pre-ringing just before the point of failure, the runaway condition,…

  • Unrecoverable

    So, a while back I was watching Blind Date (arrgh..TV…brain…melting). There was this guy, and this girl, and they obviously had some attraction, and things appeared to be going well. In the course of the typical smalltalk, they got on the subject of parties, and he told her about a time when he was at…