Dren.dk

Rui Santos writes, “In this project, you’re going to learn how to control the ESP8266 or the ESP32 with voice commands using Alexa (Amazon Echo Dot). As an example, we’ll control two 12V lamps connected to a relay module. We’ll also add two 433 MHz RF wall panel switches to physically control the lamps.”

More info at randomnerdtutorials.com.

Check out the video after the break.

WiFi cameras like many other devices these days come equipped with some sort of Linux subsystem. This makes the life of a tinkerer easier and you know what that means. [Tomas C] saw an opportunity to mod his Xiaomi Dafang IP camera which comes configured to work only with proprietary apps and cloud.

The hack involves voiding the warranty by taking the unit apart and installing custom firmware onto it. Photos posted by [Tomas C] show the mainboard powered by an Ingenic T20 which is a popular IP Camera processor featuring some image and video processing sub-cores. Upon successful flashing of the firmware, the IP camera is now capable of a multitude of things such as remote recording and playback which can be configured using the web UI as documented by [Tomas C]

We did a little more digging on the custom firmware and discovered that the original author of the custom firmware, [EliasKotlyar] has done a lot of work on this project. There are loads of images of the teardown of a camera and an excellent set of documentation of how he made the hack. Everything from adding serial headers, getting root access, dumping the firmware and even toolchain links are given on the page. This is extremely handy for a newbie looking to get into the game.

And IP Cameras are not of the only hackable hardware out in the wild. There are other devices that are running Linux based firmware such as the Wifi SD Cards that run OpenWRT. Check out the essential guide to compiling OpenWRT from source if you are looking to get started with your next IP Camera hack.

Thanks for the tip [Orlin82]

Dr. Scott M. Baker published a new build:

The original reason for this project is that I wanted to build a standalone RC2014 with keyboard and display. There is an official RC2014 serial keyboard, but I find it a little inconvenient for my big fingers and poor eyesight. I have plenty of old PS/2 keyboards laying around, so I figured I’d rig up a microcontroller to convert the PS/2 keyboard interface into a TTL-level serial interface that could be plugged directly into the RC2014’s serial port.
Along the way, I discovered that the very same circuit would make an interesting project to turn a PS/2 keyboard into a simple MIDI controller. So I adapted the circuit for that purpose as well.

See the full post on his blog.

Check out the video after the break.

Politicon is a non-partisan “Unconventional Political Convention” that brings Republicans, Democrats, and people of all political stripes together to get worked up over politics. It's a lot of fun, and it goes down in Pasadena, CA on Saturday, July 29th and Sunday, July 30 at the Convention Center. I will be there, hosting and speaking on panels that include the likes of noted Delta airlines seat-swapper Ann Coulter and longtime Donald Trump ally Roger Stone.

Buy tickets here. (more…)

Moninda Marube, a professional runner from Kenya who is also a student at the University of Maine at Farmington, awoke before 5 a.m. on Wednesday to go for an 18-mile run.

Things were fine for about six miles—until Marube ran into two black bears on a trail near Auburn Lake. After a five-second staredown, Marube did precisely what experts say you shouldn't: He turned around and ran, according to the Lewiston-Auburn Sun Journal. The bears immediately gave chase, and got as close as 10 yards from Marube before he managed to lock himself in a screened porch.

Then a waiting game began.

"They could see me. I could see them," Marube told the Sun Journal. Ten minutes went by like this, as the bears sniffed around, before they suddenly peeled off into the woods. (The bears apparently didn't realize that they could easily have broken through the screens.)

Marube's close encounter with two of Maine's estimated 36,000 black bears was over, and left him with a moment of contemplation. "Just make peace with people," he told the Sun Journal. "You never know when your day comes."

Good advice.

So what should you do if you see a black bear? According to the National Park Service, stand your ground and start shouting, while beginning a slow retreat. You should also throw rocks. If the bear attacks anyway, fight with any available weapon, including your bare fists.

"Do not," they advise, "play dead."

Amazon announced today it has agreed to buy the Whole Foods grocery chain for $13.4 billion, as the internet retailer eyes a broader expansion of services.

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CNN reports today that Patrick Leahy and Al Franken, two democratic senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked former FBI Director James Comey to investigate Attorney General Jeff Sessions over concerns Sessions may have had an undisclosed private meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

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Yup, we can hear a crowd full of “not-a-hack” loading their cannons as we speak, but this machine has a special place in the community. For years, the Taig milling machine has remained the go-to micro mill for the light-duty home machine shop. These machines tend to be adorned and hacked to higher standards, possibly because the community that owns these tools tends to enjoy machining for machining’s sake–or possibly because every single component of the mill is available as a replacement part online. For many, this machine has been a starting point to making chips at home. (In fact, Other Machine Co’s CTO, Mike Estee, began his adventure into machining with a Taig.)

For years, Taig has sold their machines with a leadscrew and a brass nut that could be tensioned to cut down the backlash. Backlash still remains an issue for the pickiest machinists, though; so, at long last, Taig has released a backlash-free ball-screw variant in two incarnations: an all-in-one machine pre-fitted with ballscrews and an upgrade kit for customers that already decorated their garage with the lead-screw model.

In the clip below [John] takes us on a tour of the challenges involved in cramming 3, 12-mm ballscrews into the original topology. As we’d expect, a few glorious chunks of metal have been carved away to make space for the slightly-larger ballnut. Despite the cuts, the build is tidy enough to fool us all into thinking that ballscrews landed in the original design from the start.

Confused why ballscrews are such a giant leap from leadscrews? Lend your eyes and ears a few moment to take in [Al]’s overview on the subject.

Newsweek is expected to publish on Wednesday a bombshell Kurt Eichenwald report that reveals some of Donald Trump's financial conflicts of interest, and other unflattering information the reporter says could change the 2016 US presidential election.

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