Wow, a lot has happened. This is, sadly, a quick post to do a couple things.
1. A better way to do usb booting: UNetbootin will take an iso and make a flash drive bootable in a jiffy.
2. The barbie rover project is coming along nicely. Today we go most of the hardware done, so it actually has wheels and new motors and gears! The biggest thing left to do is software and electronics, plus any extras we want (speakers, rockets, etc).
I will post later with more pictures of the project and a summary of the code and the terrible process it has been. I can't wait to start driving this thing, and then start wardriving this thing. We are going to get some more work done tomorrow with the hardware and painting. I will be working on code tomorrow night (maybe afternoon to) and monday. I really hope my new plan goes as smooth as it is supposed to. anyway, more later.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
Another car update
We have met once since the last post and have made several decisions. First of all, after getting the car, we pressure washed it and took it apart. The good news is that it now actually looks pink, not greenish gray, and the way it was laid out is friendly. We are going to order new motors for it, since the ones in it now are rusted. Replacement motors should run about $3 each. I am kind of in charge of electronics. Here is my plan. We will hook each motor up to a speed controller that will go in an arduino. The arduino will be powered from an onboard aspire one. The laptop will be feeding it C code, one program that takes in arguments that decide what to do. This will then be controlled graphically via PHP. To control it remotely, we will connect to the laptop with Hamachi. In the future, we will host a little http server on it and control it via a webpage. For now, we will use the laptop's wifi to connect to an access point. Ideally, we would have a cell phone piping internet to it so it would always have internet. Unless we can use my Dads phone, we will have to write an autoconnect shell script. I am thinking I am going to run ubuntu on it, but I am not sure yet. If so, then I have a couple shell scripts i can modify to aggressivly connect to networks. This is why 2 interfaces would be helpful. 1 onboard, 1 usb. It would always have 1 connected. The rules would be to always connect to an open network when the signal was above a certain level, and to try to crack wep networks by letting the operator know that they are in range and it is trying to crack. then it could store these keys on a keyring for later use. For the first beta test, we will be using a closed local network. You will also be able to control it via an ad hoc or p2p network. Then of course, you have to be within a certain range. There is a lot more to do, and we are going to order parts tomorrow. I can't wait to start playing with an arduino, I have heard so much about them. More later.
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Which is way smaller than using Apache or something when all we need to serve is a single page of PHP. We will remote control it with SSH. I am less concerned with hard drive space than I am with RAM. The name of the game is minimal power usage, because we would like a long battery life. Yes, I know there are all kinds of great little linux boxes, or I could use a pico ITX, or a linutop (runs off 9v, very tempting), or even an EEE pc or something. The problem with those options is money. We don't have a lot to spend on this at all, and most of the money is going to be used buying the controller and battery. Unless we can mooch those off of someone, the budget is small. If we do end up having to buy a machine, we will probably end up getting a pico ITX, or an EEE pc because of simplicity.
As for scripting, I found something called airoscript yesterday. It is designed to be used with aircrack-ng and that suite of tools. It basically scans for networks and recommends attacks based on the encryption type. That combined with a simple network setup script should be really nifty. Airoscript even has a keychain thing so you can save old keys and use them again later rather than recracking. The problem with jumping on encrypted networks is going to be time. I really don't want to have to sit in front of a house for like 30 minutes waiting for IVs to come in, so that part will be experimental at first. Well, the whole thing will be experimental at first. Anyway, we plan on using 2 wifi cards, so we can be connect 100% of the time. I'm gonna go look for a cheap EEE pc now. More as it comes.
Edit:
Pictures coming soon. Also, to fund this, we are starting a little computer repair business. This will be interesting. Got a lot going on right now, will post more details when I have time.
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Which is way smaller than using Apache or something when all we need to serve is a single page of PHP. We will remote control it with SSH. I am less concerned with hard drive space than I am with RAM. The name of the game is minimal power usage, because we would like a long battery life. Yes, I know there are all kinds of great little linux boxes, or I could use a pico ITX, or a linutop (runs off 9v, very tempting), or even an EEE pc or something. The problem with those options is money. We don't have a lot to spend on this at all, and most of the money is going to be used buying the controller and battery. Unless we can mooch those off of someone, the budget is small. If we do end up having to buy a machine, we will probably end up getting a pico ITX, or an EEE pc because of simplicity.
As for scripting, I found something called airoscript yesterday. It is designed to be used with aircrack-ng and that suite of tools. It basically scans for networks and recommends attacks based on the encryption type. That combined with a simple network setup script should be really nifty. Airoscript even has a keychain thing so you can save old keys and use them again later rather than recracking. The problem with jumping on encrypted networks is going to be time. I really don't want to have to sit in front of a house for like 30 minutes waiting for IVs to come in, so that part will be experimental at first. Well, the whole thing will be experimental at first. Anyway, we plan on using 2 wifi cards, so we can be connect 100% of the time. I'm gonna go look for a cheap EEE pc now. More as it comes.
Edit:
Pictures coming soon. Also, to fund this, we are starting a little computer repair business. This will be interesting. Got a lot going on right now, will post more details when I have time.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Car Aquired!
Well, I got a barbie car. My neighbors had one that they didn't want anymore, so we got it for free. It doesn't work, and it needs some serious help. It had been sitting outside for a long time, so pretty much all the screws are rusted beyond ever being unscrewed again. It still has a battery and charger though. Here are some pictures of it with the seat removed. Luckily, new motors look pretty easy to install. We will be meeting in the next day or 2 to discuss hardware and everything, so parts should be in the mail soon. Yesterday I started working on a stripped down version of Ubuntu to run on an old desktop we will use. It is command line only, no GUI, and has a good collection of common linux tools. I wanted Ubuntu rather than something like D*mn Small Linux (DSL) because of apt-get. Waaaaay easier to install new stuff. So the main stuff it has on it is SSH, Python, and Remastersys which I use to make a liveCD of the current installation. I managed to get to version 2 yesterday (I'm not messing with partial versions, the first ISO I make is version 1, the second is version 2, etc). It also has gcc on it of course. It turns out that there is a really nifty Python command that spawns an HTTP server that serves the current directory:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Which is way smaller than using Apache or something when all we need to serve is a single page of PHP. We will remote control it with SSH. I am less concerned with hard drive space than I am with RAM. The name of the game is minimal power usage, because we would like a long battery life. Yes, I know there are all kinds of great little linux boxes, or I could use a pico ITX, or a linutop (runs off 9v, very tempting), or even an EEE pc or something. The problem with those options is money. We don't have a lot to spend on this at all, and most of the money is going to be used buying the controller and battery. Unless we can mooch those off of someone, the budget is small. If we do end up having to buy a machine, we will probably end up getting a pico ITX, or an EEE pc because of simplicity.
As for scripting, I found something called airoscript yesterday. It is designed to be used with aircrack-ng and that suite of tools. It basically scans for networks and recommends attacks based on the encryption type. That combined with a simple network setup script should be really nifty. Airoscript even has a keychain thing so you can save old keys and use them again later rather than recracking. The problem with jumping on encrypted networks is going to be time. I really don't want to have to sit in front of a house for like 30 minutes waiting for IVs to come in, so that part will be experimental at first. Well, the whole thing will be experimental at first. Anyway, we plan on using 2 wifi cards, so we can be connect 100% of the time. I'm gonna go look for a cheap EEE pc now. More as it comes.
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Which is way smaller than using Apache or something when all we need to serve is a single page of PHP. We will remote control it with SSH. I am less concerned with hard drive space than I am with RAM. The name of the game is minimal power usage, because we would like a long battery life. Yes, I know there are all kinds of great little linux boxes, or I could use a pico ITX, or a linutop (runs off 9v, very tempting), or even an EEE pc or something. The problem with those options is money. We don't have a lot to spend on this at all, and most of the money is going to be used buying the controller and battery. Unless we can mooch those off of someone, the budget is small. If we do end up having to buy a machine, we will probably end up getting a pico ITX, or an EEE pc because of simplicity.
As for scripting, I found something called airoscript yesterday. It is designed to be used with aircrack-ng and that suite of tools. It basically scans for networks and recommends attacks based on the encryption type. That combined with a simple network setup script should be really nifty. Airoscript even has a keychain thing so you can save old keys and use them again later rather than recracking. The problem with jumping on encrypted networks is going to be time. I really don't want to have to sit in front of a house for like 30 minutes waiting for IVs to come in, so that part will be experimental at first. Well, the whole thing will be experimental at first. Anyway, we plan on using 2 wifi cards, so we can be connect 100% of the time. I'm gonna go look for a cheap EEE pc now. More as it comes.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
First projects
Yesterday, my friend and I built a Heron's fountain. Wikipedia has a good description of you don't know what that is. Here is a video of it (sorry for the format, it was taken on my phone), and here is a picture of the first version. The first version we tried to get away with using Slurpee straws (we biked a couple miles to get them because we had no car) which didn't work. So once we got a car, we bought aquarium tubing and it worked great. The most important thing is the seal at each bottle. We first tried impression material (yes, we just had some lying around), which worked ok, but it set pretty fast and was hard to get in small cracks. We read somewhere that PlayDoh would work well. It didn't. Turns out that it actually dissolves in water. Finally, we had a stroke of genius and used hot glue. It looked much better and worked great.
Today, I made version 1 of a business card with planetary gears in it. Here it is. The problem is that the card stock I used is 20 pound, and its a bit too thin to let the gears mesh. I am going to try it again with 40 pound, or any thicker I can find. I also cut it out by hand with a scalpel and scissors. Most people did it with a laser cutter or a CNC. I found an instructable on how to make a laser cutter with 2 scanners, but I thought of a better solution: a lego plotter. I know that the Mindstoms set came with instructions on building a printer, I just need to change the pen to a laser diode, which is not hard. Programming would probably be a pain though. But I'm sure there's some homebrew stuff out there.
Lots more projects in store. Barbie car should be starting soon.
Today, I made version 1 of a business card with planetary gears in it. Here it is. The problem is that the card stock I used is 20 pound, and its a bit too thin to let the gears mesh. I am going to try it again with 40 pound, or any thicker I can find. I also cut it out by hand with a scalpel and scissors. Most people did it with a laser cutter or a CNC. I found an instructable on how to make a laser cutter with 2 scanners, but I thought of a better solution: a lego plotter. I know that the Mindstoms set came with instructions on building a printer, I just need to change the pen to a laser diode, which is not hard. Programming would probably be a pain though. But I'm sure there's some homebrew stuff out there.
Lots more projects in store. Barbie car should be starting soon.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Finally
Hooray, first year of Tech done. I have so many projects I want to work on this summer. I'm going geocaching today, and my and my friend are going to start work on the Barbie Car soon. I am also working on getting a server set up for hosting. I'll post back as projects are finished.
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