New semester

Well, I am about to start school again. I got a lot done over the summer though. Check bit.ly/barbierover for some updates on the rover project. I also got my server up and running. I installed wordpress (which isn't quite working yet) and drupal going as well. Drupal can do blogs though, so I might just use that. My server is running Windows Server 2008 database edition. I set up remote desktop and I installed loginexpress. The physical machine is sitting under my desk at home. I will have my brother turn it on and then I can remotely connect and add/remove roles and stuff. I am not completely happy with it yet, so I won't release the URL yet. I won't have a lot of time to work on it during the year, but I will work on it when I can.
My buddy Bandit5317 over at xbox-scene.com just made engadget with his micro xbox. He is also working on an xbox360 laptop. That dude is quite a craftsman.

meh

Haven't posted in a while because of work and the rover project. I am still working on my new server as well. I have a lot of projects going and they are all sort of coming together, since I want to host the rover control on my website. Anyway, keep following the rover blog and I'll put some other updates here when I have time.

Barbie Rover site up

Here it is: the project website for the rover.

http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~hscott7/rover

It has its own blog as well. Still working on it, but most of the updates will now go on that blog, not this one.

How to make an ad-hoc network between Windows and Linux

How to set up an ad-hoc network between Windows and Linux:

1. Disconnect both computers from any networks
2. make sure you have wicd installed on the linux laptop
3. On windows, go to control panel->network connections
4. right click on your wireless interface
5. go to properities and on the networking tab, scroll down
to Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCPIP/IPv4) and click on it once
6. Click properities
7. click use the following IP address and enter the following:
IP address: 192.168.1.2
subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
default gateway: 192.168.1.1
and leave the other boxes blank. Click Ok.
8. Windows may yell at you, just click ok or continue.
9. On linux, open wicd and click network->create ad-hoc network
10. name the network whatever you want (the ESSID)
11. Give it the IP 192.168.1.1
12. Click ok.
13. Connect to the new network with windows
14. You're done!

Coming soon

I just finished a website documenting the barbie car project. Once we get a video of the test run, I will post a link and go live. I will also announce the project on several websites and see if I can get on hackaday.

Random note:

Heron's fountains work underwater. The pressure from the water pushes down the air in the bottles. I could feel the water flow underwater and want to try it again with colored water in the bottles.

another update on the car

We are really only waiting on 1 part to come in the mail, our other motor controller.
Once we have that, it will take about 30 seconds to install it and get the remote control going. I was having a problem
the other day with my ubuntu laptop. After trying to install some stuff to get skype to work, I rebooted and my wifi
stopped working. I did everything I could think of and finally found a forum post that helped. It turned out that by
going to system->administration->hardware drivers, I had to enable the wifi driver. Once I did, it worked great. I rebooted
again and had the same problem, but this time the driver was enabled. I disabled it and it worked. I am now working on
getting the cameras to work. I am using ZoneMinder for linux. Its designed to be used as a home security thing, and
it can support multiple cameras. But most importantly, it can be accessed from the web and can record. It can even detect
motion and only record then, which is cool. So the way we are setting this up, we should need only a browser to control
then entire car. Just connect with hamachi and then access the page with controls and the monitor page. I also managed
to get a spare linksys wrt54g router going on only batteries. This will be how we control the car if there is no
wifi. Just fire up the router and connect to it and control it on a local network. I have been wanting to get some
relays for the arduino so i can turn stuff on and off like the router. I also got a bit more hardware done, including the
charging port. I noticed that on the back of the car was a little fake nozzle for gas. So I found a male and female
12v cigarette lighter connecter and installed it. Its pretty awesome, now you just open the little gas thing
and plug in the charger. I found a nice piece of pvc that I can use to make the rocket launcher. I plan on using
vex to build a holder for it and a gear assembly. Then we can pick what angle to launch the rocket from and put it at
0 degrees for storage. We might even be able to get a sensor on there that tells you what angle you are at or at least
when you have hit a certain angle. I also came up with a design to mount the camera with. Basically its just a
long piece of pvc with the camera at the top. Then just underneath it is the usb hub with the bluetooth and wifi dongles.
If I can find a pigtail, then I can also put the antennas from the linksys router up there for better connection.
That whole thing rotates. In the end, we will have 2 cameras. The first is the logitech that is for the main driver.
The second is the built in camera on the latop that will be looking at a multimeter monitoring battery and anything
else we want. I also still need to get some sort of tread for the tires. This thing is really close to done now.
We are planning on debuting it at bandcamp during a night practice. In which case it will need lights...

another car update

I know I haven't given a big update yet, so here it goes. The car is painted and we have 1 wheel and axel mounted. We solved the problem with the motor controller we were having: it turns out that the one we were using was broken when we got it. Once we started using the other one we order, the code worked great. The lights responded and the voltage went from -12 to 0 to 12. I emailed the company who made them and I found out that the PWM range is not standard for them. The PWM is Pulse Width Modulation, which is how servos get talked to. Instead of sending a static voltage, it sends pulses. The length and width of those pulses decide how the servo acts. So for us, pulses of length 1ms mean that the servo is going in full reverse (0 degrees on an r/c controller). 1.5ms is neutral (90 degrees) and 2.0ms is full forward (180 degrees). The duty cycle doesn't matter that much, but should be around 20ms. On the controller that we got, its cool because if you don't supply an extrernal battery, it executes the code using the 5v it needs to run (so you can get -5v to 5v). Anyway, so we got all excited and the multimeter was reading correctly, so we plugged in the motor and barely got any movement at all. We tried different size motors and they all worked ok. We concluded that it was drawing too much current. The controllers we got could handle 3 amps continuous and 9 amps max, at which point it cuts the power to save itself. It does the same for temperature. I noticed that even after only a few seconds, it started getting really hot. Based on everything that we had seen, we concluded that we were drawing too much. We calculated a theoretical draw of 13 amps (i fried the current measuring part of my multimeter). Our solution was a giant resistor. We did some math and decided that we would do 3- 1 ohm 30 watt resistors in parallel straight off the battery. We ordered those parts yesterday and they ship today. I am also going to try to get another motor controller in the mail to replace the broken one. If all goes to plan, then we should have it working maybe by the end of the week. I have to finish up some code for the arduino and the web interface. Right now the demo page for the web interface is just php buttons. I wanted to support keyboard use to make it easier, and it looks like a bit of javascript should do the trick. I will have the mouse be in a special box that reads the keystrokes. When a key is pressed, its ID is sent as a variable to another php page that isn't loaded. That way we should be able to have php do stuff without reloading the page each time. I am still experimenting with that, but the demo works for now. Then the only thing we have to do is install everything and get the extra stuff working. The extra stuff are things like rockets, speakers, lights, etc. We plan on debuting the car at bandcamp this year. Imagine this: its night, and they are almost done with practise. Then out of now where, a little power wheels are comes driving accross the field playing music with lights. It drives the the side of the feild and launches a rocket. It is this image that keeps us working. We are still trying to think of other things to attach to the car. I thought about some sort of turbo feature. Maybe use a relay on one of the arduino output pins to trigger a dump of like an extra 6-12 volts. We also will have a pan/tilt for the webcam. The webcam will be able to see my multimeter screen, so we can keep an eye on the battery, because it can't get below 10.5v. On that note, it turns out that you can charge a battery with a charger rated at the same voltage, but lower amp-hour rating. It just takes longer. The other thing we want to do it have an airsoft gun with pan/tilt as well on the back.

quick update

I know I keep putting off a big post, but oh well. Got the car painted and got my code finally working. Tonight I will finish that up. I also got ubuntu and xp dual booting on my netbook. Here are the links I used:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=4900

I also posted this on stack overflow which helped my code a lot:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/941744/keyboard-input-in-php


Still trying to learn AJAX enough to capture keyboard input so we can use the arrow keys to drive the rover. Until then, I will get a button based version going for electronics testing. A nice long post is coming soon with plenty of pictures of the rover process and code.

Catch up

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

one more thing

I need to write a script that will make me a daily/weekly schedule. It needs to generate the weather, stuff from my google calander, parse the facebook birthday page, put important rss feeds on there, etc. There are scripts that do some of this, I just need to modify them.

I lied

Had to write these down. These are the embedded electronics modules that I want to play with:

-XBee wireless
-arduino (lillypad, duamelavente or however you spell it)
-MAKE controller
-phidget
-vex controller
-ATMega

work

There won't be any posts for the next couple weeks because of finals. I will literally be studying 24/7 for the next 3 weeks. I promise I have lots of cool projects planned for the summer, and I will update that as soon as I can. Until then...

What are the odds?

Recently, my friend's dad got 5 of the 6 lottery numbers and won a bunch of money.

according to Wikipedia, the odds of winning the florida lottery is 1:22,957,480

(the odds of what her dad won are 1:81,409)

according to the national safety council website, you are:

4 times more likely to die from legal execution than win the lottery

3 times more likely to die from being hit by lightning

about as likely to die from excessive heat or cold from a man made origin

about as likely to die from being confined to or trapped in a low oxygen environment

2 times more likely to die from being struck by another person or from the explosion of a pressurized device

11 times more likely to be killed from an accident when you are an passenger in an animal drawn vehicle.


That is why I will never buy a lottery ticket.

small hack link dump

http://hack0wn.com/forum/index.php?topic=963.0

build this:
http://www.ladyada.net/make/wavebubble/powersupply.html

use this:
http://ikat.ha.cked.net/

watch this:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2160824376898701015

go to this:
http://dc404.kaos.to/index.html

buy one of these:
http://www.fon.com/en/

Fun with physical access to public computers

There is a common source of hacking that many people overlook. It is well known that physical access is total access. That is, if an attacker has physical access to a computer, it is not your computer anymore. Usually this involves a live CD to do things like grab the SAM file or replace it, etc. I want to concentrate on a situation where you have physical access, but have limited time and privlidges. We are also assuming that you can't boot to anything else. And we are going to say that you are not allowed to use a hardware keylogger. What can you do? Well, the objective is to get admin privlidges. Then, we will own the box. So. First, lets see about a shell. In my experience, I just write a batch file. This is the common source of hackery that is overlooked sometimes. Batch files and VBS scripts don't need to be compiled and the language is simple. As long as you have notepad, you are good. Batch files are just a collection of commands to be executed by cmd.exe. It also supports if and switch statements, and several other basic programming features. VBS scripts are just visual basic scripts. Most people use visual studio to make stuff with visual basic, but you can actually get away with only notepad. There won't be a GUI, but that can be a good thing. The only way to tell that either a batch or vbs script is running is the task manager. This is only one reason why disabling the task manager for users is a bad idea. Anyway, here is the batch script that I used to get a shell whenever I needed one.
[code]
@echo off
cmd.exe
[/code]
Yes really, thats it. Even if the admin disables the ability to execute cmd.exe if you navigate to it, this will work. You can google for all kinds of interesting batch and vbs scripts. Or you can be less lame and write your own. Once you get a shell, you can add yourself as administrator. You can also kill applications that you don't want running. In my situation, you could see the processes running but could not end any of them. So if I don't want VNC or other remote control software or access restriction stuff running, you can force kill them.

Or, use this:
This is a bloody brilliant site written by paul craig. He presented it at DefCon last year. It is designed to let you exploit internet kiosks. It basically automates the process of trying every possible way to get a shell. And it works great. Be aware that the site may be nsfw because of the giant picture of a girls naked butt on the front. That is the one thing that I do not understand, because you would think that you wouldn't want to draw attention to yourself. Anyway, I am working on getting a version of his site up without the picture on it. Until then, he has released a zip file with all the code for the site in it, so you can use that. Here's the site:

http://ikat.ha.cked.net/


I also recommend watching the talk he gave at defcon here. Its almost 100Mb, but its worth it. It gives a great explanation of what exactly is going on behind the scenes.

Enjoy!

quick hack idea

Get a pineapple (fon router hack, hak5.org for more details) and bring it on a airplane with you. Set up a network called United Airlines Courtesy Wireless or something and see how many people connect. For bonus points, use your cell phone (if you can get a signal) to actually connect them to the internet. While deliberately setting up lots of wireless communication on an airplane may not be the best idea, I'd be willing to bet that everything on the plane is shielded and you probably won't crash the thing. I'd also be willing to be that the first thing people will connect to is their email. More bonus points for convincing the captain or flight attendants that the plane is already equipped with wireless via social engineering so that they announce over the intercom that free wireless is available. You could set up a captive portal that had them download a small file that allowed them to join the 'special airplane kind of wifi' and pack a little dummy program that displays a window with a bogus speed graph and the word "Connected!". Then using the iexpress packing method, also include an exe created from metasploit that executes after the dummy program does. Then it doesn't matter that the internet suddenly doesn't work and the captive portal redirects to a page that explains how, unfortunately, the connection to the ground is currently unavailable due to wind currents or something. By that time, the exe is already running and you have a meterpreter session on every computer that connected. Of course, the classic, easier hack for this situation is just the pineapple asking clients with wifi on for their autoconnect SSID and then silently connecting with them.