FPGA-and-Pi Colossus Smashes Your Codes!

If it were sixty years ago, and you were trying to keep a secret, you’d be justifiably glad that [Ben North] hadn’t traveled back in time with his Raspberry-Pi-and-FPGA code-breaking machine.

We’ve seen a lot of Enigma builds here at Hackaday — the World War II era encryption machine captured our readers’ imaginations. But perhaps the more important machines to come out of cryptanalysis during that era were Turing’s electromechanical Bombe, because it cracked Enigma, and the vacuum-tube-based Colossus, because it is one of the first programmable electronic digital computers.

[Ben]’s build combines his explorations into old-school cryptanalysis with a practical learning project for FPGAs. If you’re interested in either of the above, give it a look. You can start out with his Python implementations of Colossus to get your foot in the door, and then move on to his GitHub repository for the FPGA nitty-gritty.

It’s also a cool example of a use for the XuLA2 FPGA board and its companion StickIt board that plug straight into a Raspberry Pi for programming and support. We haven’t seen many projects using these since we first heard about them in 2012. This VirtualBoy hack jumped out at us, however. It looks like a nice platform. Anyone else out there using one?

Filed under: classic hacks, FPGA

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Genuino 101 review

Intel has been trying to break into the maker market for a few years now, having seen the success of the Arduino project and the Raspberry Pi. The Intel Galileo (reviewed in LU&D Issue 138, 4/5) proved unpopular thanks to poor IO performance from the Quark processor. Its successor, the Edison (reviewed in LU&D Issue 151, 4/5), added an Atom processor to address performance issues but its odd form factor and high-density connectors were off-putting.

The Genuino 101 is Intel’s third crack of the whip. Abandoning its previous approach of producing an Arduino-compatible microcontroller, the company has partnered with the Arduino project to create a fully official Arduino board – known as the Arduino 101 in the US and Genuino 101 elsewhere thanks to ongoing trademark issues. The result is a device which, at a casual glance, looks just like the classic microcontroller-based Arduino Uno. Yet, while it shares the Uno’s layout, the Genuino 101 is a different beast.

At its heart is the Curie module, an ultra-compact, low-power system-on-chip (SoC) designed primarily for wearable projects. Inside this chip is a pair of processors: a 32MHz Quark core acts as the central processor, while a 32MHz Argonaut RISC Core (ARC) is present as a co-processor – a tacit admission from Intel that the Quark’s ability to directly drive IO pins isn’t quite where it should be.

The presence of two processors splits the Curie module in an interesting manner. The Quark, which is a fully compatible x86 architecture processor based on the company’s old Pentium microarchitecture, runs a real-time operating system (RTOS); the ARC is used to execute whatever Arduino program you care to upload, and in a manner which is theoretically indistinguishable from any other Arduino.

In theory, this split architecture offers the best of both worlds: the flexibility and power of a microcomputer with the real-time operation and low power of a microcontroller. Sadly, at present, the RTOS is locked-down and closed-source. Intel has pledged to open-source the RTOS in March 2016, at which point the true potential of the Genuino 101 should become apparent – such as the ability to offload your own tasks to the Quark, or even to install and run a cut-down Linux directly on the device.

Want to find out more about what we thought of the Genuino 101? Check out the full review in issue 163 of LU&D!

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Hexapod Tank from Ghost in the Shell Brought to Life

Every now and then someone gets seriously inspired, and that urge just doesn’t go away until something gets created. For [Paulius Liekis], it led to creating a roughly 1:20 scale version of the T08A2 Hexapod “Spider” Tank from the movie Ghost in the Shell. As the he puts it, “[T]his was something that I wanted to build for a long time and I just had to get it out of my system.” It uses two Raspberry Pi computers, 28 servo motors, and required over 250 hours of 3D printing for all the meticulously modeled pieces – and even more than that for polishing, filing, painting, and other finishing work on the pieces after they were printed. The paint job is spectacular, with great-looking wear and tear. It’s even better seeing it in motion — see the video embedded below.

 

The tank uses custom software to handle gait control, and there is also a Unity 3D pipeline for modeling and playing back sequences of poses (animations) derived from a 3D model. The tank can be controlled via PS3 joystick, but it also has some degree of autonomy in that it can detect and track faces.

The information on the site doesn’t go too deeply into the nitty-gritty technical details, but there are plenty of excellent photos of the construction process.

This isn’t the first time someone has been inspired by Ghost in the Shell; we’ve also seen a working Tachikoma made with LEGO that drives and walks just like in the show.

Filed under: robots hacks

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QuiteRSS 0.18.3 review

The little symbol indicating a feed of headlines from a site is perhaps not so ubiquitous as it was a few years ago, but for most important news sites there is a feed – even if it’s easier to find it through Google. Google’s own Reader service closed three years ago – a small boost to desktop feed readers – but many just jumped ship to other services like Feedly.

If you’d like to bring feed reading back to your desktop, to avoid relying on some web-based service that could disappear as easily as Google Reader, QuiteRSS is a neat little reader to try. Packages are available for Arch, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, Mandriva and OpenSUSE, as well as OS X and Windows – with the pre-Qt5 version from last year also available ported to IBM’s OS/2, for the seriously retro amongst you.

We did have a few issues with stability on OpenJDK 7 on Ubuntu Trusty, but we cannot blame QuiteRSS here, as this combination has given us trouble elsewhere. In daily use it was responsive enough, but most noteworthy for a simple and pleasant interface, which gave us the news we wanted, from RSS and Atom feeds, viewable in an embedded WebKit browser – with ad blocking.

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Issue 166 of LU&D is out now!

The latest issue of Linux User & Developer is out now. If you’re among the lucky 1 million in the UK that got their hands on a free micro:bit (or you know someone who is) then this issue is a must-have! It includes everything you need to know, including a complete anatomy of the micro:bit, a guide to how it shapes up against the latest models of the Raspberry Pi, and five maker projects to get you started.

Also in this issue you’ll find the ultimate FOSS toolkit, packed with creative software to help you edit video, audio and graphics like a pro. Pick up the print edition and you get a free DVD with two live-booting distros packed with the FOSS from our feature. If you read the magazine digitally, don’t worry – our secure repo FileSilo.co.uk contains all the downloads you need.

Plus there’s a great range of tutorials in this issue to help you master filesystems, networks, passwords and much more. Issue 166 of Linux User & Developer is in all good newsagents now – if it hasn’t reached your part of the world yet, you can order a print copy or read it digitally right now!

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Pi project: Underwater drone

“When I was a kid I frequently built RC models; sailing boats and speedboats,” explains Niels Affourtit. “While I owned a fantastic RC glider and dreamed of having my own RC submarine someday, my neighbour at the time had an RC submarine and discouraged me from building one by saying this thing always had trouble with its electronics and leakage. Besides, almost all waters are murky in our area!

“Around the end of 2014, I saw a National Geographic episode about the salvage of the Costa Concordia and was very impressed with how they used a VideoRay to monitor the work done by their divers, and it helped revive my dream of having my own model submarine. That’s when I stumbled across the people who have built their own ROV.

“The ROV is controlled with a joystick connected to a laptop. The laptop runs Python scripts, and with PyGame I can read the signals from the joystick. The signals are then translated into servo commands and sent to the Raspberry Pi via a simple socket connection. The Raspberry Pi is the brain of the ROV; it communicates with the surface laptop via Ethernet. Thanks to the OpenROV project, I learnt to implement a Tenda home plug, which reduces the communication lines from four to two wires, increases the reach from about 50 metres with a submerged CAT5 to 300 metres, and makes the signal much less susceptible to noise.”

Want to find out more about Niels Affourtit’s amazing sub? Check out the full interview in issue 164 of LU&D!

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Korora review

Since its inception back in 2005, Korora has undergone numerous updates, been abandoned, rescued from obscurity and has recently been revamped into something completely new. To say it has gone on a journey would be an understatement, but the finished product proves to be one of the better entry-level distros out there.

While it’s essentially a remix of Fedora, Korora fills in some of the gaps that Fedora often seems to miss. It ships with a number of both open-source and proprietary applications, so that the end-user doesn’t need to tweak the system or set up a third-party repository. The idea of an out-of-the-box distro has never been more apparent with the ease of use that Korora both promises and delivers.

What’s even better about Korora is that it offers great customisation options to its users by supporting a number of desktop environments. Users can effortlessly switch between MATE, Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE and Gnome environments, and then perform heavy, detailed customisations, depending on their tastes and expertise.

We should also point out the existence of the helpful Pharlap tool, used for installing third-party drivers – such as graphics cards – without the complicated process than many other distros have you follow. Korora is all about simplicity, and end users are the ones who will benefit from it.

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