Category: Projects
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Raspberry Pi – at last
The raspberry pi, for those living under a rock, is the $25 linux pc that was announced big almost a year ago. It has a 700Mhz ARM CPU, 256MB RAM and an OpenGL ES capable GPU. To enable hardware hacking it comes with lots of GPIO pins. All in all about the performance of a […]
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installing ros on a bifferboard
I wanted the robot arm to be a bit autonomous from the computer, and I thought the bifferboard should be powerful enough to drive it. So I wanted to install ROS onto it. My bifferboard runs debian squeeze, and that means it’s not just a matter of installing the packages as with ubuntu. There is […]
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Roomba vacuum cleaner hacking
Late last year I got a Roomba vacuum cleaner from a friend. My wife and I wanted to evaluate such a device for a while. The battery was completely dead, and before spending lots of money on a new battery, for a device that I didn’t know if it still worked, I tried to hook […]
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Full disk encryption with the crypto stick
Last week I finished the udacity applied cryptography course. I did not as well as in the other courses, nonetheless I learned a lot and it was (as always) really interesting. We learned about symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hashes as well as key exchange and management. Each week in addition to the regular homework, we […]
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Driving assistant
Recently I completed the udacity class “programming a robotic car”, where Sebastian Thrun thought us what makes the self driving cars tick. He drew from his experience of winning the DARPA grand challenge in 2005. Now he’s leading the Google self driving car project. It was a very interesting course. Some stuff was already covered […]
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Playing with Smart-Cards
Ever since reading the book “Kryptographie und IT-Sicherheit” where I first learned about how SmartCards work, I wanted to do some SmartCard programming. In the book it describes some inner workings of Smart Cards, and that some of them have a small Java VM inside. But it turned out that the entry was not as […]
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Installing to an external harddisk with qemu
The harddisk of my aunt’s pc was broken, and I had an old disk around that I could use for replacement. Now I wanted to install it prior to go there. Of course there is the option to take my harddisk out, and use my PC to install her harddisk. But I wanted to use […]
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Reviving my vintage 3d shutter glasses
Many people don’t even know that there were 3d rushes before the one that’s currently fading. In a previous one, some ten years ago, I bought a very expensive ASUS graphics card with shutter glasses. It was really cool for gaming with the 21 inch CRT, but nothing compared to the graphics of today’s games. […]
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A sink for the kids to play
When the new kitchen was installed in our camper, I didn’t throw everything of the old one away. Only the part with Mirella’s bad memories. I kept the faucet so that I could use it for the kids one day. Recently I exchanged the pump and the water tank. With the old parts I had […]
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Robot arm part 2 : ROS connection
As the name implies, ROS is not just another library to get familiar with. It is an operating system for robots. That is also quite different to a traditional operating system. As I didn’t want to learn a whole bunch of stuff first, I learn about the concepts and facilities as I move along. After […]