multimolti's Techblog » Electronics

E-Book readers coming up

multimolti — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:32:26 +0000

In the last time, E-Book readers are coming up. In the beginning, they were heavy, had bad displays and were really expensive. But by now, the developers managed to create some products really looking worth to buy. Currently, there are two major readers: the Amazon Kindle and the Sony PRS-505.

With Kindle, Amazon wants to overtake the E-Book reader market. It features an 15cm display with 800×600 pixels and has the size of a normal book. The user can download E-Books directly from the Amazon shop using a free mobile connection, so you’ve got basically all available books with you at every time. Up to 200 books should fit into the internal memory which can be extended with an SD memory card.
The battery should last for one week, since it only needs power to turn pages (once the new page is loaded, the display keeps the image without needing any power). In addition, the user can add comments to lines of the E-Book. Price: 280â‚¬ (360 US$)

Sony’s PRS-505 has the same display as the Kindle and is, like the Kindle, convenient to read even for long texts. It’s internal memory of 196MB can hold 160 books and can also be extended using a SD memory card or one of Sony’s memory sticks.
The battery should last for 7500 pages, and since the E-Book reader remembers the last read page, you won’t need bookmarks any more. Here, the user can’t add comments because the keyboard is missing.
Furthermore, it can only be equipped with E-Books using a computer or memory card, which makes Kindle far better – you can purchase books everywhere. Price: 235â‚¬ (300 US$)
The successor, called PRS-700, will have a touch screen and LED background lighting, thus you can read also in the darkness. This will be a good advantage.

The E-Book readers can display various file formats: Adobe’s E-Book format, EPUB, TXT, RTF and PDF files. They can even display image files (JPG and PNG, but only in grayscales) and play music (MP3 and WAV files).

This video compares the Kindle with Sony’s reader:

iMovio iKIT: Micro-Netbook as small as an iPod

multimolti — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:49:15 +0000

Do you think today’s Netbooks like the Asus Eee PC, MSI Wind or Acer Aspire One are small? Then check out the iMovio iKIT! It’s a complete Netbook at the size of an iPod classic.

The iKIT is a mixture between notebook and messenger, has a size of only 95 x 65 x 15 mm, uses a 2.8″ display with 320×240 pixels and has a weight of only 113g including it’s 1050mAh battery. Inside, an Marvell PXA270 processor (312 MHz), 64 MB RAM and a memory card with 128 MB are doing the computing. Through the microSD-slot, it can be extended with an 8 GB memory card.

Including 54 Mbit WLAN, Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 1.1 which can be used to insert an UMTS stick, internet access is possible everywhere.

Like many other Netbooks, a specialized version of Linux is installed as operating system. Other installed software includes an instant-messenger for many protocolls (ICQ, MSN, Google Talk, AIM), an E-Mail client, a media player and Opera Mini as browser.

Currently, the iKIT is only available in Great Britain for around Â£100 (130â‚¬, 160US$).

Probably it is far too small for real use, because even the 7″ Netbooks are a challenge for your eyes and fingers, so it’s rather a toy than a replacement for your laptop. There are many smart phones with same-sized displays and the possibility to use internet and many more functions. All in all, the iKit seems to be very cheap, but not very useful.

Remote controlled rats – sensor in brain let scientists control their movements

multimolti — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:38:56 +0000

The next time you see a rat crawling in your basement, it may not be as innocent as you would think. Perhaps it’s your neighbour spying on your inventory? Or the CIA checking whether you are planning terrorist activities!

Scientists have found a way to send signals to a rat’s brain and thus controlling its movements. A backpack receives radio signals sent from a nearby laptop (up to 500m away) which are sent to electrodes implanted in the rat’s brain. The brain recognises this small electrical stimulus and interprets it as an object touching its whiskers.

Sending signals to the electrode which in the part of the brain which handles information from the right whisker makes the rat turn right. With a second electrode for the left whisker, the scientists can make the rat turn the way they want it to.
Another electrode is connected to the part of the brain which makes the rat feel pleasure. A signal to this part tells the rat its going the controller want it to.

See more about it in this video:

The scientists plan to use it to locate survivors of earthquakes or make them find land mines. With their small size and low weight, they would fit into any heap of rubble and wouldn’t trigger a mine.

More information on these websites:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/0501_020501_roborats.html
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500E0DE153AF936A25751C1A9649C8B63
http://wireheading.com/roborats/ratbots.html

Intelligent Surveillance and & Security Guard Robot

multimolti — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:30:24 +0000

The â€œIntelligent Surveillance and & Security Guard Robotâ€ or â€œSamsung SGR-A1â€ is an autonomous guarding robot designed to protect the South Korean border. It was developed by Samsung Techwin, a subsidiary of the Samsung Group. The robot can detect intruders from North Korea, raise the alarm, and, if necessary, fire at them with its top mounted machine gun. It is the first robot to have surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice recognition systems built into a single unit.

“Until now, technology allowed these robots to conduct monitoring functions only. But now our robots can detect suspicious moving objects, literally go after them, and can even fire at them!”
Sang-Il Han, principal research engineer at Samsung Techwin

The system uses its voice recognition to identify approaching persons. If the intruder is unable to provide the necessary access code when at a distance of ten meters, the Samsung SGR-A1 can either sound an alarm, fire rubber bullets or make use of its Daewoo K3 5,56mm machine gun which has a shooting rate of up to 1000 bullets per minute. It is equipped with both optical and infrared sensors to identify and follow targets from 4 km in daylight and around half that distance at night. It can differentiate between men, animals, vehicles and the environment. A rocket launcher may be used as secondary weapon.

South Korea’s northern border is the most heavily militarized zone in the world, and the southern government has poured millions of dollars into automated military technology. Hundreds of these robots could be deployed along the 248 km long zone dividing the two Koreas as well as along the country’s coastline and at military airfields. Prototypes have been tested in 2007, and the South Korean government plans to buy 1000 of these robots at US$200.000 each.

Experts criticize the loss of human control over force of arms. They expect the rate of wrong decisions of the software to be higher than a humanâ€™s. There may also be a way to manipulate the robot.

When I first found information about this robot around a year ago, there was plenty of stuff written on the official Samsung Techwin website, on Wikipedia and so on. Now it is not mentioned at all at the Techwin site, the Wikipedia article is gone, … Do they want to hide their invention?

Links:

Here is another interesting Security Robot, and it shows quite good why there shouldn’t be any automated fighting robots I think:

Spy other people via internet webcams

multimolti — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:16:55 +0000

Today I’ll show you how to find lots of webcams in the internet that are easily accessible and sometimes show very interesting and private content.
You don’t need any hacking or other internet skills, just use the tools google provides for you. There is a search parameter called “inurl:”, with it you can find all the websites that have a specific term in their URL. The quite common “AXIS Video Server” uses usually the URL “/view/index.shtml”, so just use google’s “inurl:” command to find them all. The whole query now looks like this:

inurl:/view/index.shtml

Now you can see lots of IP adresses with “/view/index.html” following, most of the admins don’t know about this trick. So you can see inside offices, company stockrooms, and sometimes even bedrooms or living rooms (2).

Here some nice photos I got from webcams freely accessible in the internet:

The guy you can see on the first three images seems to know about the webcam, and likes to entertain the watchers.

With the controls often found at the left side of the side, you can control the camera, rotate it and zoom.

Here a list of the most used queries to find webcams:

inurl:/view/index.shtml
inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=”
inurl:netw_tcp.shtml
intitle:”supervisioncam protocol”
inurl:CgiStart?page=Single
inurl:indexFrame.shtml?newstyle=Quad
intitle:liveapplet
inurl:LvAppl
inurl:/showcam.php?camid
inurl:video.cgi?resolution=
inurl:image?cachebust=
intitle:”Live View / – AXIS”
inurl:view/view.shtml
intext:”MOBOTIX M1″
intext:”Open Menu”
intitle:snc-rz30
inurl:home/
inurl:”MultiCameraFrame?Mode=”
intitle:”EvoCam”
inurl:”webcam.html”
intitle:”Live NetSnap Cam-Server feed”
intitle:”Live View / – AXIS 206M”
intitle:”Live View / – AXIS 206W”
intitle:”Live View / – AXIS 210″
inurl:indexFrame.shtml Axis
inurl:”ViewerFrame?Mode=”
inurl:”MultiCameraFrame?Mode=Motion”
intitle:start
inurl:cgistart
intitle:”WJ-NT104 Main Page”
intext:”MOBOTIX M1″
intext:”Open Menu”
intext:”MOBOTIX M10″
intext:”Open Menu”
intext:”MOBOTIX D10″
intext:”Open Menu”
intitle:snc-z20 inurl:home/
intitle:snc-cs3 inurl:home/
intitle:snc-rz30 inurl:home/
intitle:”sony network camera snc-p1″
intitle:”sony network camera snc-m1″
intitle:”Toshiba Network Camera” user login
intitle:”netcam live image”
intitle:”i-Catcher Console – Web Monitor”
inurl:/home/home

I would be happy if you comment about what nice stuff you found And post screen-shots if possible!

German discussion about it: http://free-hack.com/viewtopic.php?t=21188

Remote trigger with cell phone

multimolti — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:02:01 +0000

Hi guys,

Today I’ll show you how to build a remote trigger with your old cell phone. You don’t need much stuff and the trigger will be useful for all kind of stuff that I’ll show later.

Requirements:

Old cell phone, must support silent mode with vibration
Old SIM card (working)
2 wires
Screwdriver
Diagonal pliers
Small block of wood/rubber/plastic
second, working cell phone to trigger the other one

WARNING: YOU ARE DOING THIS EXPERIMENT ON YOUR ON RISK! I WON’T BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE CAUSED TO YOUR PROPERTY!

Here I’m using my old Nokia 3200, but you can apply this tutorial to any other cell phone model.

First of all, remove the casing of your phone. That should be quite easy. Next take out the battery and SIM card. Now, and that may depend on your phone model (my one has torx) use a screwdriver to disassemble the internal parts of your phone. Usually they have 6 screws of the Torx 6 format.

My Nokia 3200 consists of 2 parts, one curcuit board holds the keyboard and screen, the other one the computing stuff (memory, processor, SIM card, …). It looks like this:

When you look into the casing, you should see a small electric motor with a weight at its axis:

When this motor rotates, the weight, hanging only on one side of the axis, creates a momentum force perpendicular to its current line from center of gravity to mid of axis, pulling the phone in the direction of the phone. Since it’s rotating, the direction of this force changes all the time, and the phone is pulled in alternating directions, thus creating a vibration.

But we don’t want the phone to vibrate, it should trigger something. So we remove the motor (you can simply pull it out), but use its power supply.

As you can see in the image above, the motor has 2 metallic contacts, used to transfer the power. We need to connect them to our trigger, so when somebody calls the phone and it would usually vibrate, it now gives a signal to whatever you want to trigger.

You can either solder 2 wires directly to the phone’s board’s contact counterparts, or do it the way I did it: By creating an block with 2 contacts similar to the motor we removed.

Here you can see the phone’s contacts for the vibration motor:

You will need a hole in the phone’s back so that the wires can come out, so just drill one where the weight on the axis has been:

Then take a wooden block the size of the motor and placed it where the motor previously has been:

Now punch two holes into the block with a needle at the same distance as the contacts, so you can plug in the wires later:

Now take two equally-long wires, remove around 5-7mm of the isolation from one end, and twist them around each other:

After that, bend the unisolated ends around a screwdriver and make a knot in the cord, so it won’t drop out of the hole you drilled:

Now insert the blank ends of the wires into the holes in the wooden block, and pull the other end through the drilled hole. It should look something like this:

Hold the phone’s computing board over your construction and check whether the blank ends of the wires touch the contacts on the board, so that the power will be transfered.
Then reassemble the whole phone excluding the vibration motor, screw in the screws, put in SIM card and battery, and give it a try

Now start the phone, enter PIN, switch to silent mode and call it from another phone. If you connect a voltmeter to the wires coming out from the body, you should be able to measure the current! If not, check the contacts inside the phone.

Here it’s working fine!

I will continue this post tomorrow, it’s after midnight already and I should get some sleep… I hope you enjoyed reading this!