fwaggle.org

So I have an idea for a new Hungry Hacker project – a power consumption monitor for our house. It won’t exactly be new – when I was standing out in our backyard waiting forever for our dog (who’s so fat she’s going to need cellulite treatments in around her jiggly belly – that oughta piss my wife off, haha) to do her business, I thought about trying to reverse engineer the wireless protocol the utility company uses to read the meter from the street.

Turns out that that’s not such an easy endeavor, and that the alternative method is widely known already… reading the IR flashes that are emitted out the top of the meter. But regardless, I’ve never let lack of originality get in the way of starting a new project before, and I’m not about to now… assuming I ever get off my butt and finish it.

I’m going to do something different with our system though – I don’t feel like dedicating an Arduino, AVR, or PIC to the task, so I’m going to try and rig up a circuit to trigger a parallel port on my downstairs server, and run a long cable over that way. I’m sure it’ll take a little more effort to make it robust, but I think I can do it with just what I have laying around the house.

I’ve been dreaming of a smart-home for years. I don’t want a fridge that tests my urine or anything – but I would just like to do little things like integrating an alarm, allowing a person to be sent notifications of events, etc.

One specific scenario I came up with was connecting a home automation computer to the washing machine and dryer. Then you could start your laundry, return to your room and configure the system to notify you when it’s done. No more forgetting your laundry and having to stay up to 1am waiting for it to dry.

Pre-built smart home systems are kinda steep, I’m just looking to hack something together. One day, I’ll make it happen, and probably open source it too.

I’ve posted this opinion on many a forum before, but I thought I’d elaborate here for good measure. When you’re faced with a hacker who’s threatened to do you or your systems harm – do not poke the bear.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re some giant ulta-secure DDoS-mitigated pci hosting vendor, or some kid with a Linode… the odds are stacked in the enemy’s favor all the same.

For you to succeed, you have to make sure you lock every virtual door, window and vent – you effectively have to triumph infinite times, they must fail an innumerable number of times. For them to succeed, you only have to fail once. The adage that it’s much more challenging to defend than it is to attack rings exceptionally true in complicated internet “warfare” (I personally abhor the term “cyber”-anything) where the unseen complications can mean you don’t fully appreciate the gravity of a simple chink in your armor.

But do yourself a huge favor and don’t poke the beast. It’s tempting, when faced with someone who you’re certain is a basement-dweller who’s ego vastly outweighs them, to demonstrate this knowledge to them. But don’t. You really don’t gain anything (there are more important things in life than being recognized as right), and all you do is strengthen the resolve of someone who has nothing but time to uncover somewhere you may have screwed up.

Poking the bear simply makes the person that much more determined to prove you wrong – to stroke their fragile ego they will spend days or weeks hunting for the most insignificant detail and use it to ruin your day. It’s not worth it – quietly disregard their wild threats, and then double check you’ve crossed all the Ts and dotted all the Is.

… I mean, a newly rekindled one.

I’ve always liked to pull shit apart, and every now and then neglect to put things back together. But lately, I’ve been pulling so much crap apart it’s not even funny – yesterday was the fridge, today the lawn mower… my paintball gun is in pieces (though admittedly I’m going to have a go at home anodizing at some point in the future, and I’ve got a lot of work to do to get it ready to play with this summer), there’s a dead Gorilla Amplifier on my desk and there’s not one but two dead treadmills in our room.

Thankfully I’m little by little re-acquiring the tools needed to put some of this crap back together. I have a 10 item eBay watch-list and a shopping list on Mouser for all the stuff needed to restore my paintball gun to it’s full glory – when I’m done with it, it’ll be a jet black anodized, custom electronics, low-pressure blow-back paintball gun. Wooh!

I bought a lot of probes for my multimeter which should be here sometime this week, along with a bunch more RJ-45 heads… we’ve been buying them from Lowes’ as we need them for about 50c a piece (~$5 for 10 of them) and I picked up a lot of 100 on eBay for ~$3, so I can’t wait till those get here.

I still have a nice soldering iron on my list of things to buy, but that’ll have to wait until after Duncan gets here and we see how our finances are.

Ever since I got a PlayStation 2 and found the joy of games that support Pro Logic II, I’ve had a thing for surround sound. It’s like this perverse fixation that gives me a boner every time – you haven’t played games like Need for Speed: Underground 2 or Ace Combat 5 until you’ve played them with Pro Logic II. Seriously, the effect is that dramatic.

The PS3 is even better because most games support Dolby Digital 5.1 native – the PS2 lacked the processing power to generate this signal dynamically, only pre-rendered cut-scenes had Dolby Digital.

I started out modest – an old “Paramount” Pro Logic decoder, which I eventually traded in for a Yamaha 5.1 receiver. This thing is great – it’ll fill up a huge room with modest speakers no trouble at all, and it’s been in our “great room” since we moved out here. Unfortunately, our “nice TV” broke permanently, and we shut off our satellite TV in favor of streaming NetFlix… meaning my beautiful receiver was relegated to my younger brothers in law playing PS2 on it.

This morning I decided enough of that, I’d bring it up here and use it in our bedroom. Story time over: I decided to see if I could hack digital output from my HP Pavilion a1213w desktop. I checked the motherboard, it’s an Asus K8S-LA “Salmon” board… bit of a piece of shit really, but it does the job.

It sports a RealTek (ugh!) on-board audio with 5.1 output. Awesome – but no digital output in sight. Searching for the manual, I found an S/PDIF output on the board which requires a daughter-board to give you a coaxial/ToSLink output. Check eBay – ~$20… fffffuuuuuu that.

A quick Google search shows plenty of other folks hacking their own so I decided to give it a shot. Ratting through my box of parts, I came up with a 4-pin CD-ROM-Audio cable from years gone past and cut it apart. I also dug out an RCA cable (I went with Coaxial for the PC since my PS3 will be using the only available ToSLink socket on the receiver) and cut it up too.

A simple hack really. Pins 1+2 are ground and digital-out respectively, with the third pin being +5vdc for powering the bits for ToSLink communication… irrelevant for my purposes. I carefully cut the connector to a little larger than the three-pin connector, then used a Dremel with a sanding wheel to smooth it to a perfect three-pin shape. I pulled the unused extra wire out, since I didn’t want to accidentally short my mobo’s +5vdc. I had the black wire on the GND pin and the white on the S/PDIF pin (see diagram at left) and it was a simple matter of soldering colors to colors to connect the RCA. Route it out the back of my PC and into my receiver.

Digging through the RealTek control panel’s “Multi-Channel Sound Manager”, the instant I clicked “Enable Digital Output” the PCM light came on my receiver and I’m good to go. Turn off all the DSP shit the kids had turned on, and my iTunes output is so manly I need chest hair supplements to keep up.

Update: Okay so apparently my RealTek card can’t output Dolby Pro Logic II (or even anything remotely close to surround sound) over S/PDIF – PCM is it (and PCM is limited to two channels). According to a thread on Overclockers, most sound cards are limited like this… if you want surround sound in games, you’re stuck using the analog outputs and the 6ch input on my receiver.

So I scrounged up some 3.5mm to RCA cables, and hooked it up… and low and behold I have full surround on games like Left4Dead. I press the 6ch button on my remote, and I’m switching back to digital output, so I can take advantage of my receiver’s vastly superior DAC for music. Not optimal, but the best I can probably do without a heinously expensive Pro Logic II capable sound card.