Oculus Rift Development Kit - My first 15 minutes with the kit

Back in April 2012 I've participated via kickstarter in crowdfounding the Oculus Rift,

a VR headset with great promises. Today I've received my kit!

I've waited like 18 years for this moment since I first saw a virtual reality demo running on my old 486.

I can't remember the name of that demo but it was so impressive, you could spin a chair, turn on a pc inside a room.. take any modern fps and you have thousand times the interactivity and graphics but still

that demo made me dream about the moment we could step into virtual reality in a decent way.

Sure there were a lot of VR headset before the Rift however if you've read about it you should know

why this could be the right time to own a vr headset. or not? well..

Unboxing

The kit arrived in a standard box inside which there's a very nice plastic case that contains the unit itself,

a power supply with various ac adapters, usb cable, hdmi cable, hdmi/dvi adapter, two more pairs of lens (a pair is already mounted on the unit). Sadly my kit was missing the dvi cable but since I won't be using it for now this doesn't trouble me (I've contacted the Oculus support and I'm waiting for their reply).

The unit itself is light enough but the cable that connect the headset to the control box is maybe a bit short,

also it seems like it is not replaceable. I hope it won't easily break.

My first 15 minutes with the Rift

So I connected the unit to my laptop running win7 via hdmi and usb, it flawlessly recognized both the display and the input adapter, after downloading the Tuscany demo I was ready to step into vr so I jumped

right into the black hole.

Woah. I'm inside a rustic house, I can move my head around and feel a little lag between my head movement and the actual movement in the demo but it is not that noticeable. But the vision is a bit out of focus so I removed the headset and then I've played around with the two screws on the headset that  increase/decrease the distance between the lens and the eyes. Once I achieved a clear focus I moved around inside the house and It felt incredible.

It feels a little strange to look down where your hands should be and well, there are no hands!

 There's a fireplace and some props inside the house and you can easily feel the volume of those props, nice. There's a window and you can look outside, this was for me

another 'Woahh' as you definitely FEEL the distance between the window and the grass outside but..

ouch I began feeling a little strange. At that time I wasn't using the mouse to look around, I was just using

WASD to move and the headset to look around. Then I left the house and began to wander outside, there's a fountain, some flowers and some trees outside, the flowers were incredible, I could just see how the petals were distant each other and when I saw a butterfly fly towards me I was really impressed.

But again that strange feeling like something is not right. If you look carefully you can see the pixels grid

but it is not too noticeably so that's not a big concern. Then I reached for the mouse to be able to move freely as I wanted to take a good look at the house from the outside. That's when the problems begin.

When I moved the mouse I felt incredibly dizzy. So much that I had to close the eyes for a while to calm down. Then I tried to look around with the mouse using very small movement. again the dizziness.

I decided to stop using the mouse and just to look around using the headset. Again dizziness and also a vague nausea. That last feeling was escalating so I had to stop and remove the headset but the nausea persisted for a long time, it was to strong that I ended up in bed as I could barely move around, every time

I moved my head I got dizziness and nausea. that was like two hours ago and I still feel a bit sick now.

Even looking at the screen while I type this post is giving me nausea.

My gf who tried the headset got this dizziness too but since she tried it for just a minute it wasn't such a strong sickness for her as it was for me.

Honestly I've read about this issue from some people who received the Rift before me but I thought it wasn't so strong and maybe it could wear out with time. For now I can only say that I badly want to try it again but for today I've had enough of nausea so I better wait until tomorrow before I try it again.

I'm a bit worried about this issue because I've played a lot of fps games and I've also used some non conventional peripherals such as head tracking devices but I never felt dizziness or nausea so I'm definitely worried whether I'll be able to use the Rift or not. However for now I have to stop since the nausea is rising again.  Stay tuned for updates and a full Review, if I ever manage to use it without sickness.

Höllenmaschine-ein (Prusa i3)

Dear pcmote readers,
I present to you Höllenmaschine-ein.
aka my first RepRap.
Building this thing was one of the most fun things I've ever done. It took me three days mostly due to some missing pieces and consequent trips to the hardware store,
I think that it would take a full day to build it being alone and having the right equipment right away.
It already prints fine with just a bit of fine tuning but if you've read some of my previous posts you know I won't stop until I get the max out of it.
While I was building it I outlined some pieces I really wanted to modify so the next thing I'm going to do is firing up my trusty blender and start modeling parts for this baby. of course everything will be shared with you all, here on pcmote and on thingiverse so.. as always, stay tuned! ;)

RepRap Prusa i3 Unboxing

Unboxing a shiny new Prusa i3,
directly from the cool ppl over Unterwelt hackspace.
Let the fun begin!
stay tuned for projects, parts and more ;)

Turn a regular low-powered laser pointer to a line laser

WARNING: When playing with lasers always wear safety glasses. Lasers can permanently damage your eyes, by proceeding reading the info shown here

you relieve the author of this blog from any liability arising 

from using the informations written here.

If you're a geek, you know this is going to happen to you sooner or later in your life,
you need a laser line for your 3D scanner  / water level, you-name-it diy project.
Chances are you only have a low-powered red laser lying around, the ones you usually see on keychains on pencils. you already know you can turn it into a laser line by using an optical fiber so you don't lose power however what if you just have a paper clip?
no problem!
Pick the paper clip and bend it in a L-shape
Here I used a clip used to keep a shirt folded.
Then polish the piece that will be reflecting the laser with some rubbing alcohol.

Now attach the L-shaped paper clip so a piece of the clip is perpendicular to the laser beam,
play around with the position by looking at the projected laser line, move around the clip until you get a nice, focused laser line.
Once you're happy with the line projected, fix
the paper clip with some tape or, better, some Blu-Tack (or Patafix if you're from UE :)
By using Blu-Tack you'll be able to move around the paper clip and it will just stay where you last put it.
If you're building this to use the laser line for a 3D scanner i suggest you to find a position for the clip so the line is very focused for a long segment.

There you go, a laser line from a low powered laser pointer in less than a minute ;) 

WARNING: When playing with lasers always wear safety glasses. 
Lasers can permanently damage your eyes, by proceeding reading the info shown here

you relieve the author of this blog from any liability arising 

from using the informations written here.

Aircrack with monitor mode on android - Part 2: Setup an ARM Development environment

(This post is a work in progress, please come back later)

Why

We need to setup a linux machine to compile our arm kernel and modules,

in order to do this I've opted to make a linux virtual machine.

There are various reasons why a virtual machine is preferred vs the linux box I'm using daily,

first of all a development box can break quite easily,

you'll be using a lot of tools which depends on libraries that can get updated and break things,

also you need to have some specific versions of some apps for compatibility reasons

and it is not a good idea to browse the web using old apps as they can be remotely exploited,

so it is a good idea to have a separate box where you have total control on what you update and what not.

Also, by having a linux virtual machine you can easily transfer the virtual hard disk image on another computer

and continue your development like nothing has happened or share the virtual machine between windows and linux,

it also allows for easy backups, you can just make a copy of the virtual hard disk, try something and if it breaks, no problem,

just restore the backup file. so win win!

Setup the virtual machine

Go to http://www.virtualbox.org and download the latest available version for your host os, download the Extension Pack too and install both.

We'll be using lubuntu 12.10 as our linux guest machine, as it is a good starting point for what we need, also by using lxde it is lightweight to run inside a virtual machine,

so go to http://www.lubuntu.net and download the (Intel x86) desktop CD image,

once you have the iso, create a new virtualbox machine.

I won't go into much detail here as there are a lot of resources about this, just make sure to enable PAE into system tab.

When the installation process finishes and you're asked to reboot, click ok, eventually the virtual machine may hang up at this point,

just wait a minute then turn off the virtual macchine, start again and boot your new lubuntu box,

on your first login you'll be asked to update some packages, do it right away,

we need an up-to-date installation as we'll need various tools and by having a stable, current release, any tool we need is just an apt-get install away,

once we're happy with our environment we may froze the current software so we'll be sure not to occur into compatibility issues and we'll selectively update

things from now and then.

Once you've updated everything head over to install Guest Addition and reboot the virtual machine.

we need now to setup our arm development environment!

Setup the development environment

Thanks to AMLogic effort to release kernel sources and info on how to compile the kernel,

we can setup or arm development environment for amlogic boards.

First of all we need to setup a standard development environment so open a terminal, and install a dev env using this:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

this will install gcc, make and some standard libs

Share files between host os, guest os and android device

We'll need to transfer a lot of files between host os, guest os and the android device,

there are many ways to do this, I've chosen to setup an ftp server on the guest os and to make it available

on the internal network so it can be accesses by both the host os and the android device.

Download and setup vsftpd, on the guest os (the arm dev machine) do:

$ sudo apt-get install vsftpd

this will install vsftpd. by default write access is disabled so if you try to upload a file

you'll get this error message:

"

200 PORT command successful. Consider using PASV.
550 Permission denied.

"

to allow write access, edit /etc/vsftpd.conf and find this line:

# Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command.

#write_enable=yes

uncomment the line above, you may also want to further customize the ftp server by disabling anonymous logins 

and so on, when you're happy with the config, save and restart vsftpd by using

$ sudo service vsftpd restart

now you can login to your ftp server and upload/download files.

Download, configure and install some tools

create the dir tools on your home, here we'll download and compile some tools.

binwalk a firmware analysis tool

get the latest version of binwalk from http://code.google.com/p/binwalk/ ,

libwalk needs some libraries like libmagic and libcurl so

download ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/file-5.12.tar.gz ,

configure & sudo make install libmagic.

install libcurl by sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev

now for binwalk, extract the file, go to src and ./configure

it should now find everything it needs, if you miss some packages then download the dependencies

(if you've followed this from the start, you should how have everything it needs)

then sudo make install

voilà we now have binwalk and we can analyze the boot image of our device, this way we can gather

info on where the kernel is addressed inside the boot image

(This post is a work in progress, please come back later)

Aircrack with monitor mode on android - Part 1: Take control over your W6HD.

(this post is a work in progress, please come back later)
As said before, this guide is tailored around Ramos W6HD,
the first thing we need to do is to get root access and install a debian system using chroot.

Rooting Ramos W6HD.
There are various ways to root the w6hd, the easiest one is to flash a firmware which
already has root.
We'll also need play store access to easily download some apps like connectbot, vnc, Screen Standby and so on, so let's just use a firmware which already come with gapps.
We'll use Librehat's ICS HatMod.
Make a backup copy of all your data, then download ICS_HatMod_for_W6HD_1.9.7z,
and unzip it in the root of your sdcard.
I suggest you to use a card reader to transfer the files since the usb connection of the ramos
is not so speedy.
Fully charge your w6hd then turn it off.
Insert the sdcard with the new firmware then keep pressing the M button and turn on he device
via the power button. hold both buttons until you see the android image with a progress bar
in the bottom, now you can release the buttons, wait until the flash process is finished,
the device will reboot and then you now have a firmware with gapps + root access.
setup your device as usual then download these apps from play store:


Screen Standby #root
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nkahoang.screenstandby
We'll use this app to turn off the screen while keeping the tablet on.
To prevent your tablet from going to suspend mode, go to
Settings->Display->Suspension and select "Never timeout".
this way the tablet will be always on until you put it in suspend mode by pressing once
the power button.
Learn to use Screen Standby as we'll leave the tablet on with the screen off to save power most of the time

also please note that we're going to compile our own kernel and flash our own firmware,
thanks to amlogic effort to release the kernel source, however we need temporary root access
to make a copy of some files.
Once you've installed a root file manager or a terminal emulator, grab a copy of these files:
/proc/config.gz This file contains the compile-time configuration settings for the kernel in gzip,
luckily it seems that they've compiled the kernel with the CONFIG_IKCONFIG_PROC enabled
that's why config.gz is available. having the kernel configuration means that we can just use this
configuration as a starting point and configure the remaining options for the kernel.
take a look at the configuration and you'll see why for some devices we can't just build a module
but we'll also need to recompile the kernel.
some devices will work with just a module however so I'm building a list of devices,
also since the kernel source supports different amlogic boards, I'm testing out also this method
for other devices.. come back later!

 (work in progress)
Part 2: Setup an ARM Development environment

(this post is a work in progress, please come back later)

How to run aircrack on android (intro)

(this post is a work in progress, please come back later)

First of all, the answer: yes it is possible to make aircrack work, to get monitor mode and even injection work on some android devices, even by using the internal network card.

However keep in mind that A LOT of requisites are to be met,

most notably the network card must support monitor mode,

it is ok if monitor mode is not supported by default on your device, since we'll be replacing the module which handles the card anyway.
just make sure that the card you're going to use, either internal or external is supported by linux and someone managed to make monitor and injection work, we'll just handle the glue to make it all work on the android device.
by the way considering that most internal card are crippled so they consume less power and also the poor reception they have, you should go with an external card anyway.

now that you have the answer, let me clarify some points.

first of all, for this guide I'll be using an external wifi usb card since my ramos has an rtl8182cu wifi card which has some problem getting injection work.

My W6HD has a micro usb otg port so i just resorted to my trusty tp-link TL-WN422G rev 2
which sports an Atheros AR9271 single-chip USB,
I also have a Trendnet TEW-424UB rev3 laying around which is based upon a Realtek RTL8187B so I'll add support for that also.

The fight with the realtek 8182cu isn't lost yet, it is just that for now I just want the overall procedure to work, getting the internal card to work is not a priority yet as I find it useful to have the internal card handled by android, this way I can just remotely connect via ssh to my tablet and still be able

to use the external card for aircrack.

I haven't finished to write this guide yet, the procedure works as I've succesfully made the tablet recognize the card, enable the monitor mode and inject (injection is not the strong point of wn422g, but at this point is just a matter of hardware. choose a very compatible card as said before!), I've tested it against my own home network and it succesfully captured data and cracked the password (tried both wep and wpa),

since it took me a lot of time to get everything work and since I didn't write every step down I thought

to redo everything from scratch and to write down every step and share everything with you all.
The process will cover rooting the device, installing a full debian system (with development tools on the device), setting up a cross compile environment on a linux pc, cross compile modules, and so on.

it will be a long ride!
The kernel source we'll be using supports these platforms:

M3 (M3_SKT_V1) platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF01)
M3 (WA) platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF02)
M3 (Shuttle) platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF03)
M3 (Ramos) platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF04)
M3 (SOCKET) platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF05)
M3 (Ainol) platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF06)
M3 (Malata) platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF07)
M3 F08 platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF08)
M3 F09 platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF09)
M3 (Asus) MBX platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF10)
M3 (Gadmei) platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF11)
M3 (Gadmei Portrait 1280*800) (MACH_MESON3_REFF11_P800)
M3 (Gadmei BC 4329) (MACH_MESON3_REFF11_4329)
MT720 (Keenhi M3 1024*600) platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF14)
M3 MBX platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF16)
M3 Bestv MBX platform (MACH_MESON3_REFF20)

so while I'll be focusing on building modules and kernel for the Ramos W6HD, by following
this guide you should gain enough knowledge for adding support for usb devices on your tablet, granted that you have access on the kernel source.
you can also always resort to standard android kernel source however I won't cover this process
in this guide, maybe I'll write up something about this in the future.

I like to put everything online as soon as I write it so you'll find here the current work in progress,

once everything is written I'll double check everything and rewrite a proper guide.

meanwhile enjoy the mess.

WHY:

Last year I bought an android tablet,

a Ramos W6HD which has some nice features,

I messed around with it a lot as it was (and still is) my first tablet.

After trying whatever app I stumbled upon I finally settled down using it as an ebook reader

for tech books as they usually contain a lot of images and my eReader (a Bebook Mini) can't handle these.

However, having a linux system (yeah I know android and all the kernel issue, however it seems that somehow they're rejoining the fun)

with this kind of hardware and use it just to read some books is an offense to human kind!
another reason to make a guide is that I see some apps popup on play store that are just a bunch of linux commands put together using android ui facilities. while this is all legit I think overall it is a bit morally questionable so let's just show you the nitty gritty details so both you and me will learn a thing or two.
if you find an easier way to do the things I'll show you, feel free to leave a comment
and I'll integrate your ideas.
This guide is intended for Ramos W6HD however you can adapt it to any android device which meets the requirements.
Let's begin!
Part 1 - Taking control over your W6HD.
Part 2: Setup an ARM Development environment

(this post is a work in progress, please come back later)