HR Geeks

Our very own telmnstr and enferex will be presenting the Open Vulture UAV platform at ShmooCon on 2/6.  As we know it will be the highlight of the con, we will be broadcasting their presntaton live.

Assuming we’ll have signal, you can watch the event live at the URL below.  At the completion of the talk a recorded version of the presentation will be available at the same URL.

http://stugs.com/live

From the talk description:

Open Vulture – Scavenging the Friendly Skies Open Source UAV Platform
Matt Davis and Ethan O’Toole

OpenVulture is a software application and library designed to to control numerous platforms (land, sea, air) using a simple software framework. During the presentation our vision for having cheap and autonomous craft for the public to play with iand hack upon shall be explained. Unfortunately other factors have prevented us from providing a live demo, however our project plans will be unveiled, including a basic set of hardware that a user can obtain in hopes of creating their own autonomous drone. The concepts illustrated will demonstrate cheap UAV building, however the information and software provided can be tweaked to adhere to other platforms (/me thinks Wal-Mart Buggy).

Matt Davis / Enferex is currently a software engineer from the Hampton Roads region of Virginia (757). He is part of the 757Labs crew, prefers obnoxious music, and imbibing in quantities of coffee that make mere mortals shiver.

Ethan O’Toole / Tele Monster is currently a network and system admin in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia (757). He is part of the 757Labs crew and likes dreaming up wild projects. Every once in a while a few get completed.

I have been working on an embedded wireless application and the development board only supports power over ethernet (PoE).  The manufacture hasn’t released their official PoE injector so I started looking for an economical alternative online.   For such a simple device I was amazed at how expensive a basic 802.3 PoE injector can be.

After looking at what was required to build one, I decided I would give it a try.

What you’ll need

• Two keystone jacks
• Dual port surface mount jack
• A short length of cat5 cable
• Power supply of your required voltage :: My SBC supports 12-36V DC so I used an old 12V (1.2A) power supply from a Netgear broadband router
• Multi-meter, wire stripper, and a punch tool

First comes the standard data connections.  If you’ve ever made an Ethernet cable then these are pretty familiar.

• PIN1 -> PIN1
• PIN2 -> PIN2
• PIN3 -> PIN3
• PIN6 -> PIN6

On the power side, we will need to supply positive (+) and negative (-) power to a total of four pins.  To do this, you’ll need to loop two of the PINs for positive (+) and two for negative (-) as shown above.

The power connections are:

• PIN4 :: positive (+)
• PIN5 :: positive (+)
• PIN7 :: negative (-)
• PIN8 :: negative (-)

Once you have your power connections looped, install the power supply cable.  I had a bunch of CAT6 jacks “laying around” the office and decided to use those as they have a ziptie connector at the back of the jack.  This is useful for securing the power supply cable.

After you assemble the surface mount box label the two ports and verify the power pins with a multi-meter.

This cost me nothing as I stole all of the parts from our telephone supply closet.  If I had purchased all the required parts at retail it would have been about $25.   This is the same price as the cheapest PoE injector I found w/out shipping.

If you want to remotely power a device that isn’t PoE, build another for the other end but replace the power supply with the approporiate connector for your device.

Chatter is making it’s way around that NCIS paid a visit to KIS Computers. This raid wasn’t a redundant array of inexpensive disks! The news came to us by way of neighbors of the business, but evidentially it has made it to one of the local television stations. No farther details are known. Goth hacker girl Abby wasn’t spotted.

ShmooCon is this weekend in Washington, DC. Tickets are all sold out, but a few HRGeek-ers may have extras they can part with (hit them up on the mailing list.
There is a huge HR crowd going this year – if you’re one of them, make sure you stop in to see Ethan give a 20 minute presentation on the infamous UAV. His slot is immediately following the Matt Blaze keynote at 4PM on Friday afternoon.

Also check out the SkeeBall Machine (SkeetBall) in the Hacker Arcade. Skeetball is being brought to you on the hardworking backs of a few HR Geeks, so be sure and donate to play!

I assume Ethan, Erik, or MattD will write up a post on OpenVulture, SkeetBall, etc., so I’ll leave more about that to them!

Meeting at Kellys, once again!
Be there for the Post-ShmooCon rundown!

We’re now running on fully updated software! It only broke…everything! No more 2 years between updates.
If you see something not functioning (web, db, jabber, mailman, etc.) let me know, and I’ll try to make sure it gets fixed.

While I could probably tell you very little about amature radio, I would like to mention that this weekend (September 20 and 21) HRGeeks will be sporting a booth at the VA Beach Hamfest(www.vahamfest.net).  The website has location and ticket information.  So if yer into stalking, come check some of the HRGeeks out.

-Matt (enferex)

A number of locals participated yet again in assisting with 2600 magazine’s HOPE conference at the famous Hotel Pennsylvania, located in New York City. The additions provided DVD quality video streaming from the 18th floor to the 2nd floor over a fiber optic network connection (provided by the network guys – props to Dragorn, Binary, Porkchop and their assistants). The big new feature this year, implemented by Erik as we drove to Manhattan was a comment system. Members of the audience in front of the large projection screen had the ability to anonymously post comments on a web page that would scroll across the bottom of the large display. Being anonymous, one can only imagine what ended up on the scroll (full analysis pending). While it was only active for a periods, it still racked over 7,000 comments.

There is the possibility we will be working on a rapidly deployable media management system intended for “hacker” conferences, and usable by other groups.

HOPE 2008, the 7th Hackers on Planet Earth conference was great fun, and we are glad to hear there will be a 8th HOPE in 2010.

Two Hampton Roads companies have made it into the best business category at Linux World 2008. One is xTuple (www.xtuple.com) with xTuple ERP 3.0, and the other is Concursive with ConcourseSuite 5.3 (www.concursive.com). Times must be ripe for name changing, xTuple used to be called OpenMFG and Concursive used to be called CentricCRM. Congrats to both Norfolk, VA based companies and good luck winning against Drupal!