Robot Phone Home…Or Else
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Robot Phone Home…Or Else
We would have enjoyed [Harishankar’s] tear down of a robot vacuum cleaner, even if it didn’t have a savage twist at the end. Turns out, the company deliberately bricked his smart vacuum.
Like many of us, [Harishankar] is suspicious of devices beaming data back to their makers. He noted a new vacuum cleaner was pinging a few IP address, including one that was spitting out logging or telemetry data frequently. Of course, he had the ability to block the IP address which he did. End of story, right?
No. After a few days of working perfectly, the robot wouldn’t turn on. He returned it under warranty, but the company declared it worked fine. They returned it and, indeed, it was working. A few days later, it quit again. This started a cycle of returning the device where it would work, it would come home and work for a few days, then quit again.
You can probably guess where this is going, but to be fair, we gave you a big hint. The fact that it would work for days after blocking the IP address wouldn’t seem like a smoking gun in real time.
The turning point was when the company refused to have any further service on the unit. So it was time to pull out the screwdriver. Inside was a dual-CPU AllWinner SoC running Linux and a microcontroller to run the hardware. Of course, there were myriad sensors and motors, too. The same internals are used by several different brands of vacuum cleaners, so these internals aren’t just one brand.
Essentially, he wrote his own software to read all the sensors and drive all the motors using his own computers, bypassing the onboard CPU. But he found one thing interesting. The Android Debug Bridge was wide open on the Linux computer. Sort of.
The problem was, you could only get in a few seconds after booting up. After that, it would disconnect. A little more poking fixed that. The software stack was impressive, using Google Cartographer to map the house, for example.
But what wasn’t impressive was the reason for the repeated failures. A deliberate command was sent to kill the robot when it quit phoning home with telemetry. Of course, at the service center, it was able to report and so it worked fine.
The hardware and the software are impressive. The enforcement of unnecessary data collection is not. It does, however, make us want to buy one of these just for the development platform. [Harishankar] has already done the work to make it useful.
It isn’t just vacuums. Android phones spew a notorious amount of data. Even your smart matress — yes, there are smart matresses — can get into the act.
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Making a Cardboard Airplane Wing
Ideally, an aircraft would be made of something reasonably strong, light, and weather resistant. Cardboard, is none of those things. But that did not stop [PeterSripol] from building an ultralight wing out of cardboard.
Firstly, he wanted to figure out the strongest orientation of the cardboard flutes for the wing spars. He decided on a mix of horizontal and vertical flutes for the wing spar, with the horizontal flutes resisting vertical deformations and the vertical flutes resisting chord wise deformations.
The main spar is made up of two long strips of these cardboard pieces, glued together with a single sheet of cardboard on the top and bottom to create a structural beam. Unfortunately, the glue had not fully dried on one of the sheets before making the spar resulting in the final spar warping. Fortunately, the first wing was always intended to be tested to destruction. The wing’s ribs are made of laser cut cardboard, with doublers on the inside providing greater surface area for hot glue and a stronger rib.
Testing revealed the aft wing spar failed around 200 lbs, approximately equivalent to a 2G wing loading with a fully weighted aircraft. Since the aft wing spar broke, for the final production wings, that spar was reinforced with an separate piece of cardboard positioned perpendicular to the spar creating more of an I beam shape.
After the lessons learned from the cardboard flute orientation tests and the first wing destruction, the two wings for the final ultralight could be built. Minor changes were made from the prototype wing. After testing one wing to 150 pounds of loading, they were skinned in butcher paper to match the esthetic of cardboard. The wings came out weighing 21.8 lbs, more then ideal, but certainly workable for a single flight ultralight aircraft.
We look forward to seeing this plane fly, so stay tuned for more coverage! While you wait, make sure to check out his previous ultralight build!
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No cat was as harmed in the taking of this photograph
