metatron

The boards look professionally manufactured, all he has to do is ask the manufacturer how much it would be per unit if they scaled it up to 1000 or so. Hopefully it's not vaporware from a sales point of view.

Just go early, stop at a supermarket and pick up meat and such and hit the the Toxic BBQ. Normally a few people who love grilling doing the cooking, everyone is super friendly and its a smaller group to socialise with, it also tends to be the best way to get invited to all the parties.

You said internal card, when you remove your old one, you disconnect the MMCX connectors going to your laptop's internal antennas (I have no idea how many you laptop has.) and then insert the new card, connect the same antennas onto the new card.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B00PITY1MG/ref=dp_olp_refurbished?ie=UTF8&condition=refurbished would be a better option. Lenovo ThinkPad T510, Core i7, Windows 7 Pro 64-Bit, 8GB DDR3 Memory, 240GB SSD = £384.00 Only good Lenovo are the Thinkpads, nearly everything else they do is bottem feeder consumer trash, built to a very low standard.

Intel 7265, I don't think the driver is in a lot of distro's, as its quite new, just grab the driver from https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/iwlwifi

I think it's important to get kids interested in tech, and I work with a handful of universities (not really kids I guess), but I have to say, I avoid anyone under the age of 16, as although I get my criminal record check once a year (its a requirement, with some uni's), it's just a fucking mine field. It just takes one parent who develops a dislike towards you, to call you a peodphile and you are fucked for life. Even if you've never done anything and never would and there is no truth to it, it's just not worth throwing your life away by risking working with kids. If you are organising something, you can teach scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/ which is part of the UK's primery education curriculum, and is a fun way to introduce the consepts behind programming. Other things I'd do, would be building and racing Brissle bots (toothbrush head with a pager motor and coin cell). Slightly older kids drawdio kits are great, as making a musical pencil gives them something to play with and take home. Light following robots are also good for slightly older kids. Waterbottle rockets are always fun if you are outside. I could write a list of hundreds of things, to teach everything from programming, electronics, aerodynamics, chemistry, but is not that hard to come up with fun ways to learn. With your requirements, build Brissle bots and race tracks.

Buy a used Thinkpad T420 for £130 up the RAM from the stock 4GB to 8GB, replace the HDD with a 1TB WD Blue mobile HDD, and buy two extended life batteries from China. Whole thing will cost you £250. I'd leave Windows 7 on it and then stick on VMware, and then drop some money on a cheap TPLink 2.4/5GHz card. Then save up a little to buy a bladeRF for £275. Upping memory and replacing a hdd is very easy.

I've been a fair few times, I'll hit this one as well, although I don't really attend many talks, mostly hang around the villages with friends and drink 24/7

BruCon is tempting and I know a few people who go most years, so I might try and hit that as its only a short flight and train ride away.

It was an enjoyable enough show, I liked that it was quite dark, but I don't think the American public will. You also have Christian Slater, who I quite like but his record of cancelled shows paired with its darkness, will likely mean they won't get picked up for a full season. From the first episode alone its far, far, far better than Scorpion.

I thinking of hitting OpenTech http://www.opentech.org.uk/2015/ no idea if anyone from here is going but I'll be lurking around.

There has been a massive spate of educational programming toys coming out the last few years, a few car ones already exist. I can understand the need to keep weight down as motors and batteries aren't cheap, and it's easy to build a board with regulators to drop voltages as necessary from a single power source and integrate a charge control for the LiPo battery. The plastics you're using look well thought out (metal inserts for screws) and injection moulded, and look like they would be structurally sound, although I would be concerned with schearing, but I'm guessing you have done modeling in software and looked at the structural properties of the plastics in relation to your design, as well as looking at the thermal issues of having hot components, i.e. power regulators near the plastic? I really don't think it matters hugely, what dev-board you go with but there is no point using anything more than an Atmel microcontroller, with the airframe you've designed as even if you've over specced the motors and battery, as an educational toy or even a home gadget, it's unlikely anyone is going to be running more than GPS and a handful of sensors. With your own programming environment, you can make it very simple to use, you also open yourself up to the huge amount of existing Drone development out there and reduce cost. Now if you are going for something like a Edison or rPi, then I'm guessing you want to do things like object avoidance and basic image processing onboard. Object avoidance can be done on much lower hardware and you are going to need to over spec the motors and battery if you want to carry a suitable camera. If I were you, I'd design a single board solution, with everything integrated based around a ATMEGA32U4. Just have angled pin headers for the motors and pins for sensors. Sell it as a kit, with optional sensor packs. Do a cheap two part injection molding body, as all the sensors/breakout boards will all be sold by you, you can keep there shape universal and have say four slots integrated into the body. As for a camera, I'd probably just sell a 2.4GHz unit as an optional extra and just power it for a pair of pins on the board. As long as what everything is, is written on the board it should be fairly simple and you can prices it as starter kits and onwards. Tooling for the body is the most expensive part in manufacturing, £17,000 to £32,000 I've been quoted.

Anyway back on topic. I've booked everything up for SteelCon, going to catch the coach up from London, as there is no parking at my hotel. I've sent them an email to say I'm happy to volunteer for whatever they need, as it's always fun to get involved. If anyone wants to meet up at some point, for a few beers/whatever I'll be about.

I know when Hak5 started a few of them were making a living doing sysadmining and such, but I figured at this point, between the shop, which I'm sure everything has a huge markup on and YouTube money, which I have no idea how the rev3/hak5 share goes, they would be making an okay living. Hell, people make a good living off youtube, just doing unboxing videos. With all the "hacker" films and TV shows that have come out the last few years and are coming out, I'd imagine there viewing figures are doing well.

I'd imagine they get too old/irrelevant for this stuff and get a job doing engineer sales for some company. Basically selling shit, but having an understanding of the product.

I'd not think so, IP TV is kind of dead, well the idea of small independent shows, producing original content. Its just regular TV delivered by a different medium and unboxings/let's play/ and my life style shows about makeup and such. Although I've not watched Hak5 in years, I respect they have kept on going, when everyone else has given up.

Yep, depends what you are into, I know Hak5 push the AVR but PIC is cheaper and better in a whole range of areas. If you have no plan of ever taking something from a Dev-board/breadboard then just buy a bunch of http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mini-ATmega328P-AU-Micro-controller-Board-Arduino-compatible/dp/B00PU6VDXW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1432711245&sr=8-3&keywords=arduino+nano

I'd imagine running a pineapple at a security conference, even with current firmware is a fine way of getting it bricked. Like taking a laptop, you kill the WiFi and go over 4G or kill the WiFi and go via a USB card from a VM, then wipe the VM and probably the base OS when you get home, but that really depends on the people there.

Bletchley Park is worth checking out for sure. I think it's completely possible to live with nothing but a Android tablet and a dedicated server somewhere in the world, but sure its nice to have a laptop to hand. I'll be bringing toys for sure, but not coming too heavy. Once the schedule is put up and any comps, I'll think about what I'll need, guessing I'm not going to need a bench spectrum analyzer or full electronics lab set up for reverse engineering, so probably my Thinkpad, phone and myself. I'm sure I'll be learning a lot, as I've not really kept too much up to speed with computer security, much outside the big things. I code and work on hardware projects, security is a secondary thought in those cases. If it works then that's good enough :)

Those cheap knock off usb Saleae Logic analysers are like £15 with a nice set of test hooks, you can use the stock Saleae software which is good, without forking out for their hardware. You can get a universal eprom programmer for like £20 and a PICkit 3 goes for about £40. A nice 15 piece pickset from SouthOrd goes for about £14.

Going to head up Friday and staying at one of the chain hotels for SteelCon until Monday morning. I basically look the same as I did in 2006 (pic 6 next to Cooper), just with a shaved head and a beard.

I went to the first (2006/2007 I think), also did a thing in Germany, which had a much smaller turn out. First London one - http://imgur.com/a/olQzX#0 Second Berlin one in 2008 - http://imgur.com/a/mg0Ex#0 You don't really need to ask for permission, just do it. I'll probably come. I just got a ticket to Steelcon, I'll probably drag some people up from London too.

rPi is fairly small, they can be fitted into a power strip/extension lead fairly easily, also their thin enough and produce fairly little heat. The "spying" devices you normally get from stores are quite expensive. You can always log files locally and set it up as an AP with a name like Mikes iPhone, so you can just log in remotely and manage the files from outside the building. Range isn't too bad, but the pro stuff will use the power lines in the building as an antenna.

Arduino powered arm is easy enough, and you can buy camera modules with basic image processing onboard, but an Ardunio doesn't have enough grunt to do everything. It could probably be done really poorly with a new model rPi to handle the image processing with something like OpenCV, and an Arduino to control the arm movement, if you want something small/embedded. You would need a good computer instead of a rPi if you didn't want it to suck at chess as image processing alone eats up resources like a bastard.Anyway this type of project would take months, and isn't super interesting, so you will need to do it yourself, or drop a fair chunk of change.

Only thing I really keep a box for now is running VM. If I had that box, I'd probably just turn it into a build box, that I can remote into and use Dev tools and build crap.