Flying the Parrot AR.Drone with a Wiimote and Nunchuck

I received a Parrot AR.Drone for Christmas this year! However, I don't have an iPhone and that makes it harder to get started. So far, the best solution I've found is flying it with a Wiimote and Nunchuck.

Checkout the source for FitAR.Drone.
Download osgi.core.jar from the OSGi Alliance and copy it to the FitAR.Drone source directory.
Import the project into Eclipse.
Add all the JARs in the source directory to the project's build path.

Now, connect your computer to the ardrone_xxx ad hoc network and check that Bluetooth is enabled on your computer. Then, build and run Main.java from org.fitardrone.main and follow the directions printed to the console:

press 1 and 2 together on the Wiimote to initiate the connection,
wait for the console to indicate that the Nunchuck was found,
press 1 to take off,
and fly!

Oh, and:

press 2 to land,
home to kill the motors (i.e. emergency),
use the D-pad to turn and adjust altitude,
and use the analog stick to move.

There's no video or navigation data feeds, but flying is nice and smooth.

Email Injection

Not so long ago, I ran a wiki called SecurePHP. On that wiki, there was one particular article about email injection that received a lot of attention. Naturally, with all the attention came lots of spam. As a result, I disabled editing of the wiki and content stagnated. Still, the email injection article remained popular. About a year later, the server that hosted SecurePHP died and I never had a chance to hook it all back up. I saved the article though and I'm reposting it now. It may be a bit old (I've been away from PHP for a long time), and I didn't write all of it, so feel free to leave comments about needed updates and corrections. Though this article focuses on PHP, it provides a lot of general information regarding email injection attacks. The PHP mail() Function There are a lot of ways to send anonymous emails, some use it to mass mail, some use it to spoof identity, and some (a few) use it to send email anonymously. Usually a web mailform using the mail() funct

XBee ZNet 2.5 Wireless Accelerometer

I managed to put together a wireless accelerometer the other night using my two new XBees, an Arduino XBee shield, an XBee Explorer USB, an ADXL330, and some Python. I struggled a bit with some of it, so here's what I learned: First, a parts list. XBee 2mW Series 2.5 Chip Antenna Arduino XBee (with XBee Series 2.5 module) XBee Explorer USB ADXL330 I'm not sure exactly what the specs are on the XBee that comes with the Arduino shield. But, it is definitely a series 2.5. The first thing to do is to configure and upgrade the firmware on your XBees. To do that, you'll need X-CTU (for the firmware upgrade at least, but it's also nice for configuration) which, unfortunately, is only available for Windows. But, it works fine from VMware. First up, the XBee we'll hook up to the computer to read incoming data from the accelerometer: Plug one of the XBees into the Explorer (it's also possible to do this from the Arduino shield by shifting the two XBee/USB jumpers to USB

MJPEG Streaming Protocol

MJPEG is a popular format for webcam streams. It's probably popular because it's so simple to do and the performance is surprisingly good. Unfortunately, I found it quite difficult to scrape together enough information to implement a streamer myself. In an effort to help the next poor, frustrated soul, here's a simple method for streaming an MJPEG to a socket in Java. public void handleConnection(Socket socket, JpegProvider jpegProvider) throws Exception { byte[] data = jpegProvider.getJpeg(); OutputStream outputStream = socket.getOutputStream(); outputStream.write(( "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n" + "Server: YourServerName\r\n" + "Connection: close\r\n" + "Max-Age: 0\r\n" + "Expires: 0\r\n" + "Cache-Control: no-cache, private\r\n" + "Pragma: no-cache\r\n" + "Content-Type: multipart/x-mixed-replace; " + "boundary=--BoundaryString\r\n\r\n&

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