The EEVblog Sparkgap Generator

• Mrs EEVblog inadvertently ordered an IoT dishwasher. It has not been allowed to phone home.
• Dave hadn't heard of Wireshark, which is a diagnostic tool that lets you watch network traffic.
• Jon Oxer talks about hard wiring lightswitches with CAT5
• Amazon key is a new device that will let the couriers (delivery drivers) into your home. No thanks!
• Chris has finally been playing with MQTT. This was after watching a talk by Elliot Williams, who had posted a series of articles on Hackaday in the past about the service.
• Chris was at Superconference last weekend (see the streamed talks here). Dave thought Jeri looked sad in a picture Chris tweeted and implored him to give her a hug.
• The badge turned out great (discussed in past episodes). Badge hacking was even more intense this year.
• Discussions about app development for the 121GW meter. How many people will use the app?
• Dave needs to launch his kickstarter to hit his delivery date!
• Telephone protocols/bandwidth
• Schottky diode cross section! The electronupdate channel has a couple cross section videos.
• Quake (the video game) redrawn on an oscilloscope. Todd Bailey told us about his project that did something similar.
• TechShop has shut down. They have details on their site as a PDF as well.
• Is it possible to compare a makerspace to a (physical) gym?
• How I built this podcast with Chipotle founder.
• "Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out"
• When Gerry Roston (Civionics) that was on the show, he was a big proponent of Steve Blank who says you need to 'Get out of the building'.

Thank you to Wikipedia for the picture of the taser

Transcript! (new)

Chris Gammell: This is the Amp Hour Podcast, released November 19th, 2017, episode 368, the EEVblog spark gap generator.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I’m Dave Jones from the EEVblog.

Chris Gammell: I’m Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Dave Jones: It happened.

Chris Gammell: What happened?

Dave Jones: My home got invaded by an Internet of Things’ appliance.

Chris Gammell: I saw your tweet of that. Is it Miele, [Mila 00:00:45]? How do you say that?

Dave Jones: [Milay 00:00:47], that’s how you pronounce it here, I don’t know. [Milay 00:00:49].

Chris Gammell: I know they make vacuums. What did you get?

Dave Jones: It’s a German company. I got a dishwasher. Obviously it wasn’t me. It was Mrs. EEVblog got a new dishwasher. She just, like the other one, she was fed up with it just completely. We had it for 10 years.

Chris Gammell: It’s the replacement cycles. Here’s the real question. Was it even an option to get something without internet connection these days, like high-end?

Dave Jones: I don’t know because I didn’t go shopping for it. She didn’t even go shopping. She just ordered it online.

Chris Gammell: Really?

Dave Jones: Yeah. I just came home yesterday and here was a new dishwasher, “Please install it.”

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, a dishwasher that greeted you once you entered the house?

Dave Jones: Yeah, “Welcome home, Dave.”

Chris Gammell: “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t clean that dish.” “Open the dishwasher door Hal.”

Dave Jones: It does. It opens on its own. It pops the door open after it’s finished. It’s got a little actuator that opens the door.

Chris Gammell: One of these days you’re going to be recording and you’re going to be like, “My bank account’s empty, what happened? My dishwasher stole all my online currencies.”

Dave Jones: Laundered it. It’s not a laundry but that would have been fun there if it was a washing machine.

Chris Gammell: Tell me about it. What does it do?

Dave Jones: I don’t want to know. I was installing it. There’s an install process where you can set for water hardness, the hardness of the water and there were all sorts of time and date and everything just because of the timer. Then I popped up with Miele at home and then I instantly knew what that means. I went, “This thing has Wi-Fi access doesn’t it?” She went, “Uh-huh (Affirmative),” as in, uh-huh (Affirmative).

Chris Gammell: It’s a feature. The crazy thing folks is the dishwasher said, “Uh-huh (Affirmative).” A brave new world here, buddy. Here’s a product idea for you, Mr. Product Design Company. You could sell it with every IoT device, the EEVblog Spark Gap Generator. Instantly block all RF in your house by flooding the spectrum.

Dave Jones: It just applies that directly to the RF output transistor, boom, poof, magic smoke, magic smoke mode.

Chris Gammell: Is it like you just don’t put it on your network then? Had you even tried it?

Dave Jones: No, I didn’t even try it. I didn’t want to try it just out of principle.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say you should get a Mi-Fi or a controlled attack surface like a cellular to Wi-Fi modem thing. Then just hook it up to that and then just put a Wireshark on there too and see what it’s doing. I would be very interested.

Dave Jones: Wireshark?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, Wireshark.

Dave Jones: I can imagine what it is. It’s a little device that sniffs Wi-Fi RF stuff.

Chris Gammell: Technically it used to do it on Ethernet. I’m pretty sure it works on Wi-Fi as well but it just watches all the raw traffic going through.

Dave Jones: Is this a commercial product, open source product?

Chris Gammell: I don’t think it’s open source but I think it is free. The last time I used it, it was free. Let’s see.

Dave Jones: It’s just an app, is it?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think it’s maybe a premium thing or no, it says GPL so yeah.

Dave Jones: You stick it on your phone or your modem?

Chris Gammell: There you go. There’s your video for the day. You can just watch what it does. Basically, it’s really good for troubleshooting. I was working on an Ethernet product and I learned about it fr