This is very sad. Indeed very sad for Zambia because on the 12th of August 2021 people voted for change and among the things that people voted was to use the police to intimidate political opponents was to stop using the police to detain political figures anyhow. The police did not have a reason to do so. Fine honourable Kachinda may have transgressed the law but does it deserve to sleep in cells because the matter that they are investigating is bailable, is bondable. And President Dakar in the Ichile matured the whole world, international community. When everybody is being investigated the police must do their investigation, complete their investigations. When they bring that person to a police station, if the matter is bailable, is bondable, you give police bond, you give bond. We have started going through the same things that we have gone through in the last 57 years of our independence and this is very sad. I have been a victim of police brutality, I have been a victim of police detentions. Haga hindi Ichilema was a victim of police detentions. The man has started doing exactly what was being done in the previous regimes. And yet he wants to appear to be a clean and very nice person in the eyes of the international community, in the eyes of every Zambian. When I was going around campaigning I told you I know this man, I have worked with him, I have been close to him. And for me to refuse to have worked with him, I had a reason what I saw in him. But Zambians thought this man was a savior. Look at what is happening today. Is saying this, these actions are something else. No we should give police bond, on the other hand is instructing the law enforcement agents not to give. Because if the president gives an instruction, people must be given police bond. Why wouldn't police not do that? Yes our brother might have transgressed the law or might have committed an offence. But should he be detained, should you be refusing sympathizers to see him. I have come all the way to visit my brother. And police have just refused me to go and see him. People of Zambia we must strive for a Zambia where the rule of law must be respected. Earlier on in the day UPN became here to attack the few PF officials that came with our brother. They have damaged vehicles, exactly what used to happen, where are we going as a country. I expect the president today to issue a statement, strong statement to stop this nonsense. Of carderism, stop this nonsense of using the police to intimidate others. This country must heal. There must be proper reconciliation. We are not going to continue on this trajectory. I was arrested 12 times and people were being refused to visit me when it is a right for everybody to visit somebody in detention. In any case, every person remains innocent until proven guilty by the courts of law. Why are you inflicting extrajudicial punishment on the Zambians? President Againda Ichile Mama brother want to tell you. You have started behaving exactly the way previous leaders have behaved in this country. And you are no better than any one of them. This is shame. Cry my beloved country. What has started happening is shame. We saw these things in the previous administration. Immediately you start seeing some sponsored chaps. No, we shall report to the police. We should be arrested the following day you are arrested. This is exactly what is happening. We just saw some chaps, angry politicians, marites, the RRPP going to the police. No, we are reporting Againda the following day you are arrested. Exactly the same thing that was happening even to you President Againda Ichile Mama. People are saying we shall report Againda the following day you are arrested. Why do you want people to go through what you went through? Provide leadership, my brother. Show that you are different. But alas, you are just the same. Nothing has changed. Youth of Zambia, what did you vote for? What did you vote for? What change did you vote for? Ababa police mune muna they are good people. But they are just given instructions. So pala muleba muna they are not happy to do what they have done. But they have just been instructed. Na rituali lesa na inu kunji kata. Kunji ala kwa chya kunji. Efi mua tampa na kabili ba hukulai kata banenu. Ua alanda ko se kuikata. Ua alanda ko se kuikata. Ati bali bali bali wu fix it. You have now started fixing the people of Zambia. You must be ashamed of yourself, my brother. Ua alanda wu inu kunji kata. But you are doing the opposite. No, this has to come to an end. We will not allow this as Zambians. And I am calling on the Zambians please, stand up and say no to these things. Yes, if somebody has committed an offence, you have the right to arrest them, take them before the law enforcement agencies, and take them to court. But don't detain them anyhow. And the cadders should not be running the country. In Zambia we must have the cadders. We will cut them. I think when I come, I will fire the entire police force and start all over again. This is a lot of nonsense.


I'm really big on teaching software-defined radio to people in the hacker community and I think that today having kind of an SDR first approach makes a lot of sense that you can get software-defined radio tools for very low cost and get started playing around and exploring the radio spectrum and learning about radio technology from a software standpoint first and then learn about hardware if that interests you whereas back in 1983 when I was a kid I used to, I would start to work on electronics and like the first radio I ever built was a crystal radio that was a little kit that was super simple really very few components but very unsophisticated and not really able to interface with kind of the modern radio systems that are more interesting maybe for kids to play with today and so I wanted to think, I wanted to kind of figure out a way for people today to kind of breadboard a very simple radio with few components and one of the things that we thought of is is that there are these microcontrollers in like high speed microcontrollers that are readily available to people and a lot of them have an analog to digital converter built in so putting this into the 1983 fictional perspective what if we're able to like reprogram the microcontroller or repurpose the microcontroller from some legitimate piece of equipment something we're allowed to have can we take a general purpose microcontroller that has a little analog to digital converter in it and build a radio receiver out of it who should be able to in theory take anything with an ADC and build some kind of a software to find radio out of it that we can use for general receiving purposes and so I came up with this breadboard SDR idea what's the smallest simplest thing that we can make out of a microcontroller with an ADC and as few components as possible and we have this circuit that we're about to demo that has actually one diode and one resistor and we have a plug into a great that which is a hardware platform that we've been working on for a while is our kind of our preferred platform for doing kind of general microcontroller things and we're using it in a number of these projects but really all that matters is that at some microcontroller that has an ADC and in this case it has an ADC and also has a USB port so we can stream samples from that analog to digital converter over to the computer that I'm demoing from really simple there's an antenna which is just a piece of wire plugged into a diode and there's a clock signal now this is the tricky part is that we're using this diode as a mixer it's a single diode mixer and I wanted to pick up a signal that's at a very high frequency compared to the things that were in that I was able to pick up when I was a kid I want to be able to pick up things like Dominic's car keys or this handheld radio things that are transmitting at hundreds of megahertz in some cases and we should be able to do that if we have a way to mix or translate the frequency shift the frequency that comes in on the antenna down to a low frequency that the analog to digital converter can tune to or can pick up and so we're doing that by mixing the signal between a clock and this antenna which is just a piece of wire and the clock is actually being generated by a clock generator on the microcontroller itself and this is pretty common like almost every microcontroller has some method for generating an internal clock because it has to clock its CPU or its peripherals and most of them will allow you to attach that to an output pin and bring that out and we'll show you a bit more of that in a minute but right now we're kind of bringing it out feeding it back into the diode along with our signal and then tapping it with an ADC. And Dominic is fond of pointing out the fact that like when I first put this circuit together and I was testing it I was like well you know it transmits as much as it receives but it does receive so it's messy it's not a really clean design but it does the job of showing you what the minimal circuit is that you need to build a mixer which accomplishes this this problem of shifting the frequency so I'm going to do a little demo here I'm going to actually receive a signal there we go everybody's radio speaks Mandarin right I'm just going to do a little narrow band FM transmission and one of the drawbacks of this design is that it has terrible performance in terms of received sensitivity but that doesn't really matter if you're transmitting from a fairly high-powered device nearby and so you can still demonstrate a functional mixing circuit with a single diode as long as you have a relatively high signal strength nearby so I'm going to do a little catcher here where I'm just streaming samples from the analog to digital converter on that great fat and then I will once it's up and running I'm going to do a little test transmission here we are testing from on stage breadboard SDR this is AD0NR and you really should have an amateur radio license to do stuff like this I highly recommend it there are ham exams going on here at Defcon and then I'm going to bring up a little flow graph and canoe radio I don't have time to go into it in detail but I'm taking this file that I just captured over the air and I'm going to see if I can recover audio from it and in software I should be able to do this. Can anyone else say that other than this? I think you could turn the volume up on your laptop. I could turn the volume up on my laptop I could also actually use the capture file I just made instead of the capture file I did earlier because that's kind of cheating right? Let's see if the new capture file actually works. We probably should have told speaker ops that we needed audio output and now we needed audio output for I can make a rule of myself once. Thank you very much. Sorry. That was our demo. So yeah when you build a radio in software you really don't need much hardware and that's one of the cool things about software defined radio technology you can actually use the power of software to overcome deficiencies in your hardware so you can demonstrate working circuits with extremely few components. All right. So Mike, what happened when we started the research for this is we divided up our ideas and Mike took the receivers and I being the one without an amateur radio license took the transmitters. Yeah, like a pro. So you won't be surprised to find we stuck to bands where we could transmit or I had Mike with me whenever I tested these things. But our scenario is that we've got inside an air gap network. We have an ally inside. We want to build a transmitter but we can't just carry a radio in there. Big brother probably wouldn't like hack RF so it's unlikely we can carry it into the build. I really wish I'd reread 1984 before this. So I could get my references right. But we couldn't carry it into the ministry and so what can we do with a microcontroller we find inside? Now previously we were talking about those clock signals. The clock signal that we were using to mix with the incoming transmission on the breadboard SDR. What if we and as we said it transmits as much as it receives. Well what if we intentionally try and transmit and see if it receives as much as it transmits. So a few people have done this before. Fontana was an interesting idea where you toggle a GPIO pin very quickly. Raspberry Pi FM does a similar thing and it toggles GPIO pin quickly and adjusts the frequency of that. And Mike Waters actually using great that previously did on off keying and so he would take that clock signal that we're using as a mixer and he'd just turn it on and off very quickly and he would generate on off keyed data. And so we wanted to kind of one up in a little bit because he's a friend of ours. And so we wanted to look at FSK data, frequency shift keyed things. And so what we did is we grabbed a great fit, stuck a, instead of having that mixer come back into the system we just stick a wire on it. And I very carefully tuned this antenna by reaching into a box of jumper wires pulling out one that was like kind of short and sticking it in the pin header and hoping that would work and it kind of does. Like if your radio is as rough as this, the antenna is not going to make the difference. So what we want to do is frequency shift keyed data and we have two options here. One is we can take those clock generators and we can very rapidly try and reconfigure them. And that's what Raspberry Pi FM does, but we can get it to make very clean jumps back and forward between our two frequencies that we needed. And we actually had inside great fit we happen to have multiple clock generators. There are three in there. There's one for audio, one for the CPU and one for USB. So if we just resign ourselves to the fact that we don't get to use two of those things then and specifically we need the CPU so we just don't use USB in the audio, we can repurpose both of those clock generators. So what we do is we set 1 to 315 megahertz, we set 1 to 315.1 and then the SCU here is a system control unit. All it does is decide which pins on the micro control, which functions of the processor get connected to which pins on output pins on the great fit. So all I do is I say this clock pin will be connected to this output pin. And then when I want to change to the other frequency I just reconfigure the SCU and switch which clock signal is going out and that's much, much quicker than waiting for a clock generator, a PLL to settle. And it is that simple. All we do is load in the FSK data into the firmware. I do it over USB but I've killed my USB by repurposing its clock. So I build a one-time firmware, load it onto the device and it immediately just repeatedly transmits my FSK signal. And so it's a super simple piece of, oh you need to tab out, yeah. That's right, videos don't work in PDF. So it's a super simple piece of code. We captured a signal. We actually used a hacker ref to capture the signal. And then we pulled the bits out using in spectrum, loaded it into the great fit and then retransmitted it. Now we have a piece of demo target for this but it was kind of large and Defcon were not super enthusiastic about us bringing it on stage so this is a video demo. I don't know why they didn't want us to bring our demo car. So I'm just pausing it for a moment. So yeah the first thing you saw was me hit a key on my keyboard and that was just loading the firmware into the, my single purpose firmware into the great fit. And then you probably want to watch the bottom, bottom in the middle to the left. Watch my lights. There they go. And we unlocked my car. So it turns out like cars use rolling codes. So to get this working correctly what we had to do was run up and down the road to get out of range of the car, capture a key press with the hacker ref, decode it, copy the bits over to the great fit, run back up the road, try it. And then the first time we tried it we thought it was going to be like there's no way this works first time. So I just ran it and I went oh I unlocked the car. And Mike's like I hadn't started recording yet.  We work opposite a dog park. So there's just a bunch of puppies following us as we went up and down. The most fun. And interestingly the target device, the actual key fob that we captured a signal from has pretty tight frequency deviations, plus or minus 25 kilohertz. And we had a little bit of difficulty with like configuring the clock generators exactly how we wanted. And we said well hey maybe this way will work and we don't have to go through the trouble of going to the more complicated configuration we were thinking about. Let's just try it this way and see what happens. And it turns out yes we actually had twice the frequency deviation and a considerable offset from the original target device's center frequency. And it still worked. Like we were within the received filter of the target device and we were able to replay those signals, well replay them. We were able to synthesize new signals from the captured signal that we had captured from the real original key fob. Right. And part of that is just power as well. We were like as you saw in the video I was like sat with the great fair on the, I was going to say bonnet of my car, hood of my car. And so I was like you know that far away from the receiver which is in the dash. So I'm so close to it that the power level I was transmitting at is probably going to go through the filter pretty well. Right. The closer you are the more you can get away with in terms of you know being off frequency or being out of the pass band of the filter of the receiver. There's nothing particularly subtle or delicate about any of these radios. So if it's like a radio and it's like a radio, it's a radio. And that's kind of a big part of the point of what we're doing today is trying to show that you can build radio circuits out of just about anything. Our next scenario is this idea that maybe you're not allowed to even have analog digital converters. Like we, in our first SDR receiver I repurposed a microcontroller that had an analog to digital converter in it. And an analog to digital converter is generally considered to be the core of any software-defined radio. And I wanted to see if we could build a software-defined radio receiver without an analog to digital converter. Specifically can we use a GPIO input, a general purpose digital input. So it's just a pin on a microcontroller that detects you know whether there's a high voltage or low voltage. And that's it. It only has one bit of dynamic range. And that we can kind of think of a GPIO pin as being a one bit ADC. And if we do, are we able to actually build a functional software-defined radio out of it? And back to kind of a real, real motivation of this too is like when we did the previous demo with a car, we captured a signal with a hack RF. And we kind of said, well, maybe that's cheating a little bit. Maybe we should actually have a demo in which we can build a radio and use it to capture the key press on the car key. And that's how we could, you know, find the code that we need to transmit. It would be nice to be able to do that without having something like a hack RF. So if you've got a hack RF, you don't need to build a PLL switching FSK transmitter. You just use the hack RF. Right. Like, like motivating the... So, but another, you know, getting back to this fictional idea that analog to digital converters are restricted. Like if you think that's far fetched in any way, here's something from ITAR that tells us about today, export controls on analog to digital converters in this country. And you can see that like, if you look on the right hand side of the page, you can see 10-bit ADCs are restricted at a certain speed and 12-bit ADCs are restricted at a certain speed and so forth. And you'll notice that there is no restriction for 1-bit ADCs. So 1-bit ADCs are totally allowed at any speed, which is pretty, until tomorrow. 1-bit ADCs are allowed by ITAR at any speed. So we should be able to implement a 1-bit ADC and, you know, if you restrict GPIO inputs, like you restrict all digital electronics. So if any digital electronics work, we should be able to improvise an ADC out of a GPIO pin. That's our thinking. So we've made a GPIO pin receiver and unfortunately, you know, one of the drawbacks of making a GPIO pin receiver is that we need a fairly strong signal that we pump into it. And so we actually decided to salvage an analog radio from something that's readily available, like a telescreen, for example. And so I made this little circuit that's using a TV tuner, and this is an old analog TV tuner, like you might pull out of a VCR. We had VCRs in 1983. And so this is not a digital receiver at all. This is just an analog radio tuner that shifts the frequency of a television signal down to a frequency that a television is able to decode. In an analog or digital way. And I connected this to a great fit, and I'm using a GPIO pin on the great fit to read the input from that tuner, that analog input. And I was able to do this with just one additional component. So I have the tuner and I have the great fit, and I have one capacitor in there. And this is a circuit diagram. You can see we're picking up 315 megahertz signal from Dominic's car key, and using this TV tuner that we can salvage out of some other equipment, like a telescreen, and that's getting converted down to about 44 megahertz. We need this one capacitor so that we can AC couple it to the GPIO input on the great fit. And the first time I made this work, I actually had a voltage divider there, so I had two additional resistors in the design to bias that GPIO pin. And there are kind of a number of tricks going on in this design. One of them is that we need to bias that GPIO pin. And the reason for that is like, if you give the GPIO pin a voltage near zero volts, it detects that as low. And if you give it a voltage that's near 3.3 volts, which is its power supply level, it detects that as high. But somewhere in between zero and 3.3 volts, there is this threshold where you can kind of twiddle the voltage by a small amount and make it and flip that bit. But finding that threshold is a little bit tricky business. And so the first time I did it, I played with different resistors to make a little voltage divider to bias it so that that pin would be at about the threshold that it needed to be. But then I realized I could eliminate those two resistors from the design just by using the digital to analog converter that's built into the microcontroller and use that to produce an arbitrary DC voltage that I use to bias that GPIO pin. And not only does that remove two resistors from the design, but it also gives me a flexible way to tune in software and find just the right threshold. Because that threshold may change over time, it may change with temperature, it may change from one microcontroller to another. It's not guaranteed by the data sheet to be at any particular voltage level. And so it's handy to be able to control that from software and dynamically find that particular threshold that I need. Now another trick that we're using in this, and this is fundamental to the concept of using a one bit ADC, is that we're oversampling and decimating. What does that mean? Oversampling means we're using a sample rate that is faster than you might expect that you need. And we're decimating, which means we're reducing the sample rate. We're throwing out some samples, but we're doing it in an intelligent way. So here's a little simulation where I have 16 random samples in this stem plot. The first one is zero, the second one is one, and so forth. They're all one bit samples. They're all one bit samples. I just have 16 random values. The first step in oversampling and decimating is to then combine some of those samples and reduce the sample rate. And ideally we use some kind of a good quality low pass filter, but as a kind of crude example, let's just say we average adjacent samples together. So those first two samples, zero and one, we combine those two samples into one sample that has a value that's the average of those two so it has a value of 0.5. And I'm going to do that with every pair of samples. If I do that, then I turn my sample stream into this in the digital domain. Instead of having zeros and ones, now I have zeros and ones and one halves, but I have half as many samples. But I've added more dynamic range. There's more nuance to the vertical scale. And I can keep going. I can do this again. I can combine two of these samples. And now I have only four samples left, but out of those original 16. But each one has several different values it could take on, not just a zero or one. So we're adding dynamic range by trading our excess sample rate. So the faster we can sample, the more ability we have to actually gain dynamic range and we gain a bit of dynamic range every time we divide the sample rate in half. And that allows us to take a low dynamic range ADC and turn it into a high dynamic range ADC at a lower speed in software. Which means ultimately we should be able to make things work with a one bit ADC like a GPIO pin. Now interestingly, Dominic, I think it was the first person to point out that not only are we over sampling in this demo, but we are also under sampling. That may be hard to wrap your head around, but we are in fact sampling at a sample rate that is lower than that 44 megahertz output of the TV tuner. We're sampling currently at 20 million samples per second, which is quite a bit lower than the 44 megahertz intermediate frequency that we have from that TV tuner. And it turns out that that works fine. We were thinking we could crank up our speed and actually sample that GPIO pin faster than that, but it turned out the way it didn't need to. So we actually ended up with a demo where we're simultaneously over sampling and under sampling. I think that's pretty cool. So let's do our demo. All right. I'm going to try and move this thing without dropping it. Good luck. Yeah. There you have it. All right. All right. These demos, I've broken like wires in these demos at least twice in the last 24 hours. So you know, we'll see how this goes. We have my favorite antenna, which is just a piece of wire stuck into the coax connector on the end of the TV tuner. And I'm going to, let's see, I have to tune the tuner, which was a little bit of, a little bit of configuration. There are some I squared C, there's a little I squared C bus on the tuner. And so we have the great Fed actually commanding it to tune into a certain frequency, which I just did. And then, what is the other command I do? I don't know. Logic analyzer. Logic. That's the one I want. We're using this logic analyzer command, which actually takes the state of multiple GPIO pins and throws them into this named pipe right now. But all the other GPIO pins that it talks to are unconnected, so they're all just at zero. And I'm going to run that while I turn on a new radio flow graph to actually process that information. And so now what you can see here are the one bit samples, that top plot that's moving rapidly left to right. Those are just one bit samples. See everything's a zero or one? And then Dominic is pressing the button, there he goes, on his key fob. And you can see that we're seeing a signal down here in our waterfall plot. And if you look at just the one bit samples, it's kind of hard to see that there's anything different going on. But if you look at the decimated samples, this is after we've down sampled with, and combined samples together with a filter that allows us to create more dynamic range. Now as he's pushing the button, you can see that sinusoidal stuff, it looks like a real radio signal that we should be able to analyze. And in fact, if we run it through an FSK demodulator, I just stopped this really quick. And you can see that in this, the left hand side of the screen here, you can clearly see the bits that are being transmitted. So sometimes it's low and sometimes it's high. And when the frequency is low, it's transmitting a zero and the frequency is high. It's transmitting a one or something like that, the other way around perhaps. But we can clearly see the digital bits that are being transmitted sufficient to decode it. And we've now taken a one capacitor circuit and used it to interface our general purpose microcontroller with a salvaged radio tuner and repurposed it. So instead of just being a TV tuner, it now is able to help us in software demodulate and decode arbitrary radio signals, including the digital signal from Dominic's key fob. All right. So moving on, yeah. So sometime, a number of people have asked us recently, we did some work earlier in the year and towards the end of last year, I guess, on direction finding. And a number of people are very interested in being able to track down the source of a radio transmitter. This is amateur radio enthusiasts want to find people who are interfering with their radios, who are people who are broadcasting illegally and so on and so forth. And we're saying here that Big Brother has deployed a pseudo Doppler technique to kind of do direction finding to track down illegal transmitters. And we have managed to somehow, given that we built it, steal one of these direction finding rigs. And can we do anything nefarious with it in a way that subverts what the authorities are attempting to do? So spoiler, yes. So pseudo Doppler direction finding is, do you know who we haven't got on this slide? And he sat in the front row as Balan. Oh yeah. That's because that's where I first learned about pseudo Doppler. So I'm sorry about that. Bouncy but also did some work maybe 10 years ago on this. Yeah. Well, he's cited in the talk that is on. There you go. Yeah. If you watch the talk that we're citing, you'll see the citation of his talk and then that's all fine. Apparently. So what you do is you have a set of antennas and you want and they're spatially separated from each other and you want to rotate very quickly between them and using that rotation, what you see is a shift in the phase of the signal, the incoming signal and that gives you some information about which direction it's coming as you change between them. I'm not going to go into the in depth of how that works now because that's about as much of it as I really understand and also you can look up those two talks that are referenced. But what you need for this is some hardware to rapidly switch antennas. So we built some. Now this is called opera cake. It connects to both Hacker F and great fit and it can be controlled from firmware. So you can do various things with it. One is you can do pseudo by attaching a number of antennas and very rapidly switching between those antennas. You can also do things like have an input and output attached and switch in different kind of filters or other things loop back between the two sides and just changing between different antennas based on which frequency you're receiving and things like that. That's what we usually use it for. But in our scenario big brothers using it to find where we're transmitting from and in doing so what they're looking for is our transmission and then they're inducing a or they're looking for a phase shift as they switch antennas. And so if we're able to somehow inject a phase shift then that will be a phase shift that they don't expect and therefore can't compensate for if it's for example pseudo random. Now I was going to explain phase shift. That's what I'm going to do. Okay. I was trying to work out what all of these slides were in. So a way to get a when we talk about phase shift what we talk about is the if you think of a wave. So this one this slide. If you think about it I drew this in my hotel room because I wanted better to better explain this concept and I'm not sure it's worked. But if you think about a wave traveling down a coax cable as you the one I've carefully drawn on the paper.  The difference in length between these two cables gives us a different section of that wave at the same time. If you inject the same wave into both of these cables simultaneously what you'll get at the antennas is a slightly different wave based on the length of the cable and the speed at which the signal propagates down them. So sometimes referred to as delay lines. So phase shift is that difference in where we are in the cycle of the wave relative to another wave. So in this instance what we're doing is we're taking those two cables and we're switching from a shorter cable to a longer cable and with our standard radio input signal coming in. And that's the signal from some arbitrary radio. It doesn't have to be we're not generating it. We're not creating a specific radio here. What we've got is a radio that we're allowed to transmit with or that we are transmitting with and we are adding this phase shift on top at the end to try and make it hidden from direction finding. And the radio we've chosen is a four dollar Bluetooth dongle that I got from ebay. And we just cracked the thing open and as you can see here we attached a coax cable so that we can hook it up to our radio system. And it's actually on the table at the front. You can get a look at it later. This took three attempts. Couple tries. Yeah. This one I think I did a really good soldering job on it. You can see in the lower right hand corner the I've nicely, you can't see it behind the cable, but I've nicely cut the original antenna trace and then I've soldered the wire onto it. And then afterwards it didn't work and we're like why doesn't it work? And if you look closely. Really closely where the mouse is right now you can see like melted the corner of it. Yeah, somehow I just destroyed the chunk of it is missing. And so then we went on to round two which survived long enough for us to work on this in the lab and then did not survive the journey to Vegas. And so thank you to the third one stayed up. Yeah, thank you to the Badgler folk who at nine o'clock this morning soldered me another one with their very precise machinery. And I want to point out that this isn't one of these sophisticated modern Bluetooth chips that knows how to do Bluetooth and FM radio and Wi-Fi and like Bluetooth low energy and all kinds of different protocols. This is like a 10 year old chip or more that like we were hacking on in the early days of Bluetooth hacking and like the reason we used it was because like what was it your first open source contribution? Yeah, one of the pieces of code I'm going to run in a minute in the demo. It was my first ever open source contribution which was to enable the radio test modes in these dongles. And when we were coming up with this project Mike was like do you have any 2.4 gigahertz like hardware kicking around that we can hack on just kind of open to draw. And I was like these because they're so cheap and so have loads of them hanging around. So that's why we picked this thing because it's pretty hackable and things like that. So what we're doing is we're taking the signal that comes out of this and we're using a direction finding technique to try and locate it and then we're going to enable our delay lines and switching back and forward between two different lengths of cable and that will produce a phase shift in the output that does not affect the signal. It makes no difference to our signal going through but it does affect the ability to direction find it. I'm not sure I'd say it does not affect our signal but it depends on the modulation of your original waveform. But for example if it's an amplitude modulation you should be able to just layer on arbitrary changes to the phase without actually affecting your ability to communicate.  Okay, so this is, I'm going to pause it a few times. This is just a demo we took on the table in our lab. So this is my directions finding set up here and you can see I've got like four, I've got four different 2.4 gigahertz antennas that are vertical and to support them structurally we are using a pint glass. Like everybody needs a glass full of antennas from time to time. And then this is my direction finding rig like I talked about with Skyler at Shmucon this year. So I have the opera cake with a hack RF and I'm using some software on my laptop to run some direction finding and I'm not finding anything right now. There isn't anything transmitting but Dominic over here is about to start transmitting with his Bluetooth dongle which you can see plugged into the USB cable that little blue blob plugged into the USB extender. That's actually a little tiny USB to Bluetooth adapter and that's plugged into his opera cake. His opera cake has four different wires in it. I think you're only using two of them but they're four different lengths of cable and he has the ability to from software control which cable is switched into the path between the Bluetooth dongle and the external antenna. So initially you can press play. So initially what we're gonna do is start transmitting from the Bluetooth dongle and we're gonna leave the path to be static. So if you pause now, you can see we've got a pretty reasonable, this is a polar, thank you, a polar plot and so you can see we've got a pretty reasonable direction from our antenna array to where this thing's transmitting. Like that's pretty, that blue dot is up to the right of the center of that plot and so that's indicating the direction of the transmitter that it's seeing. I'm gonna un-pause it here. And so what I do is I run a script that just slowly switches back and forth between two paths, just creating a little phase shift once in a while, I mean once in a while like every couple of milliseconds and you can see it just sends this, this becomes sporadic. We have such a wide range, like our bearing to our transmitter has gone from being kind of very narrow to being somewhere around 50% of the direction that we're looking in. And so that phase shift means that we now, it's now much more hard, much more harder, much more difficult to locate the transmitter than it previously was. So we're able to subvert our own, we're able to subvert our own pseudo Doppler direction finding code using our own pseudo Doppler direction finding hardware and other code that we wrote. So I'm gonna call that a win. Okay, since we can introduce those phase shifts, we thought as a final demo in the last couple of minutes that we have left, what we try and do is do a phase shift key transmission. So what we're gonna do is transmit something that is phase shift keyed by not by having a radio that transmits phase shift keyed, we're gonna have a clock source and then we're going to change the phase using those, using the delay lines on the, on the uppercase board. So, so this is a picture of those delay lines.  This, so I'm just running it again from great fact because it's the microcontroller or board I have around and it uses GPO pins to rapidly switch which antenna path. Now I'm gonna do something that's BPSK, so binary PSK, so I actually only need two of those four paths that I'm using, but essentially what I do is I switch both sides simultaneously and switch in those various lengths and those lengths are off by half a wavelength from each other, so half a or a multiple of half a wavelength at the frequency that we're using. Now because we're using a Bluetooth dongle to feed this, our wavelength, our frequency is 2.4 gigahertz and we have a little 2.4 gigahertz band pass filter in between the uppercase and the antenna and that's actually one of the nice things about using 2.4 gigahertz band for this kind of a demo is that you can get readily available low cost and highly effective filters. This technique causes a lot of spectral splatter. It really is not being a very good neighbor on the spectrum so if we're able to filter the output from it before it goes over the air, that helps us be a better neighbor on the spectrum. And one of the things we're trying to do here is show that we could take one type of radio transmitter and then layer another modulation on top of it to have a covert channel. Regardless of what the modulation of the original system is, we should be able to, in some cases actually, still use the original system, the original modulation and then also add this covert channel on top of it that acts like some other type of radio device. If you're looking up these papers, I highly recommend you Google them rather than clicking on the links on our slides because we've put the same link for two different papers here. Oh yeah, how about that? Whoops. I just noticed some people taking pictures of the slides although with the URLs. I'll try to fix that before we hand our slides to the speaker ops. Oops. Okay, so when we add in the phase shift, we're able to then kind of capture it with another radio and look at it in spectrum and so this is how we work out whether or not our transmitter is working and in spectrum let's us do a phase plot at the bottom here so at the bottom of the screen what you can see is the phase shifts being created and they're at very regular intervals because they are when I have a timer firing on the device and it fires at regular intervals and we see a very quick phase jump. We're almost out of time. Yeah, I'm only running the demo. Are you running it already? I am running the demo. Okay, so we are actually now transmitting a binary phase shift keyed signal in the 2.4 gigahertz band and we were like what target device could we use that uses 2.4 gigahertz and has binary phase shift keying or QPSK and we said hey, Wi-Fi. So why not a front couple of rows anywhere near about here you might be able to pick up a Wi-Fi beacon that we're transmitting and it says is this revolting enough for you I believe is the network SSID? I'd be really interested if anyone can receive it because I can't receive on my phone here but I could when I ran this in my hotel room like mere hours ago it turns out doing 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi demos at a con is still as bad an idea as it was when we first started doing this. Yeah, but you know we're not transmitting at a particularly high power and there are a lot of different Wi-Fi networks in here that your phone or your laptop can see but probably some of you especially those who are sitting close can actually pick up this Wi-Fi beacon right now and actually see. Yeah, this tends to work somewhat better if you're using an iPhone apparently. Interestingly, we've just had better luck with it this morning for people receiving on an iPhone but I'm guessing no one can receive it which is incredibly disappointing to me but it is definitely running. Yeah, get it as close as you can to the transit text and see if you can pick up a network. There's, yeah, I don't see it on my phone I see a lot of other networks around those so that's potentially why but I'll happily run this maybe somewhere that's a little bit more RF silent for people to try it out later but yeah, essentially what we can do is we can take a radio test mode that transmits a just a pure carrier wave into this device, we can do binary phase shift keying and I really do promise if you do binary phase shift keying at 11 megabits you get a one megabit DSSS transmission out and that can be crafted to be a Wi-Fi beacon and you should be able to pick this up on your phone. So thank you to all these folks whose work we have built upon and most of this stuff is built on hardware that we've hardware designs that are in the Great Fet repo or the HackRF repo that's where the opera cake lives. Find us on Twitter and we will take questions in the hallway off yonder in a couple minutes. Thank you very much. Thank you.


Good morning everyone. Thank you for coming to my little chit chat here. Should be nice and fun and informal. I'm going to try to keep it tutorial-esque, but also just kind of be a sort of a small look into, you know, a sort of a daily exercise. It's kind of what I called it as a daily design warm up, because this is the type of thing that I would do, sort of regularly for fun and just to kind of, you know, get my brain moving. So, you know, we're not going to make any specific pre-planned thing, but so there will be a live portion of course, but I guess I should also say hello everyone and welcome. I'm Derek Elliott from Derek.com. That's, so yeah, some of you may know me. I know some of you may not, some of you may. I know that many of you do, because you've been coming up to me at the conference saying how excited you are for this, and I responded, but great, like what do you want to see? Because it's been mostly just kind of planned in my head up until now. So, like I said, we're going to be doing sort of a live tutorial, and we're going to be making something sort of similar to what you're seeing on the screen now, which is a project I did for 36 days a type several years ago. So this is an older project, but I've done a lot of similar ones. This is just the only one that I have nicely compiled into a long thing that I could put on the screen and draw your attention while I ramble on for less than six minutes. So yeah, I was going to dive right into that, but fortunately I'm going on the last day, so I was able to watch some other talks and decided it would probably be good to talk just a little bit about myself. So I guess before I go by show of hands, has anyone watched my tutorials before, or are there a lot of people? Okay, so mostly people who have seen them, some who haven't. Thank you for coming. But yeah, so most of the ways people find me are through YouTube or Instagram or something like that, but that's really only about 10% of what I do. I'm not official YouTuber, but my background is in industrial design, which if you don't know is designing products, like physical products, like everything around you, water bottles, monitors, mice, things like that. It's not designing conveyor belts and stuff for industries, which I had to explain to many people in college that that's what industrial design was. I would call it product design, but the UX and UI designers in Silicon Valley have mostly claimed the title of product designer. But I really like industrial design because it's kind of like, I really liked art, but I also like practical things. Art is a little bit too big of a box. It's too open-ended for me, so one thing that's really good about industrial design and just design in general versus art is that there's kind of constraints. So there's a lot of room for creativity, but you can also have some things to kind of keep things bounded. So over my time in school, I kind of discovered furniture design and architecture, and I find those as sort of two really perfect areas for design because they have very specific constraints, but you think of it like a chair, for example, and it's got a very, very specific use. It needs to fit a person and they can sit in it, but every day people are designing chairs and that's fascinating to me. Why are we still designing chairs? Like you think we would have found one by now that was good, but it's just fun to design chairs because it's just like a really unique problem to try to solve. So anyways, the other 90% of what I'm doing that's not YouTube and Instagram is mostly doing freelance work of some sort or another, kind of working directly with clients to, because on my background in industrial design, I'm mostly doing stuff for product launches, product animation, things like that. At times we'll kind of stray away from that, but sort of continuously try to pull myself back into sort of my roots and what I still like, which is physical products and industrial design things. So yeah, and that is because I like constraints. Like I was saying, that it needs to be a box. So one thing that freelance work is really good for, of course, is having a deadline. As soon as somebody decides to pay me to do something, first of all, I immediately don't want to do it at that point, but also, I know I have a deadline. It's a good way to get a project done because if I don't have that, then it can be difficult to, I'm sure many of you have done personal projects and started them and never finished them because there's, you don't really have to ever finish it. So you really have to push yourself to do that, but freelance work is good for that. And it also allows me to keep a finger on the industry. So when I'm creating things like YouTube tutorials, I can sort of know what clients are actually asking for and what those conversations actually are so that when I'm presenting educational content, I can sort of talk about it in real world scenarios and like this is a situation that I actually went through. So most of the work ends up being product visualization stuff, but I've also had the pleasure of working on a lot of like super secret, more like abstract projects. So the company Niantic that makes Pokemon Go, I've worked directly with them a few times for developing some, should we watch the donut tutorial next? I was gonna replay that, but I'll also just switch over to, this is like a very short reel just for the top of my website, but this shows some other kind of more recent work in the, that's not the 36 days type stuff. But yeah, Niantic, you know, working with them very early on to kind of bring a 3D eye to a new app that they were developing. Also working with the architecture firm Gensler on sort of developing these digital physical scenarios for this, I don't know if some of you have heard the line in Saudi Arabia, it's like this new crazy, hit all the design magazines. It's of questionable practicality, but working with them to figure out kind of, it was mostly just for presentation, but the way Blender comes into that is that it's a very fast way for me to iterate and a lot of the work that I did for them and ended up being, using a lot of the exact same techniques and kind of looking like sort of the same style as the 36 days of type because it's a really fast way to sort of present concepts and spaces and structures without getting too bogged down by details and things like that. So, I think that's pretty much enough about me unless I'll probably go ahead and get into it, but yeah, I really like Blender and I'm gonna walk you through just sort of a little bit of how I would make something like those 36 days of type animations. So I'm just gonna minimize that. And here we are in Blender. And we can keep this, I'm gonna regret saying it, but we can keep this as casual as possible. Like, while I'm doing something, if anybody has a question about why I'm doing it, I'll try to keep talking the whole time. It's hard for me not to, but if there's something I'm doing and somebody wants me to kind of elaborate on that while I'm going, then we can do that. But here we have the default queue, as you may know. And I'm going to, usually when I'm starting off something like this, in the case of architecture, starting with sort of a little bit of a, there's no floor plan, there's no real design here, but we will delete the default queue if I'm almost positive. I'll add another one later at some point, but we'll just use it plain for now. So we're just gonna scale that up a little bit. And so there's really, and I guess kind of while I'm doing this, I'll try to sort of explain why we're doing this, but I try to use as few sort of base elements as possible. That's gonna be, and modifiers. So we're gonna be using like the bevel modifier, for example, the solidify modifier, skin modifier. Those are really easy ways to sort of build geometry quickly that you can create detail with. But it's really very, you know, you have a very simple base geometry, so it's easy to sort of iterate quickly. So bevel modifier is great for that. Then the next thing I might add is a solidify modifier. Basically, yeah, just ways to sort of create detail, very easy. So I'll try to stay with this being my front view. And then, yeah, just kind of sort of building out some shapes here maybe. Just thinking about what might look interesting. So that could be our floor, for example. And then, you know, maybe to do a roof, we would just select this, bring that up. Maybe a defined increment. I loved in a midge, the mantissa talk yesterday. He loved the nice, even increments, because that's very helpful. So we'll, I did automatically add my quick favorite, auto smooth to do that. I'll try to keep the technical details to a minimum since I suppose most of you probably are relatively familiar with this software. So auto smooth is in the normal section here. But I, it's like the only quick favorite I ever use. Yeah, I just, just like this one, I'm putting on here. Oh yeah, is that true? Shade auto smooth. Yeah, so this computer's running 3.4 alpha, which kind of terrified me, because I was like, don't those ones crash or something like that? But maybe that's a new thing. I don't update my blender like super regularly because most of what I'm doing is very much not on the, the bleeding edge. You know, a lot of people have like described my style as simple and it wasn't really by choice. It's kind of just like, I don't know how to do anything else in Blender. Like I definitely haven't touched geometry nodes ever. So I'm like, your style is so simple. I'm like, great. It's cause I don't know how to do anything else. So let's just start with that for now. We'll expand this over time. I kind of want to quickly get to a point where I have sort of the building blocks, sort of the Legos of this piece. So the next Lego I might do is our beloved should have been default cube. So I'll just, I'm going to use this as kind of a, maybe like a, like a window area. Start thinking about some walls. So I'll go into my X-ray view there. And then maybe we bring this back. This can come over. And at some point it's good to start thinking about maybe like what angle you're going to be looking at this from so that you can, you know, you're not putting detail on somewhere where you don't necessarily need it. So that's something I might do once I have some very basic forms built out. But now that I'm kind of looking at this, I'm thinking like, oh, maybe this is going to be sort of a covered outdoor porch area. This could be like a second or a first story porch. Maybe this is like a living room. Again, the idea with this is to kind of be inspired by architecture and, you know, sort of creating unique shapes. It's really just for fun. You know, it's not, there's no real purpose or anything that this needs to serve. But so that we can start thinking about a little bit more like architecture, I might add in a wireframe modifier just so that we can have sort of a frame to our little house there. Now, I like to do this with, I would turn off replace original so that we still have our original and it is not replaced. And I'll add like maybe a material to this. I'll call glass. And then so that I can see, and I don't know how to turn caps lock off on. I think it's off now. On, off, okay. With this material, you know, just, because I am going to be working mostly just, you know, in the viewport display, it's a good idea to go ahead and add in some, you know, just materials, viewport materials so that you can kind of see what you're doing here. And glass is blue as we all know. And I'll add another material. So this is one thing you can do that's cool on the wireframe modifiers, add in a second slot, which I'll just call black. I never like to call materials by a color name because I always end up changing it and then it just confuses me later, but I think we'll keep it black. So in the viewport display, and you know, we will go into a rendered view and maybe even do like a little bit of animation or something. And it depends on how this is looking, what you guys are interested in. But we'll just keep moving along here. So if that's black, we can go into the wireframe modifier and then do a material offset. And I'll just do that. And you know, very quickly, we already have like basically, you know, what we would need to make a house. We've got some, you know, walls, windows. And the cool thing about working like this with the wireframe modifiers that now I can just go in, I can actually turn on this so I can see in edit mode. But, you know, I can just add in another little pane right there. And you know, I'm sort of, you know, again, why do you need a pane right there? I don't know. It just, you know, this area felt blank. So, you know, maybe we add in a little bit of detail there. Now, you know, I would like to think that maybe we can get into this room. So maybe we delete that face. That's looking cool. You know, what could we do next? Maybe thinking about some other walls. So I have this as one object now. I'm gonna duplicate it. And this is a thing that I like to do a lot. It's just steel geometry. So, you know, that's another advantage of working this way with modifiers is that once you kind of have these objects built with some of those modifiers you're gonna be reusing, it's very easy to then make new objects that have the same modifiers already on them without having to re-add them. So, once I kind of duplicate that, just kind of select the inverse, delete everything. And then I will, now I have this object, which I can make as the walls. It looks like I didn't get everything there. Delete those faces. Okay, so now I have this wall object. You know, maybe this one, I don't bevel the vertices, but instead bevel the edges so that I can maybe bring this part down a little bit so it's not intersecting there.  You know, maybe this is the garage. I don't remember what's the front of the house. You know, this, okay, so we'll call that the garage area. But, you know, it's feeling a little bit big. So maybe this is like, maybe that's the garage up here. And then we're thinking about, okay, now we've got maybe more private area in the back here. So adding that, maybe extruding something out. So we've got sort of another room. And with that, and maybe we'll make the floor plan just a little bit bigger. Not sure what that area is, but looks nice. Maybe our entrance would be somewhere around there. So if that's our garage, we like close that off. Something like that. I think it looks cool. And then, you know, another thing I like to add a lot of is like little like fences and stuff. Maybe we do that as we add maybe another floor here. So we can bring that up. We start to get this sort of three story tiered structure, looking kind of cool. You know, and one of the advantages with the 36 Days of Type project, again, coming back to constraints is that, you know, you know each one each day has to have. It has to be in the form of a letter. So, you know, that alone is a good constraint.  So I'm gonna duplicate that. Actually, usually I like to put that as the same object in case I change things. So let's go into this object. Shift D to bring it up. And, you know, maybe so that we're not reusing too much. Let's just delete everything except one of those faces. You know, maybe this is the bedroom. So we, you know, want a little bit of visibility there, but we want some privacy up further on the wall. So we can duplicate this, bring it up. Let's feel good. You know, maybe this is another private balcony. So we can bring this down. A little bit of like a wall looking out. You know, this is the private office where you spend all day working on Blender. Wouldn't that be a dream? Does anybody have any specific areas that they love in their house that we could consider adding here? House, apartment, dwelling, a kitchen. The kitchen's in there somewhere. We're definitely not gonna be modeling any sinks, but that's another cool thing about this is it's like, you know, you can go in and, you know, continuously add more and more and more detail. You know, but the idea here is like, you know, let's just rough out some big forms, things like that. This shape is looking a little interesting. Now might be the time when I would go in and, you know, depending on if you're gonna do an animation or something, obviously you need to be considering more sides, but maybe now would be a good time to go ahead and start thinking about, you know, what angle we wanna look at this from so that we can kind of be adding details in the right places. And, you know, if this is gonna be a still image at the end of the day, you know, I wanna, I just kinda wanna create an interesting composition that like your eyes sort of drawn to the middle. You don't have any kind of weird lines lining up with each other. And you just kinda, you know, it's supposed to like feel like architecture, but really you like need to remember like there doesn't necessarily need to be a kitchen.  You don't need to have a door to get into some particular area. So, you know, it should look upon immediately looking like at it like a house or something like that, but that's one thing that you like have to consistently kind of disconnect yourself from. It's like it's not a house. It's inspired by a house, but it's really, it's an image, like you, I know I said, I don't wanna call myself an artist, but, you know, what you're creating here really is more, it is kind of a little bit more art. But, so let's start thinking about that. So the way I usually like to set up my cameras is by adding in an empty in the center of my scene and then just making it really big so I can see it and then binding my camera to that. So I'll press Alt G to move it to the middle, Alt R to make it pointing straight down and then R X 90 and then just kind of bring it out in little ways and maybe we make that a little bit bigger so we can see it, viewport display size. Bunder 3.4 Alpha's holding it very well so far, but I have not yet saved, so let's do that. What should we call our house? Beacon home one, because there will be a Beacon home two in a few minutes probably. All right, so let's bind this to that. I don't think I did that. Control P, keep transform, and then I'll just kind of pull out another view here and then I'll go into my camera view on this one and then just sort of the reason I do that is just because I kind of want to keep things centered in my scene and like, you know, if you're a lot of times I'll just fly around to like find like what angle I want to look at, but with this, you know, I kind of want to keep it, you know, maybe isometric looking but just, you know, finding sort of a unique angle here knowing that my camera is right there in the center. So, you know, right now, I think I was kind of designing it from this angle anyways. That's looking pretty good and maybe we consider making this image a square so it doesn't really matter because we probably won't render it, but 1500 by 1500 is a great dimension. I like, I never do like 1920 by 1920 or, those numbers are just like, it's just, you know, I like square round numbers. So 1500 by 15. A lot of people also ask, how do you get the quality so high for Instagram? And I don't do anything. I literally just save it as a JPEG and upload it. I guess it just comes down to the resolution. You know, let me just move this camera up a little bit. Okay, so also thinking about the shapes, not just the shapes of the object, we will be rendering this eventually. So not a bad idea to already start thinking maybe a little bit about lighting. Now you could put this in a little bit of an environment.  I'm gonna kind of working ahead here so that our hill isn't too, so the house stays on hill. I'm gonna add a subdivision surface to that shaded smooth. And then maybe we should actually add in a, a little bit of a backdrop there so it's not, can't see anything. We would typically light this with a beautiful HDRI from our friends at Polyhaven we heard from last night. And we might also do that, but I'm just gonna bring that down a little bit. Now this computer doesn't have a GPU, so we're seeing what Midge did yesterday. Well, he was using his laptop, but we're not getting anywhere near that complex, so I think we should be good. So for lighting, I don't know when it came out, maybe 2.8-ish, but the sky texture is just absolutely phenomenal. It looks really good. We do need to rid ourselves of the void looming behind our home, though. And that is going to be in the clip end. I don't tend to work in real scale, which is funny for someone who does a lot of product animation, but it's probably better if I did. Sun size, we can bring up a little bit. And now might be a good time to be thinking about the actual materials, not just the viewport materials. Let's spin our sun around until we've got a little bit of a better angle there. Now, I've been watching some videos on this, but the sun's strength always seems super high, but I like to keep the sun intensity a little high, and then I think exposures, maybe what you're supposed to be working with there, but again, we're not gonna necessarily talk about what you're supposed to do. We're gonna talk about what Derek does. I'm going to add a little bit of material to this just so that we can, again, the reason I'm kind of moving into render view now, I don't feel done with the house, it doesn't look good, we're gonna do more to it, but before you get too hung up, that's kind of the whole point of this, is designed to delight yourself.  So keeping things big and in that essence, like I said, because we are gonna be rendering this, going ahead and adding in some lighting, because the shadows and stuff are obviously gonna be part of the image here, so we wanna have something that feels compositionally good with shadows too. So let's add in a, let's drop the roughness, and let's add in some solidity. We will need to add in solidity, but I'll turn the transmission up, and just this is not a realistic way to do things, but I'm gonna just turn the alpha down a tad, and maybe we could tint the windows just a tad. Actually, so there's one, actually I did it here. One thing I like to do, I did it on the project that was in the talk here, but if you guys wanna see it, I'll do like, this is like a really cool thing, like another sort of detail, it's just a procedural gradient texture, but just kind of another very simple thing that you can add to just add in visual interest, and then lastly would be, yeah, something like text. So I'm gonna go back into my file here, let's, you know, a lot of times I'll do these panes with skin modifiers so that I can work more with bevels and things like that, and get a more rounded frame, and so that I can add a solidify. I haven't found a good way to have these windows be solid, but also have the wireframe not create like duplicates and stuff, but I don't like to do that until, cause at that point you have two separate objects, I don't like to do that until my shape is sort of more finalized, but maybe I did mention adding a railing, maybe I add that using the skin modifier, so I'll do that, but there's our basic window frame there, let's add in maybe a shader here, black, maybe make it tad bigger, cause that's looking cool, looking nice, maybe we should go ahead and add a material for this too, even though we'll probably just leave it white for now, I'll just call that like base material. Now I'm not loving my hilltop background here, maybe it's cause, so the traditional style for something like this I feel like would be more so isometric view, but you can also just use a super long focal length, but maybe we do orthographic view and just change our scale, and that would be so that I can delete this hill, cause I don't think I like it anymore, maybe I do like it, but we'll get rid of this. Delete those vertices, and then we'll just scale this out, give ourselves some viewport. So now we have our little house on the hill, our shadow being cast there is very long, so it might be a good idea to kind of bring this sun elevation up a little bit, which would, oh no, go in dark. Maybe the sun intensity needs to come down. Could bring the size of the sun up a tad, and I think part of the reason, okay so I'm getting light going through the windows, but a little bit too blocked out with the floor I have there, so maybe so that we don't have that coming out so much, we could sort of bring that in a little bit, and yeah, so maybe now I'll add that little railing I was talking about. Now I might do that the same way, kind of stealing some geometry here, so let's press shift D to duplicate this, and I'll just bring it up a little bit, P to separate it by selection, and instead of beveling the, oh this one already has the vertices being beveled, which is great, so I'll turn off the solidify modifier here, and then I'm going to add in a skin modifier, usually a good idea to save when you're working with a skin modifier a lot, but skin modifier is nice because, yeah it's like a super easy way to add detail that is you're just working with one vertex, you can just move it around, and you can add poles and pillars and things like that, railings, so love the skin modifier for that, it's great too because you can create different like size detail, you know in this case I think I want to match it to what I have on the window panes there, but like you know we can move this down, and then we sort of have a little bit of a railing here, you can add some glass to that as well, maybe we don't want it over here, so we can edge slide that back a little bit, hopefully nobody goes on that part of the balcony and falls off, that looks nice, and that could even get a white material, or leave the black, again starting to think about sort of the whole visual composition of that, I'm not loving like this little intersection here, I could be changing my camera angle, but you know maybe we pull that back, and that becomes like a little sitting area, and you know while we're at it I was gonna keep it mostly to architecture, but since I love chairs so much, maybe we make a little chair for this guy, and I'm gonna bring that in just, so one hot key that I use a ton is like frame selected, which I actually also balance to a button on this mouse, so when I have a big object in the background like that, if I frame selected it's gonna frame the big object as well, but this is looking good, I think what did I say, I wanted to add a little chair, so let's press, let's add in a cube, and once again could have been our default cube, make it roughly chair size here, let's scale it down a little bit, and very simple chair, again just little tiny details so that we have some fun here, trying to tell a little bit of a story with our object here, let's add in a bevel modifier, bevel modifiers were great for basically adding procedural edge loops if you're gonna do like a subdivision for example, afterwards, so love to use those, and then, okay so here's our little chair, so now thinking about our story, let's put this on a second story, this is where the adults go to relax in the afternoon, so that that's in the right place, okay so we have a little chair there, okay so that's our nice little balcony area, the shape of this is kind of disturbing me, so maybe we pull this in a little bit, maybe close that off, maybe think a little bit more about our driveway here, maybe that's our driveway, this could be our, maybe we pull that out a little bit, maybe make this like a separate pad, and this could be like a second portion of the house or something like that, pull that in a little bit, I think I'm getting over my edge here of my ground plane, it might be good, oh I think I moved it up a little bit, put that back down, so maybe that's another area, now if we were feeling good about the shapes of some of these objects on top, that might be where I go in and actually make this like a separate, maybe if we wanted this window to be rounded for example, we could go in and add in a bevel modifier to this, and then bring the size on that up a little bit, probably wanna put that before the wireframe, so that now we have, so this is where it gets a little bit nasty with the wireframe modifier, so we've got a little bit too many segments there, but let's say we still want the windows to look like that, so that's where I would probably go in and switch those over to a skin modifier to add some of those details, so maybe we ditch the wireframe there, duplicate this, and then just add in a skin modifier, but with the skin modifier, just delete everything, except for the only faces I think, and then we'll change the material on that to our little black material by removing the other one, and then let's mark our roots, let's scale this down, so that now the skin modifier, and actually, so this works a little different with the panes, I think I wanna delete the ones that aren't the sides, so that I still get the, so I get the bevel on the top and the bottom, so let's delete these edges, let's remark our roots, okay, cool, make that a little bit bigger so you can see it, I guess you can't see that one up top anyways, but, and then you know, you could add back in your details there on ends or something where you wanted to create more detail, so that's kinda cool, like in that, connect these back up, I think I'm ruining my bevel there, maybe the wireframe is a better way to go, okay, so maybe adding a little bit of color to this, I could show you how we add in that gradient texture, for example, so going into the shader editor, very simple here, let's just do a control T, so one of the reasons that I would want the bevel modifier, or sorry, I want this to be separate geometry, is so that I can add in a solidify this so that the glass looks a little bit better, so let's add in a solidify to that, just bring it up a little bit, and then for the texture, I would use a gradient texture, like I mentioned, so change that to a gradient texture, and then you always have to figure out which way it needs to go, but let's use our node wrangler add on and check that out, so it happens to be going the right way, that's beautiful, it never is going the right way, it's going the right way though, okay so connecting that back up, so now I have sort of this tinted window effect, now when you're doing like transparency materials, I always, you know, you want the color to be not too saturated but super bright, so, and I think this is working, oh this is working on the UVs now, so that's why it was working properly, which is pretty good, let's unwrap that, probably shouldn't have done it, so I want to do it on generated, oh that's going to be, so this is where it's always gets very confusing, okay maybe we should leave it on UV, and then let's actually look at our UVs and just make them all, oh gosh, make them all facing the same way, so, or actually let's, if we do generate it, but then make these separate objects, then we can separate by loose parts, then it should be working individually and I can do my rotation the way that I want to do it, 90 degrees, now for glass if you want to make it like super bright looking, one thing that you can do is add in, like bump this value up to like a two or something, and I'll give it a lot more pop, I guess would be the technical term for that, but getting back to our, let's see the design of our house is feeling a little lacking, maybe we could add in some more railings and things like that, I mean I might add that just right there, and then because we're working procedurally, you know it's obviously very easy to, I'm just sort of take pieces that you already have, kind of move them into the right area, oops, so there's another little railing, and this would be, if you wanted to add like glass around that one, for example, copying the same parts here, shift D, separate by selection, and then just removing your skin modifier, adding in, you could copy the materials and modifiers from this one, so link, or I want to at least link the materials, and we'll link the modifiers too actually, and then this one, instead of being on the edges is what we want, so we'll just bring this down. So we have another little glass detail there. I could go into adding some texture details into the actual glass like I did in that one project, but that's just another way to add more detail that's not necessarily needed. Of course we always like to turn on our high contrast too, so that it looks even better, and we can move this back up so we can see a little better. Maybe our house would look better if it wasn't all white, we could think about adding in, maybe the house is gray, or maybe the world is gray, I don't know, maybe the house stays white, and the world goes gray. Just to kind of help it pop a little bit more off the background, again, thinking about creating sort of a little bit more of an interesting composition there. So maybe moving our camera around, thinking about is that the best angle to be looking at it? I think the lighting maybe could come around a little bit of a different direction, something like that looking maybe a little bit more exciting, keeping that shadow sort of centered. Let's get rid of the roughness on this, so I know Andrew Price said you should never turn the speculator value down, but I don't think he's in here. So turn the speculator value all the way down so we have a nice flat background, if that's acceptable with you all, and then roughness up. That's kind of like my favorite material for a background would be just, I usually in something like this, I want the background to be very much the background, like I don't want it catching any light, anything like that, so making it low specular, sorry Andrew, can't see it anymore, which I like. Connecting that back up. What are we missing here? Definitely the kitchen, whoever mentioned that, that would be a good one to add. You could start thinking about adding in some lights here, I know we don't have a ton of time left, so I guess looking at the 36 days of type project that I did and some of the other ones, are there other things, this used to always crash blender, is editing these aerial lights in the viewport, which before I forget, I did want to say a big huge thank you to any developers that are here for making this beautiful piece of software that I have pretty much made my whole life out of. As I, I had to say that after I said something bad about blender, so we've got a little light in the garage there, maybe that gets the little black, the black body also that Andrew mentioned, but you can go really quick and cheat with something like that. And I've done animations too like this where one of the great things about the sky texture is that you can really create, you can create daytime rotation animations super easily changing things like the rotation obviously, or you can make a nighttime render if you wanted to just pull that sun all the way down, and then you had some lights in your scene. The one danger of, like I did to make the glass really bright is that it will sort of multiply any light so it gets a little bit unrealistic if you're not, if it is dark, that's gonna sort of multiply the light that's coming through it. So if you're gonna do a nighttime render, you might wanna drop that back down to like a one, but we'll leave it at two. That's a very cool trick in blender for making glowy stuff, is just to completely obliterate the value. You can't slide it past one, but you can type in values past one. That's one thing that I've started to and a lot of my work is like play with the value there. Okay, so maybe we add just like one little, one more little light up here. But I asked and then I didn't give anyone a chance to say anything, but what else are we missing here? What should we add to our little home? Wood? Oh, a pool, yes, yes. A pool would be very nice. Maybe we make that on the, I actually, I forgot about the pool. I was like, I should add a pool to my house today. Maybe we put it out here, somewhere like that. Maybe we go ahead and add in a loop there so it's not coming into our room we designed. Now this gets a little dangerous with the bell modifier. I don't know if this is gonna work the way I want it to. Maybe if I turn these segments down a little bit or the size up. No, that gets, that gets not good. So we could do that with a boolean. So let's like duplicate this. Now when I'm, and I actually do this a lot, you know, if you want to cut like a round hole, but I'm gonna separate that by selection and then just move this up and then use the solidify we already have on here. And you can do this for windows and stuff, but this could, you know, very quickly become our boolean object. We can move it to a new collection called bool, which is in all caps. And then we could add a boolean to this. And we would select our object and then let's just assume it's working properly, which it must be, but it always works very good. It's working, which is great. But maybe I want to actually use that boolean object as the pool also. Again, saving yourself as much work as possible by just like duplicating things. I'm gonna move that back into my main collection and then hide the boolean. The bool is the pool collection. That's an interesting how that runs. So changing our thickness down, like let's just make this our, even make it our glass material. But like, okay, let's try copying that material. I'll link materials. Okay, okay, that's looking decent. Maybe the pool needs to be like underlit or something like that. But anyways, I'm gonna keep kind of messing with this. Does anybody have any questions or like want to talk about anything else? Doesn't necessarily have to be related to this. Okay, I saw a hand go up, I told you so. I told you I couldn't stop talking. So to get rid of this where you can see through that, you can disable multiple importance and then we can kind of get the brightness of that lamp without it affecting the actual pool. Now I don't know if any of you watch Curb Your Enthusiasm but there was an episode where somebody fell in the pool because there wasn't a fence there. It's an American TV show so I'll stop talking about that but I should probably put a fence around the pool. But did you have a question? Or somebody raised their hand, anybody? Oh no, no questions. I thought somebody was stretching them. So yeah, this is our little house object.  Again, thinking back to sort of the purpose of doing something like this is just a way to sort of quickly build a composition that it's kind of fun. If you have a little bit more subject matter like for example in the 36 Days of Tight project, each one has to be a letter so you can kind of sort of challenge yourself to use these tools to sort of build out those more general shapes. But it's also fun for just creating little areas, objects. Just kind of fun little places you can imagine. Living little people living there or something like that. So yeah, love doing this stuff. It's really fun. Brent, do you have a question? Yeah, great question.  I have a sketchbook. It's full. It's very ceremonious when I can close one, put the little label on it, put it on the shelf, and open a fresh one. I'll use that sketchbook for client calls, just writing down notes, but also sketching. But really, I do tend to like to jump pretty much straight into 3D with a lot of projects because there are tools like this with solidify modifiers and skin modifiers and you can build out forms incredibly quickly without really needing to, in school we use CAD software and you would never jump straight into CAD software because it's very cumbersome and there's so many bevels and fillets and things like that and dimensions. All that just really kind of slows you down so you would not want to iterate in CAD software. But that's one thing that I really love about Blender is that it is very lightweight. It's very flexible. There's all these kind of tools at your disposal for quickly building out shapes and forms and things like that. So for me, yeah, I would jump straight into Blender quite a bit. And that also, I kind of use that to sort of drive my design processes. If a tool isn't working, then maybe that doesn't need to be part of the design. So if I can't get the modifier working the way I want, then just like go with it, kind of use kind of like letting happy accidents happen is what one of my old professors said about, you know, when things like aren't working or something, just kind of lean into that and use that as a way to sort of push something forward. So yeah, I jump straight into Blender a lot much to some people's dismay probably because I could probably plan out designs and things better if I sketch them. But I do still sketch a lot, but a lot of times I do jump straight into Blender. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that I agree with you there that that's kind of the whole point of a workflow like this is to just kind of constantly be like looking at what you're creating and sort of looking at the image on screen and not thinking so much about, you know, what is this wall made of? You know, what should this texture be? And things like that, but being able to just use it as a tool to communicate basically, that's one of my big things I didn't really talk about earlier, but you know, for me, Blender is really just a good tool for communication. And I think that one of the more, one of the powerful things about Blender is that you can basically, there's 3D software in general, it doesn't even have to be Blender, though we all love Blender. You know, one of the fascinating things about it is that there's really no other tool that allows you to take an idea you have in your head and most accurately represent it to someone else than having a powerful understanding of 3D software. So that is one thing that I think is really great about. Blender in 3D in general is that it can just be a really powerful tool for, you know, taking something that's in your head and getting it out into the world for other people to see. So there's the sunrise on our little house with a pole on top of it because the top roof was feeling a little bit empty. Yeah, but with the design moves that are somewhere, I had yourself from that and then just be like, all right, that looks good and then something. I don't know, but this needs to be a third of that and these angles need to be precisely the same. Yeah. Like I was watching you just like, all right, I'll move this over here, all right, that looks good, you're going, oh. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is just, you know, teaching yourself to purposefully be like that.  You know, this needs to be this radius and when I got in Blender, I was like, well, how long is that edge? Like it needs to be an even increment and the fill it needs to be 0.25, not 0.24136, but you know, I think the way to succeed with that is to just completely disconnect yourself from the model itself and the fact that what you're creating at the end of the day is just a bunch of pixels. Like no one's going to go in, well, in some cases, but no one's going to go in and measure those things and that was one thing that took me a really long time to get over coming from, you know, CAD background in particular was like, how do I let go of all that and realize that what I'm creating is really just an image or at the end of the day it's going to be a video or something like that. So yeah, just kind of purposefully just let go and like move on if you're not liking something. I'm like with projects like this all the time, I'll get to this point and then just, you know, never save, just delete the file and just do it again because that's kind of the purpose with something like this that should not be, you don't want to feel invested in it. You don't want it to be something that becomes your baby.  If you don't, it doesn't matter but we're not really making anything for anyone here. It's just, you know, a fun way to use the tools that Blender has and, you know, create in a different way just like you would with sketching or anything else. It's just another tool.  I don't think anyone's gonna go build that house but if you do this 100 times or like in the case of the 36 days of type project, you know, when you do all those then you have this body of like small experiments and that in itself is a substantial project that you can be proud of. So, you know, the consistency playing around all that kind of contributes to just, yeah, Blender being sort of a fun tool. Yeah. It kind of depends. Like so sometimes, you know, something like this might be used in a more of like a background animation. You know, really like I did a project recently. I can, I think let it play here on Vimeo. This was actually from my sister-in-law. She has like a virtual gallery but, you know, a lot of times using the same like solidify modifier and stuff like that to create like these, all these buildings in this little presentation are, it's just like, it literally made the exact same way. Just get inside the space and add some nice textures on top of it. But it, I mean, so using it for like a background in a product presentation, you know, a lot of times when I'm kind of art directing a product image, you know, I want shadows to fall a certain way or like hit one part of a product not the other part. And the way I do that is just by building like this crazy looking structure around it. You know, there's a lot of product animation I've done. The background is just like this crazy world with like walls going everywhere. And it's because I'm just kind of tweaking things to let the light fall certain ways because no one's going to see that. But other cases like in the case of Gensler, which is a architecture firm, in that case it was a more practical application of like, you know, we needed to sort of represent spaces but the spaces were not designed. They literally gave me a spreadsheet of like, we need a place where someone scans their avatar into the metaverse. We need a hologram. This is where people get their VR headset. Complete just spreadsheet and they're like, turn that into a space.  So that would be another more practical example. But this, you know, it's something like this is built the exact same way. Well, thank you all. I think we're about, one last question? Yeah. So I was wondering when you do the realistic product design, so it needs to be real-world skill, it needs to be structurally sound and stuff. Do you feel like Blender is the right tool for that? Would you just say I'd rather do the design of Blender but when it comes to actually creating something that we can't produce, physically, I would hop on over to like an AutoCAD or whatever, solid work. Yes, so the one area, I love Blender with the bottom of my heart but the one area that would not advise you as Blender is if you are going to be creating a physical product with the exception of like 3D printing. So you can 3D print from Blender and I suppose get relative accuracy. But if you're going to be like, oh my God. This is like another example of like more product work for a Kickstarter with a guy I worked on. But yeah, if it's going to be a physical product that needs to be cut by a CNC machine or something like that, Blender's just not the, I can't wait till Blender CAD comes out but yeah, when you really need to be super dimensionally accurate building another software. But again, thinking about the fact that then the day you're creating pixels on a screen, a JPEG image, I work with industrial design studios, they send me CAD files all the time. So for something like that, then they can send me stuff that was built in CAD, I can bring it into Blender, know that everything's dimensionally accurate and that works fine for creating renderings and things like that but you wouldn't want to start in Blender necessarily and then try to, I had a nightmare project like that one time, I told this designer from the get go, I was like, now these cannot be the final design files, we're prototyping in Blender and then sure enough, a couple months later, they're like, can you send us the step files? And I'm like, there is no step files. I said, this is like, you have the JPEG image and that is it. I can send you a front view but they need to be rebuilt. So that is an area that Blender lacks. This is another similar project. I set up a file with a base lighting environment textures and created a bunch of chairs in the shapes of A's, B's, C's. I didn't get all the way through the 36 here but yeah, this was another one, following the same process, just fun individually, they're not huge projects but when you create a lot of them, it becomes something that you can be proud of. So it's a good way to get something you're proud of while creating a lot of things that you're not proud of. This was a downloaded texture for the velvet texture and the wood. Thanks everyone for coming. It was nice to.


Hi everyone, I'm live at this nature reserve Never been here before Where's everyone from in the chat today? Ohio Texas Holland Colorado San Diego France South Carolina Connecticut Texas Ohio North Carolina Kenya Milwaukee Australia Pennsylvania, Colorado Wisconsin, Kentucky, Oregon We've got people here from all over the world. It's great. We're spreading the message To people everywhere making people aware Of what is going on. That's what it's all about. That's great to hear Obi-Wan People have inspired me to start this channel and make videos And I hope that I'm doing the same inspiring you our job isn't just to inspire people It's to inspire people to inspire people Together we can spread the awareness. I am going to answer questions as well To anyone who is a member of the channel If you're not a member you can click the join button underneath the video or If you don't want to get a membership you can just make good donation through the super chat super chat and Then I will provide you with a Detailed response to your question.  They're inadequate good all kinds of Blackberries raspberries go in here. I don't know if you can see that all over here loads of them I actually don't eat blackberries or raspberries Because it's difficult to remove the bugs I find But I do love blueberries and strawberries Grapefruits, I like exotic fruits the most though. I like mangoes fizzles grapes I don't know if they're exotic. They seem exotic to me anyway Look at all these juicy berries here Yum yum. Yes exotic fruits are the best. They're so bright and colorful and Delicious delicious and nutritious. Oh, yeah, I love cherries too The only thing I don't like about cherries is when they have those stones in them. I hate that but then that's probably a good thing because If they didn't have the stones I'd probably beaten them all day So if you're a member on the channel feel free to Ask questions I can do a Q&A here as well If you're not a member Please make a donation of any amount through the super chat And then I will provide you with a detailed response to your question That's so true life is a journey. I have talked about that in a few videos how Narcissists do tend to eat low vibrational foods They do tend to comfort eat Because everything they're doing is Just to try and Make themselves feel good. It's all about living in the moment so they will eat junk food Even though they know it's no good for them Just because they they want to feel good You'll often find a lot of Narcs at your local McDonald's or KFC Munching down a big Mac With a large fries And a big cup of Pepsi. I know I was just down here, but I'm coming back down here again now Because I think I saw there's something You can go for you. I think tells you here All of the different birds Reptiles or whatever you might see in the different seasons of the year Now obviously we're in summer. I think I did see one of those just now the only problem with this thing is My eyesight's not so good So I don't know if I'm gonna see much from here. I could see a few ducks. I don't know what those are over there cows or Bulls or something a pair of binoculars will be really good right now If anyone who works at this place is watching this Provide us with some binoculars, it'll be very useful Anyway, let's move on I'm answering questions or narcissism From anyone who is a member of the channel and anyone who makes a super chat donation of any amount It's very interesting. I don't know what that is, but it looks pretty cool.  That's how you begin to look at yourself and it's not That's not how it should be, you know, it's we all make mistakes. We all do things wrong. I Just saw a dragon fly there. I don't know if you could see it. It was pretty big Caroline, how does it feel to go? Independent in the world being free. It feels amazing. It really does as you said, you know the The feeling of independence Is your freedom just that feeling of freedom. I think that's why we all want our independence Well, we're not under someone else's control We're free to make our own decisions.  They can't Experience real positive emotions If they could they probably wouldn't be my narcissist then When you see them angry When you cause an injury That's definitely You genuine But their laughs It's always an act it's always about Impressing someone on something But it's never real. I haven't really seen much nature walking for you. I saw a few dragonflies ducks But the flies but I have enjoyed this walk and Talking with all of you are answering your questions and it is a nice place to walk actually I do like it Well, those look quite interesting Very prickly some more animals that I'm saying animals because I Hate to admit it, but I don't actually know what those are.  I Was planning to go to Dubai in Singapore But then I had to cancel the flights and everything because of the virus Traveling is also very healing Just going out there and experiencing life That will definitely heal you because while you've been dealing with a narcissist You haven't been experiencing life You've been experiencing a distorted view and a simulation of reality It wasn't real from the moment you met them. It wasn't real It wasn't real in the beginning When they were love bombing you it wasn't real when they were putting you down and devaluing you and the scary thing is In many cases Even after they discard you it still isn't real even when you've left them And you're on your own it still isn't real You're still locked into the illusion. You don't even have to be around them and for many people It goes on for years and years Sometimes for the rest of their lives They're still not in reality They're still stuck in that simulation That the narcissist programmed into their minds and that's why I do what I do I think I've said this before but what I do it's all about giving you The red pill Waking you up out of the matrix That's why I make these videos That's why I do my one-on-one coaching sessions and there will be Two premieres again tonight the first one will be starting now in about an hour and a half So I hope you can join us for that.  I hope you were satisfied with my answers to your questions and I Look forward to talking with you all in the premiere, which will be starting now In 90 minutes. Thank you all for joining the live. Talk to you later