USB Hourglass random number generator

USB Hourglass from alwynallan on Vimeo.

Over at Make: Online, John Park posted this video of a gadget that generates random numbers by watching sand fall through an hourglass.

It watches falling sand in an hourglass with an optical sensor. That data is sent via the Arduino USB output to the PC where it's analyzed. This entropy is useful for all your random number needs. My favorite part: when the hourglass runs dry a servo motor flips it over and it starts again.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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randalll

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Doo doo doooo…
glenn

This is nowhere near “truly random.” If someone wants to determine how random it is, use ‘ent’ from http://www.fourmilab.ch/random/

For information on generating truly random numbers, visit http://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/
gabu

Something something something TSA something something strip search something.
Anonymous

Seems like a lot of work to still have the dragon 1-shot you with a natural 20. Stupid RNG.
Anonymous

what is the tune in this vid? anyone know?
Anonymous

Any random data source generated from an external site is subject to monitoring, and alteration.

Don’t use a service like hotbits if you use random data for data security. You’re just asking for infiltration.

Besides that, HotBits is in china, and china is known for conducting corporate espionage. What better way to compromise SSL than to inject a set of random data that you also know?

In fact, techniques like this allow SSL encryption to be broken on conventional hardware in a day by causing power transients that generate known anomalies in the random number set.
voiceofreason

Of course, is it truly random?
- Lobster
  
  No, of course it’s not random, nothing is. It’s a lot closer than current RNGs, though.
jowlsey

I saw a story quite awhile ago about another organization (Sun?) doing the same thing with lava lamps.
- Church
  
  That’s http://www.lavarnd.org
  
  Benefit here is no net access is required.
Pantograph

Utterly pointless.

Unless of course that attached speaker plays lounge music procedurally generated out of the randomness of the hourglass.
oscar

Kind of silly, but a cool idea.

The original LavaRand by SGI used webcam snapshots of a series of lava lamps with a complicated switching system that periodically turned them off to keep them from overheating.

The new LavaRnd only shares the name, instead sampling noise from a CCD (from a cheap webcam). And it’s open-source, so anyone can make one.
_OM_

…This is fucking brilliant! It addresses one of the biggest criticisms about digitally-generated random numbers – the fact that they’re based on a long string of predetermined order – and uses an analog component to introduce natural randomness. Every PC should be equipped with one!
Anonymous

3:38?

Why are videos taking minutes to show something which could easily be done in a few dozen seconds?

Snazzy music or not, it’s tedious.
ben

900 bits/second of randomness is not too shabby. I tried to get the place I used to work at get me one of these for their cryptography boxes. http://www.idquantique.com/products/quantis.htm
Anonymous

Wouldn’t you get better random numbers by simply covering the camera’s lens? That way the only thing that strikes the CCD is random space noise. Interstellar radiation is pretty damn random if you ask me.
john

Total waste of time watching the video, I was hoping to learn more about the entropy collection, etc. You can see that the stream is random, but the entire time taken is consistent (within reason).

I’ve always read that a noisy resistor is a better source of entropy though.

John
Anonymous

This man owes his livelihood to Micro-Fluff. Shouldn’t you consider a career in Micro-Fluff, too?