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https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/stylish-outfit-packs-a-solar-charging-rig/ | Stylish Outfit Packs A Solar Charging Rig | Lewin Day | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"clothing",
"wearable",
"Wearables"
] | Being out and about with your devices rapidly running out of battery power can rapidly turn into a sticky situation. Suddenly you find yourself unable to hail rideshares and incapable of transferring money around. For the fashion conscious who wish to avoid this,
[Kitty Yeung]’s design may be a valuable addition to their summer closet.
The project starts with [Kitty] sewing an elegant bodice and shorts out of a silky silver material. This fabric tends to fray when cut, so fabric glue and iron-on tape was used to protect the edges. This also makes sure the garment doesn’t fall to pieces when washed or worn often. Ribbons, pockets, and other features were designed into the garments to integrate them with hardware to enable the garments to act as a portable charging solution. 3D-printed brackets are affixed to the shoulders, holding a solar panel in an upward-facing angle to catch a good amount of sun. The panel chosen integrates circuitry to output a nice, clean 5V output for charging devices over USB.
It’s a fashionable outfit that also packs useful hardware, and we agree with [Kitty] that it really would be perfect for Burning Man. The cone hat was a nice touch, too. It’s not the first time we’ve heard from [Kitty] either –
she appeared as a speaker at 2018’s Hackaday Superconference, too! | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217836",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-02-08T00:42:11",
"content": "If she made the solar panels into wings (wing shaped) she could be the Solar Fairy!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6217847",
"author": "... | 1,760,373,596.221424 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/a-laser-drawing-machine-for-flashes-of-creativity/ | A Laser Drawing Machine For Flashes Of Creativity | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [] | Ahh, midterms. Some students blow off steam between study sessions by playing video games or just zoning out. While those kids were all distracted, [Justinwong777] and his buddy [Brett] found a bunch of scrap wood and built
this laser drawing machine
in their school’s makerspace. You operate it as you might an Etch-a-Sketch, except your drawings are as fleeting as sparkler art on the 4th of July, if they made Tron-colored sparklers.
Though you work it like an Etch-a-Sketch, the business end operates like a laser cutter. Inside that plywood enclosure is an Arduino Uno and a pair of motors. These motors turn a series of custom gears, which move a small mirror angled at 45° in the xy-plane. There’s a 30mW laser mounted parallel with the base, pointed at the mirror, and it reflects the beam toward a canvas panel coated with phosphorescent paint. We dig the printed ergonomic case for the joystick, which gives control of both x and y. Put on some eye protection and check it out after the break.
If you want to draw with lasers, but aren’t much of an artist, do something unexpected:
build a laser turret not to kill, but to draw the weather on the wall
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217815",
"author": "BobT",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T23:11:35",
"content": "30mw? I hope goggles are required…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6217821",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2020-02-08T00:05:21",
... | 1,760,373,596.122924 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/mitch-altman-asks-how-youre-using-your-life/ | Mitch Altman Asks How You’re Using Your Life | Mike Szczys | [
"cons",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"Mitch Altman"
] | This talk will probably make you a bit angry. You might be upset with some of Mitch Altman’s views or his hyperbole in describing them. Or you might be upset because you totally agree with his views and feel the same disappointment he does with many (ab)uses of technology. Either way, the point of his talk, which was given at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, is that
we all should think deeply about what we choose to do with our time and our talents
. Consider yourself challenged.
The video below is packed full of colorful ideas, along with some colorful language. Let’s take a look.
Technology Just Is
Does technology have an inherent meaning designed right into it? Of course not. Mitch looks at “technology” as a set of tools that can be used as you see fit. The thing that changes is the cultural context in which these tools are put to use. This isn’t a new concept for the Hackaday community — after all, that hot plate and that fish pump weren’t originally designed to make their way into your basement SMD assembly line.
What happens when you design tools that end up being used for activities you don’t agree with? It’s a topic that has been bubbling to the surface of the tech world for some time. You may remember Google employees leaving the company over
machine learning projects they contributed to being used in military drone applications
. The problem is that these engineers expected a different cultural context for their work. We can guess that many of them signed up to work on image recognition aimed at self-driving cars. They expected their work to make the roads safer for everyone involved. Mitch draws the line when the tech is used to take lives, or support the taking of lives. Where do you?
It’s Your Choice, You Should Choose to Make It
You will spend a significant portion of your life working. It’s worth spending time asking yourself what meaning your work has for you and for others. Have you considered the ethics of the work? And have you reviewed these values and ethics as your career progresses? Not doing so is, for instance, how
Volkswagen diesel scandal
took place.
Through his decades of work on everything from virtual reality and network storage controllers to teaching learn-to-solder classes and building
one tv remote to turn off all
, Mitch has chosen to apply his values to the decisions he makes in who to work for and what customers to work with. His decisions come down to doing what he loves and making choices that let him continuing to do what he loves. It’s a good example to learn from. The first step in achieving your goals is know what you want, and for that we can all benefit from a little introspection. | 57 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217757",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T19:40:58",
"content": "“Either way, the point of his talk, which was given at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference, is that we all should think deeply about what we choose to do with our time and our talents.”Become an artist. Th... | 1,760,373,596.697802 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/turning-a-problem-around-the-whitney-cotton-gin/ | Turning A Problem Around: The Whitney Cotton Gin | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider"
] | [
"cotton",
"cotton gin",
"eli whtney",
"interchangeable parts"
] | If you went to elementary school in the United States, you no doubt learned about Eli Whitney’s cotton gin as an example of how the industrial revolution took previously manual processes and replaced the low-efficiency of human labor with machines. The development of the cotton gin — patented in 1794 — involves an interesting lesson about solving engineering problems.
Farmers in the southern United States had a big problem. Tobacco was a cash crop, but it eventually left your fields barren and how to solve that problem wasn’t understood yet. Indigo was valuable for dye, but the British were eating away that market with indigo created in its colonies. Rice requires a lot of water and swamp, so it was only suitable for certain areas.
There was one thing that grew very readily in much of the land: cotton. Unfortunately, the cotton had little seeds you had to remove. A single person could clean — maybe — a pound of cotton a day. In the late 1700s, plantation owner Catharine Littlefield Greene introduced Whitney to a group of farmers were trying to decide if there was a way to make cotton a more profitable crop.
Solving the Wrong Problem
Reportedly, Whitney found inspiration in a very strange way. He couldn’t figure out how to remove the little entrenched seeds from the cotton. But one day he saw a cat trying to pull a chicken through a fence. The cat was unsuccessful but managed to get some feathers. That was the key: Don’t try to remove the seeds from the cotton, but remove the cotton from the seeds.
The gin — short for engine — had tiny hooks that would pull cotton fibers or lint through a mesh. The seeds couldn’t make it through. By changing the machine from one that removes seeds to one that removes cotton, the design was very simple.
An 1883 article in the North American Review claimed that Mrs. Greene had made some suggestions about the design of the machine. However, the author didn’t provide any source for the claim and it remains unproven. It wouldn’t be surprising, though. Greene certainly provided financial support as well as encouragement.
Greene’s plantation manager, Phineas Miller, became Whitney’s business partner. Whitney, Miller, and Greene did not intend to sell the gin, instead planning a model where they would own all the machines and take a percentage of the clean cotton as a fee. Cotton as a service, if you will. The gin could do about 55 pounds a day, so one simple machine and one or two people could do the work of at least 55 people.
Aftermath
The gin made cotton profitable which was a boon to the south, but did manage to keep slavery going for another seven decades — that wasn’t Witney’s intent, of course. The service model failed because the device was simple enough, that people copied it — illegally, in light of the new patent laws. In the end, he didn’t make the money he hoped for, although he did make some and became famous for his labor-saving invention. He would go on to pioneer the use of interchangeable parts in manufacturing, but that’s an entirely different story.
How many times are we faced with a problem that we can’t quite solve? It is worth taking a page from Whitney’s book and asking yourself how to flip the problem around to see if that helps. We are just glad the gin shorthand didn’t catch on as we’d hate to have to say we work as gingineers.
[Patent drawing
via the National Archives
] | 38 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217734",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T18:08:02",
"content": "I heard in school that the ‘gin’ was from genie or djin/dgin.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6217787",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
... | 1,760,373,596.294412 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/hackaday-podcast-053-1-bit-computer-is-a-family-affair-this-displays-is-actually-fabulous-and-this-hoverboard-is-a-drill-press/ | Hackaday Podcast 053: 1-Bit Computer Is A Family Affair, This Displays Is Actually Fabulous, And This Hoverboard Is A Drill Press | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"1 bit computer",
"bluepill",
"ftdi",
"Hackaday Podcast",
"hoverboard",
"jtag",
"low power",
"shukran",
"Soyuz",
"USB to serial"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams navigate the crowded streets of the hackersphere for the most interesting hardware projects seen in the past week. Forget flip-dot displays, you need to build yourself a sequin display that uses a robot finger and sequin-covered fabric to send a message. You can do a lot (and learn a lot) with a 1-bit computer called the WDR-1. It’s never been easier to turn a USB port into an embedded systems dev kit by using these FTDI and Bluepill tricks. And there’s a Soyuz hardware teardown you don’t want to miss.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download
(60 MB or so.)
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 053 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Flashing Light Prize
and
Sprite’s entry video
Hackaday Belgrade
conference is May 9th
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Unique Clock Finally Unites Hackers And Sequins
About H-bots: Hackaday’s Own Josh Vasquez
breaks it down
.
What Everyone Else Did With Eight Bits, The Germans Did With Only One
WDR-1-Bit-Computer
Bit und Byte – Der 1 Bit Computer – Teil 1 – YouTube
One Bit CPUs
Hoverboard Grows Up, Becomes Magnetic Drill Press
The Cult Of Really Low-Power Circuits: Scrounging, Sipping, And Seeing Power
Soviet Soyuz Clock Teardown
Slice Through Your Problems With A Shukran
GitHub – jeanthom/DirtyJTAG: JTAG adapter firmware for STM32F1
UrJTAG – Universal JTAG library, server and tools
GitHub – zoobab/versaloon: JTAG Versaloon firmware for the STM32 Bluepill board
GitHub – satoshinm/pill_serial: Triple USB-to-serial adapter firmware for flashing onto an STM32F103C8T6 “blue pill” minimum development board ⛺
GitHub – ivpri/mecrisp_pillserial: Two/three USB-to-serial bridges with build in Forth for STM32F103
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks:
SMA-Q2 Smart Watch Is Completely Hackable
A Tiny USB Hub For All Your Hardware Modding Needs
See-Through Catalytic Converter
Elliot’s Picks:
How Many Smartphones Does It Take To Make A Traffic Jam?
Acrylic Mold Makes For Professional-Looking Silicone Keyboards
Up Your Game With DIY Headset Motion Tracking
Can’t-Miss Articles:
How To Hack A Portable Bluetooth Speaker By Skipping The Bluetooth
The Internet Of Football | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6222235",
"author": "Ian Farquhar",
"timestamp": "2020-02-23T22:07:45",
"content": "I was kinda shocked you hadn’t heard of the MC14500 before, as it’s hardly an unknown device.Although this document is extremely old now (last update 2003!), the “Great Microprocessors of the Past an... | 1,760,373,596.069976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/automatic-component-tape-cutter-for-when-your-electronics-kit-hits-the-big-time/ | Automatic Component Tape Cutter For When Your Electronics Kit Hits The Big Time | Danie Conradie | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"component tape",
"electronics kit",
"production hacks",
"smd components",
"surface mount"
] | Even for the simplest of products, production at scale can be big challenge. For example, you might find yourself spending many hours manually counting and cutting strips of component tape to go with the DIY electronics kit your selling on Tindie. [Tom Keddie] found himself in similar position some time ago, and built himself an
automated component counter and tape cutter
.
[Tom] posted the video of his old machine (see it after the break) after a call for help from another Twitter user who found himself with a lot of component strips to cut. The frame of the machine is made from 20×20 aluminium extrusions and laser cut plexiglass. The tape is pulled off the reel by a stepper motor using a 3D printed sprocket, with the tape held on by Lego wheel and tension spring. A second idler sprocket with tensioner is used to guide the tape through two photo-interrupters that can count holes in opaque tape or the components in clear tape. The cutter itself it an Exacto blade mounted on a wooden block in a guillotine-like arrangement, driven by another stepper motor and a threaded rod as lead screw. Everything is of course controlled by an Arduino. Although not used any more, [Tom] says it worked very well in its day.
The availability of cheap laser cutting, 3D printing and components like aluminium extrusions and stepper motors have really made it possible for anyone to add some automation to production in the home workshop. You won’t be surprised that
we’ve seen something like this before
, but we’ve also seen similar machines for
wiring prep
and
through-hole resistors
. Let us hear your production hacks in the comments, or drop us a tip if you’ve documented it!
Hey
@witnessmenow
I built a machine years ago to do this, made you a quick video, might give you some ideas.
https://t.co/7GG3bciLsP
pic.twitter.com/kZszQovqUM
— Tom Keddie (@tom_keddie)
January 24, 2020 | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217861",
"author": "George M1GEO",
"timestamp": "2020-02-08T04:24:50",
"content": "This would definitely be useful!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6217873",
"author": "Tom Hargrave",
"timestamp": "2020-02-08T06:48:25",... | 1,760,373,596.332888 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/this-week-in-security-google-photos-whatsapp-and-doom-on-deskphones/ | This Week In Security: Google Photos, Whatsapp, And Doom On Deskphones | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"cisco",
"doom",
"This Week in Security",
"WhatsApp"
] | Google Photos is handy. You take pictures and videos on your cell phone, and they automatically upload to the cloud. If you’re anything like me, however, every snap comes with a self-reminder that “the cloud” is a fancy name for someone else’s server. What could possibly go wrong? How about some of your videos
randomly included in another user’s downloads
?
Confirmed by Google themselves, this bug hit those using Google Takeout, the service that allows you to download all your data from a Google application, as a single archive. Google Photos archives downloaded between November 21 and November 25 may contain videos from other users, according to a notice sent to the users who downloaded said archives. It’s notable that those notices haven’t been sent to users who’s videos were exposed.
Whatsapp
Whatsapp has been in the news for a couple reasons in the last few days. I’ll leave it to you to decide if the stories are related. First, Jeff Bezos seems to have had some of his accounts or devices
compromised by Saudi agents
. The popular theory is that a video sent over Whatsapp contained an exploit, which when downloaded on Bezos’ iPhone, resulted in a persistent compromise. This theory seems to be supported by
an analysis by FTI
.
Reading through the report is… underwhelming. The video they suspect to have been the compromise vector wasn’t ever successfully decrypted. No actual Indicators of Compromise were found, and no maliciously changed systems files were identified. The closest thing to a smoking gun found in the report is the vast amounts of outgoing data observed after the potential compromise. There are questions about the usefulness of that metric, and Robert Graham does a good job
debunking the report
.
Whatsapp *has* had several
high
profile
vulnerabilities
that could have been used to pull off an attack like this. Which brings us to the topic of vulnerabilities in Whatsapp, so here’s one in the desktop app.
[Gal Weizman] discovered a weird Whatsapp problem in 2017. When using the web interface, and sending a message that quoted a previous message, it was possible to manipulate the message being quoted, putting words in someone’s mouth. He found it amusing, but eventually came back to take a more serious look at what he’s found. He discovered that he could also hijack the link preview banner, giving him a cross site scripting attack. That would be a serious enough vulnerability in itself, but not content with XSS, [Gal] took things one step further.
Whatsapp offers a native desktop app, using the Electron framework. Electron essentially lets you package a web app in native form. Under the hood, it’s simply a browser bundled with the web-based code. A consequence of Electron is that a XSS vulnerability will likely work in an Electron app as well. This was no exception, and since Whatsapp was shipping their app with an ancient version of Electron, an old Chrome vulnerability was still present, resulting in a viable RCE that escapes the Electron app.
Whatsapp has released updates that address these issues, so if you have desktop Whatsapp installed, go make sure it’s up to date!
I got Phished
You’re familiar with haveibeenpwned.com. Have you ever thought to yourself, if only there was a service that alerted me when one of my domains showed up in phishing attack….
I Got Phished
is the service for you. It’s intended for a company’s security team to sign up with the company domains. When an email address from one of those domains shows up in a phishing database, the team gets an email alerting them.
All it takes to sign up is the abuse@, postmaster@, noc@, or security@ email address for the domain you want to monitor. So gmail users, you’re out of luck. If you run your own domain, then maybe it’s worth signing up for the service.
Cisco Security DOOMed by CDPwn
A series of smart locks made by Nortek Security & Control has a vulnerability that is now being actively exploited. A PHP endpoint on those devices failed to sanitize inputs properly, runs as root, and
can be used to run arbitrary commands
. “card_scan+decoder.php” is accessible over http, and anything in the “door” parameter is executed as root. The active attack uses wget to grab a file from a remote server and run that file.
To exploit this flaw remotely, the endpoint has to be accessible, which means that only devices with a public IP addresses are vulnerable so far. The limited IPv4 address space and widespread usage of NAT has once again blunted the impact of a really serious vulnerability. It will be interesting to watch what happens with the growing popularity of IPv6, as more and less secure devices get their own IP addresses.
Doom on a Desk Phone
Researchers at Armis have published their research into Cisco hardware under the name
CDPwn
, inspired by Cisco’s CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol). The interesting details are available in
their whitepaper
, but before we get to that, take a moment to watch the video embedded below, as it combines a couple of our favorite things here at Hackaday: security vulnerabilities, and running Doom on unexpected hardware.
Cisco manufacturers hundreds of different devices, and one of their selling points is interoperability. You plug a Cisco phone into a Cisco switch, and they do some autoconfiguration magic, setting up proper VLANs, etc. Many of these features depend on proprietary Cisco protocols, and one of the most important is CDP. This layer-2 protocol allows devices to communicate with each other, regardless of what VLAN they’re set to. After looking at previously discovered CDP flaws, the guys at Armis got to work. Their first discovery was a Denial of Service attack. A packet informing a neighboring device about addresses lacked a reasonable upper bound on the number of addresses described. An incoming packet could claim to be describing three billion addresses, and the target device would simply crash trying to allocate enough memory to handle the packet.
One surprising discovery is that the CDP implementation seems to be built from scratch for different Cisco product lines. While this means that a single vulnerability can’t be leveraged across every device, it does suggest that more vulnerabilities will exist overall, and will take longer to fix. In VoIP phones, for example, the PortID TLV (Type-LengthValue) is copied into a static buffer without proper length checks. It’s a trivial buffer overflow, easily leading to exploitation.
Cisco has firmware updates available for the affected devices. These aren’t particularly sophisticated attacks. It appears once again, that a reputable brand name doesn’t guarantee quality code running under the hood. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217689",
"author": "Ø",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T15:18:54",
"content": "Once again Electron proves that a web browser shouldn’t be used as a replacement for native applications if security is even slightly important.Too bad the whole premise of Electron is the illusion that low-pai... | 1,760,373,596.176755 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/music-player-erected-from-floppy-disks/ | Music Player Erected From Floppy Disks | Kristina Panos | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"3.5\" floppy disk",
"floppy",
"raspberry pi",
"spotify"
] | Holding on to a cache of old floppies because nostalgia? Us too, and this might be the coolest possible use for ’em. While it’s fun to imagine that he wrote a compression algorithm to fit a lossless copy of Coltrane’s
Blue Train
on a 1.44Mb coaster, or somehow rolled his own mini-disc,
[Dino Fizzotti]’s Diskplayer uses floppies to serve up Spotify albums
.
What’s actually on the floppy, then? The corresponding Spotify album URL. He just pops a disk in the drive, and the Pi does the rest — it detects the floppy event and executes a script that starts an open-source Spotify client. There’s no track skipping and no shuffle, just the entire album as intended, take it or eject it. If you think about it, he’s actually managed to improve on the vinyl experience, since all the songs are on one side. Demo is queued up after the break, and it includes [Dino]’s simple web interface for writing the Spoti-floppies.
When this project started seven months ago, [Dino] intended to bring his vinyl collection into the 21st century with RFID tags, but we’re glad that he decided to involve a fairly obsolete medium. Don’t have a drive or a heap of floppies gathering dust in a closet? Neither did [Dino]. But he found plenty of people selling pretty-colored floppies on ebay, and Amazon has tons of cheap external drives. We think the album art stickers are a nice touch, as is matching album cover color to floppy. He’s right to lock those bad boys up.
Got a bunch of floppy drives?
Build a Floppotron and make your own music
! | 26 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217660",
"author": "José Alves",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T12:51:44",
"content": "Awesome!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6217662",
"author": "Osgeld",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T13:17:17",
"content": "No I have old f... | 1,760,373,596.479447 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/07/raspberry-pi-serves-up-24-hour-simpsons-channel/ | Raspberry Pi Serves Up 24 HourSimpsonsChannel | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"analog tv",
"composite video",
"RF modulator",
"The Simpsons",
"tv"
] | Commercial-free video on demand was every couch potato’s dream for decades, and now we’ve got it. But nostalgia has a funny way of making some folks miss the old days, even if we know it’s technically be a step backwards. Wanting to recreate the TV watching experience circa 1998,
[probnot] has come up with a way to run his very own television channel
.
With the Raspberry Pi and a digital modulator, he’s got the only house on the block that’s wired to show
The Simpsons
all day. He has absolutely no control over which episode plays next, he can’t pause it, and its in presented in standard definition (a nightmare for anyone who grew up in the Netflix era) but a familiar viewing experience for the rest of us.
Where we’re going, we don’t need HDMI.
The key to this project is the Channel Plus Model 3025 modulator. It takes the feed from the antenna and mixes in two composite video sources on user-defined channels. All [probnot] had to do was find a channel that wouldn’t interfere with any of the over-the-air stations. The modulator has been spliced into the house’s coax wiring, so any TV connected to the wall can get in on the action. There’s no special setup required: when he wants to watch
The Simpsons
he just tunes the nearest TV to the appropriate channel.
Providing the video for the modulator is a Raspberry Pi, specifically, the original model that featured composite video output. While the first generation Pi is a bit long in the tooth these days, playing standard definition video is certainly within its capabilities. With a USB flash drive filled with a few hundred episodes and a bit of scripting it’s able to deliver a never-ending stream direct from Springfield. There’s still that second channel available on the modulator as well, which we’re thinking could be perfect for
Seinfeld
or maybe
The X-Files.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a Raspberry Pi used to provide a never-ending stream of
The Simpsons
. But compared to
previous attempts which had to be directly connected to the TV
, we like the idea of using the modulator and creating a more authentic experience. | 38 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217637",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T09:16:55",
"content": "The next step to wouldfurther the nostalgia would be to add back in commercial breaks from 1998.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6217709",
"... | 1,760,373,596.600407 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/rollbot-crams-ten-arms-onto-one-wheel/ | Rollbot Crams Ten Arms Onto One Wheel | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arms",
"robot",
"rollbot",
"servos"
] | It’s not every day that we see someone trying something new with robot locomotion, but [kong]’s robot
Rollyboi was made to do exactly that
by mixing up the usual robot-wheel-motor layout. Instead of the robot using motors to drive wheels, Rollyboi is itself the wheel, and uses multiple simple arms (legs?) attached to hobby servo motors to propel itself. The idea is that the arms swivel out one at a time to roll the robot along as needed.
It’s a novel idea, but how well does it work in practice? The first version was blind and mechanically unstable, with no idea which way was up and therefore no way to effectively control which arm needed to be extended, but was nevertheless able to roll along. The next version implemented a simple control system: buttons installed along the outside rim let the robot know how it is moving and which arm to extend next. With two sets of arms (one on each side) the robot becomes capable of executing simple turns by extending one arm more than the other.
In the end, Rollyboi could move but still lacks a means to perceive and navigate its environment. This is made more challenging by the fact that the robot’s body (and therefore any sensors mounted to it) would be in constant motion as the robot moves. Still, it’s interesting to see how far the idea went using only simple hardware, and its motion gives off a certain
radial solenoid engine vibe
. You can watch a brief video below. | 9 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217620",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T06:38:51",
"content": "Sensing etc would be easy. Put a shaft crosswise through a couple of bearings then hang everything low off the ends so that they stay upright. Command the wheel locomotion system via Bluetooth Low ... | 1,760,373,596.527416 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/laser-etches-solar-absorbing-material/ | Laser Etches Solar Absorbing Material | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Science",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"solar",
"tungsten"
] | Having a laser cutter these days isn’t a big deal. But [Chunlei Guo], a professor at the University of Rochester, has a powerful femto-second pulse laser and used it to create what might be the
perfect solar absorber
. You can see a video about the work, below.
It stands to reason that white materials reflect most light and therefore absorb less energy than black materials — this is part of what makes a radiometer work. Tungsten, in particular, is a good metal for absorbing solar power, but this new laser treatment — which builds nanostructures on the surface of the metal — increases efficiency by 130% compared to untreated tungsten.
The team has previously used a similar technology to make metals either hydrophilic or hydrophobic. The process gives the metal a black color which is where much of the efficiency comes from. According to reports, there’s still a 15% increase using the laser-treated surface over a piece of plain black tungsten.
We’d like some of this for our
solar pool heater
. We doubt that is using tungsten to start with, so maybe that’s the first retrofit. There are plenty of non-tungsten
designs
. We are more likely to find tungsten in our
light bulbs
or our
metal-shaping tools
. | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217595",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T03:23:13",
"content": "Not many details, what do we think we are doing, blowing miniature bolometers into the surface?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6217599",
"a... | 1,760,373,596.793097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/watch-your-life-tick-away-with-this-lifetime-countdown-clock/ | Watch Your Life Tick Away With This Lifetime Countdown Clock | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"countdown",
"doomsday",
"DS3231",
"rtc",
"Teensy"
] | Good news, everyone! Now you can have an ongoing existential crisis, every second of your ever-dwindling life with
this personal life countdown timer
.
Why would anyone want to be confronted by a count of the number of seconds left until you’ve made 80 trips around the sun? We can think of plenty of reasons not to, but creator [Jia Xun Chai] thought it would be somehow motivating to see the seconds tick irretrievably by while going about his life. Thus the idea for “Lifeclocc” came to be, with its ten seven-segment displays and Teensy to tally up and display the number of seconds left in a nominal 80-year life. A DS3231 RTC module keeps it on track between power-offs. It’s not clear what happens when you hit your 80th birthday; we assume it rolls over and starts counting up as you start playing in the bonus round. No word either on what happens should you croak with time left on the clock. Answer these questions and many more by
building one yourself
, or you can just wait for
the Kickstarter
.
It took [Jia Xun] three years to develop Lifeclocc, during which time his personal life clock decreased by 94,608,000 seconds. We will say that the finished product, with its matte-finish PCB, makes a handsome timepiece. Circuit sculptor [Mohit Bhoite] took
a less-angsty stab at a similar clock
, the cute appearance of which is no doubt intended to blunt the pain of impending doom. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217560",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T00:05:36",
"content": "“No word either on what happens should you croak with time left on the clock.” You get a refund.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6217575",
... | 1,760,373,597.054729 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/custom-laser-tag-rifle-packs-a-sonic-punch/ | Custom Laser Tag Rifle Packs A Sonic Punch | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"laser rifle",
"laser tag",
"lasertag"
] | Laser tag is rarely (if ever) referred to as “The Sport of Kings”, but is a fun pastime nonetheless. While some are content to play with off-the-shelf toys, others prefer to make their own gear to suit their needs. [Heine Nielsen] is just one such builder,
creating a fully-featured laser rifle loaded with features
.
As far as hardware goes, [Heine]’s laser rifle is packed to the gills. There are two ESP32s running the show, along with a meaty 6S lithium battery to provide plenty of juice for long combat sessions. A 40W audio amp is hooked up to a speaker mounted in a faux-grenade launcher, aping the design of the M203 – and is able to deliver ear-splitting sound for that realistic touch.
Knowing the popularity of modern FPS games, [Heine] cribbed a lot from titles like PUBG and CS:GO. Grabbing sound effects from various weapons was just one step, with the ultimate goal being to replicate advanced game modes from these games. To help keep the player aware of the game state, there’s even a HUD on the gun, thanks to a 2.8″ TFT screen tucked into the scope.
It’s a serious build for playing serious laser tag, and we’d love to head out to the field for a match with gear like this. We’ve seen other hyper-realistic builds before too,
like this one that uses actual blanks.
Video after the break. | 33 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217519",
"author": "Benik3",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T21:14:01",
"content": "Really this metal sharp on the end? With our play style we would be without eyes and with lot of injuries after first play :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comm... | 1,760,373,596.990391 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/tool-writes-your-pwm-code-for-you/ | Tool Writes Your PWM Code For You | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"pwm"
] | The good thing about computers is they do your work for you, right? If you are a programmer, that doesn’t always seem to be a true statement. [Runtimemicro] has the answer, at least if you are writing PWM code for the Arduino. Their
free application
lets you set a few parameters, visually see the results, and then generates code for you. You can see a video of the tool in operation, below.
According to their site, the tool works for timers 1 through 5 on an Arduino Nano, Uno, or Mega2560. The app appears to work on Windows, but it doesn’t look like it would have any trouble running under Wine on other platforms.
There are only a few inputs: the clock speed, which timer you want to use, and the mode. You also have to specify the frequency in Hz or the period in milliseconds. You can also select a few options, including if you want interrupt code generated.
Once the timer shows up in the graphical display, you can adjust some sliders to get the exact PWM duty cycle you want. Of course, you can also skip the PWM code and just use the timer interrupts for timing.
It isn’t that the timer code or PWM isn’t workable without a tool. But then again, you don’t really need an assembler or a compiler — it just makes things easier. There are a few
nuances
, though. If you want to dig through the generated code, you might find
[Jack’s] video interesting
. | 40 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217493",
"author": "Dave M.",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T19:47:41",
"content": "Doesn’t this defeat the purpose of Arduino. Not saying it isn’t useful, but I thought the purpose of the Arduino was to learn how to code.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,596.872283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/dutch-hackerspaces-at-ten-years-old-celebrating-a-community-with-a-special-map/ | Dutch Hackerspaces At Ten Years Old: Celebrating A Community With A Special Map | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Current Events",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackerspaces"
] | [
"badgelife",
"hackerspaces of europe",
"revspace"
] | The exotic cruise destination of Hoek van Holland Haven.
A couple of months ago I wrote
a piece about the evolution of hackerspaces
, and mentioned that I’d be attending a party for a hackerspace birthday. As I write this that party was last weekend, and it was celebrating both the birthday of
RevSpace
in the Hague, and the tenth anniversary of hackerspaces in the Netherlands. After a relaxing ocean cruise across the North Sea and a speedy train ride I found myself in RevSpace with a bottle of Club-Mate in my hand, hanging out with not only the locals but a selection of others from all across northwestern Europe and beyond. RevSpace is an exceptionally well-organised hackerspace with a large membership, so there was plenty to talk about and a lot of interesting projects to look at.
There was a short programme of talks in Dutch, covering hackerspace history and interviewing a panel of hackerspace founders. I am told that these may make their way online with an English translation in due course, and should be worth looking out for. Then there was an epic-scale barbecue, an old-school rave with Gameboy chiptunes and analogue synth EDM among other delights, and the chance for an evening’s socialising with the rest of the attendees.
A Very Special Badge Indeed
The Decennium badge in all its glory. RevSpace is the leftmost green light.
The physical take-away from the event was the
Decennium badge
(Dutch language,
Google Translate link
), a creation in the usual high quality we’ve come to expect from that quarter. It’s a PCB about 130 mm by 180 mm, and on its front is a map of the Netherlands with provincial boundaries marked in the silkscreen layer. It has fifteen surface-mount bi-colour LEDs mounted upon it at locations corresponding to all the Netherlands hackerspaces that have been active in the last 10 years, and on the back it has an ESP32 module and a pair of screw terminals for 5 V power.
Turn it on and the LEDs flash on and off while you connect to it via WiFi to give it your hotspot password, reset it and they light up green for hackerspaces that are open or red for those with nobody in. There are also a pair of unlit memorial LEDs for two hackerspaces that have closed for good. Mine is on the desk beside my computer as I type this, and over the day I watch as my Dutch friends come and go from all red lights early in the morning to a few green lights still burning the midnight oil as I go to bed.
It works by a RevSpace server polling each space’s
spaceapi
and collating the list of open spaces, and each badge in turn polling that server before lighting its LEDs accordingly. Have a look for yourselves: at the bottom of the page we’ve posted a time-lapse video of a day’s operation. It’s a simple idea well executed, that delivers a powerful and enviable sense of community.
Welcome To Our Global Community
In the news as I am writing this is the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU. Sitting here with the Dutch hackerspace community lighting its LEDs in front of me I am reminded that the hackerspace world is an international community whose strength is in our close ties across physical and political boundaries. Back in the Cold War those of us who were radio amateurs were among the very few who communicated across the Iron Curtain, and that spirit continues today as we get excited about projects on the other side of the world and travel to each other’s hacker camps and conferences.
I wish I could have a light-up badge showing the hackerspaces all across Europe from Galway eastwards, and I am already planning my summer’s hacker camp trains and ferries. What I came away from my weekend with was the sense that it has never been more important for us to strengthen those ties, to visit our neighbours and welcome them with open arms in turn. I don’t yet know what will be the cool tech at the 20-year celebration of Netherlands hackerspaces, but I hope by then I am no longer the only Brit making the journey. In the years to come I hope to see a load of you making the same efforts.
Now, enjoy the video below courtesy of [Niek], a day’s time-lapse of a Decennium badge following the various hackerspaces as they open or close.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Decennium_timelapse.webm | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217625",
"author": "Tom Tyson",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T07:46:52",
"content": "The periodic motion of the watch in that video has got me intrigued. Doesn’t appear to be radical enough to be an automatic watch winder. Anybody got any ideas?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,373,596.919473 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/fallout-inspired-clock-radio-helps-you-party-like-its-2077/ | Fallout-Inspired Clock Radio Helps You Party Like It’s 2077 | Erin Pinheiro | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"custom case",
"Fallout",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi Case",
"retro",
"retro radio"
] | Since its first release seven years ago, Raspberry Pi single-board computers have become notoriously ubiquitous in compact and portable builds. They’re used in many different applications, but one of the most interesting has got to be how it can turn just about any old thing into a Linux computer. [xito666] writes in with his own build,
a portable retro computer inspired by the retro-futuristic stylings of the Fallout games
.
For true aesthetic accuracy, [xito666] used an old discarded Crown 5TV-65R portable TV and radio combo. The unit hails from the 1970s, so a bit newer than Vault technology, but it still gives off a great retro charm with its CRT screen and knobs. Sadly, the original components couldn’t be reused, and the shell was stripped empty so that the new hardware could take its place. This includes an off-the-shelf HDMI LCD screen with resistive touchscreen and new potentiometers and knobs that still fit in with the overall look of the machine.
What makes this build unique, however, is that it also includes custom software to turn it into a clock and music player, with the deliciously Pip Boy-like UI being controlled entirely with the front buttons and knobs. The whole project is well written up in the Reddit post, in it [xito666] explains some of their choices and planned improvements. One that we would suggest ourselves is replacing the menu scrolling selector dial with a rotary encoder rather than a potentiometer, for that added knob feel. We also think that with the addition of a keyboard, it would easily pass for
one of those luggables from the 1980s
, a style of project we’ve featured
once or twice here before
. | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217436",
"author": "Clyde",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T16:40:58",
"content": "That poor CRT…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6217444",
"author": "Maave",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T17:15:43",
"content": "I... | 1,760,373,597.340144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/troubleshooting-a-symlink-a-whodunnit-for-the-git-record-books/ | Troubleshooting A Symlink — A Whodunnit For The Git Record Books | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"bug reporting",
"OBS",
"Tales from the Sysadmin",
"tls"
] | While I normally sport the well-worn fedora of a hard-boiled sysadmin, Sunday mornings I swap that neo-noir accessory for the tech-noir: a pair of pro headphones. This is the tale of the collision of those two roles. An educational caper, dear reader. You see, my weekly gig is to run a Facebook Live Stream, and Facebook just recently began enforcing a new policy: all video streams are required to use encryption. We have Fedora installed on the media machine, and use Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to stream. It should have been easy to update the stream settings. I made the necessary changes and tested it out — no luck. The error message was less than helpful: “Failed to connect to server”. With a sigh, I took off my headphones, put my sysadmin hat on, and walked out into the digital darkness. It was time to get back to work.
What the RTMPS?
Some terms, before we dive in. RTMP is the Real Time Messaging Protocol, originally developed by Macromedia. Thanks to Adobe, a version of RTMP is now an open specification, and many video streaming services now use it to transport live audio and video across the internet. RTMPS is simply the encrypted version, where RTMP is wrapped inside a TLS/SSL connection. TLS, Transport Layer Security, is the same protocol that powers HTTPS. TLS does depend on your machine having a good copy of the certificate bundle, a collection of public keys that are considered to be trustworthy.
How does one go about trying to fix this sort of problem? A good first step is to get a more useful error message. Running OBS from a command line lets us see all the extra output messages that are usually invisible. Below I’ve cut out all the extra messages, to highlight the failing connection attempt.
info: [rtmp stream: 'simple_stream'] Connecting to RTMP URL rtmps://rtmp-api.facebook.com:443/rtmp/...
info: RTMP_Connect1, TLS_Connect failed: -0x7680
info: [rtmp stream: 'simple_stream'] Connection to rtmps://rtmp-api.facebook.com:443/rtmp/ failed: -2
info: ==== Streaming Stop ================================================
Now we’re getting somewhere. The failure is specifically in the TLS connection, which we could have guessed. We also get an error code. Quick note on trying to search for that error: Google will interpret the leading dash as an indicator that you want results that don’t include that search term. Surrounding it in quotation marks,
"-0x7680"
is the way to get useful results.
How to Narrow Down the Cause of an Error
Searching for that error number will bring up two interesting hits. One is
the thread in the OBS forum
where those of us facing this problem have been discussing it. The other hit is
the mbedtls documentation
, where an error with this code is defined. It’s possible that it’s a false positive, but since we’re troubleshooting a TLS issue, it’s likely related. That error is
MBEDTLS_ERR_SSL_CA_CHAIN_REQUIRED
, and is described as “No CA Chain is set, but required to operate.”
So what’s next? We’ve learned a bit, but still don’t have any answers, so let’s dive into code. My standby quick-and-dirty debugging technique is to add
printf()
calls to help follow code execution, but where to start? We have a breadcrumb in the program output, “RTMP_Connect1”. Searching the OBS codebase on Github lands us at
a function with that name
. Partway through the function, we can see
the command to print the log message that brought us here
.
The error message indicates that a CA chain isn’t loaded. That sounds like an initialization problem. Perhaps that term “chain” is used in the OBS source. Searching our suspect file returns 18 hits, 17 of which are in a function named
RTMP_TLS_LoadCerts()
. I spent some time chasing down the execution flow of the RTMP connection, even making a sketch of when each function gets called. The code led me back to
RTMP_TLS_LoadCerts()
. That function has quite a bit of code in it, but we can safely ignore the parts that are specific to Windows or MacOS. There is an obvious line that should load system certs.
if (mbedtls_x509_crt_parse_path(chain, "/etc/ssl/certs/") &< 0) {
goto error;
}
So OBS makes a function call to the mbedtls library, requesting that the certificates in
/etc/ssl/certs/
are loaded. Let’s make sure a proper certificate file is actually there where OBS expects it to be:
Ca-bundle.crt is the file we’re looking for. Notice the teal color? Those three files are actually symlinks to another location. Files on Linux filesystems are symbolically linked all the time, so likely not a problem. I spent some time checking things like file permissions, and tried disabling selinux, but came up with nothing. It didn’t seem to be an overzealous security setting. All I was left with was the knowledge that I had an mbedtls function that should be loading the certificate bundle, but when the program actually tried to verify a TLS certificate, it complained that the chain,
ca-bundle.crt
, was missing. If the mbedtls function was failing, shouldn’t it error out there? The next logical step is to look at
the documentation for that function
.
Now we find the first real hint about what could be happening.
mbedtls_x509_crt_parse_path()
can partially fail, and still give us a return code that doesn’t trigger an error. So, time to use
printf()
to see what that return code is on my machine. I added the code, compiled, ran the output binary… and got no such log output.
It took longer than I care to admit for me to figure out why my code changes didn’t seem to make a difference when running the program. This is a potential gotcha to watch out for. OBS uses a modular structure, consisting of the OBS binary, as well as various loadable modules. The code changes I was making were a part of
obs-outputs.so
, and even when running the compiled binary, those modules were being loaded from their default locations. To test my changes, I had to explicitly tell OBS to use the newly compiled module.
System Calls That Hate Symlinks
Something was obviously amiss with
mbedtls_x509_crt_parse_path()
. I wasn’t seeing anything obvious in the documentation, but I did see a similar function,
mbedtls_x509_crt_parse_file()
. What would happen if we forced mbedtls to only try loading the one crt file that we care about? I made the change, compiled, and to my surprise OBS finally connected to Facebook Live. I had a real fix, but I still didn’t understand why it was broken. It’s time to look at the mbedtls sourcecode.
The
parse_path()
function
is easily found in the mbedtls source tree. Make sure to watch the
#if defined()
blocks — We’re not interested in the code for Windows. Once we find
the loop that runs for each file
in the given path, the problem code might jump out at you.
else if( stat( entry_name, &sb ) == -1 )
{
ret = MBEDTLS_ERR_X509_FILE_IO_ERROR;
goto cleanup;
}
if( !S_ISREG( sb.st_mode ) )
continue;
Stat()
is a system call that gets the status of a filesystem path, and then S_ISREG is a macro that checks whether that path is pointing at a regular file. Notably, the parse_file function does not do that check, and will happily load a symlink.
Report the Bug, But to Whom?
That, of course, is the core problem. Fedora uses a symlinked
ca-bundle.crt
, and mbedtls refuses to load
ca-bundle.crt
when it’s a symlink. We understand the problem, but what’s the proper fix? Which project actually has the bug here? OBS used the mbedtls function properly according to its documentation, and mbedtls may have a good security reason for refusing to load a bundle that’s actually a symlink. Is it on RPMFusion, and the package maintainer to fix the incompatibility? Personally, I think it’s really an mbedtls problem, particularly because this quirk isn’t mentioned in any documentation that I came across. Ultimately, it’s not my call which project needs to own this problem.
Our last task, then, is to report the bug we discovered. It’s a good idea to stop at this point, and ask yourself, is this bug a potential security issue? It’s best to try to report security issues privately, and most projects have contact instructions for disclosing those sorts of issues. Depending on where you found the problem, you may even be eligible for a bug bounty reward for finding the problem.
Assuming there is no security angle to consider, you’ll want to make a bug report. Does the project have a public bug tracker? That’s probably where it should go. If not, there is likely a mailing list where bugs are reported. Include enough information to reproduce the bug, and details on what you think is happening, but don’t include a bunch of log output in the bug or the mailing list. If it’s relevant, use pastebin or one of the other text hosting sites, to avoid including a wall of text in the bug report. If you have an idea of how to fix the problem, mention it. On a mailing list, patches are usually accepted. If the project is using Github or Gitlab, you can report the bug, and turn around and submit a pull request to fix it.
Particularly for trivial changes, I tend to ask what the project prefers, should I send a pull request, or is this trivial enough to fix without one. If you’re looking to do future work on the project, doing a PR is a handy way to get your name into the git record. Projects are more likely to look kindly on your future work, if there’s record of you already fixing bugs.
The End of Another Tale
This one turned out well enough. OBS is adding some workaround code to make sure the ca-bundle is properly loaded on systems where it’s a symlink. The mbedtls project sees this behavior as a bug, and I’ve submitted a patch to fix it. I noticed a related logic bug in the certificate loading code, and it’s been acknowledged as well. I’ve patched my copy of OBS so live-streams work again. It’s all in a days’ work for for the sysadmin. No rest for the weary, though. I have a pair of 10Gb Ethernet cards that die whenever they transfer VLAN tagged traffic. Just another case.
Errata
I know the more experienced programmers will point it out in the comments,
stat()
doesn’t ever set st_mode to S_IFLNK.
Stat()
follows the symlink to report on the target, while
lstat()
tells you about the symlink itself. My fix worked, but the problem was slightly different than I thought it was.
Mbedtls_x509_crt_parse_path()
can return a positive value if only some of the files in the specified directory successfully loaded. OBS was treating that positive value as a failure, and immediately dumping the certificates that had been loaded. Chasing false leads like this is totally par for the course when it comes to finding and fixing bugs. In the end, the bug is fixed, and that’s what really matters. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find something to wash the taste of crow out of my mouth. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217461",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T18:12:04",
"content": "Surely if you sport a sysadmin Fedora, it wouldn’t be noir, it would be red?;^)… I’ll get me hat….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6217480",
"... | 1,760,373,597.40096 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/arduino-handheld-game-system-gets-a-grip/ | Arduino Handheld Game System Gets A Grip | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"Adafruit Feather",
"Arduboy",
"cyberpunk",
"handheld game",
"oled",
"ssd1306"
] | With little more than an Arduino, an OLED display, and some buttons, it’s easy to build your own faux-retro game system. There’s even a growing library of titles out there that target this specific combination of hardware, thanks in no small part to the Arduboy project. But unless you’re content to play
Circuit Dude
on a breadboard, at some point you’ll probably want to wrap the build up in a more convenient form.
Like many that came before it, the OLED handheld created by [Alex Zidros] takes inspiration from a Nintendo product; but it’s not the Game Boy. Instead,
his design is based on a 3D printed grip for the Switch Joy-Cons
that he found on Thingiverse. After tacking on a holder for the PCB, he had the makings of a rather unique system.
We especially like the offset SSD1306 OLED display. Not because we think a game system with an asymmetrical layout is a particularly sound design decision, but because it gives the whole build a rather cyberpunk feel. When combined with the exposed electronics, the whole system looks like it could have been cobbled together from a futuristic dumpster. Which is high praise, as far as we’re concerned.
Opposite the display is a LiPo pouch battery that [Alex] says was liberated from a portable speaker, and down below is an Adafruit Feather 328P. There are two tactile switches mounted to the front of the Feather, and in something of a departure from these sort of builds, there are two more on the shoulders of the 3D printed case. Everything is held together with nothing more exotic than a scrap of perfboard, making it easy for anyone who might want to build their own version.
If you prefer your Arduino and OLED gaming to come in a slightly more familiar form factor,
the build that was done inside of a Dreamcast Visual Memory Unit (VMU)
has always been a favorite around these parts. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217439",
"author": "ArcReactorKC",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T16:54:09",
"content": "Innovation in this area is always cool to see, you never know how someone will come up with a new design or set up. But I’ll say this, as someone who does more 3d printing than hardware hacking nowad... | 1,760,373,597.278423 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/06/a-network-attached-vfd-tube-clock/ | A Network Attached VFD Tube Clock | Tom Nardi | [
"clock hacks",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"IV-12",
"ntp",
"PIC18F67J60",
"PoE",
"power over ethernet",
"vacuum fluorescent display",
"vfd"
] | The elegance of Power over Ethernet (PoE) is that you can provide network connectivity and power over a single cable. Unfortunately not nearly enough hardware seems to support this capability, forcing intrepid hackers to take matters into their own hands. The latest in this line of single-cable creations is
this beautiful Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) clock from [Glen Akins]
.
Testing the VFD tube socket
One of the key advantages VFDs have over their Nixie predecessors is greatly reduced energy consumption, and after [Glen] ran the numbers, he saw that a display using six VFD tubes could easily be powered with standard PoE hardware. With this information, he started designing the PCB around the early 1990s era IV-12 tube, which has the advantage of being socketed so he could easily remove them later if necessary.
[Glen] first had to create a schematic and PCB footprint for the IV-12 tube that he could import into Eagle, which he was kind enough to share should anyone else be working with these particular tubes down the line. After a test of the newly designed socket was successful, he moved onto the rest of the electronics.
The clock is powered by a Microchip PIC18F67J60, which connects to the Ethernet network and pulls the current time down from NTP. After seeing so many clocks use an ESP to connect to the Internet over WiFi, there’s something refreshing about seeing a wired version. The tube segments are driven by a HV5812, also Microchip branded. Lastly, [Glen] used a number of DC/DC converters to generate the 1.5 V, 3.3 V, 5 V, and 25 V necessary to drive all the electronics and VFDs.
We absolutely love the simplicity of this clock, from its sleek aluminum enclosure to that single RJ45 jack on the back. But if you’re looking for something with a bit more flash,
[Glen] also put together some PoE Christmas lights over the holidays
which share a number of design elements with this project.
[Thanks to Irish for the tip.] | 12 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217346",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T09:28:16",
"content": "“precessessors” That was a struggle to say to myself! Love those VFD tubes though!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6217348",
"author": "David Pye",
... | 1,760,373,597.454093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/lighting-up-your-spectrespecs/ | Lighting Up Your Spectrespecs | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"cosplay",
"harry potter",
"neopixel",
"Neopixels"
] | In the ever-popular world of
Harry Potter
, a pair of Spectrespecs are useful if you’re hunting for wrackspurts and nargles. While we’ve never spotted either of these creatures ourselves, if you’d like to go out on a hunt,
[Laveréna]’s build might be for you.
To start with, you’ll need the frames for the Spectrespecs. [Laveréna] elected to source hers commercially, but you can
3D print them
or even
craft them by hand if you so desire
. Then, a TinyLily microcontroller board is installed, with its small size allowing it to be tucked neatly out of sight in the top of the sunglasses. Two NeoPixels are then installed, with the TinyLily programmed to flash the LEDs in the requisite blue and red colors for easy identification of supernatural creatures.
Tools such as cheap microcontrollers designed for wearables and low-cost addressable LEDs are making advanced cosplay designs easier than ever. Whipping up custom blinkables no longer requires knowledge of advanced multiplexing techniques and how to properly drive high-power LEDs. Of course, LED wearables do still get properly advanced –
like this skin-based 7-segment display
. If you’ve got a glowable project of your own that you’re dying to share,
be sure to let us know! | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217349",
"author": "lj",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T09:43:31",
"content": "> While we’ve never spotted either> of these creatures ourselve …Of course you haven’t. How would you even spot them without your spectrespecs?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,373,597.220149 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/array-of-useless-machines-is-useless/ | Array Of Useless Machines Is Useless | Richard Baguley | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"laser cut",
"useless"
] | What’s the collective noun for a group of useless machines? A passel of useless machines? A failure? A waste? A 404? Whatever you want to call it, [Martin Raynsford] has produced one here with this collection of
24 useless machines arranged into a 5 by 6 array
. He produced it for an event at a hackerspace to amuse visitors, and it certainly seems to do the job in the video after the break.
[Martin] built the case by modifying the design of his
Useless Machine kit
, stretching out the case to hold multiple mechanisms. The original plan was to use a 6 by 6 matrix, but that wouldn’t fit into the laser cutter, so it ended up with 24 mechanisms in a 5 by 6 array. All of those are driven by 2 AAA batteries, and the mechanisms are efficient enough that it survived a full day of button flipping before it began to run out of juice.
It’s a neat design and build, from the living edge to the neat design of the cover hinge that stops the cover falling into the inside of the case. | 38 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217290",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T03:04:48",
"content": "4×6 = 24",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6217294",
"author": "ROB",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T03:10:05",
"content": "Yeah, b... | 1,760,373,597.626084 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/micro-macro-keyboard-makes-a-major-difference/ | Micro Macro Keyboard Makes A Major Difference | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino pro micro",
"Gateron",
"macro keyboard",
"rotary encoder"
] | Media keyboards are nice in theory. But in practice they never have all the keys you want, and they almost always have a few you don’t. Sure, you could maybe reassign the ones you don’t use, but then the caps are wrong, and it’s a whole thing. So really, the only winning move is to
make a micro macro keyboard
as [littleSilvr] did to make all your shortcuts one-button accessible.
This lovely input has an Arduino Pro Micro for a brain, and Gateron browns for brawn. That knob there is a rotary encoder, not a potentiometer, because endless volume knob twiddling is just so much nicer. In case you’re wondering, those shortcuts open Fusion 360 and Cura, but we’re still not sure what the hyphen does.
Can we talk about those keycaps, though? [littleSilvr] used [Make Anything]’s process of of printing in multi-color with a single extruder. The technique involves building a vector for each color, each of which gets its own STL file. Then you add retraction as you go up through the layers, slow the print speed, change filament colors while the nozzle and bed are still warm, and voila, a vibrant canvas of colors.
If you don’t have a printer and you don’t mind a bit of compromise on the number of inputs,
try basing your build on an existing input, like an old rotary telephone dialer
.
Via
r/duino | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217252",
"author": "Vinny",
"timestamp": "2020-02-06T00:35:39",
"content": "“but we’re still not sure what the hyphen does.”OP answered on the reddit post: it minimizes all windows on screen at once.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,373,597.676377 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/3d-printed-gifs-for-stop-motion-memes/ | 3D Printed GIFs For Stop Motion Memes | Tom Nardi | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"animation",
"GIF",
"Meme",
"photography",
"stop motion"
] | Lithophanes are nothing new, with examples going back to the 1800s. But they’ve become popular again thanks to the ease of which these pieces of artwork can be 3D printed. While the Internet would be more than happy to see somebody press a 3D image of their cat into a thin piece of translucent porcelain ready to have a light shone through it, that’s quite a bit harder than just firing up the Monoprice.
But since the machine is doing all the work for you, why stop at one? That’s precisely the sort of thinking that lead
[The Mad Maker] to recreate animated GIFs with stop motion photography
and a stack of printed lithophanes. Now all your favorite reaction memes can make the leap to the physical world…and then go right back into the computer.
The method here is pretty simple: [The Mad Maker] disassembles his favorite GIF to get the individual frame images, converts each one of those into a lithophane STL via an online tool, prints it out, photographs it, and then stitches all those photographs back into a new GIF. Given the incredibly time consuming nature of this process you’ll want to limit it to short animations, and even then, probably do only every 2nd or 3rd frame to preserve your sanity.
In the video after the break you can see the entire process, as well as check out the final result. While there weren’t really any technical hurdles to overcome in this project, we did like seeing how [The Mad Maker] experimented to find the ideal position for the backlight and camera. The wooden frame he came up with to hold everything in position should make subsequent meme conversions a lot easier, now he just needs to
add a little color
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217168",
"author": "Steven13",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T21:08:37",
"content": "Perfect for a zoetrope!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6217173",
"author": "Waterfowl",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T21:10:22",
... | 1,760,373,597.854915 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/debugging-pcbs-with-augmented-reality/ | Debugging PCBs With Augmented Reality | Lewin Day | [
"cons"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"ar",
"augmented reality",
"circuit design",
"Hackaday Supercon",
"Hackaday SuperConference",
"pcb",
"PCB design"
] | Mihir Shah has designed many a PCB in his time. However, when working through the development process, he grew tired of the messy, antiquated methods of communicating design data with his team. Annotating photos is slow and cumbersome, while sending board design files requires everyone to use the same software and be up to speed. Mihir thinks he has a much better solution by the name of InspectAR, it’s an augmented reality platform that lets you see inside the circuit board and beyond which
he demoed during the 2019 Hackaday Superconference
.
The InspectAR package makes it easy to visualise signals on the board.
The idea of InspectAR is to use augmented reality to help work with and debug electronics. It’s a powerful suite of tools that enable the live overlay of graphics on a video feed of a circuit board, enabling the user to quickly and effectively trace signals, identify components, and get an idea of what’s what. Usable with a smartphone or a webcam, the aim is to improve collaboration and communication between engineers by giving everyone a tool that can easily show them what’s going on, without requiring everyone involved to run a fully-fledged and expensive electronics design package.
The Supercon talk served to demonstrate some of the capabilities of InspectAR with an Arduino Uno. With a few clicks, different pins and signals can be highlighted on the board as Mihir twirls it between his fingers. Using ground as an example, Mihir first highlights the entire signal. This looks a little messy, with the large ground plane making it difficult to see exactly what’s going on. Using an example of needing a point to attach to for an oscilloscope probe, [Mihir] instead switches to pad-only mode, clearly revealing places where the user can find the signal on bare pads on the PCB. This kind of attention to detail shows the strong usability ethos behind the development of InspectAR, and we can already imagine finding it invaluable when working with unfamiliar boards. There’s also the possibility to highlight different components and display metadata — which should make finding assembly errors a cinch. It could also be useful for quickly bringing up datasheets on relevant chips where necessary.
Obviously, the electronic design space is a fragmented one, with plenty of competing software in the market. Whether you’re an Eagle diehard, Altium fanatic, or a KiCad fan, it’s possible to get things working with InspectAR. Mihir and the team are currently operating out of office space courtesy of Autodesk, who saw the value in the project and have supported its early steps.
The software is available free for users to try
, with several popular boards available to test. As a party piece for Supercon, our very own Hackaday badge is available if you’d like to give it a spin, along with several Arduino boards, too. We can’t wait to see what comes next, and fully expect to end up using InspectAR ourselves when hacking away at a fresh run of boards! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217146",
"author": "N",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T20:10:12",
"content": "Boeing has been using augmented reality displays for decades to troubleshoot wiring harnesses, they made a prototype in the 1990s using the Private Eye heads-up display. Debugging an Arduino is simple and stra... | 1,760,373,597.723443 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/the-50-ham-going-mobile/ | The $50 Ham: Going Mobile | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur",
"automotive",
"car",
"ham radio",
"installation",
"loom",
"mobile",
"The $50 Ham",
"transceiver",
"yaesu"
] | So far in this series, everything we’ve covered has been geared around the cheapest and easiest possible means of getting on the air:
getting your Technician license
, buying your first low-end portable transceiver, and
checking in on the local repeater nets
. That’s all good stuff, and chances are you can actually take all three of those steps and still have change left over from your $50 bill. Like I said, amateur radio doesn’t have to be expensive to be fun.
But at some point, every new ham is going to yearn for that first “real” rig, something with a little more oomph in terms of power, and perhaps with a few more features. For many Technicians, the obvious choice is a mobile rig, something that can be used to chat with fellow hams on the way to work, or to pass the time while on long road trips. Whatever your motivation is, once you buy a radio, you have to install it, and therein lie challenges galore, both electrical and mechanical.
I recently took the plunge on a mobile rig, and while the radio and antenna were an order of magnitude more expensive than $50, the process of installing it was pretty cheap. But it’s not the price of the thing that’s important in this series; rather, it’s to show that ham radio is all about doing it yourself, even when that means tearing your car apart from the inside out and rebuilding it around a radio.
Choosing a Rig
Whatever radio you end up buying is going to depend entirely on how you plan to use it. Technicians will probably want a dual-band radio that covers the 2-meter (VHF) and 70-cm (UHF) bands, which will give you access to local repeaters. Features and quality vary by brand, but if you stick with one of the “Big Three” – Yaesu, Kenwood, and ICOM – you’ll get good value for the money. Alinco probably belongs in there, too, and you can find decent mobile rigs that are higher-power versions of the much-derided “cheap Chinese handy talkies” that are available for not much more than $50.
My choice was a
Yaesu FT-8900R
, a now-discontinued quad-band radio. In addition to the usual UHF and VHF bands, the 8900 also has 6 meters, known as “The Magic Band” because it can be worked in so many different ways, and 10 meters, which offers some interesting options for simplex, repeater-less, communications. Technicians have access to all of the 6-meter band, but only a small slice of 10 meters, and then only using single-sideband voice. The FT-8900R is an FM-only transceiver, but since I have my General class license, I can use it on the 10-meter band. The radio can also be set up as a cross-band repeater, which holds some interesting possibilities for me.
Almost all FM mobile ham rigs these days are digital, and many of them support one or the other of the digital modulation schemes, like System Fusion and DMR. Many have support for the Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) built-in, which lets you report information like your GPS location automatically. The manufacturers have responded to the market in offering as many or as few bells and whistles as possible, so whatever you want, chances are good that someone makes it. Strangely, mobile rigs are the one area of ham radio where there’s not a lot of homebrewing, although there is an active community that repurposes old UHF and VHF business band radio for ham use. But most people just buy a well-engineered COTS radio and use the installation to express their homebrew creativity.
Planning the Install
Nearing peak disassembly. The radio will go just below the drop light.
And let me tell you, modern cars and trucks require a LOT of creativity and ingenuity to achieve a clean, professional installation. I started doing mobile installs many years ago, when cars had much more metal in them and far fewer electrical components and wiring harnesses. Back then, it was easy to find a reliable ground, and you never had to work around airbag computers, seatbelt pre-tensioners, and infotainment components. Modern cars are a lot more challenging to do installations in, but they’re a lot more fun too, since you get to marvel at the skills of engineers who design pieces that can be assembled quickly with minimal tooling, and then curse their names while you try to disassemble something with no visible fasteners.
Protip: many control-head cables have RJ-style connectors. Protect the locking tab while running the cable with a little heat-shrink tubing.
Planning your install is probably the most critical step. Many mobile rigs come with separable faceplates, so that the radio itself can be trunk-mounted or installed under a seat, while the control head with the display and microphone can be placed where it’s easily used. This is a huge bonus when installing in a modern car where options for placing a large one-piece radio are limited; the small control head is far easier to wedge someplace and still be usable. In my case, I decided to remove one of the overhead storage bins in my 2004 Toyota Sequoia and install the head in its place, while the radio itself would go in one of the side pockets in the “way back.”
After planning where the parts will go, you’ll need to figure out how and where to run wires. Ham rigs take a lot of current — 7 to 10 amps on transmit is common — and they require a direct run to the vehicle battery with heavy-gauge wire. Don’t scrimp on this and try to tap into something under the dash like we used to do for installing an after-market stereo. Find a plug or grommet in the firewall and do it right. Fuses are a must. You do not want a 12-gauge wire running through the car acting like a fuse when something shorts out. Ask me how I know.
Physically protecting the power wires – all wires, for that matter – is really important too. Spend a couple of bucks on some corrugated plastic split-loom and wrap the wires up, especially in places where people are likely to step on them or kick them.
Neatness Counts
The nice thing about modern cars is there are plenty of concealed places to run wires. The bad thing is getting access to them. Almost every plastic trim piece in a car is held in place with some kind of plastic fastener that’s as likely to break as it is to release cleanly. Invest in a set of trim removal tools; these will give you a better chance at releasing these fasteners without breaking them or marring the finish of other pieces. Still, count on a 50% failure rate at this phase.
Nice and neat and safe from feet – make sure you loom your wires to protect them from damage.
I managed to run my wires fairly easily. The wire for the control head went through the headliner to the trim piece on the “C” pillar (the third roof pillar from the front); while the power and remote speaker wires went under the rear passenger door sills and under the driver’s seat to the center console. I lucked out in that I had previously installed an inverter in the console, and so had very large-gauge wires already in place. I did take care to properly loom the radio’s wiring harnesses, though, and to use good crimp connectors installed with a proper crimping tool. I also made sure the fuses were easily accessible for replacement.
Finished install. The front face could use a little more illumination for easier nighttime use, though.
Next Time
Probably the most critical task in any mobile ham installation is dealing with the antenna. Not only must you spec out a proper antenna for the job, you’ve also got to mount it. That can be as simple as plunking down a magnetic base and screwing the antenna on, or as pucker-inducing as taking a hole saw and drilling through your roof. And even after that, there are other jobs, like tuning the antenna, testing the install, and mitigating any noise being induced by the car itself. Those can all be challenging jobs, and we’ll cover them in the next installment. | 34 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217106",
"author": "MAC",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T18:32:31",
"content": "I went the really cheap and easy route: Handheld radio with a battery eliminator plugged into the accessory power port and a mag mount antenna with the feedline fed through a gap in the window. I got into th... | 1,760,373,597.800179 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/this-box-counts-your-blessings-for-you/ | This Box Counts Your Blessings For You | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino Uno",
"Chinese New Year",
"counting box",
"grove",
"Hongbao",
"servo"
] | It’s that time of year again when production in Shenzhen grinds to a halt. Lunar New Year has kicked off the annual month-long Spring Festival, and the whole country has taken time off to be with family and celebrate. One tradition of Spring Festival is that everyone gives each other red envelopes with various amounts of money in them called hongbao. The point of this ‘lucky money’ is to spread good fortune in the new year, and it’s easy to amass a whole pile of hongbao by the end of the festival.
[Makerming] made
this lovely counting box for anyone looking to keep track of their hongbao in style
. It probably goes without saying that this would make an awesome mailbox for Valentines (or anything else that fits in the slot), but there you go. The circuit is pretty simple thanks to a Grove connector shield meant for Arduinos. An IR break-beam module detects the incoming envelope, and the Uno increments the count on the display. The wiggly, servo-driven example hongbao on top are there to add to the fun.
We love the laser-cut decoration on the front, which is an homage to the intricate paper cut decorations. If you don’t like that one, [Makerming] included design files for several other options. Watch it wiggle after the break!
If you won’t be looking to collect valentines because you’ve already found that special someone,
give them something that lasts longer than chocolate or roses
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8uKiSDpfbk
Via
Adafruit | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217086",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T18:00:34",
"content": "How well does it handle underflow?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6217131",
"author": "N",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T19:29:50",
"content... | 1,760,373,597.910778 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/tipping-points-in-the-climate-system-the-worst-kind-of-positive-feedback/ | Tipping Points In The Climate System: The Worst Kind Of Positive Feedback | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science"
] | [
"climate",
"climate change",
"feedback",
"global warming",
"Ice-Albedo",
"methane",
"ocean currents"
] | With global temperatures continuing to break records in recent years, it’s important to cast an eye towards the future. While efforts to reduce emissions remain in a political quagmire, time is running out to arrest the slide into catastrophe.
Further compounding the issue are a variety of positive feedback loops that promise to further compound the problem. In these cases, initial warming has flow-on effects that then serve to further increase global temperatures. Avoiding these feedback mechanisms is crucial if the Earth is to remain comfortably livable out to the end of the century.
A Multitude of Causes
The issue of climate change often appears as a simple one, with the goal being to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent negative consequences for human civilization. Despite this, the effects of climate change are often diffuse and intermingled. The various climate systems of the Earth interact in incredibly complex ways, and there are many mechanisms at play in these feedback effects that could tip things over the edge.
Ice-Albedo
A graph showing the sudden drop in Bering-Chukchi sea ice seen in 2018. This kind of abrupt change is not currently accounted for in climate models.
NASA photographs showing the loss of ice at the Muir Glacier in Alaska, from 1941 and 2004.
The ice-albedo feedback mechanism is a climate process in which the amount of ice on earth has a significant effect on global temperature changes. It’s a positive feedback relationship, meaning it has the possibility of causing a runaway effect if not managed carefully. Higher global temperatures cause sea ice, land ice, and glaciers to melt. The ice, which is highly reflective, is instead replaced with open water, or land, which is less reflective, having a lower albedo. This causes the Earth to retain more heat from solar radiation, instead of reflecting it back into space. This further raises temperatures, causing more ice to melt, creating the positive feedback effect.
Ice levels around the world are an active target of study for climate scientists.
Records show major sustained losses over recent decades to major ice sheets,
and
glaciers are retreating all over the world.
These areas, formerly covered in highly reflective ice, are now absorbing more heat than ever from solar radiation. As temperatures continue to rise, it’s likely that ice packs around the world will continue to thaw, further exacerbating the effect.
Methane Releases From Not-So-Permafrost
Melting permafrost in Canada in 2008. Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson
Another major concern of climate scientists is the possibility of large-scale releases of methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from a variety of environmental sources. Areas such as Western Siberia have large reserves of methane trapped under permafrost, while significant reserves exist under the oceans, too. As the climate warms, much of this permafrost is beginning to thaw, releasing the stored methane trapped below the surface. This has the effect of further increasing warming, as methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with a warming potential over 20 times that of CO2 over a 20 year time frame.
There is significant worry that a tipping point could be reached
in which there is an abrupt release of large amounts of methane from these sources, causing a rapid increase in global temperatures. In this event, reducing human emissions would do little to help, as the released greenhouse gases can not simply be returned to the soil.
Research is ongoing to produce models to predict what will happen in the event of further thawing of formerly-permanent permafrost.
There is some hope — slower thawing seems likely to reduce the amount of harmful greenhouse gases released, as plants grow in formerly frozen areas, once again locking up carbon. Faster thaws threaten more massive, abrupt releases, which are more likely to result in rapid temperature rise.
Ocean Current Slowdown
Ocean currents have a big role to play in the climate. Photo credit; NASA
The world’s oceans are a major player in the climate system. Acting as a giant heat sink, what happens in the oceans tends to have staggering effects on weather patterns everywhere. Major ocean currents are a large part of this mechanism, responsible for transporting huge amounts of heat stored in these waters around the globe.
Scientists have been monitoring changes in ocean currents, and have observed major changes in recent years. The Gulf Stream is one such current, which has often been linked to major climate events in the distant past. It’s slowing down,
and is currently weaker than at any point in the last 1600 years
. The weakening is unprecedented, and current research suggests the change is at least in part due to human-induced climate change. The effect is multifaceted, with temperature increases and freshwater from melting sea ice both playing a role.
Many theorize that a slowdown or shutdown of ocean currents could have major consequences on the world climate. Extreme warming or cooling could occur in different areas, and storm activity, such as hurricanes, could increase in both frequency and magnitude.
Research suggests that changes in these currents can be both an indicator and driver of climate shifts,
and it’s likely that ocean currents will continue to change as anthropogenic warming continues.
Forest Loss And Fires
Smoke from bushfires in Eastern Australia, as seen from satellite imagery. The 2019/2020 fire season has been unprecedented in ferocity.
Forests are an important player in the global climate, acting as a major carbon dioxide sink. However, in recent years, increased temperatures and extreme wildfires have led to large swathes of forests dying off or simply going up in smoke. As trees die and are broken down by microbes, or as they burn up in fires, this leads to releases of greenhouse gases. This causes further warming, compounding the problem in yet another example of positive feedback.
Wildfires are becoming worse and more frequent.
Last year’s Arctic wildfires released a massive volume of CO2 in June alone
— equal to Sweden’s annual total output. After facing its hottest and driest year on record in 2019,
Australia also faced its worst recorded fire season, with over 10 million hectares burned.
These fires grew large enough to create their own weather, with Pyrocumulonimbus clouds observed forming from the smoke and causing lightning storms which spawned further fires in other areas. This is a case of positive feedback in the very short term, with large fires creating further fires due to the harsh conditions.
Forest die-offs have their own consequences, too.
Boreal forests are shrinking
, thus acting as less of a carbon sink as tree numbers begin to dwindle. As the forests thin out, conditions get warmer and dryer for remaining trees, further accelerating the decline. This also leads to issues as other species, both flora and fauna, have to adapt as tree cover shrinks and conditions change.
What Can Be Done?
The aforementioned feedback mechanisms are all current areas of research for climate scientists around the globe. The topic of abrupt and sudden climate change is only loosely understood. Most existing climate models are based on steady, gradual changes to the climate from human activity. These models don’t account for the possibility of large sudden methane releases from formerly frozen soils, or mass releases of carbon dioxide from continental-scale wildfires.
Unfortunately, the mechanisms at play in these feedback scenarios are far beyond the scale that humanity can realistically arrest. The only real mechanism with which to play with is the output of greenhouse gases from human activities. By reigning in emissions, there is a possibility that humanity still has time to avoid triggering these tipping points. Only time will tell. | 266 | 50 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216979",
"author": "LH",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T15:12:02",
"content": "Yaaaawn",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6217065",
"author": "BigEye in the Sky",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T17:41:28",
"content": ... | 1,760,373,598.457231 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/an-ev-motor-controller-home-build/ | An EV Motor Controller Home Build | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"igbt",
"motor controller",
"VFD controller"
] | Many of us will have experimented with brushless motors, and some of us will have built our own controllers rather than using an off-the-shelf part. Doing so is a good way to understand their operation, and thus to design better brushless motor powered projects. Few of us will have gone as far as [etischer] though,
and embarked upon building our own controller for a 300V 90kW traction motor
.
The tricky part of a high power brushless motor controller lies not in the drive but in the high-power switching arrangements. He’s using a bank of IGBTs, and to drive them he’s using a smaller industrial variable frequency drive controller with its own output transistors removed. He takes us through some of the development of the system, including showing him blowing up a set of IGBTs through having too much inductance between transistors and reservoir capacitor, and then to his final design.
This is part of a project VW first converted ten years ago, and as part of a series of videos
he’s produced one going through the whole project
. It’s a fascinating breakdown of the parts required for an EV conversion, and the teething troubles he’s encountered along the way.
Thanks [jafinch78] for the tip. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216943",
"author": "Sowlaki",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T12:24:51",
"content": "Imagine blowing up one of those IGBT’s during testing. Must be a heartbreaking experience figuring they cost a couple of $100. Still a really fun and knowledgeable project if you can spare the cash.",
... | 1,760,373,597.989121 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/05/serious-repair-work-on-the-amiga-600/ | Serious Repair Work On The Amiga 600 | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"Amiga 600",
"repair"
] | The Amiga will be forever loved for bringing serious multimedia capabilities to the home computer market. However, these machines are now showing their age, and keeping them running can take a bit of work. [Drygol] isn’t one to shy away from the task, however,
and set about repairing a few Amiga 600s that came his way.
First up on the docket is replacing the many electrolytic capacitors that tend to leak over the years. They can cause corrosion, destroying traces and other components, as well as failing themselves. [Drygol] is an old hand at this now, whipping out the hot air station and some copper shielding to protect delicate connectors from melting. A simple recap was enough to get one machine up and running, but the other was more recalcitrant. When swapping a dud CPU out, a pad was destroyed on the PCB. This necessitated some careful tracing, followed by a drill hole through the PCB to allow a bodge wire to run the signal from the other side of the board.
There’s also plenty of upgrades to be done;
S-Video
outputs instead of the crummy old RF modulator, and
special interrupt switches
that help when cracking games and doing assembly programming. Thanks to a rich aftermarket and vivid community, researching and performing mods is easy thanks to writeups and parts available online.
It’s a great example of the basic techniques one must master to keep old hardware on the boil. Learn to recap, refit, and hunt for problems, and you’ll be well on your way to maintaining your retro fleet for years to come. We’ve seen [Drygol]’s work before too –
this vampiric A500 is a particular treat! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216920",
"author": "Alex Rossie",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T09:40:55",
"content": "That interrupt 7 link is unreasonably sexy for a retro hardware modification intended for programmers!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6217216",
... | 1,760,373,598.106844 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/writing-dance-bangers-like-its-1990-again/ | Writing Dance Bangers Like It’s 1990 Again | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"amiga",
"Amiga 500",
"parallel",
"parallel port",
"sampler"
] | Dance and house music exploded in a big way at the end of the 1980s. Typically the product of well-equipped studios with samplers and mixers worth thousands of dollars, it was difficult for the home gamer to get involved. That was, until the advent of the glorious Amiga,
as [cTrix] ably demonstrates.
Sampling on your Amiga often meant sneaking off with the family hi-fi.
The video explains the history of both the music and the hardware, and highlights just why the Amiga was so special. Packing stereo audio and a four-channel sound chip, it had the grunt to pump out the tunes. All it was lacking was an audio input – which is where third-party hardware stepped in. Parallel-port analog-to-digital converters hit the market in a big way, letting users sample audio on their home computer without breaking the bank.
[cTrix] then proceeds to demonstrate how one would go about producing a dance track on an Amiga way back in 1990. A home stereo is used to play records, hooked up to a Stereo Master parallel port sampler. With a bunch of drum, piano, and synth samples recorded and saved on disk, a tracker is then used to assemble the track. It’s then compared with other music from the era as a great example of how things used to be done.
Overall, the Amiga will long have a legacy as the machine that brought real multimedia capabilities to the home computer. It’s one of our favourites,
though keeping them going can be tough sometimes.
Video after the break. | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216888",
"author": "Luke",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T06:31:26",
"content": ">”real multimedia capabilities”Almost. The Amiga or the trackers couldn’t actually produce very high quality for music production because of the limitations of the hardware and memory for sample size/resolut... | 1,760,373,598.56255 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/ham-antennas-from-mit/ | Ham Antennas From MIT | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"antennas",
"mit"
] | Dealing with an antenna is one of those topics we never feel like we know enough about. MIT had a live stream of [Dr. Kiersten Kerby-Patel]
discussing antennas in a talk
, sponsored by the ham radio club on campus. You can see the recording below.
The main assertion of the presentation is that everything is a dipole unless it is a loop. Although the professor probably deals with antennas at an extremely high theoretical level, she did a great job of keeping it aimed at ham radio operators.
The talk is about an hour long, so it isn’t optimized for the YouTube generation. There’s some introductory material that looks as though it would have been in one of our old physics classes. However, the talk gets more practical towards the end.
There’s the obligatory mention of Yagis and loops. There’s even a Smith chart. If you don’t know what the Chu limit is, you should definitely be watching this video. The end of the talk covers some very small antennas using active devices or even moving parts.
If you want more discussions on the why behind antennas, we really
liked this video
. This
two-parter is worth your time
, too. | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216862",
"author": "Dion",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T04:11:24",
"content": "Wish I could pull off pants like that :p",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6216956",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05... | 1,760,373,598.16952 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/solving-the-mysteries-of-grounding-while-improving-a-power-supply/ | Solving The Mysteries Of Grounding While Improving A Power Supply | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"capacitance",
"electricity",
"filter",
"gremlin",
"Ground Loop",
"grounding",
"inductance",
"noise",
"oscilloscope",
"power supply"
] | Grounding problems and unwanted noise in electrical systems can often lead to insanity. It can seem like there’s no method to the madness when an electrical “gremlin” caused by one of these things pops its head out. When looking more closely, however, these issues have a way of becoming more obvious.
In a recent video
, [Fesz Electronics] shows us how to investigate some of these problems by looking at a small desktop power supply, modelling it in LTSpice, and reducing the noise on the power supply’s output.
While everything in this setup is properly grounded, including the power supply and oscilloscope, the way the grounding systems interact can contribute to the high amount of noise. This was discovered by isolating the power supply from earth ground using electrical tape (not recommended as a long-term solution) and seeing that the noise was reduced. However, the ripple increased substantially, so a more permanent fix was needed. For that, the power supply was modelled in LTSpice. This is where a key discovery was made: since all the parts of the power supply aren’t ideal, noise can be introduced from the actual real-life electrical behavior of some of the parts. In this case, it was non-ideal capacitance in the transformer.
According to the model, this power supply could be improved by adding a larger capacitor across the output leads, and also by increasing their inductance. A large capacitor was soldered in the power supply and an iron ferrule was added, which decreased the noise level from 100 mV to around 20. Still not perfect, but a much needed improvement to the simple power supply. If, on the other hand, you want to make sure you eliminate that transformer’s capacitance completely, you can always
go with a transformerless power supply
. That carries other risks, though. | 22 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216840",
"author": "Simon",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T01:53:25",
"content": "Play much golf?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6216841",
"author": "cyna",
"timestamp": "2020-02-05T01:57:16",
"content": "Learn to use a ... | 1,760,373,598.513561 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/hoverboard-grows-up-becomes-magnetic-drill-press/ | Hoverboard Grows Up, Becomes Magnetic Drill Press | Kristina Panos | [
"green hacks",
"Misc Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"brushless motor",
"esc",
"hoverboard",
"hoverboard motor",
"mag drill",
"magnetic drill press"
] | If you need to drill metal in tight places, the magnetic drill press, or mag drill is your BFF. The idea here is that a drill press with an electromagnetic base can go anywhere, and even drill horizontally if need be. If you don’t need to use one often, but want one anyway,
why not build one out of e-waste?
[DIY KING 00] built this mag drill starting with the motor from a hoverboard. While these three-phase brushless motors have a lot of torque to offer reuse projects like this, they’re not designed to be particularly fast.
He was able to make it about three times faster by cutting the windings apart and reconnecting them in parallel instead of series. He designed a simple PCB to neatly tie all the connections back together and added an electronic speed control (ESC) from an R/C car.
Reluctant to give up the crown, he made his own three-coil electromagnetic base, using a drill to wind magnet wire around temporary chuck-able cores. The coils are then potted in epoxy to keep out dust and drilling debris. Everything runs from two large LiPo batteries, and he can get about 15 minutes of high-torque drilling done before they’re dead. Can you feel the electromagnet pulling you past the break to check out the build and demo video?
Depending on what you’re doing, you might get away with
a magnetic vise
instead. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216796",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T22:30:08",
"content": "I have a real Mag drill. But I once used it as an expedient “Magnabend” to make a servo drive case.https://photos.app.goo.gl/DotP2aeEQXJJ9j379",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,598.912304 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/china-x86-chips-hitting-the-market/ | China X86 Chips Hitting The Market | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks",
"News"
] | [
"centaur",
"china",
"via",
"x86",
"zhaoxin"
] | Last year, fabless chip maker Zhaoxin announced they were readying a multicore x86-compatible CPU. According to
media reports
, the chips are showing up on Chinese marketplaces like Taobao shipping around March.
The company is a joint venture between the Shanghai Municipal Government and VIA Technologies, a familiar name in the PC business. It makes even more sense if you remember that VIA bought Centaur who had built simple x86 chips and used the simplicity to add more cache that more complex Intel and AMD chips. These fell out of the hobby market, but they’ve still been pushing forward providing simple designs that are inexpensive and consume low power.
Unlike some older Centaur chips, the new Zhaoxin chip is superscalar and capable of out of order execution. It also supports modern instruction sets like SSE4.2 and AVX. With eight cores, the CPU comes in a few speed grades.
Our Chinese isn’t good enough to watch the video below, but the closed caption is in English and makes sense, so we are assuming it is accurate.
According to the video, the chip is directly mounted on a motherboard and the 16 nm, 2.7 GHz processor consumes 70 W of power and does not have an L3 cache, but does have an 8 MB secondary cache. The CPU integrates the traditional north and south bridge chips.
According to the video, the company is targeting the do it yourself market and the motherboard and chip specs will be a little different in the production model. China is pushing hard to develop independence from foreign technology. This seems like a major step. | 99 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216731",
"author": "geocrasher",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T19:42:35",
"content": "I don’t know about the product, but I was kinda mesmerized by the language and its associated accent. It didn’t sound like Mandarin to me, but what do I know. Not much about the nuances of Mandarin :p"... | 1,760,373,598.824887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/florence-nightingale-the-lady-with-the-data/ | Florence Nightingale: The Lady With The Data | Kristina Panos | [
"Biography",
"Medical Hacks",
"Original Art"
] | [
"big data",
"Crimean War",
"Florence Nightingale",
"Istanbul was Constantinople",
"Nightingale rose diagram",
"polar area diagram",
"sanitation",
"statistics"
] | When you think of Florence Nightingale, you probably imagine a nurse with a lamp, comforting soldiers. Indeed, Florence is considered the mother of modern nursing. But she also made serious contributions in statistical data analysis, and used the diagram named after her, the Nightingale rose diagram, to convince the British Parliament to enact sanitation reforms that saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives.
During the Crimean war, Florence worked around the clock as head nurse in an overcrowded field hospital. But she also found time to create graphs to illustrate the terrible conditions of that field hospital to members of British Parliament. The sanitation reforms she led greatly improved the life of the soldiers in battle, and widespread adoption of her hygienic practices vastly reduced mortality rates of humanity in general.
Young Florence, unsure of her place in the world. Public domain via
Wikipedia
A Call from God
Florence Nightingale was born into a wealthy London family in 1820. Her father believed that women should be educated, and taught her several subjects himself. She was particularly good at math, but didn’t want to pursue a mathematical career. In fact, she didn’t know what she wanted to do, only that she didn’t want to live like a house cat in high society. Florence was miserable at home, and among her many writings she mentions praying for death. Instead of mercy, she got a calling to help the sick and wounded.
When Florence announced her intent to become a nurse, her family was completely devastated. Back then, hospitals were grim, filthy places, and most nurses were either widows, ex-servants, or women of bad character who couldn’t find other work. Nursing was not the sort of thing that rich, educated girls did with their lives.
Florence defied her family and left home to study nursing in Germany. She came back to London and started training nurses in a small hospital, where she was quickly promoted to superintendent. By this time her father had softened on the idea, and was secretly sending Florence a healthy allowance to help support her.
Florence at Scutari. Image via
National Army Museum
Triage in Turkey
Soon after the promotion, Britain and France declared war on Russia, and the Crimean war began. Reports of high mortality rates due to filthy field hospitals drove Florence into action.
She happened to be friends with Britain’s war secretary, and got herself and a team of three dozen volunteer nurses deployed to the Turkish base in Scutari where the British army was sending wounded soldiers. They set sail across the Black Sea from base camp in Balaclava, Ukraine, armed with a supply of medicines Florence bought with her own money.
Florence and her nurses found the conditions at this makeshift field hospital unspeakably bad. There were vermin crawling around everywhere, mass infections, and paltry supplies of even the simplest of medicines. More soldiers were dying from typhoid, cholera, and dysentery than from battle wounds. It was time to force the administration into action.
The Statistician of Scutari
At the time, the idea of representing information graphically was fairly new. Florence developed what’s now known as the polar area diagram or Nightingale rose diagram to show Parliament the various ways in which soldiers were dying, and to impress upon them that so many deaths were from preventable diseases. It’s essentially a
pie chart
, which was itself a fairly new concept, but adds a third dimension of time.
Red shows deaths from battle wounds, black from other causes, and blue-gray from preventable diseases. Image via
Wikipedia
Her work, and her argumentation, was convincing. Through a series of letters, Florence explained that epidemics could be controlled with better nutrition, ventilation, and sanitation. The British government commissioned a pre-fab hospital that was built in England and shipped to Turkey. In the meantime, she enlisted the least infirm patients to help scrub the place from top to bottom, and set up a special kitchen to make meals for cholera and dysentery patients. Her efforts paid off greatly, and the mortality rate plummeted.
Working From Home
Florence returned from the war to a hero’s welcome, but she always shied away from attention and never gave any speeches. She turned down invitations left and right until one came in from Queen Victoria. Florence spent an entire afternoon telling the Queen and the prince consort all about the problems with Britain’s military hospitals. They were quite impressed, and when Florence asked for administrative attention on the British army in India, she got it.
Florence contracted
brucellosis
at Scutari and was mostly bedridden for the rest of her life. She never stopped working, and was frequently consulted about the design and maintenance of field hospitals until her death in 1910.
She fully rejected the life of leisure demonstrated by the women of her age, and rather than raising a family, she used her position to guide humanity into a better future. Florence transformed nursing into a skilled profession for women of good character and changed public opinion along the way. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216742",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T20:18:40",
"content": "Something good that came out of Crimea, proper nursing practice. Something bad that come out of the Crimean war, cigarettes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comm... | 1,760,373,598.700273 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/nifty-soundbender-built-from-ebay-modules/ | Nifty Soundbender Built From EBay Modules | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"groovebox",
"synth"
] | Custom audio greeting cards are a trifling gimmick, and a hefty investment compared to their paper-based colleagues. However, the technology inside can be twisted and hacked towards more interesting ends,
as [lonesoulsurfer] demonstrates with his sound-bending build.
Rather then go to the trouble and expense of gutting a greeting card, [lonesoulsurfer] simply purchases the sound recording module off eBay which often turns out cheaper anyway. It’s hacked with a couple extra buttons and a speed control, and then wired up with a reverb module that itself gets tweaked to add an echo mode. It’s all bundled up with a speaker and microphone and installed in a case that formerly held an ignition tuning analyzer from the 1970s.
The final result is quite handsome, with a wooden panel holding the speaker and a smattering of knobs, buttons, and switches to play with. After recording an audio sample, it’s possible to speed it up, slow it down, and add echo and reverb until you’re left with something unrecognizable and weird. We’ve actually seen similar projects before,
like this author’s first ever article for these hallowed pages
. Video after the break. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216702",
"author": "kaaaaaaaaaang",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T17:27:35",
"content": "Do you remember that episode of “Friends” when Ross found his old musical keyboard?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6216707",
"author... | 1,760,373,598.861078 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/how-to-hack-a-portable-bluetooth-speaker-by-skipping-the-bluetooth/ | How To Hack A Portable Bluetooth Speaker By Skipping The Bluetooth | Roger Cheng | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Featured",
"how-to",
"Portable Audio Hacks",
"Skills",
"Slider"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"audio amplifier",
"audio input",
"bluetooth speaker",
"loudspeaker",
"Loudspeaker enclosure",
"Mozzi",
"portable speaker",
"project enclosure",
"step-up",
"voltage regulator"
] | Portable Bluetooth speakers have joined the club of ubiquitous personal electronics. What was once an expensive luxury is now widely accessible thanks to a prolific landscape of manufacturers mass producing speakers to fit every taste and budget. Some have even become branded promotional giveaway items. As a consequence, nowadays it’s not unusual to have a small collection of them, a fertile field for hacking.
But many surplus speakers are put on a shelf for “do something with it later” only to collect dust. Our main obstacle is a side effect of market diversity: with so many different speakers, a hack posted for one speaker wouldn’t apply to another. Some speakers are amenable to custom firmware, but only a small minority have attracted a software development community. It doesn’t help that most Bluetooth audio modules are opaque, their development toolchains difficult to obtain.
So what if we just take advantage of the best parts of these speakers: great audio fidelity, portability, and the polished look of a consumer good, to serves as the host for our own audio-based hacks. Let’s throw the Bluetooth overboard but embrace all those other things. Now hacking these boxes just requires a change of mindset and a little detective work. I’ll show you how to drop an Arduino into a cheap speaker as the blueprint for your own audio adventures.
Directing the Hacker Mindset at Myriad Bluetooth Speakers
There’s way too many different speakers out there for one hack to rule them all. But by changing our Bluetooth speaker mindset from “it’s a reprogrammable computer” to “it’s an integrated collection of useful electronic components”, we turn market diversity into our ally.
Look at this from the perspective of Bluetooth speaker manufacturers: they want their Bluetooth speaker to stand out from competitors, and the most obvious way is in their selection of loudspeaker drivers. Surprising the customer with big sound from a little box is key for success, so each product can offer a unique combination for driving the audio, all housed inside an eye-catching enclosure that lets consumers tell one portable Bluetooth speaker from another.
Tailoring for loudspeaker selection has cascading effects through the rest of the system. For best sound, they will need matching audio amplifier modules, which will have their own power requirements, which dictates battery performance, and so on. Catering to these desires, components are excluded from the tightly integrated mystery black boxes. Fortunately for hardware hackers, such an architecture also makes components easy to reuse:
A rechargeable battery.
Ability to charge that battery from USB.
A low-power standby mode to monitor press of the power button.
Protecting battery from over-discharge.
A voltage regulator supplying battery power to the device.
An audio line-in jack.
Volume up/down control.
Amplifier and driver.
All of these are useful for projects, already neatly packaged in a mass-produced enclosure.
Putting Theory Into Practice With An Example
Now that we have a general background, let’s apply this concept to a specific example. But before we begin, an obligatory note in case it is not obvious to any beginners reading this: This activity
very definitely
voids the warranty (do it, it’s worth it!), and modern portable electronics use
lithium chemistry batteries
that can be dangerous if mistreated.
Portable Bluetooth speaker with rubber surround.
Peel back rubber surround.
Pry off speaker grille.
Remove 5 screws holding halves together.
Loosened halves allow rubber surround to be removed.
Open two halves of enclosure.
Remove main PCB for further investigation.
Main PCB Closeup
The Bluetooth speaker used in this example is a “
Rugged Portable Bluetooth Speaker
” sold by North American electronics retailer Best Buy under one of their house brands. A search of
its FCC ID
pointed to
Lightcomm Technology Co.
as the manufacturer. The “rugged” claim starts with a layer of soft rubber wrapped around its exterior. That plus reinforcements inside the case allows the speaker to absorb some level of abuse. I wanted to preserve this shock absorbing exterior and, thankfully, it was easy to open non-destructively. Even more care would be needed if it was a waterproof speaker (this one wasn’t) and moisture barriers need to be preserved. Alternatively, if the plan is to transfer the internals to another enclosure, the condition of the original box would not matter.
Once the circuit board has been extracted, the Bluetooth interface module should immediately stand out as the most sophisticated component sitting close to an antenna. A
search for ATS2823
confirmed it is a module designed and sold for integration into Bluetooth audio products. Its MIPS M4K core and associated flash storage could be a promising start for firmware hacking, but the point of this example is to demonstrate how to hack a speaker utilizing existing firmware. So we will leave the module as-is.
Solder to the External Audio Input
The easiest way to pipe audio into this system is to pretend to be an external audio source. We want the system to
believe
we are connected via an audio cable plugged into the line-in jack, but for compactness we’d prefer to do this
without
using an actual cord. This approach is easy, nondestructive, and preserves the existing volume control mechanism. There are a lot of different ways to implement an audio jack, so some exploration with a multimeter will be required. We need to find the standardized contacts for: audio input left channel, right channel, and ground. (Wikipedia reference: “
Phone connector (audio)
“)
It’ll be a little tricker to decipher the plug detection scheme, as it is not standardized. In this particular example, there is a fourth pin that floats in the absence of an audio plug. When an audio plug is present, the pin is grounded. Soldering a wire to always ground that detection pin will keep this speaker constantly in “playing external audio” mode.
Or Connect To Amplifier Directly
An alternative approach is to bypass existing input and volume control, sending audio directly to the amplifier chip. To find this chip, we start with the voice coil wires and backtrack. It’ll likely be the largest component near those voice coil wires. Once the amplifier chip is found, consult the datasheet to find the input pins to cut free from the circuit and rewire for audio input that bypasses existing control.
But even if we wish to maintain existing volume control, it is still useful to locate the audio amplifier chip. It is the most power-hungry component on the circuit board, and peak power requirements for the system are dictated by the amount of power this amplifier will draw when playing loudly. Therefore it is half the puzzle of calculating our available power. This particular Bluetooth device uses a
Mixinno MIX2052
chip sitting adjacent to the voice coil wire connector, with a peak power of 6 watts.
Tap Into Power Supply
The other half of the puzzle is the voltage regulator delivering power to the amplifier chip. Similar to how we look for our amplifier near our voice coil wires, we can look for our regulator sitting near inductors, capacitors, and diodes. Once the power module is found, read its data sheet to determine peak power output.
The power budget for our hack would be constrained by power figures for those two components. Most microcontrollers consume maximum power during bootup. So as long as the audio source stays quiet during this time, we would have a little extra power to support boot. Somewhere between the regulator and the amplifier is also the best place to tap power. It allows us to piggyback on the existing power management circuit that shuts down the amplifier when entering low power mode, cutting power to our hack at the same time.
In the case of this board, there was one prominent coil and a
Techcode TD8208
step-up regulator was found next to it. Configured to deliver 5 volts, this regulator can deliver 1A and tolerate brief spikes not to exceed 2A. This wouldn’t be enough to feed a Raspberry Pi 4, but plenty for an Arduino Nano.
Repurpose Control Button
So far functionality for three of the four buttons on this speaker has been preserved: power, volume up, and volume down. The fourth button initiates Bluetooth pairing, or to pick up a phone call. We’re cutting BT out of the equation so this is no longer useful and can be repurposed.
On this speaker, SW4 is normally open and pulls to ground when pressed, making it trivial to reuse. I cut the trace leading to the Bluetooth interface module and soldered a wire so the switch now pulls an Arduino pin to ground when pressed.
Tuck Everything Back In
A few pieces of internal plastic reinforcements for ruggedness were cut away to create enough volume for an Arduino Nano inside this enclosure. It is no longer quite as rugged, but now it is far more interesting as a platform for sound hacks. To conclude this proof of concept, the Arduino Nano is using the
Mozzi audio library
to play the classic
Wilhelm scream
whenever our repurposed button is pressed.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Wilhelm-720p.mp4
Build Your Own Bleepy Bloopy Buzzy Box
Bluetooth used to be the novelty. With plenty of hacks
adding Bluetooth
to existing audio equipment,
playing Bluetooth audio
out of one, or
building our own
Bluetooth speakers from scratch. But now Bluetooth speakers are ubiquitous, we’re approaching the point where Bluetooth is not necessarily the center of attention. Skipping the Bluetooth in a portable Bluetooth speaker gives us a new platform for our noise maker hacks. Something small, fun, and easy to bring to our next hacker show-and-tell meetup! | 54 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216684",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T16:08:09",
"content": "But since bluetooth exsts, why go with speakers rather than headphones? Headphones always had some advantage, I remember articles promoting them as a way to low cost hifi. And without the wires,... | 1,760,373,599.009641 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/slice-through-your-problems-with-a-shukran/ | Slice Through Your Problems With A Shukran | Kerry Scharfglass | [
"computer hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"breakout",
"expander",
"FT232",
"FT232H",
"ftdi",
"gpio",
"i2c",
"io expander",
"jtag",
"spi",
"tool",
"uart"
] | We’d wager most hackers are familiar with FTDI as the manufacturer of the gold standard USB-UART interfaces. Before parts like the ultra cheap CH340 and CP2102 became common, if you needed to turn a USB cable into a TTL UART device, “an FTDI” (probably an FT232RL) was the way to make that happen. But some of the parts in the FT232* family are capable of much more. Wanting to get at more than a UART, [linker3000] designed
the Shukran
to unlock the full potential of the FT232H.
The
FT232H
is interesting because it’s an exceptionally general purpose interface device. Depending on configuration it can turn USB into UART, JTAG, SPI, I2C, and GPIO. Want to prototype the driver for a new sensor? Why bother flashing your Teensy when you can drive it directly from the development machine with an FT232H and the appropriate libraries?
The Shukran is actually a breakout for the “CJMCU FT232H” module available from many fine internet retailers. This board is a breakout that exposes a USB-A connecter on one side and standard 0.1″ headers on the other, with a QFN FT232H and all the passives in the middle. But bare 0.1″ headers (in a square!) require either further breadboarding or a nest of jumper wires to be useful. Enter the Shukran. In this arrangement, the CJMCU board is cheap and handles the SMT components, and the Shukran is easy to assemble and makes it simple to use.
The Shukran gives you LEDs, buttons and switches, and a bunch of pull up resistors (for instance, for I2C) on nicely grouped and labeled headers. But most importantly it provides a fused power supply. Ever killed the USB controller in your computer because you forgot to inline a sacrificial USB hub? This fuse should take care of that risk. If you’re interested in building one of these handy tools, sources and detailed BOM as well as usage instructions are available in the GitHub repo linked at the top. | 38 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216606",
"author": "yetihehe",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T12:22:17",
"content": "If you just need cheap uart to usb, I suggest using bluepill with pill-serial firmware (https://satoshinm.github.io/blog/171223_stm32serial_triple_usb-to-serial_adapter_using_stm32_blue_pill.html). It gi... | 1,760,373,599.085089 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/04/old-rotary-phone-gets-called-into-action/ | Old Rotary Phone Gets Called Into Action | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"GSM module",
"pulse dialing",
"rotary phone",
"text to speech"
] | The more glass we punch with our fingertips, the more we miss fun physical interfaces like the rotary phone. Sure, they took forever to dial, and you did not want to be one of those kids stuck with one during the transition to DTMF, especially if you were trying to be the 9th caller to a radio station, but the solidly electromechanical experience of it all was just cool, okay? The sound and the heft made them seem so adult.
[Tal O] gets it.
He’s all but finished bringing this old girl into the 21st century without giving anything away on her surface
. Inside are some things you’d expect, like a SIM800 GSM module for the telephony part, and an ESP32 to count the pulses from the dialer and communicate between it and the GSM module. But it also has a few things we haven’t seen before. The entire journey is outlined in a five-part video series, and we’ve got part one dialed in for you after the break.
Although [Tal] got the ringer working to prove it could be done, he didn’t want to have a separate 12V circuit just to run the bells. Also, the bells and their electromagnets take up a lot of space, so he compromised with an mp3 of a rotary ringer. [Tal] also wanted a way to have dialed-number feedback without cutting up the phone to add a screen, so he found a text-to-speech library and made the phone speak each number aloud as soon as it’s dialed. It uses the same internal speaker as the ringer, but we think it would be neat if the feedback came through the handset speaker.
If [Tal] is looking for another modern convenience to add to this phone, how about
speed dial
? | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216574",
"author": "trandi",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T09:28:15",
"content": "rotary phones seem to be making a comebackhttps://trandi.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/rotary-dial-phone-revival-4-final/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,373,599.137002 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/tiptoe-through-the-tulip-mania/ | Tiptoe Through The Tulip Mania | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"electromechanical",
"ir sensor",
"raspberry pi",
"tulipomania",
"tulips"
] | Spring is headed back toward the northern hemisphere, and we’ll soon see brilliant tulips waking up from their dirt naps to dot the thawing landscape with vibrant hues. These harbingers of spring are closely associated with the Netherlands, but they are actually native to Turkey and central Asia, and weren’t brought to Europe until the 1500s. Tulips became so immensely popular that the market reached what is considered the first speculative financial fever pitch, and crashed hard in 1637.
This electromechanical parlor game
arranges the tulips with another artifact of the Dutch Golden Age — hand-painted Delft tiles designed to line fireplaces. [BuiltByBlatt] made all 114 of his on a CNC with a paint pen. To play the game, you roll a small ball toward a row of holes with different point values. Each hole has a break beam detector so the Raspberry Pi knows what you scored.
There’s also a rotating bonus hole that changes based on how many balls are left. As your score goes up, Titus the Tulip works his way to the right. It seems like it’d be fairly easy to hit the 5-point hole in the middle, but the tiles give it a horizontal Pachinko feel that makes it move less predictably. Slip into your clogs and check it out after the break.
We love the heavy clacks of electromechanical contraptions, especially old pinball machines.
You can even tear ’em down and build them into other games
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z97mDA536MA
Via
r/raspberry_pi | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216558",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T06:54:10",
"content": "Phew I thought I was going to hear Tiny Tim screeching away..,,",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6216638",
"author": "Ren",
"timesta... | 1,760,373,599.175938 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/how-many-smartphones-does-it-take-to-make-a-traffic-jam/ | How Many Smartphones Does It Take To Make A Traffic Jam? | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"cellphone",
"google maps",
"maps"
] | Online mapping services pack in a lot of functionality that their paper-based forebearers could simply never imagine. Adding in metadata for local landmarks, businesses and respective reviews, and even live traffic data, they have the capability to deliver more information than ever before – and also correspondingly, shape human behaviour.
[Simon Weckert] decided to explore this concept with a cheeky little hack.
Pictured: All it takes to create a traffic jam on Google Maps!
The hack targets the manner in which Google collects live traffic data for display on Google Maps. When users load the app, Google takes location data from individual phones, tracking them as they travel along roadways. Large numbers of users travelling slowly down a road indicate there’s heavy traffic, and thus Google will display corresponding warnings on their maps and redirect users to take alternative paths.
To pull off the hack, [Simon] placed 99 smartphones in a handy-cart, tugging them behind him as he walked slowly down a series of streets.
In the video, this is overlaid with Google’s map data captured at the time
. The app updates the maps with orange and red lines down the roads which [Simon] travelled with his 99 pretend drivers, indicating a traffic jam.
We’d love to know whether [Simon] ran 99 individual SIM cards with data access, or if the hack was perpetrated with the use of a WiFi hotspot for cheaper internet access. Reddit comments note that
Google will likely swiftly work on methods
to prevent such tomfoolery in future. It’s simple to see that 99 individual users reporting the exact same location and speed at the same time would be trivial to filter out from traffic monitoring in future.
It’s both a commentary on the power we give these apps in our lives, as well as a great demonstration of how easily such systems can be trifled with. We first reported on Google’s traffic monitoring back in 2009,
when it was a technology in its infancy.
Video after the break. | 42 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216530",
"author": "Steve Spivey",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T03:34:37",
"content": "Simple way to avoid Google from detecting tomfoolery, 99 wagons about 10 apart.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6216531",
"author": "S... | 1,760,373,599.802564 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/unlocking-hidden-potential-in-ivybridge-thinkpads/ | Unlocking Hidden Potential In IvyBridge ThinkPads | Bryan Cockfield | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"1vyrain",
"bios",
"intel",
"ivybridge",
"managment engine",
"thinkpad",
"tool",
"upgrade"
] | Upgrading the BIOS in older computers is a great way to get a few more years of life out of old hardware or improve its performance. ThinkPads are a popular choice around these parts, but often flashing new firmware involves directly programming the chips themselves. Luckily, there’s
a new flashing tool for some older Thinkpads that is much simpler
.
The ThinkPads involved are the xx30 models with IvyBridge processors built around 2012, and a tool called 1vyrain now allows unlocking the bios without disassembling your computer. This means that there’s support for custom BIOS images such as coreboot, and in certain computers this also allows for overclocking, replacing WLAN hardware, and a number of other customizations. It will also allow you to disable the Intel management engine,
which is not something we tire of talking about
.
If you have one of these older computers floating around, some new RAM, an SSD, and this update will get you well on your way to a computer that feels brand new at virtually no cost, and the upgrades to the BIOS that you can easily make now only add to that.
ThinkPads are a popular choice
, especially for their hardware, but you do need to
make sure that the software on them is trustworthy too
.
Header image: Ashley Pomeroy [
CC BY-SA 4.0]. | 37 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216512",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T01:42:26",
"content": "Which models and where is tool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6216591",
"author": "Jack",
"timestamp": "2020-02-04T11:23:47",
... | 1,760,373,599.444231 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/lathe-and-3d-printer-help-repair-buried-buttons/ | Lathe And 3D Printer Help Repair Buried Buttons | Tom Nardi | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"epoxy",
"lathe",
"marine",
"repair",
"sealed",
"water proof"
] | Usually corroded buttons on a piece of electronic equipment wouldn’t be that big a deal to repair, but as [Haris Andrianakis] recently found out,
things can get a little tricky when they are sealed inside a device
meant to operate in a marine environment. Figuring out how to get into the case to clean the buttons up is only half the battle, when you’re done you still need to close it back well enough that the elements can’t get in.
The device in question is a tachometer intended for a Yamaha outboard motor, and the buttons are sealed between the guage’s face and the compartment in the rear that holds the electronics. Pulling the guts out of the back was no problem, but that didn’t get [Haris] any closer to the defective buttons. In light of the cylindrical design of the gauge, he decided to liberate the front panel from the rest of the unit with his lathe.
Removing the face was a delicate operation, to put it mildly. The first challenge was getting the device mounted securely in the chuck, but then the cutting had to be done very carefully so as not to damage the housing. Once he cut through the side far enough to get the face off, the actual repair of the buttons was fairly straightforward. But how to get it back together?
After a few missteps, [Haris] finally found a solution that have him the results he was looking for. He 3D printed a ring that fit the front of the gauge tightly, hot glued it into place, and used it as a mould to pour in black epoxy resin. Once the epoxy had cured, the mould was cut off and the gauge went back on the lathe so he could trim away the excess. He had to do some hand sanding and filing to smooth out the bezel, but overall the end result looks very close to factory.
We get it, there’s
a lot to consider when you add a lathe to your workshop
. But hacks like these are wonderful reminders of how many tricks these versatile machines are really capable of. | 24 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216469",
"author": "dj",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T22:25:40",
"content": "don’t you have a single tool working properly ?axially unbalanced lathe, grinder, polisher",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6216474",
"author": "... | 1,760,373,599.643952 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/the-cult-of-really-low-power-circuits-scrounging-sipping-and-seeing-power/ | The Cult Of Really Low-Power Circuits: Scrounging, Sipping, And Seeing Power | Ted Yapo | [
"cons"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"low power",
"mppt",
"solar"
] | If you’ve ever tried to make a really low-power circuit — especially one that runs on harvested power — you have probably fallen into at least a few of the many traps that await the unwary in this particular realm of electronic design. Well, Dave Young has been there, seen the traps, and lived to tell about it. In these territories, even “simple” systems can exhibit very complex, and sometimes downright confusing behavior when all possible operating conditions are considered. In his 2019 Hackaday Superconference talk:
Scrounging, Sipping, and Seeing Power — Techniques For Planning, Implementing, And Verifying Off-Grid Power Systems
, Dave discusses a number of these issues, how they interplay with low-power designs, and tricks he’s collected over the years to design and, more importantly, test these deceptively simple systems.
Dave is an electrical engineer and his company, Young Circuit Designs, has worked in the test and measurement, energy, and low-power consumer industries. We were lucky to have him share some of his 15 years of experience on the Supercon stage this past November, specifically discussing devices powered from harvested energy, be it wave energy (think oceans not RF), thermal energy, or solar. The first lesson is that in these systems, architecture is key. Digging deeper, Dave considers three aspects of the architecture, as mentioned in the talk title: scrounging, sipping, and seeing power.
Scrounging Power
Dave cautions about overly optimistic estimates of available power. For example, a 6W-rated solar panel produces an average 4.11 watt-hours per day when averaged over the entire year at his location in Rochester, NY. This is, of course, much less than you might expect. Such a discrepancy isn’t unique to solar systems, either. So much so that Dave cautions us not to overlook another possibility: eschew scrounging altogether and use primary batteries with enough capacity to run low-power systems for their design lifetime. For ultra-low-power systems, this is certainly a possibility, even in environments where “free” power is available, and may represent an easier and more reliable design alternative.
There are other issues with solar systems, too. If you’ve done solar design, you may have seen maximum power point tracking (MPPT), because solar cells yield a variable amount of power depending on the load. To extract the maximum power from the cells for a given illumination, you may have to adjust the voltage that the cells run at by changing the current drawn. There are integrated circuits designed exactly for this purpose, and for large systems, this kind of architecture is a no-brainer. However, Dave points out that these MPPT ICs can consume 5-25 mA themselves, which can easily negate their benefit for small systems. Sometimes a linear charge controller is simply more efficient because it consumes less power itself.
Sipping Power
Besides the power source itself, a design must consider what to do with the power. In the second section of his talk, Dave starts with the premise that energy harvesting systems are always in either one of two states: they have power to burn, or are just about to run out of it entirely. While you can control the amount of time your system spends in either state with proper design, you must carefully consider how your system will behave in each. This feast-or-famine existence means you need to create a power breakdown for each state, and not just a single overall budget. This implies a careful examination of all the conditions the system may find itself in. For example, solar systems will have different power available during various times of day and year; coupled with different levels of battery charge, this creates a number of states that must be examined, and leads to a number of possible failure points.
Seeing Power
In the final segment of his talk, Dave discusses seeing power: in other words, determining where in your system the power is going. Here again we have the benefit of some hard-learned lessons. Fist, he suggests verifying your power budget(s) at the line-item level. By turning off chips one at a time with firmware, you can verify that their actual power consumption matches the design goals. For those parts that can’t be disabled in firmware, he recommends simply removing them from the PCB as you go. The value in such an exhaustive test is that you won’t be fooled by a system that meets the overall power budget but for the wrong reasons: such a system is likely to perform incorrectly under some combination of conditions.
There are many more lessons in Dave’s video than we can cover in this brief discussion. Definitely check out the full video of Dave’s excellent talk, and if you want to follow along at home, you can find
the accompanying slides here
. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216417",
"author": "spiritplumber",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T19:43:13",
"content": "Video is private",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6216448",
"author": "MrSVCD",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T21:19:37",
"c... | 1,760,373,599.496959 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/linux-fu-the-linux-shuffle/ | Linux Fu: The Linux Shuffle | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"linux",
"prng",
"random",
"random number",
"random numbers",
"shuf",
"shuffle"
] | Computers are known to be precise and — usually — repeatable. That’s why it is so hard to get something that seems random out of them. Yet random things are great for games, encryption, and multimedia. Who wants the same order of a playlist or slide show every time?
It is very hard to get truly random numbers, but for a lot of cases, it isn’t that important. Even better, if you programming or using a scripting language, there are lots of things that you can use to get some degree of randomness that is sufficient for many purposes.
The Root of Random
In your device directory are two quasi-files you might not have noticed before. The
/dev/random
and
/dev/urandom
files will output as many random bytes as you might want to read. Why are there two? The kernel grabs noisy data from different places. For example, it might read crypto hardware or measure time intervals between disk accesses. These numbers are not easy to predict and can make a good source of difficult to guess numbers. However, for a certain number of random bits you need a certain amount of random noise. The
/dev/random
device file fills with these environmental random bits, and if it needs more random measurements to complete the request, it will block until it gets them. The
/dev/urandom
file, on the other hand, will provide an “unlimited” number of bytes; it works by periodically re-seeding a pseudo-random number generator with environmental randomness.
If you program in any normal language, it is easy to just open either of these files and read the number of bytes you want. In normal shell scripting, it is easy, too. For example:
head -c 3 /dev/random | od -t x1 -A none
This command will give you three hex bytes. If you prefer, you could change the
x1
to get decimal numbers or anything else you want.
Better Shell
Of course, the Shell knows you want to do this. Bash keeps
$RANDOM
updated and you can read from it if you prefer:
for i in {1..5}
do echo $RANDOM
done
This will give you five random numbers each time.
Better Still
This is easy, but we can still do better. After all, suppose you have a bunch of sayings in a file, one per line. Even with a random number, you’d need to skip the lines and worry about how many lines are in the file total. There’s a better way: the
shuf
command.
This command seems simple at first but is actually quite powerful. The bare command reads a file, or standard input, and permutes it based on a random number. There are options to feed it your own source of random numbers if you care.
Sometimes you don’t want all the items in the file. For example, picking a single quote from a file, you might just want the next random song. The
-n
option limits the output to the first line or lines. If you want to shuffle numbers, you can use the
-i
option. For example:
shuf -n 1 -i1-10
This command will give you a single random number between 1 and 10. Very easy!
Back to the picking a random quote from a file, that’s as easy as:
shuf -n1 input_file.txt
Combined with a list of files, this can pick random files easily, too:
ls *.mp3 | shuf -n 1
When to Choose Which
Note the
shuf
command is part of the GNU Core Utilities, so some machines won’t have it. In BSD, the
jot
command is somewhat similar. For a more portable script, it would probably be wise to check that
shuf
exists, maybe look for
jot
, and if you find neither, try to see if
$RANDOM
changes. You could process the raw number with
awk
. Absent that, you could check for
/dev/urandom
and
/dev/random,
which would also require some processing.
With these tools, you can write delightfully unpredictable scripts. (Of course, some of our scripts are less than delightfully unpredictable, too. But we can’t blame
/dev/urandom
for that.)
If you want to dig deep into
/dev/random
, check out Elliot’s writeup of the
Linux entropy collecting system
. | 35 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216394",
"author": "eternityforest",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T18:14:46",
"content": "Interestingly, unlike shuf, mp3 player style shuffle is not actually random. If it were, you would get repeated songs more than you’d expect.This is a really cool little one liner, but I’ve usually... | 1,760,373,599.58247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/keeping-ham-radio-relevant-hack-chat/ | Keeping Ham Radio Relevant Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"emcomm",
"emergency communications",
"ham",
"JS8Call",
"SOTA",
"The Hack Chat",
"wspr"
] | Join us on Wednesday, February 5 at noon Pacific for the
Keeping Ham Radio Relevant Hack Chat
with Josh Nass!
It may not seem like it, but amateur radio is fighting a two-front war for its continued existence. On the spectrum side, hams face the constant threat that the precious scraps of spectrum that are still allocated to their use will be reclaimed and sold off to the highest bidder as new communication technologies are developed. On the demographic side, amateur radio is aging, with fewer and fewer young people interested in doing the work needed to get licensed, with fewer still having the means to get on the air.
Amateur radio has a long, rich history, but gone are the days when hams can claim their hobby is sacrosanct because it provides communications in an emergency. Resting on that particular laurel will not win the hobby new adherents or help it hold onto its spectrum allocations, so Josh Nass (KI6NAZ) is helping change the conversation. Josh is an engineer and radio amateur from Southern California who runs
Ham Radio Crash Course
, a YouTube channel dedicated to getting people up to speed on ham radio. Josh’s weekly livestreams and his video reviews of ham radio products and projects show a different side of the World’s Greatest Hobby, one that’s more active (through events like “
Summits on the Air
”) and focused on digital modes that are perhaps more interesting and accessible to new hams.
Join us on the Hack Chat as we discuss how to make ham radio matter in today’s world of pervasive technology. We’ll talk about the challenges facing amateur radio, the fun that’s still to be had on the air even when the bands are dead like they are now (spoiler alert: they’re not really), and what we can all do to keep ham radio relevant.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 5 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have
a handy time zone converter
.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. | 69 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216378",
"author": "Troy A. Wilson Sr.",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T17:22:23",
"content": "The offroading community is certainly doing it’s part in keeping HAM alive. More and more Jeep and offroading groups are using handheld HAM radios for communications during group events. They h... | 1,760,373,600.164549 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/acrylic-mold-makes-for-professional-looking-silicone-keyboards/ | Acrylic Mold Makes For Professional-Looking Silicone Keyboards | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"acrylic",
"casting",
"elastomer",
"keyboard",
"keypad",
"mold",
"pigment",
"qwerty",
"silicone"
] | The border between consumer electronics and DIY projects is getting harder and harder to define. First it was PCBs, which quickly went from homemade to professional with quick-turn services. Then low-cost CAD/CAM packages and high-end fabrication services gave us access to enclosures that were more than black plastic boxes with aluminum covers. Where will it end?
That’s a question [arturo182] begins to answer with
this custom-molded silicone keyboard
for a handheld device. There’s no formal writeup, but the Twitter thread goes into some detail about the process he used to make the tiny qwerty keypad. The build started by milling a two-part mold from acrylic. Silicone rubber was tinted and degassed before injecting into the mold with a baster. The keys are connected by a thin membrane of silicone, and each has a small nub on the back for actuating a switch.
There’s clearly room for improvement in this proof of concept – tool marks from the milling process mar the finish of the keys slightly, for instance. There may be tips to be had from
this article on silicone keyboard refurbishment
to improve the process, but overall, we’d say [arturo182] is well on his way here. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216369",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T16:31:51",
"content": "I think you can flame-polish acrylic. That might improve the surface finish.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_polishingThough that does suggest that it is best for convex surfaces.Milling all the way ... | 1,760,373,599.903074 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/02/pavlok-gets-a-literally-shocking-teardown/ | Pavlok Gets A Literally Shocking Teardown | Tom Nardi | [
"Teardown",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"fitness tracker",
"high voltage",
"nRF52832",
"smartwatch",
"wearable"
] | Apparently, there is a wrist-mounted device that delivers electric shocks to the wearer when it receives the appropriate command over Bluetooth. No, it’s not part of some kind of house arrest program. If you can believe it, the gadget is actually intended to help break bad habits or wake up
exceptionally
deep sleepers. We don’t know which of those problems [Becky Stern] has,
but we’re glad to see she decided to take hers apart
before the 21st century self-flagellation started.
Called the Pavlok and available for $180 USD from various online retailers, the device looks like a chunky fitness tracker. But in place of the screen that would show you how many steps you’ve taken or your current heart rate, there’s a lighting bolt button that you can press when you want to shock yourself. With the smartphone application, you can control the device remotely with a handy desktop widget that allows you to select the intensity of the shock. No, we aren’t making any of this up. Check out the video after the break to see it in action.
When [Becky] tried to take the Pavlok apart, she found that it was nearly impossible to handle it without inadvertently triggering a shock. So until she could get the case open and physically disconnect the battery, all she could do was turn the intensity down in the application and work through the occasional jolts from the device. We can only hope that more devices don’t adopt a similar sense of self-preservation.
Once inside she found mainly the same kind of hardware you’d expect in a standard, non-masochistic, fitness wearable. There’s a nRF52832 Bluetooth SoC, a MMA8451Q accelerometer, a PCF85063A I2C RTC, and a FXAS21002C gyroscope. What you’re somewhat less likely to find inside your FitBit however is the LPR6235 coupled inductor and beefy capacitors which are used to build up a high-voltage charge from the standard 3.7 V LiPo battery.
We’ve been very interested in the recent projects which are
creating custom firmwares for commercially available fitness wearables
, as it could be
an express route to a hacker-friendly smartwatch
. While the Pavlok has some compelling hardware, and the programming header [Becky] identified looks interesting, we don’t like the idea of being one misplaced
if
statement away from riding the lightning. | 36 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216184",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-02-02T18:14:15",
"content": "Marvellous… give them as gifts to your household! Geo-fence your stash!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6216186",
"author": "jaska the man",... | 1,760,373,599.976915 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/02/microcontroller-studies-the-blade/ | Microcontroller Studies The Blade | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"bruce land",
"cornell",
"kendo",
"LSM9DS1",
"martial arts",
"pic32",
"piezoelectric",
"sports",
"sword"
] | Kendo, a Japanese martial art, is practiced with a special sword. It’s not a particularly sharp sword, though, since the “blade” is essentially a length of bamboo. For this reason, Kendo practitioners must rely on correct form and technique in order to make sure their practice is as effective as possible, and Cornell students [Iman] and [Weichen] have made a
Kendo trainer that helps the swordsmen in their art
.
The core of the project is a PIC32 microcontroller hooked up to a set of three piezoelectric sensors and a LSM9DS1 inertial module. The three piezoelectric sensors are attached to a helmet and the inertial module to the sword, and the sensors work together to determine both the location of the strike and whether or not it had enough strength to be considered a “good” strike (the rules of Kendo are beyond the scope of this article). The trainer can then calculate all of the information and provide feedback to the user on a small screen.
While martial-arts related builds seem to be relatively rare, we did find a similar project from back in 2011 called the
Virtual Sensei
which used a then-popular Kinect in order to track movements. This PIC32-based project, though, seems to be a little more thorough by including the strength of the strike in the information the computer uses, and is probably less expensive to boot! | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216181",
"author": "Drew",
"timestamp": "2020-02-02T17:47:34",
"content": "I joined a Kendo club in a Japanese school as a teacher back in 2007 in Sapporo. It is a very satisfying thing to feel the weight of the “sword”, and the rules really encourage correct form.Seems actually li... | 1,760,373,599.846838 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/02/synthfonio-makes-music-easy-like-sunday-morning/ | Synthfonio Makes Music Easy Like Sunday Morning | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino MKR",
"midi controller",
"synth",
"synthesizer"
] | This one goes out to anyone who loves music and feels it in their soul, but doesn’t necessarily understand it in their head. No instrument should stand in the way of expression, but it seems like they all do (except for maybe the kazoo).
[FrancoMolina]’s
hybrid synth-MIDI controller
is a shortcut between the desire to play music and actually doing it. Essentially, you press one of the buttons along Synthfonio’s neck to set the scale, and play the actual notes by pressing limit switches in the controller mounted on the body. If you’re feeling blue, you can shift to minor scales by pressing the relative minor note’s neck button at the same time as the root note, e.g. A+C=Am. Want to change octaves? Just slide the entire controller up or down for a total of three.
All of these switches are muxed to two Arduinos — an MKR1010 for USB MIDI control, and a bare ‘328 to provide the baked-in synth sounds. Power comes from a stepped-up 18650 that can be charged with an insanely cheap board from that one site. [Franco] has all the code and files available, so go have fun making music without being turned off by a bunch of theory. Push that button there to check out the demo.
If ‘portable’ means pocket-sized to you, then let
this mini woodwind MIDI controller
take your breath away. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216231",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2020-02-02T22:54:42",
"content": "Another demo of sound that is nearly inaudible at minus 14dB again same as the other midi woodwind link in this article. When I amplified it via audacity I could hear the clacking of the keys and the HV... | 1,760,373,600.016289 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/02/growing-human-neurons-hooked-up-to-electrodes/ | Growing Human Neurons Hooked Up To Electrodes | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"neurons",
"science"
] | Philosophers have long mused about the concept of a “brain in a jar”, but thus far, it’s remained the preserve of science fiction rather than reality. However, after reading some scientific papers, [Justin] wanted to attempt the feat himself,
so set out to grow some human neurons on an electrode array.
The project builds on [Justin]’s earlier work, using his DC sputtering rig to coat a glass microscope slide with electrodes. The first layer is silver for high conductivity, with an added gold layer for biocompatibility. The screw cap from a Falcon tube is then epoxied on to act as a reservoir for culture media for the neurons. Finally, an air filter is added to allow the biological mixture to breathe.
This was [Justin]’s first attempt at culturing neurons, and there were plenty of hurdles along the way. The custom culture assemblies had issues with the epoxy bonds leaking or failing entirely, leading to only one slide making it through the sterilization process. Additionally, the neurons were accidentally added in too high a quantity. While some growth was observed under the microscope, [Justin] was unable to detect any real signal from the system.
Despite a poor final result, plenty was learned along the way. [Justin] has already put plans into place to fix some of the pitfalls of the original experiment, and we look forward to seeing future updates from the project. Video after the break. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216133",
"author": "lespaul1963",
"timestamp": "2020-02-02T09:46:35",
"content": "So where does one acquire healthy neurons for such an experiment? I’m pretty sure one cannot just pop onto Amazon or the Walmart eStore and buy them, regardless if it’s the economy size or the fun siz... | 1,760,373,602.058345 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/01/a-mini-sdr-receiver-using-an-audio-dsp/ | A Mini SDR Receiver Using An Audio DSP | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"dsp",
"radio",
"sdr"
] | Software defined radio or SDR is the most exciting frontier in the field of radio, transferring as it does all signal functions from the analogue to the digital domain. Radios using SDR techniques can be surprisingly straightforward and easy to understand, and [Ray Ring]’s little SDR receiver
manages to combine this with the novel use of an audio DSP
rather than a computer to perform its SDR functions.
The front end is a conventional enough direct conversion design with an Si5531 clock generator providing I and Q phase-shifted local oscillator signals to a
TS3A5017
analogue switch used as a mixer. An unexpected presence is an LTC6252 op-amp as an RF amplifier, but the special part comes after the I and Q baseband signals have been filtered. The SDR part of this receiver is an audio DSP, but it’s one that might not be an immediate choice. The
Spin Semiconductor FV-1
is a dedicated digital reverb chip for musical effects boxes, but it comes with the feature that its internal DSP core can access custom code from an external ROM. [Ray] has written his own code for demodulation of AM, USB, and LSB signals rather than musical effects, and used the device’s left and right audio channels to process I and Q quadrature signals. The use of a single purpose chip to do something its designers never intended gives it the essence of a good hack, and we’re mightily impressed at his spotting the potential for an SDR in a musical effect. Hear it in action in the video below the break.
Meanwhile if the operation of a receiver such as this one is a mystery to you,
we published a handy primer back in 2017
.
Thanks [Ziew] for the tip. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216112",
"author": "jafinch78",
"timestamp": "2020-02-02T06:11:45",
"content": "SI5351 Jenny. Caught my attention as I’m about to order another and some Si4432’s for the tinySA/VNA project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6216... | 1,760,373,601.829288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/01/art-imitates-dna/ | Art Imitates DNA | Al Williams | [
"Art",
"LED Hacks",
"Medical Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"art",
"dna",
"human genome",
"led art",
"Raspberry Pi Zero",
"sculpture"
] | It has recently been possible to pay a service a little bit of money and learn more about your own DNA. You might find out you really aren’t Italian after all or that you are more or less susceptible to some ailments. [Paul Klinger] had his DNA mapped and decided to make
a sculpture representing his unique genetic code
. The pictures are good, but the video below is even better.
The project requires a DNA sequencing, a 3D printer, and a Raspberry Pi Zero. Oh, you can probably guess you need a lot of RGB LEDs, too. Of course, the display doesn’t show the whole thing at one time — your DNA pattern scrolls across the double helix.
By far, the most expensive part of the project was the sequencing. [Paul] got the 30X service which starts at about $600. You can get more analysis for two to four times that price. A bit much for a sculpture, but if you wanted or needed it anyway, the additional cost for the sculpture is pretty low if you have the 3D printer. (You could also save a lot of money by just using random colors, and nobody would be the wiser.)
The Pi’s default I2C baudrate is very low and that prevented a refresh faster than twice a second. However, [Paul] has instructions on how to boost the speed and wound up with 10 updates per second. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216086",
"author": "Somun",
"timestamp": "2020-02-02T03:25:36",
"content": "He could have gone all the way and get it printed in gold.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6216093",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,373,601.955445 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/01/the-quest-to-find-a-second-life-for-electric-vehicle-batteries/ | The Quest To Find A Second Life For Electric Vehicle Batteries | Roger Cheng | [
"car hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"economies of scale",
"electrical safety",
"lithium ion",
"lithium polymer battery",
"Lithium-ion battery",
"reuse"
] | Rechargeable lithium chemistry battery cells found their mass market foothold in the field of personal electronics. The technology has since matured enough to be scaled up (in both physical size and production volume) to electric cars, making long range EVs far more economical than what was possible using earlier batteries. Would the new economics also make battery reuse a profitable business? Eric Lundgren is one of those willing to make a run at it, and
[Gizmodo] took a look at his latest venture
.
This man is a serial entrepreneur, though his
previous business idea was not successful
as it involved “reusing” trademarks that were not his to use. Fortunately this new business
BigBattery
appears to be on far more solid legal footing, disassembling battery packs from retired electric vehicles and repacking cells for other purposes. Typically EV batteries are deemed “worn out” when their capacity drops below a certain percentage (70% is a common bar) but that reduced capacity could still be useful outside of an EV. And when battery packs are retired due to problems elsewhere in the car, or just suffering from a few bad cells, it’s possible to extract units in far better shape.
We’ve been interested in how to make the best use of rechargeable lithium batteries. Ranging from
tech notes
helping battery reuse, to
a comparison of different types
, to looking at how their end-of-life
recycling will be different
from lead-acid batteries. Not to mention countless project wins and fails in between. A recurring theme is the volatility of mistreated or misbehaving batteries. Seeing a number of EV battery packs stacked on pallets and shelves, presumably filled with cells of undetermined quality, fills us with unease. Like the rest of California, Chatsworth is under earthquake risk, and the town was uncomfortably close to some wildfires in 2019. Eric is quick to give assurance that employees are given regular safety training and the facility conforms to all applicable workplace safety rules. But did those rules consider warehouses packed full of high capacity lithium battery cells of unknown quality? We expect that, like the business itself, standards for safety will evolve.
Concerns on safety aside, a successful business here would mean electric vehicles have indeed given battery reuse a profitable economy of scale that tiny little cell phone and laptop batteries could not reach. We are optimistic that Eric and other like-minded people pursuing similar goals can evolve this concept into a bright spot in our otherwise
woeful state of e-waste handling
. | 49 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216065",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-02-02T00:31:51",
"content": "“But did those rules consider warehouses packed full of high capacity lithium battery cells of unknown quality?”Ah, a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 warehouse.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,373,601.908244 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/01/tricking-the-brain-into-seeing-boosted-contrast-in-stereo-imagery/ | Tricking The Brain Into Seeing Boosted Contrast In Stereo Imagery | Donald Papp | [
"Science",
"Video Hacks",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"contrast",
"real-time",
"sensory trickery",
"tone mapping",
"unity",
"vr"
] | Last year a team of researchers published a paper detailing a method of boosting visual contrast and image quality in stereoscopic displays. The method is called
Dichoptic Contrast Enhancement (DiCE) and works by showing each eye a slightly different version of an image, tricking the brain into fusing the two views together in a way that boosts perceived image quality
. This only works on stereoscopic displays like VR headsets, but it’s computationally simple and easily implemented. This trick could be used to offset some of the limitations of displays used in headsets, for example making them appear capable of deeper contrast levels than they can physically deliver. This is good, because higher contrasts are generally perceived as being more realistic and three-dimensional; important factors in VR headsets and other stereoscopic displays.
Stereoscopic vision works by having the brain fuse together what both eyes see, and this process is called binocular fusion. The small differences between what each eye sees mostly conveys a sense of depth to us, but DiCE uses some of the quirks of binocular fusion to trick the brain into perceiving enhanced contrast in the visuals. This perceived higher contrast in turn leads to a stronger sense of depth and overall image quality.
Example of DiCE-processed images, showing each eye a different dynamic contrast range. The result is greater perceived contrast and image quality when the brain fuses the two together.
To pull off this trick, DiCE displays a different contrast level to both eyes in a way designed to encourage the brain to fuse them together in a positive way. In short, using a separate and different dynamic contrast range for each eye yields an overall greater perceived contrast range in the fused image. That’s simple in theory, but in practice there were a number of problems to solve. Chief among them was the fact that if the difference between what each eyes sees is too great, the result is discomfort due to binocular rivalry. The hard scientific work behind DiCE came from experimentally determining sweet spots, and pre-computing filters independent of viewer and content so that it could be applied in real-time for a consistent result.
Things like this are reminders that we experience the world only through the filter of our senses, and our perception of reality has quirks that can be demonstrated by things like this project and other “sensory fusion” edge cases like the Thermal Grill Illusion, which we saw used as the basis for
a replica of the Pain Box from Dune
.
A short video overview of the method is embedded below, and
a PDF of the publication
can be downloaded for further reading. Want a more hands-on approach? The team even made a
DiCE plugin (freely) available from the Unity asset store
.
[via
Road to VR
] | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216022",
"author": "Dion",
"timestamp": "2020-02-01T21:09:38",
"content": "Human HDR. Wonder if viewer fatigue goes up all from the background processing happening in your head?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6216023",
"au... | 1,760,373,602.341586 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/01/cnc-hot-wire-cutter-gives-form-to-foams/ | CNC Hot-Wire Cutter Gives Form To Foam | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"EPS",
"foam",
"g-code",
"hot-wire",
"inkscape",
"nichrome",
"polystrene",
"XPS"
] | Rapid prototyping tools are sometimes the difference between a project getting off the ground and one that stays strictly on paper. A lightweight, easy-to-form material is often all that’s needed to visualize a design and make a quick judgment on how to proceed. Polymeric foams excel in such applications, and
a CNC hot-wire foam cutter
is a tool that makes dealing with them quick and easy.
We’re used to seeing CNC machines where a lot of time and expense are put into making the frame as strong and rigid as possible. But [HowToMechatronics] knew that the polystyrene foam blocks he’d be using would easily yield to a hot nichrome wire, minimizing the cutting forces and the need for a stout frame. But the aluminum extrusions, 3D-printed connectors. and linear bearings he used still make for a frame stiff enough to give clean, accurate cuts. The addition of a turntable to the bed is a nice touch, turning the tool into a 2.5D machine. The video below details the construction and goes into depth on the toolchain [HowToMechatronics] used to go from design to G-code, including the tricks he used for making a continuous path, as well as integrating the turntable to make three-dimensional designs.
Plenty of hot-wire foam cutters have graced our pages before, everything from
tiny hand-held cutters
to
a hot-wire “table saw” for foam
. We like the effort put into this one, though, and the possibilities it opens up.
Thanks to [Keith O.] for the tip. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216010",
"author": "Luke",
"timestamp": "2020-02-01T19:38:10",
"content": "It’s not much more complicated to cut the inverse model and use it to cast shapes in concrete.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6216014",
"auth... | 1,760,373,602.191227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/01/what-everyone-else-did-with-eight-bits-the-germans-did-with-only-one/ | What Everyone Else Did With Eight Bits, The Germans Did With Only One | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"1-bit",
"MC14500",
"WDR-1"
] | In the 1980s there was an impetus for the first time for young people to be equipped with computer literacy. A variety of different educational programmes were launched, typically involving a collaboration between a computer manufacturer and a broadcaster, and featuring BASIC programming on one of the 8-bit home computers of the day. One such educational scheme was a bit different though, the German broadcaster WDR produced an educational series using a modular computer featuring an unusual 1-bit processor that was programmed in hexadecimal machine code. [Jens Christian Restemeier]
has produced a replica of this machine
, that is as close to the original as he can make it. (Video, in German, embedded below.)
The computer is called the
WDR-1
, and had its origin in a kit machine before it was taken up by the broadcaster. The unusual 1-bit processor is a
Motorola MC14500
, which was produced from 1977 onwards for industrial control applications. He takes the viewer in the video below the break through the machine’s parts, explaining the purpose of each daughter card and the motherboard. Lacking an original to copy he instead worked from photographs to replicate the chip placements of the original, substituting pin headers for the unusual sockets used on the 1980s machines. Take a look at his video, below the break.
More information on the WDR-1
can be found online in German
(
Google translate link
). Meanwhile we’ve featured the MC14500 before,
in a small embedded computer
.
MC14500 image: JPL [
CC BY-SA 4.0
] | 51 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215961",
"author": "monsonite",
"timestamp": "2020-02-01T15:25:38",
"content": "Jenny, my Physics teacher introduced me to the MC14500 in 1982 – when I did an electronics option in my Physics A-level. And the rest is history – thanks to Dave Gell for setting me out on my future ca... | 1,760,373,602.146988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/01/see-through-catalytic-converter/ | See-Through Catalytic Converter | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"catalyist",
"catalytic converter",
"engine",
"exhaust",
"flame",
"hydrocarbons",
"see through",
"temperature",
"window"
] | There’s always something to be learned from taking things apart. Sometimes the parts can be used for other things, sometimes they can be repaired or improved upon, but sometimes it’s all in good fun. Especially in this case where extremely high temperatures and combustible gasses are involved. This is from the latest video from [Warped Perception] that
lets us see inside of a catalytic converter as its operating
.
Catalytic converters are installed on most vehicles (and other internal combustion engines) in order to process unburned hydrocarbons from exhaust gasses with a catalyst. These can get extremely hot, and this high temperature complicated the build somewhat. There were two prototypes constructed for this build and the first was a cross-section of a catalytic converter with a glass window sealed on in order to allow the viewing of the catalyst during the operation of a small engine. It was easy to see the dirty exhaust gasses entering and cleaner gasses leaving, but the window eventually blew off. The second was a complete glass tube which worked much better until the fitting on the back finally failed.
A catalytic converter isn’t something we’d normally get to see the inside of, and this video was worth watching just to see one in operation in real life. You could also learn a thing or two about high-temperature fittings as well if you’re so inclined. It might be a nice pairing with another build we’ve seen which gave us a window into a
different type of combustion chamber
than ones normally found on combustion engines.
Thanks to [Ryoku] for the tip! | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215946",
"author": "Thinkerer",
"timestamp": "2020-02-01T14:02:15",
"content": "You may find catalytic converters in places you hadn’t expected. Our new stove has one about 2.5cm across installed in the oven vent – apparently not uncommon these days – and it works very well at oxi... | 1,760,373,602.013047 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/01/a-nano-with-an-otters-bite/ | A Nano With An Otter’s Bite | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"Arduimp Nano",
"STM32F",
"USB-PD"
] | The would-be microcontroller experimenter is now faced with a bewildering array of choices when it comes to a tiny development board for their projects. Everything from descendants and clones of the original Arduino through to full-fat Linux powerhouses such as the Raspberry Pi Zero and similar boards can be had, and often for a reasonable price.
A new entrant has now joined the fray,
the OtterPill is an STM32F072-based board with an Arduino-Nano-like pinout
, and it comes from the bench of [Jana Marie]. With so many competitors you might ask yourself what it can offer, and it would be a valid point given that a Nano clone can be had for relative pennies. Aside from the Nano shield compatibility and extra power of the ARM Cortex M0 then, it’s an open source development board with USB-PD included from its USB-C socket, and with some elite BoM wizardry she’s managed to get the cost of its components to below three dollars.
A USB-PD example firmware is available
and a blank firmware is on its way. For now the board exists only in prototype form, but she’s putting together a production run if you would like one too. We saw an early development of it
at eth0
back in the autumn, and given the progress since then we’re sure that we won’t have to wait for long.
Regular readers will recognise [Jana Marie]’s work, because otter-themed boards have made their way to these pages before. Our most recent ones were
the USB-C replacement board bringing USB-PD to the TS-100 soldering iron
, and
a nifty little USB board for addressable LEDs
. | 22 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215931",
"author": "Wayne Call",
"timestamp": "2020-02-01T11:45:32",
"content": "Otters are necrophiliacs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6215954",
"author": "ehrichweiss",
"timestamp": "2020-02-01T15:11:08",... | 1,760,373,601.77928 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/an-arcade-cabinet-with-displays-to-spare/ | An Arcade Cabinet With Displays To Spare | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"arcade cabinet",
"emulation",
"marquee",
"oled"
] | We’ve all got a pretty good mental image of what an arcade cabinet looks like, so you probably don’t need to be reminded that traditionally they are single-screen affairs. But that idea dates back to when they were built around big and bulky CRT displays. Now that we have modern LCD, LED, and OLED panels, who says you have to follow the old rules?
That’s precisely the sort of out of the box thinking that lead
[Al Linke] to build this unique multi-display arcade cabinet
. The game itself is still played on a single screen, but several smaller sub-displays are dotted all around the cabinet to indicate various bits of ancillary information. Are they necessary? Hardly. But we can’t deny it’s a clever idea, and we wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing something similar in other DIY cabinets.
The build started with a commercially available cabinet from Arcade1Up, which at this point are popular enough that some of the Big Box retailers have them in stock. All of the electronics except for the display were stripped out, and replaced with a Dell OptiPlex 9020 computer and high-quality joysticks and buttons. [Al] then installed his various displays all over the cabinet,
including a gorgeous LED marquee that we’ve featured previously.
So what do all these little screens do? [Al] explains them in the video after the break, but the general idea is that they provide contextual information about the game you currently have loaded up. A two-color OLED display shows the name of the game and what it’s rated, while a seven segment LED display shows the year the game was released. The displays are located both by the controls and where you’d expect the coin slot to be, so whether you’re actively playing or across the room, you can see all the information.
We’re always amazed to see how builders find ways
to make their own personal arcade cabinets stand out
. While it’s an idea that at this point we’ve seen quite a lot of,
no two projects have ever been quite the same
. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215906",
"author": "Foobar",
"timestamp": "2020-02-01T07:25:53",
"content": "“Suitable for all ages” … *sigh*Arcade cabinets were never really available here in Germany for youngsters. At least in my teens (90’s – don’t really know if it changed by now) almost all arcade cabinets w... | 1,760,373,602.391289 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/a-60-ghz-phased-array/ | A 60 GHz Phased Array | Al Williams | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"antennas",
"lattice",
"phased array",
"SiBeam",
"Supercon"
] | Our friend [Hunter Scott] gave a talk at a past Supercon about phased array antennas. He mentioned he was looking for collaborators to create an antenna with the SiBeam SB9210 chip. This is a specialized chip for WirelessHD, a more or less failed video streaming protocol, and it’s essentially an entire 60 GHz phased array on a chip with both transmit and receive capabilities. For $15, it seems like quite the bargain, and [Hunter] still wants to
put the device to work
.
The downside is that Lattice bought SiBeam and killed this chip — not surprising considering WirelessHD never really took off. However, [Hunter] says the chip was in some old smart TVs and laptops. If you can find replacement boards for those devices on the surplus market, you can get the chip and the supporting circuitry for a song.
The situation is a little sticky. [Hunter] has the datasheets for the parts, but is still bound by a nondisclosure agreement. He’s still working on getting that encumbrance removed. But until then, he has some advice about similar chips that have public datasheets and a controller chip that — if you would sniff its bus in a working system — might very well shed light on how to set up the cheap antenna chip.
There are also a bunch of public links that should make things clearer. However, we hope that Lattice will allow the NDA to expire on the datasheets. Meanwhile, you can catch the Supercon talk that started it all in the video below.
You might be interested in
visualizing phased arrays
. These are really common in
radar systems
. | 15 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215887",
"author": "Zack Kummer",
"timestamp": "2020-02-01T04:15:33",
"content": "Very satisfying to hear that their NDA’d chips were a total failure. Bad enough to have a black box chip, but when even the documentation needed to use it is hidden it’s nice to see the company lose ... | 1,760,373,602.44073 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/fixing-the-flicker-afflicting-a-night-light/ | Fixing The Flicker Afflicting A Night Light | Kristina Panos | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"bridge rectifier",
"capacitor",
"dollar store",
"night light"
] | It’s hard to part with some things, even if they’re broken and were worth next to nothing to begin with. But some things are just special, y’know? And we would say in this case, the thing was definitely worth saving.
[Taste the Code]’s daughter’s beloved night light had a terrible flickering problem
, and then stopped working altogether. Eager to make her happy, he cracked it open and found that one of the wires had disconnected from the outlet pin it was soldered to. That’s a simple enough fix, but trying to solder in tight quarters where the walls are soft plastic can be quite challenging.
Once that was fixed, [Taste the Code] plugged it in to a test outlet. It’s back to working, but also back to flickering, because there is no capacitor to smooth out the signal going to the LEDs. [Taste the Code] measured the voltage drop across the output of the bridge rectifier and soldered in an electrolytic cap with more than double the necessary voltage rating, just to be safe. You can check out the video after the break.
This goes to show several things: one, you can learn from fixing and improving cheap electronics from the likes of your local dollar store. Two, you can also get some kinds of components there quite inexpensively from things like magnetic sensor-based window alarms and dirt cheap solar garden lights.
You can also do some fun stuff with those cheap IKEA lamps designed for children.
Here’s an adorable cloud lamp with an RGB LED upgrade that shows the weather mood using an ESP8266
. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215855",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2020-02-01T01:12:23",
"content": "This definitely gets extra bonus dad points.A simple little thing but it no doubt put a smile on his daughter’s face. Tinkerers make the best dad’s in my book.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,602.490469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/water-switch-lamp-illuminates-current-flow/ | Water Switch Lamp Illuminates Current Flow | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"0x20",
"20 watt leds",
"acrylic",
"lamp",
"saline switch",
"salt water"
] | They always told you not to mix water and electricity. And while yes, that is good general advice regarding the two, you won’t rip a hole in the fabric of space-time should you go about it responsibly.
Water will conduct electricity, so why not use it to switch on a lamp
?
[Manvith Subraya]’s Hydro Lamp is, among other things, a reminder not to let Big Switch dim your idea of what’s possible with simple components. Switches don’t have to be complex, and some of the most reliable switches are pretty simple —
the reed switch
and the mercury tilt switch are good examples. By salinating the water at a ratio of 1:1, [Manvith] ensures power will flow through the acrylic tank, completing the circuit and lighting the 20W LEDs in both ends.
The brief demo video after the break sheds light on an interesting aspect of using water as a tilt switch — it’s not instantaneous. As he slowly moves the lamp from vertical to horizontal and back again, the light brightens and dims with the tide of electrons. We think it would be interesting to build a motorized frame that takes advantage of this for mood lighting purposes, especially if there were a few LEDs positioned behind the water.
Water is often used to explain the basic principle of current flow and the relationship dynamics of voltage, current, and resistance.
As we saw in this water computer, the concept flows all the way into logic gates
.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Hydro-Lamp/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2abCLPwsYJc | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215798",
"author": "kww",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T21:27:16",
"content": "The current flow is instantaneous in the circuit. It’s just that the water is acting as a variable resistor in the circuit -the thinner the cross-section at one side, the higher the resistance.",
"parent_... | 1,760,373,602.603906 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/companion-bots-definitely-are-the-droids-youre-looking-for/ | Companion Bots Definitely Are The Droids You’re Looking For | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"cons",
"Hackaday Supercon",
"Hackaday SuperConference",
"robot companions",
"talks"
] | Companion robots are a breed that, heretofore, we’ve primarily seen in cinema. Free from the limits of real-world technology, they manage to be charismatic, cute, and capable in ways that endear them to audiences the world over. Jorvon Moss and Alex Glow decided that this charming technology shouldn’t just live on the silver screen, and have been developing their own companion bots to explore this field.
Lucky for us, they came down to Hackaday Superconference to tell us all about it!
The duo use a variety of techniques to build their ‘bots, infusing them with plenty of personality along the way. Jorvon favors the Arduino as the basis of his builds, while Alex has experimented with the Google AIY Vision Kit, BBC Micro:bit, as well as other platforms. Through clever design and careful planning, the two common maker techniques to create their unique builds. Using standard servos, 3D printed body parts, and plenty of LEDs, it’s all stuff that’s readily accessible to the home gamer.
[Alex]’s companion bot, Archimedes, has been through many upgrades to improve functionality. Plus, he’s got a cute hat!
Having built many robots, the different companions have a variety of capabilities in the manner they interact. Alex’s robot owl, Archimedes, uses machine vision to find people, and tries to figure out if they’re happy or sad. If they’re excited enough, it will give the person a small gift. Archimedes mounts on a special harness Alex built out of armature wire, allowing the avian to perch on her shoulder when out and about. Similarly, Jorvon’s Dexter lurks on his back, modeled after a monkey. Featuring an LED matrix for emotive facial expressions, and a touch sensor for high fives, Dexter packs plenty of character into his 3D printed chassis.
Alex and Jorvon also talk about some of the pitfalls and challenges they’ve faced through the development of their respective companion bots. Jorvon defines a companion robot as “any robot that you can take with you, on any type of adventure”. Being out in the real world and getting knocked around means breakages are common, with both of the duo picking up handfuls of smashed plastic and bundles of wires at times. Thankfully, with 3D printing being the tool of the trade, it’s easy to iteratively design new components to better withstand the rough and tumble of daily life out and about. This also feeds into the rest of the design process, with Jorvon giving the example of Dexter’s last minute LED upgrades that were built and fitted while at Supercon.
Develop on companion bots is never really finished. Future work involves integrating
Chirp.io data-over-sound communications
to allow the bots to talk. There’s been some headaches on the software side, but we look forward to seeing these ‘bots chatting away in their own droid language. While artificial intelligence doesn’t yet have homebrew companion bots matching the wisecracking droids seen in movies, designing lifelike bodies for our digital creations is a big step in that direction. With people like Alex and Jolyon on the case, we’re sure it won’t be long before we’re all walking around with digital pals on our shoulders — and it promises to be fun! | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215777",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T20:29:28",
"content": "Battlestar Galactica was ahead of it’s time.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6215791",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2020-01-... | 1,760,373,602.5428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/the-internet-of-football/ | The Internet Of Football | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Wearable Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"football",
"nextgen stats",
"NFL",
"rfid",
"superbowl",
"zebra"
] | While football in the United States means something totally different from what it means in the rest of the world, fans everywhere take it pretty seriously. This Sunday is the peak of U.S. football frenzy, the Super Bowl, and it is surprisingly high-tech. The NFL has invested in a lot of technology and today’s football stats are nothing like those of the last century thanks to some very modern devices.
It is kind of interesting since, at the core, the sport doesn’t really need a lot of high tech. A pigskin ball, some handkerchiefs, and a field marked off with some lime and a yardstick will suffice. However, we’ve seen a long arc of technology in scoreboards, cameras — like instant replay — and in the evolution of protective gear. But the last few years have seen the rise of data collection. It’s being driven by RFID tags in the player’s shoulder pads.
These aren’t the RFID chips in your credit card. These are long-range devices and in the right stadium, a computer can track not only the player’s position, but also his speed, acceleration, and a host of other statistics.
A Stripe of a Different Color
The company behind the technology is Zebra
, and they make RFID solutions for many different industries. At first, this might seem a little gimmicky. Do you really need to know that the halfback is running at a certain speed? Does the color commentator really need to tell us that the quarterback’s average acceleration is down 30% today for some reason? Maybe not, but then again baseball fans have obsessed about statistics for years. However, there are other consumers of this data. Coaches, scouts, and trainers can all use the horde of data to assess players and possibly plan improvements.
It is all part of an NFL program known as
NFL NextGen Stats
. If you want to know which team has the fastest runners, for example, you can find out on that site. We can now reveal that running back Matt Breida was the fastest ball carrier in the 2019 season with a peak speed of 22.3 miles per hour. Who knew statistics were so exciting?
Of course, all this data is subject to number crunching, so the site can tell you how one quarterback performs compared to the average of all quarterbacks and there are a number of fancy colorful graphs. There are even YouTube videos
based completely on these harvested stats
.
Cracking Open the Hardware
The RFID transponder is about the size of a coin and reports position and accelerometer readings at 25 Hz. Every compatible stadium has 20 receivers that ship the incoming data to Zebra’s San Jose, California control room in a little more than 100 milliseconds. The company claims they report data to broadcasters in under 500 milliseconds. Material on the vendor’s web site indicates the measurements of position are good to within six inches.
RFID tracking tag
RFID stadium antenna installation
We understandably couldn’t find a lot of technical details on the Zebra or NFL websites. But we got lucky when we went to find some images. The photos above are screenshots from
a Zebra promotional video
which shows tag itself is clear enough that you can read the FCC ID!
Taking
Bob Baddeley’s advice about FCC filings
we managed to literally get a look inside of the tag itself. Above you can see the block diagram from the filing that indicates a PIC microcontroller and a CR1616 3V battery for power. A charge pump gives it 3.3V and the RF generation is at 6.55 GHz.
The filing even includes internal photos of the PCB. At 6.5 GHz everything is an antenna or a transmission line, so you can see there is a very distinctive PCB feature near U8 and Q1 that form part of the circuitry. If the big coil at L1 looks scary at 6 GHz, don’t be alarmed. That has to be part of the “magnetic interface” from the block diagram. That coil isn’t carrying anything that high in frequency.
For practice sessions, the tag also can send data in real-time via Bluetooth. This joins a host of other bio instrumentation coaches are starting to use during practice sessions like heart rate monitors. The NFL doesn’t allow this during games, though. But a coach might see that a player is, for example, dehydrated by monitoring stats gathered like this.
DIY
We started thinking about how hard this would be to do for your own backyard athletes. Long-range RFID gear is available, although it can be costly and only makes sense when harvesting data from numerous tags. However, a small wearable package that records data for later is workable. We wondered if some of the better fitness trackers could work in a pinch?
You can
hack existing trackers
or you can opt for
open source
. There are even some hacks for the
cheap knock offs
if you don’t want to lose the name brand tracker to a particularly nasty sack.
Living in the Future
Given that many of us remember when radio was a big purchase and a personal computer was unthinkable, it is funny to see radio and computers so commonplace and so tiny. It’s a story that repeats itself. Putting a computer in a toy, or even a car, would have been outlandish science fiction until relatively recently. The shoulder pad sensors are
So if you are watching the big game and you hear some oddball stat, you’ll know where it came from. Or, just hang out on the NFL stats site and find out the ratio of weight to acceleration for each player or something like that. | 37 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215749",
"author": "﴾ ﴿",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T18:09:59",
"content": "Curious if there are g-force sensors integrated inside? Would probably be a good idea to put them into their helmets. Could get real time and longitudinal data correlations between being continually hit versu... | 1,760,373,603.363861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/hackaday-podcast-052-shorting-components-printing-typewriter-balls-taking-minimal-time-lapse-and-building-a-makerspace-movie-prop/ | Hackaday Podcast 052: Shorting Components, Printing Typewriter Balls, Taking Minimal Time Lapse, And Building A Makerspace Movie Prop | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"cockpit",
"Hackaday Podcast",
"IBM Selectric",
"rf modulation",
"rov tether",
"serial cable",
"time-lapse"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recap a great week in hardware hacking. There’s perfection in the air as clever 3D-printing turns a button and LED matrix into an aesthetically awesome home automation display. Take a crash course in RF modulation types to use on your next project. Did you know the DB-9 connector is actually a DE-9? Building your own underwater ROV tether isn’t as simple as it sounds. And Elliot found a treasure trove of zero-ohm jumpers in chip packages — what the heck are these things for?
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Direct download
(60 MB or so.)
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 052 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Hackaday Belgrade Early Bird Tickets On Sale Right Now
Submit a talk proposal for Hackaday Belgrade!
Mike got a CS32F103 on his Bluepill
32F103 Comparison (part 1) – BlaatSchaap
Hackaday Forth: Mecrisp Stellaris & Embello
Straight to the
Hackaday Forth GitHub
Forth: The Hacker’s Language
Elliot discovered
Zero Ohm PCB Jumpers
New Part Day: LED Driver Is FPGA Dev Board In Disguise
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Flicker Detector Lets You Hear What You Can’t See
eric archer . net » Sound Cameras
Amazing All-Band Receiver
The Options For Low Cost ROV Tethers
16-Bobbin Rope Braiding Machine Inspired By Surplus Store Find
Stylish Thermometer Is DIY Hardware Perfection
Can You Help 3D Print A Selectric Ball?
Using a Selectric Typewriter for Mathematics
ESP32-Cam Does Time Lapse
ESP32-Cam Time-Lapse – bitluni’s lab
bitluni (bitluni) / Repositories · GitHub
ESP32 Serial Interface Modernizes Old Equipment
D-subminiature – Wikipedia
GitHub – jeelabs/esp-link: esp8266 wifi-serial bridge, outbound TCP, and arduino/AVR/LPC/NXP programmer
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Light The Way To Every Component
Broken 3D Printer Turned Scanning Microscope
Clock Uses Custom LED Displays To Keep Myst Time
Mike’s Picks:
A Raspberry Pi Terminal That’s Always Within Reach
Hubble Telescope Power Supply Tester On EBay
Spring Clamp Is Completely 3D Printed
Can’t-Miss Articles:
RF Modulation: Crash Course For Hackers
Hacking The Internet Of Things: Decoding LoRa
SignalsWiki
: Tons of modulation examples
P-51 Cockpit Recreated With Help Of Local Makerspace | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6217792",
"author": "lobster",
"timestamp": "2020-02-07T21:33:35",
"content": "I really like your podcast, which I listen to while on my way to work.What I would really appreciate: Include the shownotes in the feed metadata, so I can open the interesting links directly from within t... | 1,760,373,603.007582 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/the-multiyear-hunt-for-a-gameboy-games-bug/ | The Multiyear Hunt For A Gameboy Game’s Bug | Al Williams | [
"Games",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"debugging",
"Direct Memory Access",
"dma",
"Gameboy Advance",
"gba",
"reverse engineering"
] | [Enddrift] had a real problem trying to run a classic game, Hello Kitty Collection: Miracle Fashion Maker, into a GBA (Gameboy Advance) emulator. During startup, the game would hit an endless loop waiting for a read from a non-existent memory location and thus wouldn’t start under the emulator. The problem is, the
game works on real hardware even though that memory doesn’t exist there
, either.
To further complicate things, a similar bug exists when loading a saved game under Sonic Pinball Party. Then a hack for Pokemon Emerald surfaced that helped break the case. The story is pretty interesting.
You can read the details in the original post, but the upshot was that reading an invalid address on a GBA just reads the open bus because the device doesn’t have a memory management unit to throw a page fault — known in that world as a data abort. Turns out, you’d expect an open bus to read the last value you’d read or written — either some data or the last instruction fetch. But it is more complicated than that.
The code was reading ghost values not from the last CPU memory read and write, but from the last DMA cycle! The workaround is clever, too, since it compares the expected end of the DMA time with the current instruction and forces it to read the right value.
A great piece of detective work. We aren’t sure we are lining up to play Hello Kitty, but it is nice to know that we could. Especially if we had an emulator
inside our real device
. If your hacking desires run more to real hardware, we would suggest
this FPGA project
. | 7 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215746",
"author": "mtr",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T18:00:06",
"content": "This is just beautiful!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6215754",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T18:38:23",
"content": "N... | 1,760,373,603.088574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/this-week-in-security-openstmpd-kali-release-scareware-intel-and-unintended-consequences/ | This Week In Security: OpenSMTPD, Kali Release, Scareware, Intel, And Unintended Consequences | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Browlock",
"Kali",
"OpenSMTPD"
] | If you run an OpenBSD server, or have OpenSMTPD running on a server, go update it right now. Version 6.6.2, released January 28th, fixes an exploit that can be launched locally or remotely, simply by connecting to the SMTP service. This was found by Qualys, who waited till the update was released
to publish their findings
.
It’s a simple logic flaw in the code that checks incoming messages. If an incoming message has either an invalid sender’s username, or invalid domain, the message is sent into error handling logic. That logic checks if the domain is an empty string, in which case, the mail is processed as a local message, sent to the localhost domain. Because the various parts of OpenSMTPD operate by executing commands, this logic flaw allows an attacker to inject unexpected symbols into those commands. The text of the email serves as the script to run, giving an attacker plenty of room to totally own a system as a result.
Browser Locker
“Your browser has been locked to prevent damage from a virus. Please call our Windows help desk immediately to prevent further damage.” Sound familiar? I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve gotten from freaked-out customers, who stumbled upon a scare-ware site that locked their browser. This sort of scam is called a browlock, and one particular campaign was pervasive enough to catch
the attention of the researchers at Malwarebytes
(Note, the picture at the top of their article says “404 error”, a reference to a technique used by the scam. Keep reading, the content should be below that.).
“WOOF”, Malwarebyte’s nickname for this campaign, was unusual both in its sophistication and the chutzpah of those running it. Browsers were hit via ads right on the MSN homepage and other popular sites. Several techniques were used to get the malicious ads onto legitimate sites. The most interesting part of the campaign is the techniques used to only deliver the scareware payload to target computers, and avoid detection by automated scanners.
It seems that around the time Malwarebytes published their report, the central command and control infrastructure behind WOOF was taken down. It’s unclear if this was a coincidence, or was a result of the scrutiny they were under from the security community. Hopefully WOOF is gone for good, and won’t simply show up at a different IP address in a few days.
Kali Linux
Kali Linux, the distribution focused on security and penetration testing, just
shipped a shiny new release
. A notable new addition to the Kali lineup is a rootless version of their Android app. Running an unrooted Android, and interested in having access to some security tools on the go? Kali now has your back.
Not all the tools will work without root, particularly those that require raw sockets, and sending malformed packets. It’s still a potentially useful tool to put into your toolbox.
Cacheout, VRD, and Intel iGPU Leaks
Intel can’t catch a break, with three separate problems to talk about. First up is
cacheout
, or more properly, CVE-2020-0549, also known as
L1DES
. It’s a familiar song and dance, just a slightly different way to get there. On a context switch, data in the Level 1 cache isn’t entirely cleared, and known side-channel attacks can be used to read that data from unprivileged execution.
VRD,
Vector Register Sampling
, is another Intel problem just announced. So far, it seems to be a less exploitable problem, and microcode updates are expected soon to fix the issue.
The third issue is a bit different. Instead of the CPU, this is
a data leak via the integrated GPU
. You may be familiar with the most basic form of this problem. Some video games will flash garbage on the screen for a few moments while loading. In some cases, rather than just garbage, images, video stills, and other graphics can appear. Why? GPUs don’t necessarily have the same strict separation of contexts that we expect from CPUs. A group of researchers realized that the old assumptions no longer apply, as nearly every application is video accelerated to some degree. They published a proof of concept, linked above, that demonstrates the flaw. Before any details were released, Phoronix covered
the potential performance hit
this would cause on Linux, and it’s not great.
Unintended Legal Consequences
Remember the ransomware attack that crippled Baltimore, MD? Apparently the Maryland legislature decided to step in and put an end to ransomware, by
passing yet another law to make it illegal
. I trust you’ll forgive my cynicism, but the law in question is a slow-moving disaster. Among other things, it could potentially make the public disclosure of vulnerabilities a crime, all while doing absolutely nothing to actually make a difference.
GE Medical Equipment Scores 10/10
While scoring a 10 out of 10 is impressive, it’s not something to be proud of, when we’re talking about a CVE score, where it’s the most critical rating. GE Healthcare, subsidiary of General Electric, managed
five separate 10.0 CVEs in healthcare equipment that they manufacture
, and an 8.5 for a sixth. Among the jewels are statements like:
In the case of the affected devices, the configuration also contains a private key. …. The same private key is universally shared across an entire line of devices in the CARESCAPE and GE Healthcare family of products.
The rest of the vulnerabilities are just as crazy. Hard-coded SMB passwords, a network KVM that has no credential checking, and ancient VNC versions. We’ve known for quite some time that some medical equipment is grossly insecure. It will apparently take a security themed repeat of
the Therac-25 incident
before changes take place.
Odds’n’ends
The Windows 7 saga continues, as Microsoft’s “last” update for the venerable OS broke many users’ desktop backgrounds.
Microsoft plans to release a fix
.
Firefox
purged almost 200 extensions
from their official portal over the last few weeks. It was found that over
100 extensions by 2Ring
was secretly pulling and running code from a central server.
The Citrix problems we discussed last week has finally been addressed, and patches released, but not soon enough to prevent the installation of future-proof backdoors on devices in the wild. There are already plenty of
reports of compromised devices
. Apparently the exploitation has been so widespread, that Citrix has developed
a scanning tool
to check for the indicators of compromise (IoCs) on your devices. Apply patch, check for backdoors. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215704",
"author": "bsiege",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T15:05:19",
"content": "What the hell is OpenSTMPD? (wrong in header, correct in article)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6215732",
"author": "Pete",
"times... | 1,760,373,603.231547 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/stinger-the-hacked-machine-gun-of-iwo-jima/ | Stinger: The Hacked Machine Gun Of Iwo Jima | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"Browning",
"improvised",
"machine gun",
"salvage",
"world war 2",
"WW2"
] | During the Second World War, the United States was pumping out weapons, aircraft, and tanks at an absolutely astonishing rate. The production of military vehicles and equipment was industrialized like never before, and with luck, never will be again. But even still, soldiers overseas would occasionally find themselves in unique situations that required hardware that the factories back at home couldn’t provide them with.
A Stinger machine gun in WWII
Which is precisely how a few United States Marines designed and built the “Stinger” light machine gun (LMG) during the lead-up to the invasion of Iwo Jima in 1945. The Stinger was a Browning .30 caliber AN/M2, salvaged from a crashed or otherwise inoperable aircraft, that was modified for use by infantry. It was somewhat ungainly, and as it was designed to be cooled by the air flowing past it while in flight, had a tendency to overheat quickly. But even with those shortcomings it was an absolutely devastating weapon; with a rate of fire at least twice that of the standard Browning machine guns the Marines had access to at the time.
Six Stingers were produced, and at least on a Battalion level, were officially approved for use in combat. After seeing how successful the weapon was during the invasion of Iwo Jima, there was even some talk of putting the Stinger into larger scale production and distributing them. But the war ended before such a plan could be put into place.
As such, the Stinger is an exceedingly rare example of a field modified weapon that was not only produced in significant numbers, but officially recognized and even considered for adoption by the military. But the story of this hacked machine gun actually started years earlier and thousands of kilometers away, as Allied forces battled for control of the Solomon Islands.
Battlefield Improvisation
Looking for any possible advantage over a tenacious and entrenched adversary, the fact that soldiers would attempt to re-purpose the AN/M2 for infantry use is hardly a surprise. After all, there would have been no shortage of these high-performance weapons. The AN/M2 was fitted as defensive armament on many US Navy aircraft used in the Pacific theater, such as the SBD Dauntless, PBY Catalina, and Grumman Avenger. Each time one of these aircraft became too damaged to fly, several AN/M2s would become available.
Twin .30 AN/M2 guns mounted in a SBD Dauntless
The weapon also had some very compelling features. Since it was developed for use in planes, it was built to be as light as possible while still delivering the high rate of fire necessary for air-to-air combat. Compared to the standard M1919 Browning in use by infantry, the AN/M2 would have seemed like a considerable upgrade.
Unfortunately, while the gun was light enough to easily carry, it was impractical for a soldier to actually operate reliably in its standard configuration. Never intended to be used outside of an aircraft’s defensive turret, the AN/M2 didn’t have it own sights, a stock, or even a traditional trigger. It had all of the functional components, but none of the features which would allow a person to operate it.
But this didn’t stop Private William “Bill” Colby from pushing one into service while defending Bougainville island in 1943. By hastily attaching a bipod to the front of the AN/M2, he was able to rig the weapon up well enough to provide fire from a defensive position. The additional firepower allowed Colby to successfully repel a surprise Japanese assault, proving that the concept had enough merit to warrant further development.
Preparing for the Invasion
A year later, Sergeant Milan Grevich and Private First Class John Lyttle came up with their own take on the AN/M2 modification. While Private Colby’s addition of a bipod allowed the weapon to be fired from a stationary position, the Marines needed something they could take with them as they advanced from Iwo Jima’s beaches and moved deeper into the island. For their purposes, the AN/M2 would need to be far more mobile, and potentially even usable by a single soldier from a standing position.
Firearms researcher Ian McCollum
holds a replica Stinger
Spare stocks for the M1 Garand rifle were cut down to size, hollowed out to accept the unique shape of the machine gun’s rear buffer tube, and bolted to the back of the gun. A trigger assembly was fashioned from scraps of sheet metal, and an adapter was fabricated so the bipod and carrying handle from the far smaller Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) could be fitted.
Simplistic front and rear sights were also fashioned (or in some cases, taken from a BAR) so the operator would have an idea of where their shots would land. But as the Stinger was meant to be used as a suppressive weapon in relatively close quarters, pinpoint accuracy was never really the goal.
The Stinger was born, and just in time. Supposedly the finishing touches were still being made on the guns even as the Marines sailed towards Iwo Jima. Gervich himself carried one of the six weapons into battle, four were distributed among the Company’s rifle platoons, and the last one was given to Corporal Tony Stein.
Legend of the Stinger
As Corporal Stein wasn’t from the same Company as Gervich or Lyttle, there’s some debate as to why he received a Stinger of his own. But as a machinist by trade, it’s possible that he assisted in the assembly of the weapons with the understanding he would be given one once they reached Iwo Jima. In any event, the exploits of Corporal Stein and his Stinger were
immortalized in his posthumous Medal of Honor citation
:
The first man of his unit to be on station after hitting the beach in the initial assault, Cpl. Stein,
armed with a personally improvised aircraft-type weapon
, provided rapid covering fire as the remainder of his platoon attempted to move into position.
….
Cool and courageous under the merciless hail of exploding shells and bullets which fell on all sides, he continued to
deliver the fire of his skillfully improvised weapon at a tremendous rate of speed
which rapidly exhausted his ammunition.
While the Stinger moniker itself was perhaps deemed inappropriate for inclusion in a formal citation, the fact that the weapon and its improvised nature was specifically mentioned multiple times speaks to how effective it was during the battle. Had the war continued much longer, it seems almost a certainty that more Stingers (officially sanctioned or not) would have been produced as soldiers heard accounts of how they performed on Iwo Jima.
A Brief Moment in Time
Despite the success of the Stinger at Iwo Jima, the story stops here. Six months after American forces raised the flag on Mount Suribachi, Emperor Hirohito officially announced that Japan would agree to the unconditional surrender outlined in the Potsdam Declaration.
Raising the American flag on Iwo Jima
Whatever interest there had been in mass producing the Stinger, or an LMG like it, the end of the war made it unnecessary. Like many of the
other fearsome weapons that were proposed or tested
during the the last throes of the Second World War, it was deemed excessive in the post-war era.
So where are the Stingers now? Nobody actually knows. Since they were built out of scrap parts, they wouldn’t have appeared on any official manifest. Once the war ended, weapons and equipment were often unceremoniously discarded. It’s entirely possible they never left Iwo Jima, and ended up buried under the island’s black sands. Or if they did get removed, they could have been dumped in the ocean along with all the other wartime hardware which suddenly became more of a burden than an asset. There may even be a Stinger collecting dust out there in someone’s attic; part of a trove of souvenirs that a stoic Marine brought home from the war, now dutifully stored by his grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
While the Stingers themselves may be lost, the story of the men who built them continues on. More than 75 years after a few enterprising young Marines decided to see if they could cobble together a machine gun more powerful than anything in their Government-sanctioned inventory, one can’t help but be inspired by their ingenuity as they prepared for what they knew might be the last days of their lives. | 55 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216354",
"author": "bandit",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T15:25:39",
"content": "Semper Fi !!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6216358",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T15:45:56",
"content": "During th... | 1,760,373,603.180811 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/deploy-workaround-code-to-the-field-when-the-field-is-lunar-orbit/ | Deploy Workaround Code To The Field When “The Field” Is Lunar Orbit | Roger Cheng | [
"Space"
] | [
"abort",
"apollo",
"apollo 14",
"Apollo AGC",
"Apollo Guidance Computer",
"Apollo Lunar Module",
"moon",
"nasa"
] | The Apollo missions still inspire people today, decades after they took place. A fortunate side effect of the global public relations campaign is that a lot of information is publicly available for us to review and process. We’re right around the 49th anniversary of Apollo 14 mission, so it was a good time for [Frank O’Brien] to take readers through
Apollo Guidance Computer and the hack that saved Apollo 14
(while it was in lunar orbit).
Space fans would already know many parts of this piece, but [Frank] weaves it together into a single narrative around a problematic “Abort” button that was found to be making intermittent contact as the crew were preparing to land on the moon. An inconvenient timing would have unnecessarily aborted the mission, which was obviously Not Good. [Frank] brings us up to speed on AGC fundamentals, just enough to understand the technical constraints for the hack, devised within the time constraints they faced.
For those that prefer a short video summary [Scott Manley]
covered this same hack on YouTube
. And for another perspective on the scope of this task, remember this was years before we had vi or emacs. When they were contemplating flipping status bits as programs were running, it’s not trivial to do a global search for code that might examine those bits. Look at
the tome of source code
AGC programmer [
Don Eyles
] worked with. Space fans who want to learn more can
check out [Don]’s book
.
For the ultimate AGC talk, check out
The Ultimate AGC Talk
.
Maybe someday trips to the moon will be a commonplace thing, but Apollo will always be the pioneer. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216321",
"author": "Shoe",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T12:33:20",
"content": ">We’re right around the 19th anniversary of Apollo 14 missionSurely you mean 49th, my memory is poor but I’m fairly sure Apollo wasn’t flying in 2001!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,373,603.04504 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/03/avros-project-1794-a-canadian-flying-saucer/ | AVRO’s Project 1794: A Canadian Flying Saucer | Al Williams | [
"History"
] | [
"avro",
"avrocar",
"flying saucer",
"UFO"
] | If you ask those of us who grew up somewhere in the 1950s to 1970s what our car would be like in the year 2020, we might have described an
Avrocar
. This top secret vehicle from Canadian Avro was part hovercraft and part jet-powered vertical takeoff vehicle. There were two prototypes actually made and [Real Engineering] has a short video on how the prototypes worked, how the real design might have worked, and even has a lot of footage of the actual devices. You can see the video below.
The designer, [Jack Frost], experimented with ground effect and the Coanda effect. The Canadian branch of Avro, a British company, worked with the U.S. military and if you look at it, you wonder how many UFO sightings it caused. Nothing like a flying disk 18 feet in diameter going over your backyard to make you call the newspapers. On second thought, it probably never got enough altitude for that to happen.
The ground effect is well understood by anyone who has seen a hovercraft working. The Conada effect is a little more obscure. This is the effect where a fluid — and for this purpose, air is a fluid — will hug a convex shape. According to the video, the Conada effect inspired the shape, but might not have been very significant for the actual operation.
[Frost’s] saucer was airflow neutral, but with some carefully-placed jet engines, the craft could create a virtual airfoil. In theory, the craft could take off and land vertically, but also be made to perform well at both subsonic and supersonic speeds.
Of course, a theory is one thing and practice often another. The aerodynamic center of pressure was too far away from the center of gravity. The craft was unstable and the mechanical systems of the day couldn’t tame it.
Although the project survived in one way or another from the early 1950s, by 1961 the program ended. What had started as a futuristic combination helicopter and jet fighter had been reduced to little more than a hovercraft. Ironically, if the Avrocar had a skirt to form a plenum chamber, it would have probably been the first hovercraft, which launched in 1959.
We looked at the
Conada effect
before. You can use it to lift
a lot of things
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216326",
"author": "Gerrit Visser",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T13:08:41",
"content": "I lived in Malton at the time. Never saw this fly over but did see and hear the Avro Arrow multiple times. Sad how we lost all that tech to south of the border. Spineless politicians :-(",
"pare... | 1,760,373,603.277801 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/02/up-your-game-with-diy-headset-motion-tracking/ | Up Your Game With DIY Headset Motion Tracking | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"accelerometer",
"head tracking",
"motion control",
"usb hid"
] | While there’s been a lot of advancements in VR gaming over the last couple of years, plenty of folks are still happy enough to just stare at their monitor. But that’s not to say some of those fancy head-tracking tricks wouldn’t be a welcome addition to their repertoire. For players who are literally looking to get their head in the game,
[Adrian Schwizgebel] has created qeMotion
.
The idea here is simple enough: attach a motion sensor to a standard gaming headset (here a MPU-6050 IMU), and use the data from it to virtually “press” keys through USB HID emulation. Many first person shooter games offer the ability to lean left or right by pressing Q or E respectively, so all [Adrian] had to do was map the appropriate accelerometer readings to those keys for it to work seamlessly with popular titles such as
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
and
Insurgency.
The concept might be basic, but the execution is anything but. Rather than just duct taping an Arduino to his headset, [Adrian] designed a very slick 3D printed enclosure for the electronics that sits on his desk. While they haven’t all been implemented yet, the devices features indicator lights and buttons to switch through various modes. The sensor on the headset has similarly been encased in a very professional looking 3D printed box, complete with a nice braided cable to link it to the desk unit.
It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a head tracking project, and
most of those utilized something like the Wii Remote
. Adding sensors to a person’s head normally wouldn’t be an ideal situation, but if you’re going to be wearing the headset anyway to listen to the game and chat, it’s not really a problem. If your hair is too nice for the qeMotion,
you could always try doing something similar with computer vision
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216290",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T06:53:37",
"content": "been rather interested in an imu based alternative to my aging trackir. given the kind of games i play lean towards the simpit side of things and away from hmd based vr. stereo displays arent very use... | 1,760,373,603.408615 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/02/lego-space-station-designed-by-fan/ | Lego Space Station Designed By Fan | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"international space station",
"iss",
"lego",
"nasa"
] | It is no secret that most people like to play with Lego, but some people really like it to an extreme degree. Lego’s Idea platform lets people submit designs for review and also lets users vote on these designs. If accepted, the company works with the designer to put a kit in production and they share in the profits. [Christophe Ruge] submitted his
design for the International Space Station
and three years later, you can buy it on the Lego website.
The kit has 864 parts and the finished model is 12″ x 19″ x 7″ — probably will take longer than a coffee break to finish it. The model even includes the two rotating Solar Alpha Rotary Joints that allow the solar panels to align with the sun. You can see [Scott] building his on a recorded live stream below if you have 3 hours to kill.
The $70 price isn’t bad. You can spend a lot more on a kit that is probably a lot more work. It looks pretty accurate, too.
We suspect the build might be above our average Lego skill level. However, the build instruction link on the Lego website doesn’t pull up anything yet, so it is too early to tell. If it were not so big, we’d probably do the
paper version
, instead.
We shouldn’t be surprised about a Lego space station. After all, we’ve seen a
drone
and a
submarine
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216267",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T03:41:28",
"content": "I have a Rule of Thumb I use when buying LEGO.Divide the Price by the number of Pieces.If the result is less than $0.10 per piece, I’ll consider buying it.If the price is less than $0.05 per piece, I’ll proba... | 1,760,373,603.45198 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/02/hackaday-links-february-2-2020/ | Hackaday Links: February 2, 2020 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"2020 Hackaday Belgrade",
"con",
"ct",
"digital detox",
"hackaday links",
"larynx",
"LoRaWAN",
"mummy",
"security",
"serbia",
"surplus",
"voice"
] | Is it just me or did January seem to last for about three months this year? A lot has happened since the turn of the decade 31 days ago, both in the normie world and in our space. But one of the biggest pieces of news in the hacker community is something that won’t even happen for four more months:
Hackaday Belgrade
. The annual conference in Hackaday’s home-away-from-home in Serbia was announced, and as usual, one had to be a very early bird to score discount tickets. Regular tickets are still on sale, but I suspect that won’t last long.
The call for proposals
for talks went out earlier in the month, and you should really consider standing up and telling the world what you know. Or tell them what you don’t know and want to find out – there’s no better way to make connections in this community, and no better place to do it.
Someone dropped a tip this week about the possible closing of
Tanner Electronics
, the venerable surplus dealer located in Carrollton, Texas, outside of Dallas and right around the corner from Dallas Makerspace. The report from someone visiting the store is that the owner has to either move the store or close it down. I spoke to someone at the store who didn’t identify herself, but she confirmed that they need to either downsize or close. She said they’re actively working with a realtor and are optimistic that they’ll find a space that fits their needs, but the clock is ticking – they only have until May to make the change. We covered Tanner’s in a 2015 article on
“The Death of Surplus”
. It would be sad to lose yet another surplus store; as much as we appreciate being able to buy anything and everything online, nothing beats the serendipity that can strike walking up and down aisles filled with old stuff. We wish them the best of luck.
Are you finding that the smartphone in your pocket is more soul-crushing than empowering? You’re not alone, and more and more people are trying a “digital detox” to free themselves from the constant stimulation. And there’s no better way to go about this than by
turning your smartphone into a not-so-smart phone
. Envelope, a paper cocoon for your phone, completely masks the screen, replacing it with a simple printed keypad. A companion app allows you to take and make phone calls or use the camera, plus provides a rudimentary clock, but that’s it. The app keeps track of how long you can go before unwrapping your phone and starting those sweet, sweet dopamine hits again. It reminds us a bit of the story we also saw this week about phone separation anxiety in school kids, and
the steps schools are taking to mitigate that problem
.
We saw a lot of articles this week on
a LoRaWAN security vulnerability
. The popular IoT network protocol has been billed as “secure by default”, but
a white paper
released by cybersecurity firm
IOActive
found a host of potential attack vectors. Their main beef seems to be that client devices which are physically accessible can be reverse engineered to reveal their encryption keys. They also point out the obvious step of taking the QR code off of client devices so an attacker can’t generate session keys for the device.
And finally, the mummy speaks! If you ever wondered what the voice of someone who lived 3,000 years ago sounded like, wonder no more. Using computed tomography (CT) data, scientists in the UK and Germany have
recreated the vocal tract
of Nesyamun, an Egyptian scribe and priest from the time of pharaoh Rameses XI. He died in his mid-50s, and his mummified remains have been studied since the 1800s. CT data was used to 3D-print Nesyamun’s larynx and nasopharynx, which was then placed atop a “Vocal Tract Organ”, possibly
the strangest musical instrument in existence
. The resulting vowel-like utterance is brief, to say the least, but it’s clear and strong, and it’s pretty impressive that we can recreate the voice of someone who lived and died three millennia ago.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/41598_2019_56316_MOESM2_ESM.wav | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216243",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-02-03T00:37:51",
"content": "Now all one needs is a preserved body. Not always the case.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6216250",
"author": "chango",
"timestamp": "2020... | 1,760,373,603.509686 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/02/a-tiny-usb-hub-for-all-your-hardware-modding-needs/ | A Tiny USB Hub For All Your Hardware Modding Needs | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"0603",
"FE1.1s",
"SSOP-20",
"USB hub"
] | Going all the way hack to the heady days of Eee PC modding, hardware hackers have been on the hunt for small USB hubs that can easily be liberated from their enclosures and integrated into whatever project they happen to be working on. From time to time you see recommendations out there for makes and models which lend themselves to this sort of repurposing, but it’s seemed more difficult than necessary to source such a basic component.
Which is why
[RETROCUTION] has developed a USB hub that’s not only extremely small
, but relatively easy to assemble with only six components. Plus best of all, they are dirt cheap.
When you add up the cost of getting the PCBs made and buying all the SMD components, the per-unit price of these hubs is only going to be a few dollars. If you’ve got what it takes to make the PCBs in-house, even better. Considering how much easier these things could make other projects, it seems more than worth the upfront cost.
The star of the show is the FE1.1s, a four port USB 2.0 controller in a SSOP-28 package. As of this writing, it goes for about 25 cents from the usual overseas sources (even less, for larger orders). Add to the mix a few 10 μF ceramic capacitors, a 2.7 kΩ resistor, and a 12 MHz crystal.
There’s no provision for actual USB ports in the design, but they would just take up space anyway; this hub is intended to be directly soldered to the other devices. Incidentally, to reduce the number of traces and pads on the PCB, there aren’t power lines for the downstream devices either. So you’ll need to power them separately.
The passives are 0603, but the crystal is a good old fashioned through-hole component. [RETROCUTION] assembles the boards with a solder paste stencil and a hot air station,
but if you’ve got a little practice
, it’s certainly something you could do with an iron. With such a straightforward design, you could build a lifetime supply of these itty-bitty hubs in an afternoon. That’s certainly our plan, anyway. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6216214",
"author": "Electronic Eel",
"timestamp": "2020-02-02T21:38:47",
"content": "The FE1.1 has just a single transaction translator. When using multiple usb 1.1 devices in parallel this is not a good idea as it slows the transfers down unnecessarily.I suggest the GL852G instead... | 1,760,373,603.750384 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/sonic-the-hedgehog-self-balancing-robot-can-bend-at-the-knees/ | Sonic The Hedgehog Self-Balancing Robot Can Bend At The Knees | Danie Conradie | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"2 wheel robot",
"boston dynamics",
"pid control",
"Self Balancing Robot",
"sonic"
] | Building your own self-balancing robot is a rite of passage for anyone getting into the field of robotics. Master of robots, [James Bruton] has been there, done that, and collected a few T-shirts. Now he’s building a large
Sonic the Hedgehog self balancing robot
that can bend at the knees and hip, allowing it to lean while turning and handle uneven terrain. Check out the first video embedded after the break.
Standing about 1 m tall, the robot is inspired by Boston Dynamic’s box handling bot,
Handle
. It’s “skeleton” consists of 20×20 aluminium extrusions, bolted together using a bunch of 3D printed fittings in the signature blue and red of Sonic. The wheels and tyres are also 3D printed, and driven by brushless motor via a toothed belt. The knee/hip mechanism is actuated using a ball screw, also driven by a brushless motor.
[James] intends to implement an active shock absorption system into the leg mechanism, using the same technique he
tried on his OpenDog robot
. It works by bolting a load cell onto one of the leg extrusion to sense when it flexes under load, and then actuating the knee mechanism to absorb the force. His first version of the system on OpenDog used PWM signals to send the load cell data to the main controller, but the motors on the legs induced enough noise in the signal wires to make it unusable. He has since started experimenting with the CAN bus protocol, which was specifically designed to work reliably in noisy systems like modern automobiles. If he gets it working on the two legs of this Sonic robot, he plans to also implement it on the quadruped OpenDog.
This is another very ambitious project from [James], and we’re really looking forward to the next instalments. With a bunch of complex projects under his belt, like a
series of full size Star Wars robots
, we have high hopes for success. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215738",
"author": "RetiredHobgoblin",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T17:31:28",
"content": "Firstly, I doubt he has the correct license from SEGA to use Sonic to endorse his project. Second, he hasn’t done the proper patent search to make sure his approach doesn’t infringe on BD’s or an... | 1,760,373,603.675326 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/31/this-crossbow-fires-cannonballs/ | This Crossbow Fires Cannonballs! | Jenny List | [
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"crossbow",
"diy crossbow",
"home made crossbow"
] | The would-be invader of a mediaeval kingdom could expect to face some stern opposition from a variety of formidable weaponry. Making modern versions of these deadly curiosities seems to be a popular pursuit, and the bug has bitten [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle], who’s created what he calls a “Stonebow”,
a crossbow on steroids that fires stones or large ball bearings with considerable force
.
It uses a couple of leaves from automotive springs, mounted in a welded steel riser with two strings and a pouch for the projectile. The barrel is an oak fencing post, and at its other end is a cocking lever which also forms a stock, and a cleverly designed trigger mechanism. The projectile is loaded, the bow is cocked, and it is fired at a scrap Land Rover radiator in which it places a satisfying impact mark.
Despite two successful firings it’s evident that so much force isn’t easy to contain. The crimps that secure the strings aren’t up to the job, and neither is the oak fence post, which has cracked at the end. We trust that our Essex hacker friend will return having fixed these flaws, and more defenceless scrap car parts will be sacrificed for our entertainment.
We’ve featured [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle] before, most recently
building a mini-bike for his youngsters
. Meanwhile, enjoy the Stonebow in the video below the break. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215648",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T09:23:56",
"content": "there where mainly hunting crossbows like that during XV-XVII centuries. Bolts are better for heavier targets but on light game birds rabbits and so on round ball is good.",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,373,603.880627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/ohio-scientific-300-trainer/ | The Ohio Scientific 300 Trainer | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"OSI",
"retrocomputing"
] | In the late 1970s there were a host of companies that dominated the computer market before the introduction of the IBM PC. One of these was Ohio Scientific or OSI. [BradH] has an OSI Model 300 trainer — their first major product — and
gives us a peek
at it along with some history of the company.
Companies like OSI, Southwest Technical Products, Osborne, Northstar, and PolyMorphic were the second wave after the likes of MITS and IMSAI had opened the personal computer market. Only a few companies like Apple hung on and made it work over the long haul.
If the history lesson isn’t for you, the technical talk starts at 4 minutes into the video below the break. This is a 6502 with 128 bytes of RAM. Not 128 megabytes or even kilobytes. 128 bytes. There’s a pretty traditional front panel with switches and LEDs.
We were impressed the board is still working. The typewritten manual looks odd today, and the board reminded us of a precursor of machines such as the KIM-1 and even the old Apple computer — the one that was also a small 6502 board and is now retconned as the Apple I.
We love these little peeks at old hardware. This would be a fun one to reproduce on a breadboard. The hand-drawn PC board shows there isn’t much to connect compared to almost anything you’d build today.
Watching [BradH] flip the switches, we couldn’t help but remember
our own tour of the PDP-8
. That one was an emulator, but we love
[Oscar’s] recreation
for doing real switch flipping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vww6XbDc2pY | 48 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215619",
"author": "Thrasher",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T06:14:12",
"content": "This is so cool! The only thing cooler would be to rip out all the components and put an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi on the board.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,603.967932 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/remotexy-simplifies-arduino-control/ | RemoteXY Simplifies Arduino Control | Al Williams | [
"Android Hacks",
"Arduino Hacks",
"ipod hacks"
] | [
"mobile phone",
"remotexy",
"smartphone"
] | [Labpacks] wanted to build a robot car controlled by his phone. As a Hackaday reader, of course you probably can imagine building the car. Most could probably even write a phone application to do the control. But do you want to? In most cases, you are better off focusing on what you need to do and using something off the shelf for the parts that you can. In [Labpacks’] case, he used Visuino to avoid writing ordinary code and
RemoteXY to handle the smartphone interface
.
RemoteXY is a website that allows you to easily build a phone interface that will talk to your hardware over Bluetooth LE, USB, or Ethernet (including WiFi). One thing of interest: even though the interface builder is Web-based, the service claims that the interface structure stays on the controller. There’s no interaction with the remote servers when operating the user interface so there is no need for an external Internet connection.
The system supports Arduino and ESP controllers. On the phone side, you can use Android or iOS. The
RemoteXY site has plenty of examples
.
We know there are other ways to do this, including just rolling your own. However, it is nice to have different options and RemoteXY has all the usual controls, including a joystick, a color picker, a level, graphs, and more.
We did our own version of this project using
Blynk
. We’ve also seen
Visuino
before, too. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215603",
"author": "ehrichweiss",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T04:15:14",
"content": "Is there something like RemoteXY that interfaces with more than Arduino? I already know one other way I’m going to do this but I’m looking to have my phone control my RasPi in this manner if possible.... | 1,760,373,603.8303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/this-is-it-for-the-particle-mesh-network/ | This Is It For The Particle Mesh Network | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"mesh networking",
"particle",
"Particle Mesh",
"Particle Xenon"
] | The long-held dream of wireless network hackers everywhere is to dispense with centralised network infrastructure, and instead rely on a distributed network in which the clients perform the role of distribution and routing of traffic. These so-called mesh networks promise scalability and simplicity on paper, but are in practice never as easy to implement as the theory might suggest. Much venture capital has been burned over the years by startups chasing that particular dream, yet most of our wireless connectivity still follows a hub topology.
An exciting development in our sphere concerning mesh networking came in early 2018, when Particle, the purveyors of wireless-equipped dev boards, launched their third generation of products. These offered mesh networking alongside their other features, but this week they have announced that
they’ll no longer be developing that particular side of their offering
. The Wi-Fi-equipped Argon and Cellular-equipped Boron will remain on sale, but they will henceforth discontinue the mesh-only Xenon. Existing owners of the now orphaned board will be compensated with store credit.
Their rationale for discontinuing mesh networking is interesting, and reflects on the sentiment in our first paragraph. Mesh networking is
hard
, and in particular their attempt to make it work with zero configuration was simply not successful. But then they talk about the realisation that maybe mesh networking was not the right solution for the IoT applications the boards were being used in, and
perhaps another technology such as LoRa
would be more appropriate.
So the mesh experiment from Particle is over, but the company and its connected dev boards are very much still with us. We salute them for being bold enough to try it, and we wonder when we’ll next find a piece of similar mesh networking hardware. | 24 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215567",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T00:41:46",
"content": "Store-and-forward on steroids.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6215573",
"author": "dj",
"timestamp": "2020-01-31T00:56:07",
"content": ... | 1,760,373,604.76911 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/poking-around-the-wide-world-of-bluetooth/ | Poking Around The Wide World Of Bluetooth | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino Nano 33 BLE",
"ble",
"bluetooth",
"Bluetooth Classic",
"bluetooth low energy",
"ESP32",
"wireless"
] | Bluetooth is a technology with a very interesting history. When it first came around in the late 1990s, it promised to replace the mess of wires that was tucked behind every desk of the day. Unfortunately, the capabilities of early Bluetooth didn’t live up to the hype, and it never quite took off. It wasn’t until the rise of the smartphone more than a decade later that Bluetooth, now several versions more advanced, really started to make sense.
As [Larry Bank] explains in a recent blog post, that means there’s
a whole lot to learn if you want to really understand Bluetooth hacking
. For example, the Bluetooth versions that were used in the 1990s and 2000s are actually a completely different protocol from that which most modern devices are using. But the original protocol, now referred to as “Classic”, is still supported and in use.
That means to really get your head wrapped around working with Bluetooth, you need to learn about the different versions and all the tools and tricks associated with them. To that end, [Larry] does a great job of breaking down the primary versions of Bluetooth and the sort of tools you might find yourself using. That includes microcontrollers such as the ESP32 or Arduino Nano 33 BLE.
But the post isn’t just theory. [Larry] also goes over a few real-world projects of his that utilize Bluetooth, such as getting a portable printer working with his Arduino, or figuring out how to use those tiny mobile phone game controllers for his own purposes. Even if you don’t have these same devices, there’s a good chance that the methods used and lessons learned will apply to whatever Bluetooth gadgets you’ve got your eye on.
Readers may recall [Larry] from our previous coverage of his exploits, such as his efforts to
increase the frame rate of the SSD1306 OLED display
or his
wireless bootloader for the SMART Response XE
. Whenever we see his name pop up in the Tip Line, we know a fascinating hardware deep dive isn’t far behind. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215561",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2020-01-30T23:57:20",
"content": "Funny how one of the oldest consumer com standards MIDI has a bluetooth standard only recently and there is not a lot of bandwidth in MIDI. Perhaps the need for low latency was the hurdle. Also only wit... | 1,760,373,604.01788 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/understand-linux-htop-visually/ | Understand Linux Htop Visually | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"htop",
"linux",
"top"
] | If you want to know exactly what’s going on in your Linux system, some of you might reach for
top
. For the connoisseur of system monitors, nothing less than
htop
will do. Not familiar with
htop
? [Umer Mansoor] did
a beautiful job of explaining it graphically
.
We’ve mentioned
htop
in a previous
Linux Fu
, but we’ve never gotten a chance to dig into it. And now, we don’t have to. Like
top
, the
htop
program is still text-based, but it has a much nicer interface with colors, and easier way to send signals to processes, and support for tree displays. You can even use the mouse with it if you want to.
[Umer] did a lot of work to take screenshots of
htop
at work and annotate them. Sure, you could read the man page, but we think this is a lot better.
Of course, there are other improvements to top.
Glances
is pretty interesting, for example. For serious system administration help, you can try
Webmin or Cockpit
. | 33 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215507",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-01-30T19:33:08",
"content": "I still miss the old “System Monitor” terminal window in the corner of the screen.I hope when I install my next Linux (without systemd), I’ll be able to get one back.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,604.085202 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/retrotechtacular-teasmade/ | Retrotechtacular: Teasmade | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"home hacks",
"Interest",
"Retrotechtacular",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"appliance",
"retrotechtacular",
"teamaker",
"teasmade"
] | We’re used to our domestic appliances being completely automated in 2020, but not so long ago they were much simpler affairs. Not everything required a human to run it though, an unexpected piece of electromechanical automation could be found in British bedrooms. This is the story of the Goblin Teasmade, an alarm clock with a little bit extra.
But Does It Make The Tea?
The height of late-1960s sophistication.
All countries have their own oddities that everyone who hails from them know, and are surprised when they find that nowhere else in the world has heard of them. I can’t speak for readers outside the UK, but for us those things include Christmas crackers and Marmite.
There’s another one that nobody but Brits have heard of though, and it’s the Teasmade. An unexpected confluence of alarm clock and teapot that would wake its owner to a hot cup of tea at their bedside, your aunt or your grandmother would have probably had one back in the 1970s. It’s a gloriously naff piece of mid-century ephemera that is not part of the typical house in the 2020s, but on the other hand it’s an electromechanical curiosity that bears a second look. For a few tenners at our favourite online auction house I secured a Teasmade — a late 1960s model 834B — and set to work with it on the bench.
What I unwrapped was a unit the size of a stack of hardback books, with an angular ’60s styled clock and lamp assembly at the front. Behind the clock is a platform hosting a curiously cube-like teapot and an electric kettle. The teapot is completely conventional, but the kettle is not the same as your everyday one. The spout is a pipe that protrudes into the body of the kettle down to just above the element, and instead of fitting loosely its lid engages and turns to form a tight seal. The final feature at the back of the unit is that the kettle sits upon a sprung platform with a switch underneath it, which is designed to settle down and close only when it has a load of water in it.
Satisfyingly low-tech brains of the unit, an AC clock and buzzer.
The kettle full switch cuts power to the element when the tea is made.
They Didn’t Need Microcontrollers In Those Days
Electrically it’s a simple enough design. The clock is an AC-synchronous mechanical unit typical of what could be found in millions of homes worldwide at the time. When its alarm is triggered it closes the circuit through the kettle platform switch (ensuring it’s not heating an empty kettle) and to the kettle element via the flying lead. Once the kettle boils it forces the hot water up the spout by steam pressure. As the water leaves the kettle, the switch in the platform opens. This shuts off the element and in turn completes a circuit that sets off a buzzer and powers up the lamp. A pair of switches on the front allow control of both buzzer and lamp.
There’s nothing to stop a careless user from forgetting to place the teapot spout under the kettle spout, and having boiling water gushing all over their bedside table.
This appliance was made in the days before mandatory safety certifications, the unit doesn’t even bear a British Standard Kitemark.
Setting it up is a case of filling the kettle, putting a pair of teabags in the teapot, and placing both in their respective positions on the back of the unit. Ensure both switches are in the correct position, and go to sleep until the alarm sounds and wakes you up with a cup of fresh tea awaiting in the teapot.
There’s one more interesting design feature at play. This is a small kettle with only a 600W element, about a quarter of that a standard British kettle has. It thus boils very slowly, and most importantly quietly, so it allows you to sleep soundly until the tea is ready. Alas, the effect is lost as the buzzer is a loud and raucous buzz, and hardly a relaxing sound to wake up to.
So Where Have All The Teasmades Gone?
The workings of one of the final iterations of the classic Teasmade, from UK patent
GB1597834A
, 1978.
The Teasmade may have had its heyday in the few decades following WW2, but the history of similar machines stretches back to the late 19th century. A patent search turns up a plethora of automatic tea and coffee makers, but the one that would become the Teasmade had its origins in the 1930s. British patent number
414088A
was filed in 1933, and the design was refined and improved thereafter. Though it no longer enjoys the popularity it might have seem half a century ago it is still possible to buy a Teasmade, albeit one of a slightly different design.
The Teasmade in its current form,
the Swan Teasmade
.
In the 21st century we are surrounded by automated devices thanks to the easy availability of microcontrollers, so it is easy to forget that in decades past a simple electromechanical appliance such as this one would have seemed the last word in futuristic luxury. It’s interesting to note that the Texas Instruments TMS1000, the progenitor of all microcontrollers, had domestic appliances as one of its core target markets back in the early 1970s.
So why have we abandoned the fully automated wake-up that the Teasmade promised, and why do me not have a
Wallace and Gromit
style start to the day courtesy of modern silicon? I think the answer lies in the staid image I alluded to earlier, that it was the choice of bedside adornment for your middle-aged or elderly relatives rather than anybody remotely cool. The tea would have been poured into the bone china teacup set that Goblin sold as an accessory rather than into a chipped mug with a jokey slogan on it, and who on earth would want
that
in their 1980s bedsit? Perhaps Goblin said it best themselves in their advertising slogan: “
The next best thing to sleeping
“.
My Teasmade will be passed on to a retro-enthusiast friend to whom I owe a favour, and I hope it will complement the rest of her awesomely mid-century home. Meanwhile I’ll continue to stumble down the stairs every morning and make my tea the modern way; by hand. | 70 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215472",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-01-30T18:23:27",
"content": "Before passing it on to your friend,you WILL put an ESP32 into it, because…Right?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6369665",
"author": "Stone... | 1,760,373,604.257358 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/nfc-for-your-home-automation/ | NFC For Your Home Automation | Brian McEvoy | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"home automation",
"IFTTT",
"IoT",
"near field communication",
"NFC",
"Radio-frequency identification",
"rfid",
"wifi"
] | If home automation in the IoT era has taught us anything, it is that no one wants to run wires. Many of us rent, so new cabling is not even an option, even if we wanted to go that route. If you want a unique sensor, you have to build your own, and [tmkThings] wanted an
NFC scanner at his front door
. Just like arriving at work, he scans his credentials, and the door unlocks automagically.
Inside a little white box, we find an ESP8266 speaking Wifi attached to a PN532 talking NFC, and both are familiar names on these pages. The code, which is available on GitHub, links up with IFTTT and MQTT. For the security-minded, we won’t see this on your front door, but you can trigger your imagination’s limit of events from playing your favorite jams at the end of the day to powering down all the televisions at bedtime.
NFC
hacks are great because they are instantly recognizable and readers are inexpensive, but
deadbolt hacking
is delightful in our books.
Thank you, [c00p3r] for the tip. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215457",
"author": "Rent a Wire",
"timestamp": "2020-01-30T17:35:20",
"content": "“If home automation in the IoT era has taught us anything, it is that no one wants to run wires.”Wrong! I do!I’ve found the lifespan of wireless routers to be ridiculous. It might as well be IP via fr... | 1,760,373,604.14883 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/the-spitzer-space-telescope-ends-its-incredible-journey/ | The Spitzer Space Telescope Ends Its Incredible Journey | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"astronomy",
"exoplanet",
"Hubble",
"infrared",
"james webb space telescope",
"nasa",
"Space Shuttle"
] | Today, after 16 years of exemplary service,
NASA will officially deactivate the Spitzer Space Telescope
. Operating for over a decade beyond its designed service lifetime, the infrared observatory worked in tandem with the Hubble Space Telescope to reveal previously hidden details of known cosmic objects and helped expand our understanding of the universe. In later years, despite never being designed for the task, it became an invaluable tool in the study of planets outside our own solar system.
While there’s been no cataclysmic failure aboard the spacecraft, currently more than 260 million kilometers away from Earth, the years have certainly taken their toll on
Spitzer
. The craft’s various technical issues, combined with its ever-increasing distance, has made its continued operation cumbersome. Rather than running it to the point of outright failure, ground controllers have decided to quit while they still have the option to command the vehicle to go into hibernation mode. At its distance from the Earth there’s no danger of it becoming “space junk” in the traditional sense, but a rogue spacecraft transmitting randomly in deep space could become a nuisance for future observations.
From mapping weather patterns on a planet 190 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major to providing the first images of Saturn’s largest ring, it’s difficult to overstate the breadth of
Spitzer’s
discoveries. But these accomplishments are all the more impressive when you consider the mission’s storied history, from its tumultuous conception to the unique technical challenges of long-duration spaceflight.
A Scope for the Shuttle
While the Spitzer Space Telescope might have been launched in 2003, its origins date back to the Apollo era. As NASA’s ability to launch large payloads into space improved, astronomers began to consider the possibility of an orbiting infrared observatory. An IR telescope in space would vastly outperform a similarly sized telescope on Earth due to the fact that most of the infrared radiation from space is absorbed by water vapor and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. While it would be a considerable technical challenge to build, launch, and operate such a telescope, there was no question it would be able to do more useful science than anything that could be built on the ground.
Concept art from the Hughes design study.
In 1976, Hughes Aircraft Corporation released their
preliminary design study for the Shuttle Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF)
, a cryogenically cooled IR telescope that would be mounted inside the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle. Thanks to the promised rapid reusability of the Shuttle, the SIRFT could be regularly upgraded and reflown to take advantage of improvements in IR imaging technology.
Unfortunately, the reality of the Space Shuttle program turned out to be very different than what was originally envisioned. Rather than launching regularly and cheaply like a commercial airliner, the Shuttle ended up being just as slow and expensive a ride into space as more traditional rockets. To make matters worse,
experiments performed during the STS-51-F mission
showed that IR observations made from the Shuttle were complicated by the aura of dust and heat that surrounded the winged orbiter.
By the mid-80s, it became clear SIRTF wasn’t going to work as a part of the Shuttle. It would need to be a free-flying instrument, which naturally made the design considerably more complex. SIRTF would not only have to fit onto a smaller rocket, but it would also need to have its own means of communication, propulsion, navigation, and power generation.
Beating the Heat
Throughout the 1990s, the SIRTF concept went through several revisions. Now called
Space
Infrared Telescope Facility to differentiate itself from the earlier Shuttle-centric design, the new telescope needed to be small and light enough to be carried on a Delta II rocket. Optimizing a design for spaceflight is never easy, but in the case of the SIRTF, it posed some unique challenges.
For optimal performance, the IR sensors would need to be cooled down to near absolute zero. This means a cryogenic coolant and insulation, which adds mass and bulk to the spacecraft. The easiest way to reduce launch mass would be to load less coolant onboard, but that reduces the useful life of the telescope: an exceptionally difficult compromise to make.
To solve the problem, a radical change was made to the original concept. Rather than operating in low Earth orbit like the Hubble Space Telescope, SIRTF would be launched into deep space. At that distance, the cooling system would no longer have to contend with the heat radiating from the Earth. Naturally the spacecraft would be heated by the sun as well, but that could be mitigated with a passive solar shield. SIRTF would still need to bring along liquid helium to cool the sensors, but in deep space it would require far less.
With these changes to the mission parameters, it was estimated that the SIRTF could keep its instruments cooled to approximately 5 Kelvin ( -268 °C, -450 °F) for up to 5 years.
Spitzer’s Evolving Mission
The SIRTF was launched aboard a Delta II rocket on August 25th, 2003. As was customary at the time, NASA didn’t officially change the spacecraft’s name to the Spitzer Space Telescope until it was ready to begin observations. It was named after Dr. Lyman Spitzer, an early proponent of space telescopes who
helped lobby Congress for the funding necessary to build the Hubble
before his death in 1997.
From December 2003 to May 2009,
Spitzer
observed the energy from distant galaxies, young forming stars, and exoplanets at wavelengths between 3.6 μm and 160 μm. After that point the liquid helium ran out, and the temperature of the instrumentation rose to approximately 30 K (−243 °C, −406 °F). This limited the telescope’s observations to a minimum wavelength of 4.5 μm, and marked the beginning what mission controllers referred to as the “Spitzer Warm Mission”.
An image created using data from the “Cold” phase of
Spitzer’s
mission. Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech
By the time the so-called warm phase of the mission started,
Spitzer
was already years beyond its original design lifetime. But the discoveries it made during this period, either on its own or when working in conjunction with other instruments and observatories, were no less impressive. Data from
Spitzer
helped identify a galaxy that lies an incredible 32 billion light-years from Earth, and techniques such as transit photometry and gravitational microlensing enabled it to perform exoplanet research which had never even been considered in its original mission.
Scientific observations have continued to the present day, though in recent years, declining battery health and the ever-increasing distance between
Spitzer
and Earth has made downloading the resulting data more difficult.
The Future of Infrared Astronomy
The Spitzer Space Telescope has already outlived the European Space Agency’s similar William Herschel Telescope, and NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) isn’t sensitive enough to perform the same sort of observations. Naturally there’s plenty of data to sift through for the time being, but after today, how long will astronomers have to wait before new IR observations can be made?
The James Webb Space Telescope
Spitzer’s
direct successor,
known as SAFIR (Single Aperture Far InfraRed)
, is at this point just a concept with no firm timeframe for its construction or launch. The European Space Agency is looking to launch
Euclid
in 2022, though it will only be able to look as far into the infrared wavelengths as
Spitzer
. NASA also continues to operate Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a modified Boeing 747 that flies high enough to avoid the majority of the IR-blocking water vapor in the atmosphere.
But certainly the most exciting prospect on the horizon is the
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
. Slated to be launched next year, the JWST won’t be able to see all of the same IR wavelengths that
Spitzer
did during its cold phase, but the telescope’s incredibly large 6.5 meter diameter mirror will allow it to observe objects that are dimmer and farther away than ever before. | 34 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215429",
"author": "kevinshumaker",
"timestamp": "2020-01-30T15:24:33",
"content": "“Data from Spitzer helped identify a galaxy that lies an incredible 32 billion light-years from Earth,” are we missing a decimal point?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,604.338862 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/unique-clock-finally-unites-hackers-and-sequins/ | Unique Clock Finally Unites Hackers And Sequins | Tom Nardi | [
"clock hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"belt driven",
"clock",
"kinematics",
"robotics",
"sequins"
] | We’ve all seen the two-color sequin fabrics you can “draw” on by dragging your finger over so the pieces flip to the other color. It’s fun stuff to play with, and very popular with the kids right now, but if you asked us if the material had any practical application we’d have said no. But that was before we saw this
clever clock created by [Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi] that he calls Sequino
.
Since a clock (at least one that only shows hours and minutes) doesn’t need to refresh very quickly, [Ekaggrat] thought that the sequin material could work as a display. Of course the tricky part is figuring out how to actually draw on it reliably. It can’t be done from the back, and since the sequins are plastic, you can’t use a magnet. The only way to do it is with a robotic “finger” and some very slick kinematics.
The most obvious feature of the Sequino is the belt drive that goes the length of its cylindrical shape. When the two motors connected to the belt are turning in the same direction, the pointer is moved left or right. But when the motors turn in opposite directions, the tension on the belt forces the pointer to extend and contact the sequins. It’s like an H-bot , but with the shortest ever Y axis. The front bar is moved up and down with rotating rings inside of the device. It will probably make a lot more sense once you watch the video of it in operation after the break.
[Ekaggrat] says this project was developed as part of his quest to build
“doodle clocks” that draw out the time continuously
. The advantage of using the sequin fabric is that it shouldn’t be damaged by repetitive use,
an issue he’s tried to solve via photonic means in the past
. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215401",
"author": "Dr. Tech",
"timestamp": "2020-01-30T13:15:14",
"content": "Interesting and very well done.But isn’t it a bit energy consuming and noisy as a clock? not for bed side usage, of course :-)I can imagine other cool purposes for stuff that don’t need to be updated f... | 1,760,373,604.408763 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/30/sma-q2-smart-watch-is-completely-hackable/ | SMA-Q2 Smart Watch Is Completely Hackable | Danie Conradie | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"nRF52832",
"smart watch",
"smartwatch",
"wearable"
] | The search for the ultimate hacker’s smart watch probably won’t end any time soon. [
emeryth
] has nominated another possible candidate in the form of the
SMA-Q2
, and has made a lot of progress in making it accessible.
Also known as the SMA-TIME, the watch is based around the popular NRF52832 Bluetooth SoC, with a colour memory LCD, accelerometer, and a heart rate sensor on the back. The main feature that makes it so easy to hack is the stock bootloader on the NRF52832 that works with generic Nordic upload tool, making firmware upgrades a breeze via a smart phone. Unfortunately the bootloader itself is locked, so it must be completely wiped to gain debugging access. The hardware configuration has also been well reverse engineered with all the details available.
Custom main board with a NRF52840 module
[
emeryth
] has most of the basic features working with his
custom firmware
, although it’s still in the early stages. He designed a new watch face that includes weather updates and basic audio controls. The 3-bit display’s power consumption has also been reduced by only refreshing the necessary parts. The heart rate sensor outputs the raw waveforms, and it’s pretty accurate after a bit of FFT and filtering magic. Built-in tap and tilt detection is available on the accelerometer, which works well, but strangely doesn’t appear to have been used in the stock firmware.
Unfortunately the original enclosure design that used screws was dropped for glued version. It’s still possible to open without breaking anything, just a bit more difficult.
[
emeryth
]
Another hardware hacker named [BigCorvus] has even designed
a completely new open-source main board with a NRF52840 module
and heart rate sensor on a small flex PCB, with everything up on GitHub.
We really hope the community takes a liking to this watch, and look forward to seeing some awesome hacking. This is an excellent addition to the list of candidates for the
perfect hacker’s smart watch
that [Lewin Day] has already investigated . We also see a lot of DIY smart watches including one with a
beautiful wood-filled 3D printed housing
and another with
LED matrix display
. | 30 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215364",
"author": "Emeryth",
"timestamp": "2020-01-30T09:54:47",
"content": "Correction: the alternative PCB is a parallel effort by BigCorvus.https://github.com/BigCorvus/SMA-Q2_replacement_board",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,373,604.488395 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/29/lazydoro-mothers-you-into-being-productive/ | Lazydoro Mothers You Into Being Productive | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"pimoroni blinkt",
"pomodoro",
"productivity",
"Raspberry Pi Zero",
"Time of Flight Sensor"
] | The Pomodoro Technique has helped countless people ramp up their productivity since it was devised in the late 1980s. Breaking down tasks into 25 minute chunks can improve your focus tremendously, provided you show up, start the timer, and get to work.
Lazydoro
takes the psychology focus even further. In [romilly.cocking]’s interpretation, a time-of-flight (ToF) sensor is your productivity Santa Claus — it knows whether you’re doing your part by simply applying butt to chair, and your present is a productive 25 minutes where not a second is wasted futzing with timers and worrying about time lost to such administrative tasks. When Lazydoro senses that you have arrived, the Raspi Zero starts a 25-minute Pomodoro timer, and represents the time remaining across a Pimoroni BLINKT LED matrix.
But hold on, you haven’t heard the best part yet. Lazydoro was designed with real life in mind, because [romilly] thought of everything. Whenever you leave your chair, a 5-minute timer starts, and there’s a beep when time is up. If you make it through the 25 minutes and hear the victory beep, then it’s break time. But if you get up too soon, the work timer stops, and the 5-minute timer becomes your limited space in which to fret, stare out the window, or get the snack you think you desperately need to keep going. This makes Lazydoro awesome even without the Pomodoro part, because simply sitting back down is a big step one.
If you make
a circuit sculpture Pomodoro
and stare at it on your 5-minute breaks, you might achieve productivity enlightenment. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215377",
"author": "Varna",
"timestamp": "2020-01-30T10:57:53",
"content": "It doesn’t knows when I’m browsing HaD, tho. It wouldn’t work for me unless it included browsing monitoring and a taser, Michael Reeves’ style.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,604.533766 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/29/tensors-explained/ | Tensors Explained | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"math",
"mathematics",
"tensor"
] | You can do a lot of electronics without ever touching a tensor, but there are some situations in which tensors are absolutely essential. The problem is that most math texts give you a very dry description that is difficult to internalize.
That’s where [The Science Asylum] comes in
. Their recent video (see below) starts with the dry definition and then shows you what it means and why.
According to the video, the textbook definition is:
A rank-n tensor in m-dimensions is a mathematical object that has n indices and m
n
components and obeys certain transformational rules.
That sounds a lot like an array but we are not sure what “certain transformational rules” really means to anyone.
Wikipedia does a little better:
[A]n algebraic object that describes a linear mapping from one set of algebraic objects to another.
These constructs are key to anything electromagnetic (including antennas) and show up a lot in stress calculations and quantum mechanics. Even Einstien’s theory of relativity uses tensors.
The video is a dozen minutes well spent. You even get some applications with tetrahedron dice and a basketball.
It is a shame, but a lot of math and electronics seem to be made harder than necessary. [Will Sweatman’s]
series on calculus
does a great job demystifying the subject. Then again, you could use
a computer crutch
, but that doesn’t help you understand, really. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215314",
"author": "wrong_all_the_time",
"timestamp": "2020-01-30T03:06:55",
"content": "I don’t know, a lot of texts seem to be made hearer than necessary.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6215509",
"author": "Matt",
... | 1,760,373,604.603709 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/29/harmonicade-is-a-high-scoring-midi-controller/ | Harmonicade Is A High-Scoring MIDI Controller | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"db25",
"midi",
"midi controller",
"Sanwa",
"Teensy 3.6"
] | When [KOOP Instruments] started learning the piano, he wasn’t prepared for the tedium of learning chords and their relationships on the standard keyboard layout. But instead of killing his desire to tickle the ivories, it inspired him to explore alternative layouts that are easier to play. He converted to Isomorphism, started building MIDI controllers, and hasn’t looked back.
The latest incantation is
Harmonicade
, a dual-decked number arranged
Wicki-Hayden style
. Both decks have 5½ octaves, are (electrically) identical, and run off a single Teensy 3.6. We admire [KOOP]’s use of DB25 connectors to wrangle the wiring between the decks and the Teensy — quite a neat solution. Almost as neat as his
beautifully-commented code
.
Although the button decks and control boxes are all printed and open source, they are designed to be easily made from acrylic or plywood instead. [KOOP] is going to keep iterating until he’s totally happy with the control locations and layout, and the ease of breakdown and reassembly. We’ve got a double shot of videos for you after the break — one of [KOOP] playing Harmonicade, and a longer one exploring and playing its precursor, the Melodicade.
Tired of conventional-looking MIDI controllers? We hear your bellows and offer this
MIDI controller in a concertina
.
Video about the Melodicade
Via
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/01/23/harmonicade-3dprinting-3dthursday/ | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215004",
"author": "Keith Woodward",
"timestamp": "2020-01-29T09:45:02",
"content": "Very impressive work. That layout of the keys makes much better sense. The pattern of how you played chords with the same finger layout would make learning very intuitive.I wonder how a touch scree... | 1,760,373,605.331866 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/dad-makes-xbox-and-nintendo-work-together-to-bridge-the-accessibility-gap/ | Dad Makes Xbox And Nintendo Work Together To Bridge The Accessibility Gap | Erin Pinheiro | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"accessibility",
"adaptive controller",
"controller mod",
"gaming",
"nintendo",
"Nintendo Switch",
"video games"
] | In the last few years, console and controller manufacturers have been making great strides in accessibility engineering in order to improve the inclusiveness of people with different motor disabilities into the gaming world. One such example is the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which [Rory Steel] has used to build his daughter
a fully customized controller to allow her to play Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch
.
His build plan is outlined in
just a few Twitter videos
, and sadly we don’t have a detailed walkthrough on how to build our own just yet, though he mentions plans on making such guide in the future. In the mean time, it’s not too hard to speculate on some specifics. The Adaptive Controller can use USB-C for communication, as the Switch also does with its Pro controller in wired mode. Interfacing the two is as simple as using an adapter to bridge the gap between the two vendors.
The joysticks are each wired into generic gamepads which act as the left and right sticks, each one being a separate USB input into the Adaptive Controller, while each one of the button inputs is broken out to 3.5mm jacks on its back, making them dead simple to wire to the sixteen arcade buttons surrounding the sticks. The layout might look unconventional to us, and [Rory] mentions this is simply a prototype that will be improved upon in the future after real-world testing.
The size of his daughter’s smile
tells us this is already a success in her eyes.
This is not the first time we’ve seen a build with the Xbox Adaptive Controller, and it’s nice to see just how well it
enables parents to build their kids controllers they can use more easily
, seeing as how before its introduction these kinds of controllers usually
required the expertise for tearing expensive official controllers apart in ways the manufacturers never expected
. We can only hope that going forward, this sort of accessibility becomes more the norm and less the exception.
[via
Kotaku
, thanks Itay for the tip!] | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6215013",
"author": "Louis Davies",
"timestamp": "2020-01-29T10:31:19",
"content": "That is amazing! I love it when a tiny bit of engineering can bring so much joy! Also I’m very happy that Microsoft/ Nintendo put some considerable work in to make it so easy for many to do the last ... | 1,760,373,605.377649 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/eric-talks-crystal-radios/ | [Eric] Talks Crystal Radios | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"crystal radio",
"nostalgia"
] | The AM broadcast band doesn’t have a lot of mainstream programming on it across much of the United States today. That’s a shame because a lot of kids got their first taste of radio and electronics by building simple crystal radios. [Eric Wrobbel] has a well-done page discussing some of the
crystal radio kits and toys
that have been around.
[Eric] should know, as he’s written two books on toy crystal radios. The pictures range from a 1945-era “Easy Built Radio Kit” which looks like a piece of masonite with a coil, some Fahnestock clips, and a cat whisker, to a very slick looking Tinymite from 1949. Honestly, though, the one we really want is the X-50 Space Helmet Radio that comes in a box marked “For Young Moon Travelers.”
Continuing the space theme, there’s a picture of a radio built in a rocket by a Japanese company. Oddly enough, there was also a crystal radio made inside a pincushion that included a thimble and a tape measure. Presumably, you could listen to tunes while you mended a sock.
It makes us a little sad to think of the times we built crystal radios and strained to hear pop music, sports, or news. With all the options today, it hard to imagine a young person listening to a tinny earphone to some weak mono audio. On the other hand, there’s still something magic about building something simple that takes no power and can pull audio out of the air around us from relatively far away.
We wonder what counts as today’s crystal radio? Is a blinking LED on an Arduino? An IC-based FM radio receiver? A simple robot kit? Perhaps if we were making a crystal radio kit today, we’d pair it with a preassembled
AM transmitter
that could take a feed from a phone or other audio device. If you want to be super modern, why not
3D print
the chassis? | 42 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6214947",
"author": "noelmasson",
"timestamp": "2020-01-29T03:58:41",
"content": "“The AM broadcast band doesn’t have a lot of mainstream programming on it across much of the United States today.”Well that’s a bit harsh. Hard to define “mainstream” when AM radio still has about 58 m... | 1,760,373,604.85444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/esp32-cam-does-time-lapse/ | ESP32-Cam Does Time Lapse | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera",
"ESP32",
"ESP32-CAM",
"time-lapse"
] | Just a few years ago, had someone asked you how much a digital camera with WiFi would cost, you probably wouldn’t have said $6. But that’s about how much [Bitluni] paid for an ESP32-CAM. He wanted to try making the little camera do time lapse, and it
turns out that’s pretty easy to do
.
Of course, the devil is in the details. The camera starts out needing configuration on the USB interface and that enables the set up of Arduino integration and WiFi configuration. Because it stores each frame of the image on an SD card, the board can’t take rapid-fire pictures. [Bitluni] reports a 3-second delay was about the shortest he could manage, but for most purposes, he was using at least ten seconds.
The program has a live preview window to help you set up the shot, but before your recordings start that should be turned off so as not to overload the little processor and the I/O buses. The result is a bunch of JPG images that you can easily convert to a video on a PC if you wish.
This might be a good way to fit a camera on a
3D printer
, especially if the time lapse effect was desired. Otherwise, you might sync to a layer change. Now all [bitluni] needs is an
orbital rig
. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6214919",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-01-29T00:34:08",
"content": "Hacker mode was obviously faked, he wasn’t wearing a hoodie.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6214951",
"author": "Coil",
"time... | 1,760,373,604.915383 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/flicker-detector-lets-you-hear-what-you-cant-see/ | Flicker Detector Lets You Hear What You Can’t See | Tom Nardi | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"audio amplifier",
"led",
"PAM8403",
"pwm",
"solar panel"
] | Have you ever looked at modern LED lighting and noticed, perhaps on the very edge of your perception, that they seemed to be flickering? Well, that’s because they probably are. As are the LEDs in your computer monitor, or your phone’s screen. Pulse width modulation (PWM) is used extensively with LEDs to provide brightness control, and if it’s not done well, it can lead to headaches and eyestrain.
Looking to quantify just how much flashing light we’re being exposed to, [Faransky] has created a simple little gadget that
essentially converts flashing light into an audio tone the human ear can pick up
. Those LEDs might be blinking on and off fast enough to fool our eyes, but your ears can hear frequencies much higher than those used in common PWM solutions. In the video after the break, you can see what various LED light sources sound like when using the device.
The electronics here are exceptionally simple. Just connect a small solar panel to an audio amplifier, in this case the PAM8403, and listen to the output. To make it a bit more convenient to use, there’s an internal battery, charger circuit and USB-C port; but you could just as easily run the thing off of a 9 V alkaline if you wanted to build one from what’s already in the parts bin.
Who knows? If you carry this thing around long enough,
you might even hear the far less common binary code modulation
in action (but probably not). | 58 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6214888",
"author": "behle",
"timestamp": "2020-01-28T22:20:39",
"content": "This is the kind of device I did not knew I needed.I’m gonna build it.Maybe the other way round is also interesting? Making sound visible, for example infra- and ultrasound?",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,373,605.078398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/factory-laptop-with-ime-disabled/ | Factory Laptop With IME Disabled | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"dell",
"disabled",
"enterprise",
"factory",
"IME",
"intel",
"management engine",
"security"
] | Unfortunately not all consumers place high value on the security of their computers, but one group that tends to focus on security are businesses with a dedicated IT group. When buying computers for users, these groups tend to have higher demands, like making sure the Intel Management Engine (IME) has been disabled. To that end, Reddit user [netsec_burn] has
outlined a pretty simple method to where “normal people” can purchase one of these IME-disabled devices for themselves
.
For those
unfamiliar with the IME
, it is a coprocessor on all Intel devices since around 2007 that allows access to the memory, hard drive, and network stack even when the computer is powered down. Intel claims it’s a feature, not a bug, but it’s also a source of secret, unaudited code that’s understandably a desirable target for any malicious user trying to gain access to a computer. The method that [netsec_burn] outlined for getting a computer with the IME disabled from the factory is as simple as buying a specific Dell laptop, intended for enterprise users, and selecting the option to disable the IME.
Of course Dell warns you that you may lose some system functionality if you purchase a computer with the IME disabled, but it seems that this won’t really effect users who aren’t involved in system administration. Also note that this doesn’t
remove
the management engine from the computer. For that,
you’ll need one of only a handful of computers
made before Intel made complete removal of the IME impossible. In the meantime, it’s good to see that at least one company has a computer available that allows for it to be disabled from the factory. | 36 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6214839",
"author": "Bert",
"timestamp": "2020-01-28T19:57:58",
"content": "Yes, more wallet-voting.Great to see people being aware of their buying power.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6214897",
"author": "sdfdsfds",... | 1,760,373,605.601723 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/rf-modulation-crash-course-for-hackers/ | RF Modulation: Crash Course For Hackers | Danie Conradie | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Radio Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"ask",
"FSK",
"LoRa",
"modulation",
"OOK",
"RF",
"wireless",
"Wireless Module"
] | When you’re looking to add some wireless functionality to a project, there are no shortage of options. You really don’t need to know much of the technical details to make use of the more well-documented modules, especially if you just need to get something working quickly. On the other hand, maybe you’ve gotten to the point where you want to know how these things actually work, or maybe you’re curious about that cheap RF module on AliExpress. Especially in the frequency bands below 1 GHz, you might find yourself interfacing with a module at really low level, where you might be tuning modulation parameters. The following overview should give you enough of an understanding about the basics of RF modulation to select the appropriate hardware for your next project.
Three of the most common digital modulation schemes you’ll see in specifications are Frequency Shift Keying (FSK), Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK), and LoRa (Long Range). To wrap my mechanically inclined brain around some concepts, I found that thinking of RF modulation in terms of pitches produced by a musical instrument made it more intuitive.
And lots of pretty graphs don’t hurt either. Signals from two different RF dev boards were captured and turned into waterfall and FFT plots using a $20
RTL-SDR
dongle. Although not needed for wireless experimentation, the RTL-SDR is an extremely handy debugging tool, even to just check if a module is actually transmitting.
Amplitude Shift Keying
As the name suggests, with Amplitude Shift Keying the amplitude is shifted between two levels, like playing a single note (frequency) on a piano loudly or softly, to represent binary data. ASK modulation’s main advantage lies in its simplicity, which allows for very cheap hardware. It is also very bandwidth-efficient since it only outputs on a narrow frequency band. However, ASK modulation is badly affected by interference, which limits its effective range. A simplified form of ASK modulation is On-Off Shift Keying (OOK), where the transmitter is simply switched on (1) and off (0). This has a power saving advantage since no power is emitted for a 0 symbol. ASK is often used in cheap RF remote controls for consumer devices and automatic garage doors. RF modules that support more complex modulation schemes often can also do ASK and OOK modulation.
ASK (Left) and OOK (RIGHT), both transmitting at the same power level. Note how much less accumulative power is output by the OOK signal
Frequency Shift Keying
In Frequency Shift Keying the transmitted signal shifts between two different frequencies to represent binary data, like two different notes from a piano. This would technically be 2-FSK modulation. Four different frequencies can also be used (4-FSK) to represent 01, 11, 10 and 00. FSK uses more bandwidth, but is less susceptible to interference than ASK, allowing for a much longer effective range up to multiple kilometres. On real hardware, the rapid frequency changes can cause the desired frequency to be “overshot”, creating interference. To solve this, a common variation on FSK is Gaussian FSK, where the shifts between frequencies are smoothed to help reduce the effective bandwidth of the signal. Bluetooth Low Energy uses GFSK modulation.
2-FSK (Left) and 2-GFSK (Right). On GFSK the intermediate frequencies are visible from the “smooth” shift.
LoRa
LoRa modulation, with the sweeping “chirps” clearly distinguishable
The current darling for long range applications is LoRa, which most Hackaday readers would have heard of many times. LoRa is a form of “chirp spread spectrum” modulation. The “chirp” signal sweeps smoothly across specific frequency range: usually 125 kHz, 250 kHz or 500 kHz wide. How long the sweep takes to complete is determined by the “spreading factor” (SF). The SF is between 7 and 12, which is equal to the number of bits encoded in each chirp. A higher spreading factor reduces the data rate, and increases power consumption, but also makes it easier for the receiver to distinguish the signal from background noise, and helps with longer-range transmissions. Data is encoded by shifting the start frequency of the sweep. When the sweep reaches the end of the top frequency, it “rolls over” and start again from the bottom frequency.
LoRa modulation allows for good receiver sensitivity and interference immunity, but it comes at the cost of bandwidth efficiency. Another disadvantage is the higher cost of hardware, partly due to the patent on LoRa modulation. All manufacturers of LoRa RF chips must pay license fees to the patent holder, Semtech.
Closing Transmission
When working with RF, it’s always a good idea to know what your local regulations are with regard to allowed frequencies and output power. You don’t want authorities knocking on your door
for jamming everyone in the neighbourhood’s key fobs
. If you stay within the ISM bands, usually 868/915 MHz and 2.4GHz, licensing isn’t required. However, you can always get your ham radio license, and access more of the frequency spectrum, at much higher power output to even achieve intercontinental communications.
The modulation schemes above are only some many in existence, each with advantages and disadvantages. You’ll probably end up with a few choices in your parts inventory, so don’t be afraid to play around with them for different use cases. And be sure to pull out an SDR dongle and have a look! | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6214806",
"author": "Mike Massen in Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2020-01-28T18:09:44",
"content": "Nice summary, thanks for posting :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6214844",
"author": "Jayesh Prajapati"... | 1,760,373,605.14148 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/open-source-medical-devices-hack-chat/ | Open-Source Medical Devices Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"austere",
"diagnostic",
"instrument",
"medical",
"otoscope",
"stethoscope",
"The Hack Chat",
"war"
] | Join us on Wednesday, January 29 at noon Pacific for the
Open-Source Medical Devices Hack Chat
with
Tarek Loubani
!
In most of the developed world, when people go to see a doctor, they’re used to seeing the latest instruments and devices used. Most exam rooms have fancy blood pressure cuffs, trays of shiny stainless steel instruments, and a comfortable exam table covered by a fresh piece of crisp, white paper. Exams and procedures are conducted in clean, quiet places, with results recorded on a dedicated PC or tablet.
Such genteel medical experiences are far from universal, though. Many clinics around the world are located in whatever building is available, if they’re indoors at all. Supplies may be in chronically short supply, and to the extent that the practitioners have the instruments they need to care for patients, they’ll likely be older, lower-quality versions.
Tarek Loubani is well-versed in the practice of medicine under conditions like these, as well as far worse situations. As an emergency physician and researcher in Canada, he’s accustomed to well-appointed facilities and ample supplies. But he’s also involved in humanitarian relief, taking his medical skills and limited supplies to places like Gaza. He has seen first-hand how lack of the correct tools can lead to poor outcomes for patients, and chose to fight back by designing a range of medical devices and instruments that can be 3D-printed. His
Glia Project
has free plans for a high-quality stethoscope that can be built for a couple of dollars, otoscopes and pulse oximeters, and a range of surgical tooling to make the practice of medicine under austere conditions a little easier.
Join us as we talk to Dr. Loubani about his open-source medical efforts. We’ll chat about how he got interested in building devices, how he decides what’s worth building, and what’s in store for the future of the Glia Project specifically and open-source medicine in general.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 29 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have
a handy time zone converter
.
Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6214861",
"author": "alfcoder",
"timestamp": "2020-01-28T20:52:11",
"content": "bill gates won’t be happy about this…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6214995",
"author": "Clint LeClair",
"timestamp": "2020-01-29T08:35:59... | 1,760,373,605.186442 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/clock-uses-custom-led-displays-to-keep-myst-time/ | Clock Uses Custom LED Displays To KeepMystTime | Tom Nardi | [
"clock hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"ESP8266",
"LED display",
"Myst",
"ntp"
] | The
Myst
fans in the audience will love this project because
it displays the 25-hour timekeeping system of the D’ni
. The hardware hackers will lean a little closer to their screen because it does so with custom made 25-segment LEDs, and the precision obsessed will start breathing heavily when they hear it maintains an accuracy of 0.001 seconds. As for which of those camps creator [Mike Ando] most identifies with, we can’t say. But we definitely respect his style.
We’ll spare you the in-depth description of the base-25 number system apparently used in the
Myst
franchise. If you’re interested enough you can click on through to the project’s Hackaday.io page and learn how to actually read the clock. Presumably you’ll then come back here and leave your comment in Klingon.
Let’s instead jump right to the part that really gets us excited, those custom displays. To create them, [Mike] cut the face out of black acrylic with a laser, and filled each void with a mixture of clear resin and very fine gypsum plaster. Getting the mix right can be a little finicky as the plaster can clump up, but the end result diffuses the light nicely. The acrylic front panel and a couple of cardboard “gaskets” to keep the light from leaking onto adjacent segments is then stacked on top of a PCB with corresponding 0603 SMD LEDs.
Beyond the soul-crushing number of wires required to hook everything up internally, the rest of the project is
relatively
straightforward. It uses a WeMos D1 Mini to connect to the WiFi network and pull the current time down from the geographically closest NTP server every couple of hours. Rather than putting a temperature controlled oscillator on the board, [Mike] has decided to pin his accuracy on a constantly on Internet connection and aggressive synchronizations.
From
impressive curved bar graph modules
to
displays segmented with household items
, we’ve seen our fair share of custom indicators. But we have to admit that building 25-segment LED displays for the alphabet of a fictional interstellar species sets the bar pretty high. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6214799",
"author": "jrfl",
"timestamp": "2020-01-28T17:23:01",
"content": "Bragging about 1ms precision is like bragging about how you can accurately measure position accurate to the nearest mile.A dollar store watch can keep time accurate to a millisecond, a low grade scientific q... | 1,760,373,605.244662 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/lead-free-solder-alloys-their-properties-and-best-types-for-daily-use/ | Lead-Free Solder Alloys: Their Properties And Best Types For Daily Use | Maya Posch | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"alloys",
"sac",
"sn100c",
"solder alloys",
"soldering"
] | Lead-free solder alloys have been around for as long as people have done soldering, with sources
dating back about 5,000 years
. Most of these alloys were combinations like copper-silver or silver-gold and used with so-called hard soldering. That’s a technique still used today to join precious and semi-precious metals together. A much more recent development is that of soldering electronic components together, using ‘soft soldering’, which entails much lower temperatures.
Early soft soldering used pure tin (Sn), yet
gradually alloys were sought
that would fix issues like thermal cycling, shock resistance, electron migration, and the development of whiskers in tin-based alloys. While lead (Pb) managed to fill this role for most soldering applications, the phasing out of lead from products, as well as new requirements for increasingly more fine-pitched components have required the development of new solder alloys that can fill this role.
In this article we’ll be looking at the commonly used lead-free solder types for both hobby and industrial use, and the dopants that are used to improve their properties.
In the Tin of Things
There is a good reason why tin (Sn) is so commonly used in soft solder and solder alloys: it melts at low temperatures (232°C) and offers good wetting (ability to flow on the pad) properties in addition to its ability to dissolve well with most metals. This last property is crucial in forming a good intermetallic compound (IMC). The quality of this IMC boundary determines how durable the joint will be. Both the granularity and number (and size of) any voids in the IMC will affect this durability.
The two most commonly used types of lead-free solder are SnAgCu (tin-silver-copper, also called SAC) and SnCu (tin-copper). SnAgCu alloy with 3% silver and 0.5% copper (SAC305) was
initially endorsed
for use in SMT assembly, along with a number of other SAC alloys. These other alloys are types with higher silver content, such as SAC387 (3.8% Ag), and SAC405 (4% Ag). These higher silver alloys are true eutectic alloys — completely changing form a solid to a liquid at the melting point of 217°C. In contrast, SAC305 has a range between 217–219°C.
Although SAC is an acceptable solder alloy, the addition of silver does raise its cost. This has driven the industry to use low-silver alloys (e.g. SAC0307) or silver-free alternatives, such as SnCuNi.
Back in the IMC
The key to a reliable joint lies in the quality of the IMC that is forced. It cannot be too thick or too granular, and preferably should not have any
Kirkendall voids
.
The IMC of each joint is subjected to various types of aging and damage:
thermal cycling
thermal shock
drop impact
vibration
electromigration
Of these, thermal cycling and
thermal shock are related
, in that both are caused by environmental temperatures. As a joint is exposed to changing temperatures, its individual components will be subject to thermal expansion, which is likely to be dissimilar between different materials. The
tensile strength
of the joint then determines at which point the resulting strain will cause a crack to form.
Usually, under thermal cycling, the IMC will be subject to recrystallization, which causes a roughening of the IMC that allows for the formation of cracks.
Studies have shown
that adding La
2
O
3
nanoparticles improves the thermal reliability, mostly by inhibiting the growth of the IMC. High-silver alloys also show better thermal reliability. The addition of 0.1% aluminium (Al) to low-silver alloys also had such an effect, as did the addition of Ni, Mn and Bi to SnAgCu alloys.
Drop impact crack path of test boards in the IMC.
Drop impact and vibration are similarly related, in that some type of mechanical deformation is applied, which can affect the PCB, the joint, and the component. Especially with large pin count BGA chips, a drop impact can cause significant damage, testing properties such as the shear strength of the joints. The failure modes from mechanical vibration are similar to those from thermal cycling, caused by the gradual development of cracks.
Electromigration failure of interconnected solder joints.
Finally,
electromigration
is the most insidious of all, as it does not require any external influences. The ultimate effect of electromigration is the transport of material within the joint and IMC, caused by the gradual movement of ions, as momentum is transferred by electrons and diffusing metal atoms. The current within the joint between the anode and cathode causes cavities to form. Over time, these voids become large enough that cracks can form in the joint and IMC until ultimately the joint fails. At higher temperatures and currents, this process accelerates.
Preventing electromigration
involves regulating temperature and current density, as well as tweaking the composition and structure of the solder joint to increase their electromigration resistance. Adding cobolt (Co) was shown to improve electromigration resistance, as did the addition of nickel (Ni) and bismuth (Bi), with the latter also decreasing the melting point of the alloy. Both seem to improve the electromigration resistance through the inhibiting of the growth of the IMC, which appears to be a key element.
More alloy with less
During the 70s, 80s, and much of the 90s, virtually all soldering was done on relatively large pads. Most if not everything involving through-hole soldering using DIP packages or similar. As surface-mounted soldering and the use of smaller packages such as SOIC, TSSOP, QFN and BGAs became commonplace, the
strength of the IMC
and its durability became much more of an issue as pads became smaller and smaller.
As we saw earlier, electromigration is a major issue which along with those of thermal and mechanical resilience will play major roles now and in the future. Solutions to those issues will determine much of the lifespan of our devices, as well as whether dropping that new smartphone will be a mere annoyance, or fracture half a dozen minuscule solder balls on the main, 0.2 mm pitch BGA package.
Enter SN100C
Roll of SN100C alloy.
Although SnCu as alloy is not preferred for soldering as the copper tends to form a rather coarse and brittle IMC, a micro-alloy variation on this that can
compete with, or outperform SnPb and SAC alloys
has been around since the 90s, when
Nihon Superior
developed SN100C, which is SnCuNiGe. Unfortunately, this alloy has been encumbered by patents until quite recently. It has its melting point at 227°C, with the 0.05% of Ni promoting a shiny joint while lowering copper pad erosion. The 0.009% of Ge promotes wetting and prevents the formation of dross.
With this eutectic alloy being cheaper than SnCuAg alloys, and its
better properties
with for example reworking
, it appears to be an interesting choice for both professionals and hobbyists. With the patent having expired (yet ‘SN100C’ still trademarked), many manufacturers have now added this alloy to their catalog, including
Stannol
and
Felder
(Sn100Ni+), making it much easier to procure.
Materials Science is About Compromises
At the core of soldering alloys lies the realm of materials science, which is by definition one of compromises. Enhance one quality in one area, and degrade a quality in another. We can see this when we look at using micro-alloying to improve the mechanical stability of the IMC, resulting in worse electromigration resistance, and so on.
Sometimes the statement is made that we had found the perfect soldering alloy with 63/37 SnPb solder, but as electronics miniaturizes ever more and research on soft soldering alloys progresses, we can see a number of requirements appear that were not even remotely an issue back in the 1990s, yet where we can now apply new knowledge to solve them. Reading through scientific papers from 2005 on the topic versus today really shows how far we have come already.
One of the most annoying properties of tin — tin whiskers — still remain one of the hardest to fully solve. Although lead (Pb) did inhibit the development and growth of tin whiskers, it was not a perfect solution. Alloys like SnCuNiGe at this point appear to offer comparable performance in this regard and have been recommended as a drop-in solution.
Building a Better Alloy
With issues like the thermal cycling and shear strength of ever-shrinking solder joints becoming an issue, the refining of the alloys we use for assembling PCBs is something that is worth tackling. If we can make the assembly of 500+ lead BGA packages and their reliability over 10+ years of daily use into a near-certainty, then that means less electronic waste that needs to be recycled, or which ends up in landfills.
Similarly, having easier to use and more reliable alloys for hobbyists is also becoming more of a topic. Hobbyists are no longer merely jamming a couple of 74-series DIP ICs into a through-hole board. More often we see QFN, TSSOP, and similar packages are being used. With improved wetting and decreased bridging potential of new alloys, it should make life better for everyone. | 99 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6214757",
"author": "Martin",
"timestamp": "2020-01-28T15:17:47",
"content": "In my opinion, the best leadfree/leadless solder is not better than the good SnPb stuff. So I stay with that for everyday lab and hobby use. Let the leadfree stuff be reserved for the industry with their w... | 1,760,373,605.527556 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/28/raspberry-pi-4-benchmarks-32-vs-64-bits/ | Raspberry Pi 4 Benchmarks: 32- Vs 64-bits | Al Williams | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"benchmarks",
"Raspberry Pi 4"
] | [Matteo] bought a new Raspberry Pi 4. Why not? You get a quad-core ARM processor, up to 4 GB of RAM, and a gigabit Ethernet port for
$35
$35-55. However, the default operating system is still a 32-bit system and doesn’t take advantage of the Pi 4’s 64-bit capable CPU. So he installed a light version of 64-bit Debian and ran some
benchmarks for the Raspberry Pi 4 running both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems
.
It really shouldn’t be surprising that the 64-bit OS did better in nearly every test. If anything is surprising, it may be that the difference is so pronounced. Some of the benchmarks, like Dhrystones, probably don’t relate much to real-life usage. But some things, like computing a hash, is something you probably do pretty often in normal usage, and the timing difference is pronounced.
A few things were limited by things other than the CPU. RAM speed was a little better, but not much. Dropping firewall packets was another big difference. The 32-bit system could drop 268 packets per second, while the 64-bit dropped 557. VPN is another case where other things limited performance so the difference between the operating system size didn’t matter much.
Benchmarks are always tricky, so your mileage — especially your real-life mileage — may vary. However, it does seem like there are some real advantages to dumping the 32-bit operating system.
If you are interested in
performance versus the Pi 3
, we looked at that earlier. Spoiler alert: it is much better. Or you can
go even further back
if you like. | 58 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6214705",
"author": "Murray",
"timestamp": "2020-01-28T12:14:53",
"content": "In most arithmetic operations 32 bits should be enough, but in Boolean operations on blocks of data like in encryption, more bits translates directly to an increase of performance. If your use case include... | 1,760,373,605.691132 |
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