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https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/exploring-early-90s-video-game-architecture-with-another-world/ | Exploring Early ’90s Video Game Architecture WithAnother World | Sharon Lin | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"computer architecture",
"gaming consoles",
"video games"
] | Curious about past computer architectures? Software engineer [Fabien Sanglard] has been experimenting with
porting
Another World
, an action-adventure platformer, to different machines and comparing the results in his “Polygons of Another World” project.
The results are pretty interesting. Due to the game’s polygon-based graphics, optimizations vary widely across different architectures, with tricks allowing the software to run on hardware released five years before the game’s publication. The consoles explored are primarily from the early ’90s, ranging from the Amiga 500, Atari ST, IBM PC, and Super Nintendo to the Sega Genesis.
The actual game contains very little code, with the original version at 6000 lines of assembly and the PC DOS executable only containing 20 KiB. The executable simply exists as a virtual machine host that reads and executes uint8_t opcodes, with most of the business logic implemented with bytecode. The graphics use 16 palette-based colors, despite the Amiga 500 supporting up to 32 colors. However, the aesthetics still fit the game nicely, with some very pleasant pixel art.
There’s a plethora of cool tricks that emerge in each of the ports, starting with the original Amiga 500 execution. Prior to the existence of the CPU/GPU architecture, microprocessors had blitters – logic blocks that rapidly modified data within the memory, capable of copying large swathes of data in parallel with the CPU, freeing up the CPU for other operations.
To display the visuals, a framebuffer containing a bitmap drives the display. There are three framebuffers used, two for double buffering and one for saving the background composition to avoid redrawing static polygons. Within the framebuffer, several tricks are used to improve the graphical experience. For scenes with translucent hues, special values are interpreted from the framebuffer index by “reading the framebuffer index, adding 0x8 and writing back”.
Challenges also come when manipulating pixels given each machine’s CPU and bus bandwidth limitations. For filling in bits, the blitter uses a feature called “Area Fill Mode” that scans left to right to find edges, rendering the bit arrays with spaces between lines filled in. Since the framebuffer is stored in five separate areas of memory – or bitplanes – this requires drawing the lines and filling in areas four times, multiplying by the hundreds of polygons rendered by the engine. The solution was to
set up a temporary “scratchpad” buffer
and rendering a polygon into the clean space. The polygon can then get copied to the screen area with a masked blit operation since the blitter can render anywhere in memory.
Intrigued? The series continues with deep dives into
Atari ST
,
IBM PC
, and upcoming writeups on SEGA Genesis/MegaDrive. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211804",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2020-01-18T04:53:41",
"content": "I’ve never heard of the game, but it sounds very interesting. The virtual machine reminds me of a more graphically-oriented version of the Infocom Z-Machine.One quibble I have about the article is the... | 1,760,373,619.33902 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/get-compressed-air-from-falling-water-with-the-trompe/ | Get Compressed Air From Falling Water With The Trompe | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"adiabatic",
"compressed air",
"demo",
"gas",
"htdraulics",
"isothermal",
"mining",
"trompe"
] | If you’re like us, understanding the processes and methods of the early Industrial Revolution involved some hand waving. Take the blast furnace, which relies on a steady supply of compressed air to stoke the fire and supply the oxygen needed to smelt iron from ore. How exactly was air compressed before electricity? We assumed it would have been from a set of bellows powered by a water wheel, and of course that method was used, but it turns out there’s another way to get compressed air from water: the trompe.
As [Grady] from Practical Engineering explains in
the short video below
, the trompe was a clever device used to create a steady supply of high-pressure compressed air. To demonstrate the process, he breaks out his seemingly inexhaustible supply of clear acrylic piping to build a small trompe. The idea is to use water falling around a series of tubes to create a partial vacuum and entrain air bubbles. The bubbles are pulled down a vertical tube by the turbulence of the water, and then enter a horizontal section where the flow evens out. The bubbles rise to the top of the horizontal tube where they are tapped off by another vertical tube, as the degassed water continues into a second vertical section, the height of which determines the pressure of the stored air. It’s ingenious, requiring no power and no moving parts, and scales up well – [Grady] relates a story about one trompe that provided compressed air commercially for mines in Canada.
Need an electricity-free way to pump water instead of air? Check out
this hydraulic ram pump
that takes its power from the water it pumps. | 24 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211767",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2020-01-18T01:16:44",
"content": "Reminds me of this,https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprengel_pump",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6211851",
"author": "Alexander Wikström",
... | 1,760,373,619.459583 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/a-simple-auger-pet-feeder/ | A Simple Auger Pet Feeder | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"automatic cat feeder",
"cat feeder",
"feeder",
"pet feeder"
] | Pet feeders are a popular maker project. One can speculate that this shows the great self-confidence common to the maker set, who are willing to trust their own work to keep their animal companions alive for many days at a a time. [Darren Tarbard] is one such maker,
who put together this simple auger build.
The project consists of a hopper for dry pet food, into which a screw auger is inserted. Both parts are 3D printed, making them easy to produce at home for the average maker. The build was designed specifically around the parts [Darren] had to hand, namely a 28BYJ-48 stepper motor, which is charged with turning the auger. Running the show is an Arduino, which can be run with whatever suitable timing code is necessary to feed the particular pet in question. There’s also a remixed version that adds a larger food storage dish on top for longer periods of unattended operation,
created by [szuchid].
It’s a basic build, but one that would be readily achievable by most makers with little more than some junkbox components and a roll of filament. Of course, if your pet prefers wet food,
you might need a different design
. Video after the break. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211718",
"author": "Juan M. Casillas",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T21:24:05",
"content": "This is a very clever design. I design and built two types of feeders and I found that for the auger designs the better design is the wire-bended metal auger.Filled augers doesn’t work well with ... | 1,760,373,619.391604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/jen-costillo-explains-why-hackers-thrive-in-a-recession/ | Jen Costillo Explains Why Hackers Thrive In A Recession | Tom Nardi | [
"cons"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"diy culture",
"economics",
"history"
] | If you haven’t noticed, this is an absolutely fantastic time to be a hacker. The components are cheap, the software is usually free, and there’s so much information floating around online about how to pull it all together that even beginners can produce incredible projects their first time out of the gate. It’s no exaggeration to say that we’re seeing projects today which would have been all but impossible for an individual to pull off ten years ago.
But how did we get here, and perhaps more importantly, where are we going next? While we might arguably be in the Golden Age of DIY, creative folks putting together their own hardware and software is certainly nothing new. As for looking ahead, the hacker and maker movement is showing no signs of slowing down. If anything, we’re just getting started. With a wider array of ever more powerful tools at our disposal, the future is very literally whatever we decide it is.
In her talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference,
“
The Future is Us: Why the Open Source And Hobbyist Community Drive Consumer Products
“
, Jen Costillo not only presents us with an overview of hacker history thus far, but throws out a few predictions for how the DIY movement will impact the mainstream going forward. It’s always hard to see subtle changes over time, and it’s made even more difficult by the fact that most of us have our noses to the proverbial grindstone most of the time. Her presentation is an excellent way for those of us in the hacking community to take a big step back and look at the paradigm shifts that put such incredible power in the hands of so many.
Hacker History
To get the whole picture, Jen starts all the way back in the 1970s with the Homebrew Computer Club. In those heady days, some of the biggest developments in home computing were literally taking place in hacker’s garages. By the 1980s, the GCC project was in full swing, giving hobbyists their own toolchain to develop and debug software without having to purchase an expensive license. A few short years later,
Linus Torvalds made his now iconic post on the comp.os.minix newsgroup
looking for feedback on the free “hobby” operating system he’d been working on.
Moving on to the 2000s, we see the rise of Maker culture. Companies like SparkFun and Adafruit pop up to provide high-tech components for DIYers, Makerbot makes it possible for the average consumer to 3D print parts at home, Kickstarter provides an influx of cash to anyone with a good idea, and Maker Faire proves there’s a huge number of people out there who are curious about building things themselves. The stage is set for another revolution in how hardware and software is created, and this time it’s on a scale that would have been inconceivable a few decades prior.
All of these milestones have been critically important for our community, and when presented in a timeline like this, the natural progression towards bigger and better things is clear. But what Jen is really trying to illustrate by plotting them all out is not so much
what
happened, but
when
it happened.
The Circle of (Tech) Life
As Jen goes on to explain after presenting this hacker history lesson, many of the formative events that put us where we are today happened during a recession. It seems that when the economy is doing poorly, hackers and makers thrive.
The rationale for the big events is easy enough to understand; when you’ve got a lot of really smart people that are unemployed or underemployed, they’re more likely to throw themselves into the hobby projects that they otherwise might not have had time to work on. For the DIY crowd the reasoning is even more blunt. When the money’s tight, people are more willing to repurpose things than buy new.
But history also tells us that this period doesn’t generally last very long. Pretty soon, the big corporate players get wind of all the incredible things coming out of garages and hackerspaces, and start buying up ideas and hiring up the talent. Once part of the corporate machine, the innovation invariably slows back down, things start getting expensive, and the stage is set for the cycle to start all over again once the money dries up.
If we look closely enough, some of the cracks are already starting to form.
Maker Media is struggling to rebrand itself
, putting the flagship Maker Faires on indefinite hold. Companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Samsung are aggressively
scouring the community for ideas and talent
they can use for their respective virtual and augmented reality projects, which one could argue has slowed the development of hacker-friendly AR and VR headsets.
Preparing for What’s Next
The “Great Recession” that brought us all those incredible maker advancements in the 2000s is now over, and we’re currently enjoying a period of exceptional economic growth. Companies are expanding and buying up ideas, and for those who recognize these sort of trends, there’s an opportunity to cash in.
Jen says that companies today are watching sites like GitHub and Hackaday.io closely for the next great idea, and will often know all about your capabilities before you even agree to an interview. They might be a little more cautious to write the big checks than they were during the last big boom, but the skilled operators and the good ideas are still going to get recognized.
But of course what goes up must come down. Many economists think that we’re only a year or two away from the next downward trend, putting the potential for more layoffs and cautious spending on the horizon. Some even think it will hit before the end of 2020. So if you get a job with that dream startup in the next few months, don’t be completely surprised if it doesn’t last very long.
The plus side of all this is that if we are looking at another recession in the near future, then we’re also likely to see some new developments in the hacker and maker scenes before too long. If the last recession launched the technologies and companies that have allowed us to operate in this hacker utopia for the last few years, we’ll admit to being more than a little interested in seeing what the next one could bring. | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211688",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T19:53:13",
"content": "“If you haven’t noticed, this is an absolutely fantastic time to be a hacker. ”The good kind.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6211713",
"author"... | 1,760,373,619.269666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/who-invented-the-mouse-are-you-sure/ | Who Invented The Mouse? Are You Sure? | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"hardware",
"History"
] | [
"history",
"mouse",
"trackball"
] | If you ask most people who invented the mouse, they won’t know. Those that do know, will say that Doug Englebart did. In 1964 he had a box with two wheels that worked like a modern mouse as part of his work at Stanford Research Institute. There is a famous demo video from 1968 of him showing off what looks a lot like an old Mcintosh computer. Turns out, two other people may have an earlier claim to a mouse — or, at least, a trackball. So why did you never hear about those?
The UK Mouse
Ralph Benjamin worked for Britain’s Royal Navy, developing radar tracking systems for warships. Right after World War II, Ralph was working on the Comprehensive Display System — a way for ships to monitor attacking aircraft on a grid. They used a “ball tracker.” Unlike Engelbart’s mouse, it used a metallic ball riding on rubber-coated wheels. This is more like a modern non-optical mouse, although the ball tracker had you slide your hand across the ball instead of the other way around. Sort of a trackball arrangement.
Turns out, the navy preferred a joystick and the work was all secret. Ralph went on to important positions with GCHQ and NATO, and while he got no credit, he reportedly was pleased that people were using a device he thought of, even if they didn’t learn about it from his invention.
You could argue this device didn’t have a lot in common with a modern mouse but look at the photo of the inside of an old serial mouse. There’s a ball. Little wheels move as the ball moves and photosensors detect the motion and direction of the little wheels. Flipped over, this is a simple trackball.
Whither Canada?
Although it was secret from the public, Canadian engineers working for Ferranti Canada had a chance to see the system and in 1949 started working on DATAR — a system attempting to build a common operation picture from sensor data across a naval task force.
They built a trackball similar to the one Ralph had, although their choice of balls was a Canadian five-pin bowling ball. If you are unfamiliar with this variation of bowling, the balls are small enough to fit in one hand and, thus, usually have no finger holes.
DATAR was a success and everyone who saw it was impressed. However, no one wanted to go in with the Royal Canadian Navy and they could not bear the cost alone. Despite building a successful prototype in four years, the program ended.
The DATAR trackball used two X disks and two Y disks. The disks made mechanical contact with wires and counting pulses allowed the system to understand the ball’s position. Once again, the project was secret, so not many people saw one of these in action.
Commercialization
Despite all of this early activity, it would be 1965 or 1966 before commercial trackballs showed up. The German company Telefunken offered a trackball in 1965 and by 1968 had realized you could flip it upside down to create what we’d call a mouse. They called both devices the RKS 100-86 and you can see it in the adjacent photo.
From Theory to Practice
The mouse we know is a far cry from an RKS 100-86 or Engelbart’s original mouse (see the adjacent photo).
Today’s mouse probably has a laser sensor and a raft of buttons. But the idea is still the same: provide a high-resolution way to point at something on the screen and take action on it.
There are alternatives. The trackball is still around and favored by hardcore touch typists. There are trackpads and some laptops have the little eraser knobs. There’s touchscreens and a vanishing number of light pens. But the mouse has survived the test of time to be the predominant way we interact with screens. Not bad for a trackball turned upside-down.
And if you’ve never seen the 1968 “Mother of all Demos” from Engelbart showing wordprocessing, instant messaging, hyperlinks, an awesome function keypad, and — of course — the mouse in use, you can find it in the video below.
Photo Credits:
Serial mouse © Raimond Spekking
CC BY-SA 4.0
RKS 100-86 [Marcin Wichar]
CC-BY-SA-2.0
Engelbart mouse [SRI International]
CC-BY-SA-3.0 | 40 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211671",
"author": "Kent",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T18:44:59",
"content": "Back in the 70’s I worked with a digitizing system associated used by the company for early IC design. The board had an inductive grid and a mouse like puck pickup on it with function buttons on it. Except f... | 1,760,373,619.150849 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/hackaday-podcast-050-counterfeit-chips-servo-kalimba-resistor-colors-pi-emulation-and-sed-maze-solver/ | Hackaday Podcast 050: Counterfeit Chips, Servo Kalimba, Resistor Colors, Pi Emulation, And SED Maze Solver | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys work their way through a dizzying maze of great hacks this week, bringing you along for the ride.
We take a look at simplifying home automation with Node-RED and marvel at the misuse of the SED — Linux’s stream editor for filtering and transforming text — to find your way through a maze. Have the hippest portable; grab your really old Apple laptop and stuff a not-so-old Apple desktop inside. We bring it on home with our love (or hate?) for the resistor color code.
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 050 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Mike’s been playing with Node-Red
Guide:
Automate Your Life With Node-RED (Plus A Dash Of MQTT)
Great example project:
Node-RED Laser Shooting Gallery Goes Anywhere
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Maze Solving Via Text Editing
Think Labrynth: Maze Solving Algorithms
Retro PowerBook Gets A Mac Mini Transplant
What To Know When Buying Chips That Haven’t Been Made For Three Decades
Counterfeit Integrated Circuits – Detection and Avoidance
Plucky Kalimba Plays Itself
An Arduino-Based Flute Playing Machine
Make A Mean-Sounding Synth From Average Components
LDRsynth.JPG – Google Drive
Synth schematics–::– Filter
Printed Separator Separates Printed Pages
Hot Wire Strippers Are Probably The Best Tool You Aren’t Using
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
3D Printable Stick Shift For Your Racing Simulator
Take Security Up A Notch By Adding LEDs
ESP8266 – 1+ Year 18650 battery lifetime – Qball’s Weblog
ESP8266 WiFi power reduction – Avoiding network scan – OppoverBakke
Mike’s Picks:
Vintage Mini Inkjet Prints On-Demand ASCII Art
Lego Drone Finally Takes Off
Better Controls For Your Chromecast Through CEC
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Why Do Resistors Have A Color Code?
Raspberry Pi 4 And The State Of Video Game Emulation
How The Sony PlayStation Was Hacked | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211693",
"author": "Thresholdshift",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T20:11:11",
"content": "I’ve been listening since episode 0. The only one I’ve missed is the briefly available “error” episode from last week. Gotta be quicker.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,619.514544 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/magic-acrylic-makes-this-ring-stand-out/ | Magic Acrylic Makes This Ring Stand Out | Lewin Day | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"jewelry",
"ring"
] | LEDs look great no matter how you use them, but sometimes you want to hide them from direct view. [Charlyn] found a great way to do that,
using a special material designed just for the purpose.
[Charlyn] built a ring as a piece of fashion jewelry, hooking up a Gemma M0 microcontroller to a Neopixel Jewel, which packs 7 individual LEDs. The hardware is secreted away inside an enclosure featuring both 3D-printed and lasercut parts.
Rather than openly show off the electronics, it’s all hidden away inside. Instead, a piece of black Chemcast LED acrylic is used, which allows LED light to shine through, while otherwise appearing opaque. Those interested in learning more can
check out the product details on the manufacturer site.
It’s a great way to make a subtle costume piece that only reveals its flashier side when you so decide. We’ve seen badges use
similar techniques on PCBs to great effect
, too. Video after the break. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211655",
"author": "Tom Nardi",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T16:57:26",
"content": "That really is a gorgeous effect, looks very futuristic.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6211656",
"author": "Capt McAllister",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,373,619.019842 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/this-week-in-security-windows-10-apocalypse-paypal-problems-and-cablehaunt/ | This Week In Security: Windows 10 Apocalypse, Paypal Problems, And Cablehaunt | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"cisco",
"paypal",
"This Week in Security",
"Windows 10"
] | Nicely timed to drop on the final day of Windows 7 support, Windows 10 received a fix to an extremely serious flaw in
crypt32.dll
. This flaw was reported by
the good guys at the NSA
. (We know it was the good guys, because they reported it rather than used it to spy on us.) It’s really bad. If you’re running Windows 10, go grab the update now. OK, you’re updated? Good, let’s talk about it now.
CVE-2020-0601
pic.twitter.com/8tJsJqvnHj
— Saleem Rashid (@saleemrash1d)
January 15, 2020
The flaw applies to X.509 keys that use elliptic curve cryptography. We’ve discussed ECC in the past, but let’s review. Public key encryption is based on the idea that some calculations are very easy to perform and verify, but extremely difficult to calculate the reverse operation.
The historic calculation is multiplying large primes, as it’s unreasonably difficult to factorize that result by a conventional computer. A true quantum computer with enough qubits will theoretically be able to factorize those numbers much quicker than a classical computer, so the crypto community has been searching for a replacement for years. The elliptic curve is the solution that has become the most popular. An agreed-upon curve and initial vector are all that is needed to perform the ECC calculation.
There are potential weaknesses in ECC. One such weakness is that not all curves are created equal. A well constructed curve results in good cryptography, but there are weak curves that result in breakable encryption.
With that foundation laid, the flaw itself is relatively easy to understand. An X.509 certificate can define its own curve. The Windows 10 implementation doesn’t properly check the curve that is specified. A malicious curve is specified that is similar to the expected curve — similar enough that the checks in
crypt32
don’t catch it.
Paypal Password Bug
Imagine this scenario. You get an email, click a link, and immediately realize that this isn’t the page you thought it was. Close that tab, and all is well, right? You didn’t actually fall for the fishing scam. Well, [Alex Birsan] has
bad news
, in the form of a clever attack based off a Cross-Site Script Inclusion (XSSI) vulnerability in the Paypal login flow.
XSSI is similar to its other cross-site scripting brethren, but rather than running malicious code on a target web page, it runs a script from another web service on a malicious web page. It’s pretty common to include a JavaScript script from a different domain. The difference here is that not all JS scripts are intended to be included in other pages. Paypal had such a script. Visiting a malicious web page could load that script in your browser, and if you’ve ever logged in to Paypal, it would contain a set of valid session keys. The attacker could make a few password attempts using those credentials, which triggered a CAPTCHA request.
That CAPTCHA request is important. When the CAPTCHA form is filled, it launched a self-submitting form that contained the plain text username and password. Yikes! Once a user logged back in to Paypal, that CAPTCHA page could be run again, with the stolen session key, and the username and password easily recovered by the attacker. Thankfully, [Alex] disclosed the vulnerability to Paypal, who fixed it and paid him a nice tidy sum for his work.
Intel GPU Vulnerability
Brought to us by Phoronix, Intel is in the process of mitigating
a problem in their integrated GPU cores
. Even in
Intel’s disclosure
, there isn’t a whole lot of detail, but it seems to be another information leak in the same vein as Meltdown and Spectre.
The solution, at least in the Linux kernel, is to reset the iGPU between context switches. On 7th generation processors in particular, the performance hit to GPU is pretty severe. Considering the less than stellar video performance of those chips, losing 50% performance to this mitigation is quite the blow.
Cablehaunt
Use a cable modem? There’s a decent chance it has a Broadcom chip in it, and is vulnerable to
Cablehaunt
. A group of researchers found a way to download the current modem settings, which started a hunt for vulnerabilities. They found a spectrum analyzer page that responds to JSON requests. Naturally, the JSON parser isn’t written defensively. A long enough value in a request overflows the buffer, and the processor and microkernel that system runs doesn’t have any modern mitigation. Getting from access to the open port to malicious modification is a nearly trivial task. Check out the page for more details, as well as instructions for how to test your modem.
Cisco Again
At this point, if you have any Cisco equipment you can put your hands on, unplug it now before the long weekend of patching that you have ahead of you. [Steven Seeley] did
an audit of the Cisco D
ata Center Network Manager
. While he found multiple security problems, the glaring issue is a hardcoded authentication key. Yes, another Cisco product had a backdoor left in a production unit. There are deserialization bugs, SQL injection vulnerabilities, and plenty more to wade through, so go check it out if you want the gritty details. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211624",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T15:24:50",
"content": "They reported it because they know they don’t have a monopoly on the exploit.Putting it in the public domain not only pushes it to be fixed but it also makes it clear to other organisations they also have ... | 1,760,373,619.576367 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/19/binary-advent-calendar-does-more-with-fewer-doors/ | Binary Advent Calendar Does More With Fewer Doors | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"advent",
"advent calendar",
"binary",
"binary calendar",
"chocolate"
] | [John] sent this one in to us a little bit after Christmas, but we’ll give him a pass because it’s so beautiful. Think of it this way: now you have almost a full year to make
a binary advent calendar
of your own before December 1st rolls around again.
Normal advent calendars are pretty cool, especially when there is chocolate behind all 24 doors. But is it really a representational ramp-up if you never get more than one chocolate each day? [John] doesn’t think so. The economics of his binary advent calendar are a bit magical, much like the holiday season itself. Most days you’ll get two pieces of chocolate instead of one, and many days you’ll get three. That is, as long as you opened the right doors.
A momentary switch hidden behind the hinge of each door tells the Arduino clone when it’s been opened. The Arduino checks your binary counting abilities, and if you’re right, a servo moves a gate forward and dispenses one chocolate ball per opened door. We love the simplicity of the dispensing mechanism — the doors are designed with a ceiling that keeps non-qualifying chocolates in their channels until their flag comes up.
[John] is working out the kinks before he releases this into the wild. For now, you can get a taste in the demo video featuring a bite-sized explanation. If you don’t like chocolate, maybe
this blinky advent calendar
will light you up inside. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6212132",
"author": "N0BOX",
"timestamp": "2020-01-19T18:13:43",
"content": "So, does that make this a good Christian way to teach your kids how to think in binary while also observing advent?(I really am not being sarcastic, here, BTW)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,373,619.208289 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/19/experiments-in-soft-robotics/ | Experiments In Soft Robotics | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"flxo",
"programmable air",
"robot",
"soft robotics",
"TPU"
] | [Arnav Wagh] has been doing some cool experiments in
soft robotics using his home 3D printer.
Soft robots have a lot of advantages, but as [Arnav]
points out on his website
, it’s pretty hard to get started in the same way as one might with another type of project. You can’t necessarily go on Amazon and order a ten pack of soft robot actuators in the way you can Arduinos.
The project started by imitating other projects. First he copied the universities who have done work in this arena by casting soft silicone actuators. He notes the same things that they did, that they’re difficult to produce and prone to punctures. Next he tried painting foam with
silicone
, which worked, but it was still prone to punctures, and there was a consensus that it was creepy. He finally had a breakthrough playing with origami shapes. After some iteration he was able to print them reliably with an Ultimaker.
Finally to get it into the “easy to hack together on a weekend” range he was looking for: he designed it to be VEX compatible. You can see them moving in the
video
after the break. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6212110",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2020-01-19T15:15:48",
"content": "There are quite a few companies that sell custom pneumatic suction cups for industrial robots. If you’re polite they might even send you free samples of some of the long thin bellow types. Stick a couple t... | 1,760,373,619.061918 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/19/play-that-funky-3d-printer/ | Play That Funky 3D Printer… | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"midi",
"music"
] | Human brains are wired for music. Scientists think the oldest musical instruments were flutes that date back somewhere between 67,000 and 37,000 years ago. We assume though that people were banging on wood or their thighs, or knocking two rocks together long before that. Almost anything can be a musical instrument. A case in point: [elifer5000] walked into a room containing a lot of running 3D printers, and thought it seemed musical. Next thing you know, he harnessed
3D printers as a MIDI instrument
.
At a hackathon, he found some software that converts a MIDI file to GCode. The only problem is a common printer has three axes and, therefore, can only produce (at most) three notes at once. The obvious answer to this problem is to use more printers, and that’s what he did, as you can see below.
Apparently the speed the stepper motor moves is proportional to the pitch of the tone it emits. Of course, the distance of travel at a given speed corresponds to how long the tone will endure. Given that, it is a pretty simple math problem to figure out the parameters of the note.
Common printers have a slow Z axis, so the final product only uses the X and Y axis on each printer. That means you might even be able to use a CNC machine or a plotter as part of your printer orchestra.
One problem arose when trying to handle a MIDI file in realtime. When you start a note, you don’t know how long it will last. You will only know the note has ended when it stops. That makes sense when you remember that a MIDI keyboard won’t know how long you will press a key when you first push on it. The code uses a small “micronote” of 50 milliseconds and plays it until the stop signal arrives.
The Python code takes a bit of calibration because every printer is a little different. The result is — as you might expect — a bit electronic, but pleasing enough and sure beats two rocks. We’ve seen music played on
floppy drives
and hard drives before. Or, you can go the other way and use
a hard drive as a microphone
. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6212100",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2020-01-19T13:29:26",
"content": "Move over, Floppotron.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6212113",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2020-01-19T15:32:55",
"... | 1,760,373,619.756673 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/19/modular-solar-powered-iot-sensors/ | Modular Solar-Powered IoT Sensors | Danie Conradie | [
"Solar Hacks",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"agriculture",
"environmental sensor",
"IoT",
"modular",
"solar power"
] | Bringing a product to market is not easy, if it were everyone would be doing it, and succeeding. The team at Pycno is in the process of launching their second product, a modular solar powered IoT unit called
Pulse
. It’s always interesting to get an inside look when a company is so open during the development process, and see how they deal with challenges.
Pycno’s first product was a solar powered sensor suite for crops. This time round they are keeping the solar part, but creating a modular system that can accept wired or wireless connections (2G/3G/4G, WiFi, LoRa, GPS and Bluetooth 5) or modules that slide into the bottom of the unit. They plan to open source the module design to allow other to design custom modules, which is a smart move since interoperability can be a big driving factor behind adoption. The ease of plugging in sensors is a very handy feature, since most non-Hackaday users would probably prefer to not open up expensive units to swap out sensors. The custom solar panel itself is pretty interesting, since it features an
integrated OLED display
. It consists of a PCB with the cutout for the display, with solar cells soldered on before the whole is laminated to protect the cells.
Making a product so completely modular also has some pitfalls, since it can be really tricky to market something able to do anything for anybody. However, we wish them the best of luck with their
Kickstarter
(video after the break) and look forward to seeing how the ecosystem develops.
When a large community develops around a modular ecosystem, it can truly grow beyond the originator’s wildest dreams. Just look at Arduino and Raspberry Pi. We’re also currently running a
contest involving boards for the Feather form factor
if you want to get in on the act. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6212220",
"author": "x3n0x",
"timestamp": "2020-01-20T04:48:41",
"content": "Cool idea! a platform like this has been something I have wanted to pursue for some time, but have not for lack of time. Accessible, internet connected sensors for various environmental uses are something... | 1,760,373,619.799091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/18/another-iot-debacle-charter-offers-home-insecurity/ | Another IoT Debacle: Charter Offers Home Insecurity | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Rants"
] | [
"charter",
"cloud",
"home security",
"IoT",
"spectrum",
"zigbee"
] | If you are a glass-half-empty person, you’ll view Charter’s announcement that they will shutter their home security and smart home service on February 5th as another reason not to buy into closed-source IoT devices. If you are a glass-half-full person though, you’ll see the cable company’s announcement as a sign that a lot of Zigbee hardware will soon flood the surplus market.
Ars Technica reports
that after investigation it appears that some of the devices may connect to a standard Zigbee hub after a factory reset, but many others will definitely not.
As you might expect, users were less than thrilled. Especially those that shelled out thousands of dollars on sensors and cameras. This sort of thing might be expected if a company goes out of business, but Charter just doesn’t want to be in the home security business anymore.
Charter acquired the security business when it bought Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in 2016. According to Charter, they stopped marketing the home security service after that. To add insult to injury they are offering a deal to customers by which they can get an Amazon Ring kit with a hub, a range extender, and five devices for “free” if they sign up for one year of Ring monitoring for $340. When a year of monitoring can be had for $100 and a 5-piece Ring set for $199, understandably this has not gone down well. Even a 10-piece set that has the same devices plus an extra motion detector and two extra sensors can be had for only $259.
If you’re a Charter IoT customer and you don’t like that deal, there is the
$179 plan from Abode
, which is a slightly better proposition. Even then, the yearly monitoring plan only lists for $200 and is actually $100 right now, regardless of your relationship with Spectrum.
We liked the one quote in the article that said: “Zigbee is famously nonstandard as a standard.” We couldn’t help but think of the old adage: “The good thing about standards is there are so many of them.” This remindS us of the fiasco with
Best Buy’s smart devices
last year. Maybe someone will take pity on these poor users and
help them out
. | 38 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6212035",
"author": "Mike Molinari aka:MMISCOOL",
"timestamp": "2020-01-19T06:24:28",
"content": "I dont trust the cloud. That why I build my own. ESP8266 is all it takes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6212271",
"aut... | 1,760,373,620.334781 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/18/building-a-better-bittorrent-client-in-go/ | Building A Better BitTorrent Client In Go | Sharon Lin | [
"Security Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"bit torrent",
"distributed computing",
"peer-to-peer"
] | When it comes to peer-to-peer file sharing protocols, BitTorrent is probably one of the best known. It requires a client implementing the program and a tracker to list files available to transfer and to find peer users to transfer those files. Developed in 2001, BitTorrent has since acquired more than a quarter billion users according to some estimates.
While most users choose to use existing clients, [Jesse Li] wanted to
build one from scratch in Go
, a programming language commonly used for its built-in concurrency features and simplicity compared to C.
Client-server versus peer-to-peer architecture
The first step for a client is finding peers to download files from. Trackers, web servers running over HTTP, serve as centralized locations for introducing peers to one another. Due to the centralization, the servers are at risk of being discovered and shut down if they facilitate illegal content exchange. Thus, making peer discovery a distributed process is a necessity for preventing trackers from following in the footsteps of the now-defunct TorrentSpy, Popcorn Time, and KickassTorrents.
The client starts off by reading a .torrent file, which describes the contents of the desired file and how to connect to a tracker. The information in the file includes the URL of the tracker, the creation time, and SHA-1 hashes of each piece, or a chunk of the file. One file can be made up of thousands of pieces – the client will need to download the pieces from peers, check the hashes against the torrent file, and finally assemble the pieces together to finally retrieve the file. For the implementation, [Jesse] chose to keep the structures in the Go program reasonably flat, separating application structs from serialization structs. Pieces are also separated into slices of hashes to more easily access individual hashes.
The bitfield explained as a coffee shop loyalty card.
Next, a GET request to an `announce` URL in the torrent file announces the presence of the client to peers and retrieves a response from the tracker with the list of peers. To start downloading pieces, the client starts a TCP connection with a peer, completes a two-way BitTorrent handshake, and exchanges messages to download pieces.
One interesting data structure exchanged in the messages is a bitfield, which acts as a byte array that checks which pieces a peer has. Bits are flipped when their respective piece’s status changes, acting somewhat like a loyalty card with stamps.
While talking to one peer may be straightforward, managing the concurrency of talking to multiple peers at once requires solving a classically Hard problem. [Jesse] implements this in Go by using channels as thread-safe queues, setting up two channels to assign work and collect downloaded pieces. Requests are later pipelined to increase throughput since network round-trips are expensive and sending blocks individually inefficient.
The full implementation is
available on GitHub
, and is easy enough to use as an alternative client or as a walkthrough if you’d prefer to build your own. | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6212020",
"author": "RetiredHobgoblin",
"timestamp": "2020-01-19T03:36:47",
"content": "Ripping off xkcd artistic style and rewriting an application in Go doesn’t make a “better” client.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6212028... | 1,760,373,620.445113 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/18/diy-lambo-that-made-the-real-lamborghini-take-notice/ | DIY Lambo That Made The Real Lamborghini Take Notice | Danie Conradie | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"car",
"diy car",
"fabrication",
"lamborghini aventador"
] | When you start sharing your projects with the world, you never know who might take notice. [Sterling Backus] and his son [Xander] have been
building a functional Lamborghini Aventador look alike
in their garage, and the real Lamborghini company caught wind of it and decided to turn it into an
awesome Christmas ad
.
Named the AXAS Interceptor by its creators, the car is built from scratch around a custom tubular space frame chassis. Most of the body panels are 3D printed and then skinned with carbon fibre, with a few sheet metal panels mixed in. The interior is mix of parts from other cars and aftermarket components, with 3D printing to pull everything together. The drivetrain consists of an engine from a Corvette, a transaxle from a Porsche 996, with the rest of the chassis components being either aftermarket or custom-fabricated pieces.
[Sterling] got an unexpectedcall from Lamborghini, and they arranged to secretly sneak a real Aventador into the garage in the dead of night to surprise the rest of the family, and let them borrow it for a few weeks. Lamborghini got some marketing out of it, which most people would probably agree is a pretty good deal. We would admit that we’re quite envious.
The car is driveable, but still many hours from being complete. [Sterling] admits that he is no car building professional, but we’re impressed by what he has been able to achieve so far with this ambitious project, and we’re looking forward to the finished product.
If you want to get your feet wet with your first project car, here’s
how you pick one
. | 33 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211973",
"author": "AggregatVier",
"timestamp": "2020-01-19T00:24:47",
"content": "That top picture looks like a lambo that’s been in a bad accident with an even worse bondo rescue attempt. But he keeps at it and it will be a thing of pride and beauty.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,373,620.650905 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/a-water-cooled-gaming-pc-you-can-take-with-you/ | A Water Cooled Gaming PC You Can Take With You | Tom Nardi | [
"computer hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"gaming pc",
"mobile computer",
"Ryzen",
"VR goggles",
"water cooled"
] | Have you ever been stuck in a hotel room wishing you brought your VR-capable gaming PC along with you? Well [thegarbz] certainly has, which was the inspiration for this absolutely gorgeous
mobile rig affectionately known as “The Nuclear Football”
that brings console-level portability to those who count themselves among the PC Master Race.
OK, fine. We’ll admit that the existence of gaming laptops means you don’t
actually
need to carry around such an elaborate contraption just to play Steam games on the go. But if you’re going to do it, shouldn’t you do it in style? More practically speaking, [thegarbz] says the cost of this project was less than what a gaming laptop of similar specs would have cost.
The Nuclear Football features a Ryzen 5 2600 processor, a NVIDIA 2070 Super graphics card, and 16 GB of DDR4 RAM. The water cooling gear is from Alphacool, and includes a custom controller that links to the computer and allows [thegarbz] to monitor temperatures and fan speeds via a widget on the desktop.
While not nearly as mobile, this machine does remind us of the water cooled “Big O” that
packed all the current-gen consoles and a gaming PC into one glorious machine
. | 39 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211575",
"author": "kepler",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T12:09:05",
"content": "I doubt they let you on a plane with that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6211643",
"author": "TSA F-",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T16... | 1,760,373,620.522203 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/17/oceanography-as-open-as-the-seas/ | Oceanography As Open As The Seas | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"adalogger",
"citizen science",
"DS18B20",
"oceanography",
"rtc",
"salinity"
] | With Earth in the throes of climate change and no suitable Planet B lined up just yet, oceanography is as important now as it has ever been. And yet, the instruments relied upon for decades to test ocean conditions are holding steady within the range of expensive to prohibitively expensive. Like any other area of science, lowering the barrier of entry has almost no disadvantages — more players means more data, and that means more insight into the inner workings of the briny deep.
[Oceanography for Everyone] aims to change all that by showing the world just how easy it is to build an oceanographic testing suite that measures conductivity (aka salinity), temperature, and depth using common components.
OpenCTD
is designed primarily for use on the continental shelf, and has been successfully tested to a depth of 100 meters.
An Adalogger M0 and RTC Featherwing run the show from their waterproof booth in the center of the PVC tube. There’s a 14-bar pressure sensor for depth, a trio of DS18B20s for temperature averaging, and a commercial conductivity probe that gathers salinity data. These sensors are fed through a 3D-printed base plate and ultimately potted in stainless steel epoxy. The other end of the tube is sealed with a mechanical plug that seats and unseats with the whirl of a wingnut.
We particularly like the scratch-built magnetic slide switch that turns OpenCTD on and off without the need to open the cylinder. If you’d like to build one of these for yourself, take a deep dive into [Oceanography for Everyone]’s
comprehensive guide
— it covers the components, construction, and calibration in remarkable detail. The switch is explained starting on page 50. You can find out more about the work Oceanography for Everyone is doing at
their site
.
As far as cheap waterproof enclosures go, PVC is a great choice.
It works well for underwater photography, too
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211557",
"author": "Knope",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T10:33:13",
"content": "This isn’t accurate at all. I worked for many oceanic sensor projects in my career and they are almost all projects like the one above. Fuck, I remember when 3d printing came about, we nearly shit ourselve... | 1,760,373,620.261319 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/a-simple-app-controlled-door-lock/ | A Simple App Controlled Door Lock | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"app inventor",
"arduino",
"bluetooth",
"door",
"lock"
] | [Adnan.R.Khan] had a sliding door latch plus an Arduino, and hacked together this
cool but simple app controlled door lock.
Mechanically the lock consists of a Solarbotics GM3 motor, some
Meccano
, and a servo arm. A string is tied between two pulleys and looped around the slide of a barrel latch. When the motor moves back and forth it’s enough to slide the lock in and out. Electronically an Arduino and a Bluetooth module provide the electronics. The system runs from a 9V battery, and we’re interested to know whether there were any tricks pulled to make the battery last.
The system’s software is a simple program built in MIT App Inventor. Still, it’s pretty cool that you can get functionally close to a production product with parts that are very much lying around. It also makes us think of maybe keeping our childhood Meccano sets a little closer to the bench! | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211512",
"author": "Simon",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T07:09:00",
"content": "Correct me if I’m wrong, but anyone who connects to this device and then sends the text “L” through a bluetooth serial shell would be able to open this no? There doesn’t seem to be any security involved.",
... | 1,760,373,620.209388 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/these-bit-twiddling-tricks-will-make-your-coworkers-hate-you/ | These Bit Twiddling Tricks Will Make Your Coworkers Hate You | Kerry Scharfglass | [
"classic hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"bit manipulation",
"bit math",
"bit twiddling",
"bits",
"mask",
"registers",
"shift"
] | In the embedded world, twiddling a few bits is expected behavior. Firmware is far enough down the stack that the author may care about the number of bits and bytes used, or needs to work with registers directly to make the machine dance. Usually these operations are confined to the typical shifting and masking but sometimes a problem calls for more exotic solutions. If you need to descend down these dark depths you invariably come across the classic
Bit Twiddling Hacks
collected by [Sean Eron Anderson]. Here be dragons.
Discussions of bit math are great opportunities to revisit
Wikipedia’s superb illustrations
Bit Twiddling Hacks is exactly as described; a page full of snippets and suggestions for how to perform all manner of bit math in convenient or efficient ways. To our surprise upon reading the disclaimer at the top of the page, [Sean] observes that so many people have used the contents of the page that it’s effectively all been thoroughly tested. Considering how esoteric some of the snippets are we’d love to know how the darkest corners found use.
The page contains a variety of nifty tricks. Interview content like
counting set bits
makes an early appearance. There’s more esoteric content like
this trick for interleaving
the bits in two u16’s into a single u32, or
rounding up to the next power of two
by casting floats. This author has only been forced to turn to Bit Twiddling Hacks on one occasion: to
sign extend
the output from an unfortunately designed sensor with unusual length registers.
Next time you need to perform an operation with bitmatch, check out Bit Twiddling Hacks. Have you ever needed it in production? How did you use it? We’d love to hear about it in the comments. | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211470",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T03:13:08",
"content": "I feel like a huge number of these are “barrel shifters are awesome.” Which of course means if you’re on an architecture that doesn’t have one, many of those trucks will actually be pretty bad.",
"parent_... | 1,760,373,620.170207 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/74-series-clock-gets-a-mems-heart/ | 74-Series Clock Gets A MEMS Heart | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"74 series logic",
"clock",
"MEMS",
"mems oscillator"
] | [Erik van Zijst] has had a long career as a programmer, but lacked an understanding of what was happening at a bare metal level. After building a few logic gates out of transistors to get a feel for electronics, he set out to build a working clock using 74-series logic.
Naturally, it was quite the adventure.
The project starts out as many do on the breadboard. The requisite BCD counters and 7-segment displays were sourced, and everything was connected up with a cavalcade of colorful hookup wires. A 32.768 KHz crystal was pressed into service to generate the clock signal, divided down to get a 1Hz output to drive the seconds counter that would then run the entire clock. [Erik] then had to learn some more practical electronics skills, to deal with debouncing buttons for the time setting circuit.
With the clock now functional, [Erik] decided to take things further, aiming to build something more robust and usable. An automatic brightness control was created using a 555 to run a crude PWM dimmer for the LEDs. Additionally, a PCB was designed to replace the temporary breadboard setup. This led to problems with the oscillator that [Erik] couldn’t quite figure out. Rather than continue on the same path, he changed tack, instead replacing the quartz crystal with a modern MEMS oscillator that solved the problem.
It’s a great look at how to construct a working clock from bare logic, and one that serves to remind us just how complex even a seemingly simple device can be. We’ve seen other from-scratch builds before too,
like this 777-transistor clock
,
or this attractive stacked design.
Video after the break. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211436",
"author": "MvK",
"timestamp": "2020-01-17T00:14:16",
"content": "Cool project. Erik should should hook-up the unused inputs of the 74HCT/74HC chips to ground or Vcc. Without it, it will be spewing RF noise all over the spectrum. (No such need for 74LS).",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,373,620.380796 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/motorized-inline-skates-run-on-makita-power/ | Motorized Inline Skates Run On Makita Power | Lewin Day | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"drill",
"makita drill",
"rollerblades"
] | Inline skates can be fun, but like most wheeled contraptions, they’re even better when motorized. With just such a goal in mind,
[The Real Life Guys] decided to whip up a set of powered skates, running on Makita power!
To get power to the ground, the third wheel on each skate is modified to have a sprocket attached. A Makita drill is then fitted to the skate, transferring power to the wheel through a 90-degree gearbox and a chain drive. The drill is controlled by removing the trigger from the shell and hooking it up with an extended cable.
It’s a lairy setup that probably takes serious practice to use effectively, but does allow for fancy tricks like differential steering if you really want to show off. It’s a great example of using a powerdrill as an all-inclusive motion setup, with the battery, motor and drivetrain already integrated in a neat, tidy package.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen a powered set of ‘skates, either!
Video after the break.
[Thanks to Itay for the tip!] | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211386",
"author": "Finnius de la Lettuice",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T21:26:16",
"content": "Powered wheels on skates is a dream of mine, though less for propulsion and more for braking.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "626610... | 1,760,373,620.696635 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/a-strange-display-gives-up-its-secrets/ | A Strange Display Gives Up Its Secrets | Jenny List | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"dot matrix",
"led",
"LED display"
] | Providing a display for a project in 2020 is something of a done deal. Standard interfaces and off-the-shelf libraries for easily available and cheap modules mean that the hardest choice you’ll have to make about a display will probably relate to its colour. Three decades ago though this was not such a straightforward matter though, and having a display that was in any way complex would in varying proportion take a significant proportion of your processing time , and cost a fortune. [AnubisTTP]
has an unusual display from that era
, a four-digit LED dot matrix module, and the take of its reverse engineering makes for a fascinating read.
The LITEF 104267 was made in 1986, and is a hybrid circuit in a metal can with four clear windows , one positioned over each LED matrix. Inside are seven un-encapsulated chips alongside the LED matrices on a golf plated hybrid substrate. The chips themselves are not of a particularly high-density process, so some high-resolution photography was able to provide a good guess at their purpose. A set of shift registers drive the columns through buffers, while the rows are brought out to a set of parallel lines. Thus each column can be illuminated sequentially with data presented on the rows. It’s something that would have saved a designer of the day a few extra 74-series chips, though we are guessing at some significant cost.
This display may seem antiquated to us today, but it wasn’t the only option for 1980s designers. There’s one display driver from back then
that’s very much still with us today
. | 17 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211350",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T19:34:21",
"content": "“golf plated hybrid substrate”Interesting…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6211354",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-01-... | 1,760,373,620.574442 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/a-spacex-falcon-9-will-blow-up-very-soon-and-thats-ok/ | A SpaceX Falcon 9 Will Blow Up Very Soon, And That’s OK | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"abort",
"Crew Dragon",
"dragon",
"nasa",
"Space Escape",
"SpaceX"
] | They say you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, and there are few fields where this idiom is better exemplified than rocketry. It’s a forgone conclusion that when you develop a new booster, at least a few test articles are going to be destroyed in the process. In fact, some argue that a program that doesn’t push the hardware to the breaking point is a program that’s not testing aggressively enough.
Which is why, assuming everything goes according to plan,
SpaceX will be obliterating one of their Falcon 9 boosters a little after 8:00 AM EST on Saturday morning
. The event will be broadcast live via the Internet, and thanks to the roughly 70% propellant load it will be carrying at the moment of its destruction, it should prove to be quite a show.
This might seem like an odd way to spend $62 million, but for SpaceX, it’s worth it to know that the Crew Dragon Launch Abort System (LES) will work under actual flight conditions. The LES has already been successfully tested once, but that was on the ground and from a standstill. It allowed engineers to see how the system would behave should an abort occur while the rocket was still on the pad,
but as the loss of the Soyuz MS-10 dramatically demonstrated
, astronauts may need to make a timely exit from a rocket that’s already well on the way to space.
In an actual emergency, the crewed spacecraft will very likely be speeding away from a violent explosion and rapidly expanding cloud of shrapnel. The complete destruction of the Falcon 9 that will be carrying the Crew Dragon during Saturday’s test will serve to create the same sort of conditions the spacecraft will need to survive if the LES has any hope of bringing the crew home safely. So even if there was some way to prevent the booster from breaking up during the test, it’s more useful from an engineering standpoint to destroy it.
Of course, that only explains
why
the Falcon 9 will be destroyed during this test. But exactly
how
this properly functioning booster will find itself being ripped to pieces high over the Atlantic Ocean in a matter of seconds is an equally interesting question.
A Semi-Simulated Disaster
F9R Dev1 activates its FTS
It was initially assumed that ground controllers would activate the Flight Termination System (FTS) to destroy the rocket and engage the LES. On the Falcon 9 the termination system uses explosive charges to “unzip” the rocket’s propellant tanks and fuselage, rapidly releasing all of the RP-1 and liquid oxygen. This results in a mid-air deflagration rather than an outright explosion.
All things considered, this is the fastest and safest way to neutralize the Falcon 9, and is intended to be used in a situation where the rocket has veered off course and is heading towards a populated area. The FTS has never been used on an operational Falcon 9, but it was used when the onboard computer of the “F9R Dev1” test vehicle determined that it was heading away from the predefined safe zone.
But for the purposes of this test, such an orderly disintegration of the booster doesn’t really fit many potential abort scenarios. The event most likely to trigger the LES during an actual mission would be an engine failure, explosive or otherwise. So for the purposes of Saturday’s test, ground control will simply command Main Engine Cut Off (MECO) at a little over one minute into the flight. The Crew Dragon’s systems will interpret this loss of thrust as a non-recoverable failure, and automatically begin the abort sequence.
Hitting a Brick Wall at Mach 1.5
The time frame for MECO wasn’t selected arbitrarily, either. At approximately one minute into the flight, the vehicle will experience what’s known in the industry as “Max Q”, the point when aerodynamic structural loads will be at their highest. If performing the abort test during the period in which the airframe will be under maximum stress seems like the most difficult time to do it, that’s because it is. Not only is Max Q arguably the point where a structural failure is most likely to occur, but engaging the LES during this stage of the flight will show NASA and SpaceX engineers how the system will perform in the worst case scenario.
What happens next is really anyone’s guess.
Once the Crew Dragon fires its SuperDraco engines
and pulls away from the Falcon 9 booster, the flat top of the rocket’s upper stage will be exposed to supersonic airflow it was never designed for. It’s very likely the crushing, instantaneous, pressure will cause the booster to collapse. But even if the booster somehow survives the force of the inrushing air, it will have become aerodynamically unstable; it will quickly deviate from the direction of flight and begin tumbling, which will invariably tear the relatively flimsy fuselage to pieces.
In either event, the rapid disintegration of the Falcon 9 and the resulting release of propellants will provide a perfect analog for the sort of dramatic failure that the LES is designed for.
The Final Countdown
If everything goes according to plan, the Crew Dragon will pop its parachutes and splash down in the Atlantic approximately 32 kilometers East of Cape Canaveral. Both SpaceX and NASA recovery teams will use this opportunity to rehearse the delicate task of recovering the spacecraft from the ocean. This procedure has also been practiced previously, but never this far out, or with the Crew Dragon returning from such a high altitude.
A successful in-flight abort test is the final milestone on the long road towards human-rating both the Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon. If NASA is happy with what they see this weekend, SpaceX will be cleared to bring astronauts to the International Space Station as soon as next month, though finalizing the certification process could push the first operational flight to Spring.
After
Boeing’s Starliner failed to reach the International Space Station
on its first test flight in December, all eyes are now on SpaceX. Should this test go off without a hitch, the Crew Dragon may well become the first American spacecraft to carry astronauts since the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle. | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211332",
"author": "Wretch",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T18:38:58",
"content": "I volunteer to be a test dummy on this flight.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6211339",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,373,620.856151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/analyzing-cnc-tool-chatter-with-audacity/ | Analyzing CNC Tool Chatter With Audacity | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"audacity",
"audio",
"chatter tooling",
"cnc",
"fft",
"spectrogram",
"spindle",
"vibration analysis"
] | When you’re operating a machine that’s powerful enough to tear a solid metal block to shards, it pays to be attentive to details. The angular momentum of the spindle of a modern CNC machine can be trouble if it gets unleashed the wrong way, which is why generations of machinists have developed an ear for the telltale sign of impending doom: chatter.
To help develop that ear, [Zachary Tong] did
a spectral analysis of the sounds of his new CNC machine
during its “first chip” outing. The benchtop machine is no slouch – an Avid Pro 2436 with a 3 hp S30C tool-changing spindle. But like any benchtop machine, it lacks the sheer mass needed to reduce vibration, and tool chatter can be a problem.
The analysis begins at about the 5:13 mark in the video below, where [Zach] fed the soundtrack of his video into Audacity. Switching from waveform to spectrogram mode, he was able to identify a strong signal at about 5,000 Hz, corresponding to the spindle coming up to speed. The white noise of the mist cooling system was clearly visible too, as were harmonic vibrations up and down the spectrum. Most interesting, though, was the slight dip in frequency during the cut, indicating loading on the spindle. [Zach] then analyzed the data from the cut in the frequency domain and found the expected spindle harmonics, as well the harmonics from the three flutes on the tool. Mixed in among these were spikes indicating chatter – nothing major, but still enough to measure.
Audacity has turned out to be an incredibly useful tool with a broad range of applications. Whether it be
finding bats
,
dumping ROMs
,
detecting lightning strikes
, or
cloning remote controls
, Audacity is often the hacker’s tool of choice. | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211314",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T17:07:28",
"content": "Awesome technique. People often overlook sounds as an analytical tool. I’ve used sound to determine RPM on a number of occasions – whip out my phone, hold a piece of paper against a spinning part (as lon... | 1,760,373,620.927639 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/car-alternators-make-great-electric-motors-heres-how/ | Car Alternators Make Great Electric Motors; Here’s How | Jenny List | [
"Engine Hacks",
"Featured",
"how-to",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"ac motor",
"alternator",
"brushless motor",
"motor",
"tutorial"
] | The humble automotive alternator hides an interesting secret. Known as the part that converts power from internal combustion into the electricity needed to run everything else, they can also themselves be used as an electric motor.
The schematic of a simple automotive alternator, from
US patent 3329841A
filed in 1963 for Robert Bosch GmbH.
These devices almost always take the form of a 3-phase alternator with the magnetic component supplied by an electromagnet on the rotor, and come with a rectifier and regulator pack to convert the higher AC voltage to 12V for the car electrical systems. Internally they have three connections to the stator coils which appear to be universally wired in a
delta configuration
, and a pair of connections to a set of brushes supplying the rotor coils through a set of slip rings. They have a surprisingly high capacity, and estimates put their capabilities as motors in the several horsepower. Best of all they are readily available second-hand and also surprisingly cheap, the Ford Focus unit shown here came from an eBay car breaker and cost only £15 (about $20).
We already hear you shouting “Why?!” at your magical internet device as you read this. Let’s jump into that.
These People Think Building Their Own Electric Vehicles is Fun!
One of the interesting facets of watching the UK
Hacky Racer
series grow from a bunch of friends making silly electric vehicles to something approaching a formal race series has been seeing the evolution of the art of building a Hacky Racer. As the slightly grubbier cousin of the US
Power Racing series
it has benefited somewhat from inheriting some of their evolutionary experience, but that hasn’t stopped the Hacky Racers coming up with their own vehicle developments. They’ve moved from salvaged mobility and golf buggy motors to Chinese electric bicycle and tricycle motors, and now the more adventurous constructors are starting to look further afield for motive power. One promising source for an inexpensive decently-powered motor comes in the form of the car alternator.
Our Ford Focus alternator
Searching for car alternator conversions reveals a variety of pages, HOWTOs, and guides, many of which can be extremely confusing and overcomplex. In particular there are suggestions concerning the three stator connections, with advice to break out the individual windings and apply special wiring configurations to them. Based upon the experience of converting quite a few alternators this appears surprising, as all the various models we’ve converted have had the same ready-to-go delta configuration that needed no rewiring at all. Perhaps it’s time to present a Hackaday guide with a real alternator, and explode any remaining myths while we’re at it.
So, fired up by the prospect of a cheap brushless motor by the passage above, you’ve got a Ford Focus alternator on the bench before you. How does one go about converting it?
Wanton Destruction Of An Innocent Car Part
Removing the regulator/brush assembly
On the back of a modern alternator is universally a plastic dust cover secured by a set of bolts. These devices are designed to be refurbished so (perhaps surprisingly for a modern automotive component) they are usually very easy indeed to dismantle. If you take off the dust cover you’ll see the regulator, rectifiers, and brushes, sometimes integrated into a single unit, but more usually as in the case of the Focus alternator with the regulator and brushes as a separate assembly to the rectifier.
There is often a copious quantity of silicone sealant which needs to be cut away, but any nuts or bolts that secure the regulator should be able to be undone, and with care not to damage the brushes themselves it can be lifted clear in one piece. Then the rectifier unit can be removed, a process in which it is sometimes simpler to attack it with side cutters rather than try to remove it in one piece.
The rear plate of the alternator with the regulator and rectifier removed, showing the stator winding connections.
You should be able to identify the three bundles of thick enameled copper wires coming from the stator coils, and detach the rectifier straps from them. In some alternators they’re soldered, but some other particularly annoying designs they’re spot-welded. At the end of the dismantling process you should have a bare alternator with three sets of stator wires protruding and a bare shaft with two slip rings, whatever remains of the rectifier pack, and the regulator/brush pack.
The next step is to remove the regulator circuitry while preserving the shape of the regulator/brush assembly, and to locate and preserve the brush connections where they meet the regulator. Yet again there will be copious quantities of silicone potting compound to hack away, but eventually the regulator should be exposed. These are universally some form of hybrid circuit on a ceramic or metal substrate, with connections emerging from the moulded plastic surrounding them being soldered to pads on their edges. It should be relatively straightforward to identify the pair of connections for the brushes, carefully unsolder them, and push out the regulator circuit.
The regulator circuit exposed, with the slip ring contacts at its top right.
The slip ring contacts secured to their wires.
The completed motor.
Finally, you should have a bare alternator, a brush pack with a missing regulator circuit, and the plastic dust cover. Simply solder three suitably large-gauge wires to the three sets of stator wires and cover them in heat-shrink, solder a pair of lighter wires to the brush connections, and reassemble the brush pack to the alternator. You may need to put some form of strain relief on the wires to the brushes. The rectifier pack doesn’t need reassembling, so on some models you may need to make a spacer to replace it in supporting one side of the brush pack.
Holes can be made in the dust cover for all the various wires, and the dust cover fitted with all the wires poking through. At this point you’ve converted your alternator, and all that remains is to drive it with something. Fortunately that is a surprisingly simple process with off-the-shelf parts.
Driving Your New Motor
Motor and controller, on the bench.
A so-called brushless DC motor is simply an AC motor with a bundle of electronics that turns a DC supply into an AC one to run it. They have the advantage over brushed DC motors in reliability, efficiency, and ease of speed control, but at the expense of more complexity.
The good news for people converting automotive alternators into electric motors is that a whole range of brushless motor controllers can be had for not a lot of money, in the form of electronic speed controllers (ESC) intended for those Chinese electric bicycles and tricycles. They take a battery DC supply and produce a three-phase AC suitable to drive a delta-connected motor, and they work well with converted alternators.
ESCs have two modes, one for motors with Hall-effect feedback sensors, and one for motors without such as our alternator. Usually a wire link needs to be made to enable this, consult the instructions for your controller. We’ve found that an alternator drives well as a motor from a 36V or a 48V supply, and as long as a controller with enough power is used then they do so reliably. A quick AliExpress search for “brushless motor controller 1500W” turns up plenty of choice.
Given a controller, there is one more requirement for our alternator to become a motor, it must have a DC supply to its rotor winding. It needs to have about 2 or 3A flowing through it, for which a current-limited PSU module performs the task admirably. Having to use that power makes the motor a bit less efficient than a permanent magnet one, but the cost of a scrap alternator is hard to beat.
The motor featured in our pictures is destined to be one of a pair providing traction in a new car for an assault on this year’s races. Personal experience with
SMIDSY the Robot Wars robot
would lead me to give them forced-air cooling, but unlike the electric tricycle motors these do seem to cope well with getting hot. An alternator motor might not be the one-stop solution to whatever your small-scale traction needs could be, but even so it’s worth being aware that they are an option without unexpected wiring rituals. If you convert one for a project, please make sure to write it up and
send it to our tips line
! | 197 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211266",
"author": "cyberteque",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T15:12:15",
"content": "this only applies to alternators with an internal regulatorolder ones that use an external regulator do not work like thisthey have a shitload of coils, each on has it’s own “tophat” diodethat is one o... | 1,760,373,621.778946 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/turn-by-turn-driving-directions-from-a-turntable/ | Turn By Turn Driving Directions From A Turntable | Roger Cheng | [
"car hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"dead reckoning",
"direction finding",
"navigate",
"navigation",
"odometer",
"odometry"
] | Many of us now carry a phone that can give us detailed directions from where we are to a destination of our choosing. This luxury became commonplace over the last decade plus, replacing the pen-and-paper solution of consulting a map to plan a trip and writing down steps along the way. During the trip we would have to manually keep track of which step we’re on, but wouldn’t it have been nice to have the car do that automatically? [Ars Technica] showed us that innovators were marketing solutions for
automatic step by step driving directions in a car
over a 100 years ago
.
Systems like the Jones Live-Map obviously predated GPS satellites, so they used vehicle odometry. Given a starting point and a mechanical link to the drivetrain, these machines can calculate miles traversed and scroll to the corresponding place in the list of instructions. This is a concept that has been used in many different contexts since, including the “Next Bus in 7 Minutes” type of display at bus stops. Because a bus runs a fixed route, it is possible to determine location of a bus given its odometer reading transmitted over radio. This was useful before the days of cheap GPS receiver and cellular modems. But the odometry systems would go awry if a bus rerouted due to accidents or weather, and obviously the same would apply to those old school systems as well. Taking a detour or, as the article stated, even erratic driving would accumulate errors by the end of the trip.
The other shortcoming is that these systems predated text-to-speech, so reading the fine print on those wheels became a predecessor to today’s distracted driving problem. One of the patent diagrams explained the solution is to hand the device to a passenger to read. But if there’s a copilot available for reading, they can just as easily track the manual list of directions or use a map directly. The limited utility relative to complexity and cost is probably why those systems faded away. But the desire to solve the problem never faded, so every time new technology became available, someone would try again. Just as they did
with a tape casette system in the 1970s
and the
computerized Etak in the 1980s
.
[Photo by Seal Cove Auto Museum] | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211251",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T14:31:52",
"content": "Solo drives in the 90s, I just recorded directions for myself on a cassette tape. We’ll probably eventually find a wax cylinder saying “At gibbet hill, take the high road…”There was another system in... | 1,760,373,621.189979 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/16/a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-small-scale-production/ | A Behind The Scenes Look At Small Scale Production | Tom Nardi | [
"hardware"
] | [
"hand assembly",
"manufacturing",
"milling",
"prime number"
] | Back in 2013, [Karl Lautman] successfully got his kinetic sculpture
Primer
funded on Kickstarter. As the name implies, you press the big red button on the front of the device, and the mechanical counter at the top will click over to a new prime number for your viewing pleasure. Not exactly a practical gadget, but it does look pretty slick.
These days
you can still by your very own Primer from [Karl]
, but he tells us that the sales aren’t exactly putting food on the table. At this point, he considers it more of a self-financing hobby. To illustrate just what goes into the creation of one of these beauties, he’s put together a time-lapse video of how one gets built from start to finish, which you can see after the break.
Even if you’re not interested in adding a mathematics appliance to your home, we think you’ll agree that the video is a fascinating look at the effort that goes into manufacturing a product that’s only slightly north of a one-off creation.
The biggest takeaway is that you really need to be a jack of all trades to pull something like this off. From milling and polishing the metal components to hand-placing the SMD parts and reflowing the board, [Karl] demonstrates the sort of multi-disciplinary mastery you need to have when there’s only one person on the assembly line.
Small scale manufacturing isn’t cheap
, and is rarely easy. But stories like this one prove it’s certainly possible if you’re willing to put in the effort. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211223",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T12:58:16",
"content": "I’m glad that folks wil pay enough for the designer to manufacture them. Any time you can sell a one-off for a net profit it’s a win!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,373,621.286759 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/the-rfi-hunter-looking-for-noise-in-all-the-wrong-places/ | The RFI Hunter: Looking For Noise In All The Wrong Places | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur",
"choke",
"common mode",
"emi",
"ferrite",
"ham",
"noise floor",
"nosie",
"radio",
"RFI",
"shortwave",
"toroid"
] | Next time you get a new device and excitedly unwrap its little poly-wrapped power supply, remember this: for every switch-mode power supply you plug in, an amateur radio operator sheds a tear. A noisy, broadband, harmonic-laden tear.
The degree to which this fact disturbs you very much depends upon which side of the mic you’re on, but radio-frequency interference, or RFI, is something we should all at least be aware of. [Josh (KI6NAZ)] is keenly aware of RFI in his ham shack, but rather than curse the ever-rising noise floor he’s come up with
some helpful tips for hunting down and eliminating it
– or at least reducing its impact.
Attacking the problem begins with locating the sources of RFI, for which [Josh] used the classic “one-circuit-at-a-time” approach – kill every breaker in the panel and monitor the noise floor while flipping each breaker back on. This should at least give you a rough idea of where the offending devices are in your house. From there, [Josh] used a small shortwave receiver to locate problem areas, like the refrigerator, the clothes dryer, and his shack PC. The family flat-screen TV proved to be quite noisy too. Remediation techniques include wrapping every power cord and cable around toroids or clamping ferrite cores around them, both on the offending devices and in the shack. He even went so far as to add a line filter to the dryer to clamp down on its unwanted interference.
Judging by his waterfall displays, [Josh]’s efforts paid off, bringing his noise floor down from S5 to S1 or so. It’s too bad he had to take matters into his own hands – it’s not like
the FCC
and
other spectrum watchdogs
don’t know there’s a problem, after all. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211135",
"author": "phase2682",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T06:39:11",
"content": "Gary Johnson NA6O gave a great presentation on RFI hunting at Pacificon",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "8041018",
"author": "Old GUy",
... | 1,760,373,621.480358 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/a-safer-self-healing-polymer-battery/ | A Safer, Self-Healing Polymer Battery | Sharon Lin | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"batteries",
"Lithium-ion battery",
"polymers",
"research"
] | Lithium-ion batteries are notorious for spontaneously combusting, with seemingly so many ways that it can be triggered. While they are a compact and relatively affordable rechargeable battery for hobbyists, damage to the batteries can be dangerous and lead to fires.
Several engineers from the University of Illinois have developed a solid polymer-based electrolyte that is able to self-heal after damage, preventing explosions.The material can also be recycled without the use of high temperatures or harsh chemical catalysts. The results of the study were published in the
Journal of the American Chemical Society
.
As the batteries go through cycles of charge and discharge, they develop branch-like structures known as dendrites. These dendrites, composed of solid lithium, can cause electrical shorts and hotspots, growing large enough to puncture internal parts of the battery and causing explosive chemical reactions between the electrodes and electrolyte liquids. While engineers have been looking to replace liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries with solid materials, many have been brittle and not highly conductive.
The high temperatures inside a battery melt most solid ion-conducting polymers, making them a less attractive option for non-liquid electrolytes. Further studies producing solid electrolytes from networks of cross-linked polymer strands delays the growth of dendrites but produces structures that are too complex to be recovered after damage. In response, the researchers at University of Illinois developed a similar network polymer electrolyte where the cross-link point undergoes exchange reactions and swaps out polymer strands. The polymers stiffen upon heating, minimizing the dendrite problem and more easily breaking down and resolidifying the electrolyte after damage.
Unlike conventional polymer electrolytes, the new polymer also shows properties of conductivity and stiffness increasing with heating. The material dissolves in water at room temperature, making it both energy-efficient and environmentally friendly as well. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211109",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T03:55:31",
"content": "You should just stop betting on what I will do.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6211118",
"author": "Joseph Sammarco",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16... | 1,760,373,621.230668 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/one-esp8266-one-battery-one-year-and-counting/ | One ESP8266, One Battery, One Year… And Counting. | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"deep sleep",
"ESP8266",
"low power"
] | There are times when a sensor is required that does its job without the need for human attention over a long period, and for those applications a minimal power drain is a must. [Dave Davenport] had an EPS8266-based moisture sensor, and became disappointed in having to replace its AA batteries every few months. With an 18650 Li-ion cell and a bunch of power-saving tricks that time has been extended so far to over a year and still going, so
he’s written a blog post detailing how he did it
.
Some of his techniques such as turning off the sensor or using a better LDO regulator than the stock Wemos one are straightforward. Others though are unexpected, such as using the memory associated with the on-board RTC to store the WiFi connection info and channel number during sleep. The normal ESP8266 connection sequence involves a network scan, by hanging onto what it found last time the extra time and thus power expended by it can be avoided. Similarly switching from a DHCP lease to a fixed IP address cuts the time the device waits for a lease and thus the time it has to stay awake.
We might not all have ESP8266 moisture sensors to build, but we’re many of us on a quest to sip less power in our projects.
Let us help you with a previous sojourn into that arena
.
ESP8266 image: connorgoodwolf [
CC BY-SA 4.0
]. | 24 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210798",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T09:19:45",
"content": "thanks Jenny, keep ’em comin’#esp32 #esp8266 #lowPower",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6210799",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T09... | 1,760,373,621.540939 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/camcorder-viewfinder-converted-to-diminutive-vector-display/ | Camcorder Viewfinder Converted To Diminutive Vector Display | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"arcade",
"coil",
"crt",
"deflection",
"display",
"Lissajous",
"toroid",
"vector",
"viewfinder",
"X-Y"
] | We generally cast a skeptical eye at projects that claim some kind of superlative. If you go on about the “World’s Smallest” widget, the chances are pretty good that someone will point to a yet smaller version of the same thing. But in the case of what’s touted as
“The world’s smallest vector monitor”
, we’re willing to take that chance.
If you’ve seen any of [Arcade Jason]’s projects before, you’ll no doubt have noticed his abiding affection for vector displays. We’re OK with that; after all, many of the best machines from the Golden Age of arcade games such as
Asteroids
and
Tempest
were based on vector graphics. None so small as the current work, though, based as it is on the CRT from an old camcorder’s viewfinder. The tube appears to be about 3/4″ (19 mm) in diameter, and while it still had some of its original circuitry, the deflection coils had to be removed. In their place, [Jason] used a ferrite toroid with two windings, one for vertical and one for horizontal. Those were driven directly by a two-channel push-pull audio amplifier to make patterns on the screen. Skip to 15:30 in the video below to see the display playing
[Jerobeam Fenderson]’s “Oscilloscope Music”
.
As much as we’d love to see a tiny game of
Battlezone
played on the diminutive display, there’s only so much it can do. Maybe an analog version of
this adorable digital oscilloscope
would be possible? | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210763",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T06:06:59",
"content": "But the video is not at home.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6210803",
"author": "Luke",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T09:34:31",
"content": "... | 1,760,373,621.417566 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/particle-accelerators-that-fit-on-a-chip/ | Particle Accelerators That Fit On A Chip | Sharon Lin | [
"Science"
] | [
"chip",
"particle accelerator",
"physics"
] | If you were asked to imagine a particle accelerator, you would probably picture a high-energy electron beam contained within a kilometers-long facility, manned by hundreds of engineers and researchers. You probably wouldn’t think of a
chip smaller than a fingernail
, yet that’s exactly what the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s
Accelerator on a Chip International Program (ACHIP)
has accomplished.
The Stanford University team developed a device that uses lasers to accelerate electrons along etched channels on a silicon chip. The idea for a miniature accelerator has existed since the laser’s invention in 1960, but the requirement for a device to generate electrons made the early proof-of-concepts difficult to manufacture in bulk.
via Scientific American
The electromagnetic waves produced by lasers have much shorter wavelengths than the microwaves used in full-scale accelerators, allowing them to accelerate electrons in a far more confined space – channels can be shrunk to three one-thousandths of a millimeter wide. In order to couple the lasers and electrons properly, the light waves must push the particles in the correct direction with as much energy as possible. This also requires the device to generate electrons and transmit them via the proper channel. With an
accelerator engraved in silicon
, multiple components can fit on the same chip.
Within the latest prototype, a laser hits a grating from above the chip, directing the energy into a waveguide. The electromagnetic waves radiate out, moving with the waveguide until they reach an etched pattern that creates a focused electromagnetic field. As electrons move through the field, they accelerate and gain energy.
The results showed that the prototype could boost the electrons by 915 electron volts, equivalent to the electrons gaining 30 million electron volts over a meter. While the change is not on the scale of SLAC, it does scale up more easily since researchers can fit multiple accelerating paths onto future designs without the bulk of a full-scale accelerator. The chip exists as a single stage of the accelerator, allowing more researchers to conduct experiments without the need to reserve space in expensive full-scale particle accelerators. | 28 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210731",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T03:23:58",
"content": "So now, do they get “bunching” of the electrons within the accelerator also?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210745",
"author": "ratStomper",
... | 1,760,373,621.359159 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/make-a-mean-sounding-synth-from-average-components/ | Make A Mean-Sounding Synth From Average Components | Kristina Panos | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"555",
"cd40106",
"CdS cell",
"moog",
"photocell"
] | A while back, [lonesoulsurfer] stumbled upon a mind-blowing little DIY synth on YouTube and
had to make one of his own
. We don’t blame him one bit for that, ’cause we’ve been down that cavernous rabbit hole ourselves. You might want to build one too, after you hear the deliciously fat and guttural sounds waiting inside those chips and passives. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
The main synth is built on five LM358 op-amps that route PWM through a pair of light-dependent resistors installed near the top. There are two more oscillators courtesy of a 40106 hex inverting Schmitt trigger, which leaves four more oscillators to play with should you take the plunge and build your own.
He didn’t just copy the guy’s schematic and call it good. He added [a 555-based arpeggiator that’s controlled with two homebrew optocouplers. These sound fancy and expensive, but can be bred easily at home by sealing an LED and an LDR inside a piece of black heat shrink tubing and applying a bit of PWM. With the flick of a toggle, he can bypass the momentary buttons and use the yellow knob at the top to sweep through the pitch range with a single input.
Although he doesn’t hold your hand through the build, [lonesoulsurfer] has plenty of nice, clear pictures of the process that nearly give a step-by-step guide. That plus the video demo and walk-through should get you well on your way to DIY synthville.
If this all seems very cool, but you’d really like to understand what’s happening as you descend into the rabbit hole, our own
[Elliot Williams]’s Logic Noise series
is an excellent start. | 12 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210690",
"author": "MLEVee",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T00:58:10",
"content": "This thing looks great, and sounds even better",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6210701",
"author": "Pez",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T01:35:48",
... | 1,760,373,621.825154 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/a-slightly-bent-esp8266-sensor-platform/ | A Slightly Bent ESP8266 Sensor Platform | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"18650",
"environmental monitor",
"ESP8266",
"pcb enclosure",
"sensors"
] | The ability to get professionally manufactured PCBs, at least small ones, for dirt cheap has had a huge impact on the sort of projects we see around these parts. It’s getting to the point where experimenting with PCB enclosures is not only a way to make your next project stand out, but an economical choice.
Which is how this
ESP8266 sensor gadget from [Josef Adamčík] got its unique “folded over” look
. The top panel is where the microcontroller and headers for various sensors live, the bottom panel is home to the TP4056 USB charging module, and the center panel provides mechanical support as well as holds the single 18650 cell. Rather than close the whole thing up with a fourth panel, he decided to leave it open so the battery can easily be removed. Plus, of course, it looks cooler this way.
Could [Josef] have fit all his electronics on a single 100 x 100 PCB and then put the whole thing into a 3D printed enclosure? Well, sure. But that’s been done to death at this point, and besides, he was looking for an excuse to get more comfortable doing PCB design. We think it also makes for a considerably more visual appealing final product than simply taking the “normal” way out.
Currently [Josef] has an SHT21 humidity/temperature sensor and a BH1750 light sensor slotted into the headers on the top side of the device, but they could just as easily be swapped out with something else if you wanted to do something a bit more exciting. We notice that
homebrew air quality monitors
are becoming increasingly popular.
Building bespoke enclosures from PCBs is a fantastic trick that frankly we’d love to see more of.
It’s somewhat of an artform in itself
, but if you’re willing to put the effort in to do it right
the results can be truly phenomenal
. | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210721",
"author": "RetiredHobgoblin",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T03:01:32",
"content": "Does Poland provide sufficient counseling for the mental health of their citizens? Seems like the winter is affecting this guy and this project is a cry for help.",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,373,621.880022 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/better-controls-for-your-chromecast-through-cec/ | Better Controls For Your Chromecast Through CEC | Lewin Day | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"cec",
"chromecast",
"consumer electronics control",
"hdmi"
] | Modern home cinema equipment is well-equipped with features for interoperability and convenience, but in practice, competing standards and arcana can make it fall over. Sometimes, you’ve gotta do a little work on your own to glue it all together,
and that’s what led [Victor] to develop a little utility of his own.
ChromecastControls is a tool that makes controlling your home cinema easier by improving Chromecast’s integration with the CEC features of HDMI. CEC, or Consumer Electronics Control, is a bidirectional serial bus that is integrated as a part of the HDMI standard. It’s designed to help TVs, audio systems, and other AV hardware to communicate, and allow the user to control an entire home cinema setup with a single remote. Common use cases are TVs that send shutdown commands to attached soundbars when switched off, or Blu-Ray players that switch the TV on to the correct output when the play button is pressed.
[Victor]’s tool allows Chromecast to pass volume commands to surround sound processors, something that normally requires the user to manually adjust their settings with a separate remote. It also sends shutdown commands to the attached TV when Chromecast goes into its idle state, saving energy. It relies on the PyChromecast library to intercept traffic on the network, and thus send the appropriate commands to other hardware. Simply running the code on a Raspberry Pi that’s hooked up to any HDMI port on a relevant device should enable the CEC commands to get through.
It’s a project that you might find handy, particularly if you’re sick of leaving your television on 24 hours a day because Chromecast never bothered to implement a simple CEC command on an idle timeout. CEC hacks have a long history, too –
we’ve been covering them as far back as 2010! | 34 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210600",
"author": "Kyle Brinkerhoff",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T20:59:59",
"content": "chromecast was just a flash in the pan and couldnt really compete with roku, even modern roku devices support screen casting to a degree. i had originally purchased chromecasts for my entire home... | 1,760,373,621.954446 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/a-vintage-phone-in-2020/ | A Vintage Phone In 2020 | Jenny List | [
"Original Art",
"Phone Hacks",
"Skills",
"Slider",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"dial phone",
"GPO-746",
"phone",
"pulse dial"
] | When we make a telephone call in 2020 it is most likely to be made using a smartphone over a cellular or IP-based connection rather than a traditional instrument on a pair of copper wires to an exchange. As we move inexorably towards a wireless world in which the telephone line serves only as a vehicle for broadband Internet, it’s easy to forget the last hundred years or more of telephone technology that led up to the present.
The iconic British telephone of the 1960s and 1970s, the GPO model 746. Mine is from 1971. (That isn’t my phone number)
In a manner of speaking though, your telephone wall socket hasn’t forgotten. If you like old phones, you can still have one, and picture yourself in a 1950s movie as you twirl the handset cord round your finger while you speak.
As we move inexorably forward, it’s worth considering for how much longer we’ll be able to do this. If all goes well, I’ll be receiving a new fibre optic connection in a few weeks. Along a sliver of glass will come faster Internet that I can currently dream of, and I’m expecting that the box that our telephone provider puts on the end of it will have a telephone socket that is simply the front-end of a dedicated VOIP client. It’ll undoubtedly work with my digital answerphone, but will it still work with a 50-year old model with an old-fashioned dial designed for use with a mechanical Strowger exchange? If I’m going to have to hack on this old phone, I’d better figure it out now in case I have to hook it up to something else to keep it communicating.
Just How Does A Telephone Work?
A grotesquely simplified schematic of a dial phone. In this diagram SW2 is open and SW3 is closed, so the handset is off the cradle but the dial is not in use.
The great thing about a passive device whose roots lie around the turn of the twentieth century is that its principles are relatively easy to understand. A phone like my GPO 746 contains a lot of clever circuitry to give it better audio, and to protect it from line faults, over-voltage, and other mishaps. But its most basic operation can be explained with something like the much-simplified schematic we’ve pictured.
On the left is the handset, with a carbon microphone and an earpiece in series. When the handset is off the cradle, SW3 is closed, and because the line has a standing DC voltage on it a current flows through the handset. Any audio on the line is heard in the earpiece, and any speech into the carbon microphone varies that current and creates an audio signal in return.
A telephone dial, front and rear. The two sets of spring contacts can be seen, on the left the one for pulse dialing and on the right the one that switches in the low resistance across the handset. The speed governor is diagonally across the mechanism, and the toothed wheel that drives it also serves to operate the left hand contact. Daderot [
CC0
]
When the handset is put on its cradle SW3 is opened and there is no DC current path, but through the capacitor C1 there is an AC path to the bell B1. Thus the exchange can ring the bell by sending an AC voltage on top of the DC standing voltage.
SW1 and SW2 are the contacts in the dial, and since it has become a viral meme that
people below a certain age may be unfamiliar with dial phones
it’s worth explaining the operation of the dial for them. A spring loaded disk is rotated to a point representing the desired number by the user before being let go. It returns at a constant rate set by a governor, and as it does so it closes a set of contacts here labelled SW2 to switch in a low resistance across the handset, and it passes its other contacts, SW1, over a toothed wheel. The effect is to interrupt the line current and
create a series of pulses set by the number dialed
, which were originally used in a mechanical exchange to advance the switchgear a step with each pulse.
An interesting side-effect of this circuit is that with some telephones it was possible to simulate dialing by rapidly depressing the cradle in sequence. On some payphones this offered a means to circumvent the coinbox circuit which disabled the dial. (I remember some students at my university getting into trouble for doing this.) Who needs a 2600 Hz tone to scam the telco!
The Other Side Of The Socket
Having understood our telephone, how might we simulate a telephone line to connect it to? I sat down for an evening in the hackerspace with my GPO 746 to find out.
My basic fake phone line simulator, which should serve as a template for something a little more useful.
A web search will tell you that a phone line carries a standing DC voltage and an intermittent AC voltage to operate the bell. Further searching reveals that each of those voltages can be 50 V, and that the DC current shouldn’t be more than 50 mA. A good place to start therefore is with a bench power supply set to 50 V, and a 1 kΩ resistor to limit the current and simulate the resistance of several miles of phone cable. With the resistor in place any change to the line can only cause a 50 mA current to flow, and thus the possibility for damage is reduced. Connecting this to the 746 resulted in the sound picked up in the microphone being audible in the earpiece, and had I wanted to I could have retrieved the audio after the 1 kΩ resistor.
Experimenting with driving a dial phone on the bench.
Similarly, with the handset on the cradle I could apply an AC voltage and ring the bell. My AC transformer was a bit less than 50 V, but it did work with smaller volume. I still lacked any means of sensing dialing or the cradle, for which I needed to sense the presence or absence of 50 mA DC current. The real GPO exchange back in the day would have done this with a relay in series with the line, so I reached for a small relay. At this point I learned that relays have a hysteresis curve on their close and release currents so it was not as reliable or as quick as I’d hoped. I began to understand why telecoms circuits use reed relays. In the future I’ll have to use a current sensing resistor and a transistor to do the job.
To make this work as a real project, I will have to pay attention to my two 50 V power supplies with probably a little boost converter and oscillator to produce my AC bell drive, and then I’ll need to program a microcontroller to handle being on-hook and off-hook, as well as decoding the pulse streams into numbers. I may also have to pay attention to the phase relationship between my audio source and the audio from the microphone, as feedback can become a problem in some circumstances. Once I have mastered those things I’ll be able to make a unit that sits behind a standard British Telecom master socket and provides a connection to anything I choose, be it a GSM module or a SIP client on a single board computer. In that way I can still be using my GPO 746 dial phone in decades to come. | 72 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210556",
"author": "Charlie",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T18:22:45",
"content": "There have been a number of projects to turn an analog phone into a wireless phone (including dial and cradle detection). One project sets up the phone as a bluetooth headset, another does a full-blown in... | 1,760,373,622.262368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/the-flexible-permanence-of-copper-tape-circuits/ | The Flexible Permanence Of Copper Tape Circuits | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"cardboard",
"copper tape",
"copper tape circuits",
"kapton tape",
"polyimide",
"prototyping"
] | Somewhere between shoving components into a breadboard temporarily and committing them to a piece of protoboard or a PCB lies the copper tape method. This flexible Manhattan-style method of circuitry formed the basis for [Bunnie Huang]’s Chibitronics startup, and has since inspired many to stop etching boards and start fetching hoards of copper tape.
[Hales] hit the ground running when he learned about this method
, and has made many a copper tape circuit in the last year or so. He offers several nice tips on his site that speak from experience with this method, and he’ll even show you how to easily work an SMD breakout board into the mix.
Generally speaking, [Hales] prefers plywood as the substrate to paper or cardboard for durability. He starts by drawing out the circuit and planning where all the tape traces will go and how wide they need to be. Then he lays out copper traces and pads, rubs the tape against the substrate to make it adhere strongly, and reinforces joints and laps with solder before adding the components. As you can see, copper tape circuits can get pretty complicated if you use Kapton tape as insulation between stacked layers of traces.
Copper and Kapton (polyimide) tape are just two of the many useful tapes you may not be aware of. Stick with us a moment and check out
[Nava Whiteford]’s exploration of various adhesive marvels
. | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6211076",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2020-01-16T01:54:41",
"content": "He’s got some interesting non-traditional attempts to make PCBs as well. Check out his links. Some of these could make for a good HAD fail of the week article.https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/015_alumi... | 1,760,373,622.045297 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/new-part-day-arduino-goes-pro-with-the-portenta-h7/ | New Part Day: Arduino Goes Pro With The Portenta H7 | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware",
"News"
] | [
"arduino",
"ARM Cortex-M4",
"ARM Cortex-M7",
"ces",
"eNUC",
"industrial components",
"javascript",
"portenta",
"python",
"STM32H7",
"USB Type-C"
] | The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is traditionally where the big names in tech show off their upcoming products, and the 2020 show was no different. There were new smartphones, TVs, and home automation devices from all the usual suspects. Even a few electric vehicles snuck in there. But mixed in among flashy presentations from the electronics giants was a considerably more restrained announcement from a company near and dear to the readers of Hackaday: Arduino is going pro.
While Arduino has been focused on the DIY and educational market since their inception,
the newly unveiled Portenta H7 is designed for professional users
who want to rapidly develop robust hardware suitable for industrial applications. With built-in wireless hardware and the ability to run Python and JavaScript out of the box, the powerful dual-core board comes with a similarly professional price tag; currently for preorder at $99 USD a pop, the Portenta is priced well outside of the company’s traditional DIY and educational markets. With increased competition from other low-cost microcontrollers, it seems that Arduino is looking to expand out of its comfort zone and find new revenue streams.
That’s a Lot of Pins
The Portenta H7 is obviously a far cry from the relatively dinky 8-bit Arduinos that we’ve all got filling up our parts drawers. Developed for high performance edge computing applications, the new board is powered by a 32-bit STM32H747XI that utilizes both an ARM Cortex M7 and an M4 running at 480 MHz and 240 MHz respectively. The two cores can work independently, allowing for example one core to run interpreted Python while the other runs code compiled in the Arduino IDE. When they need to work together, the cores can communicate with each other via a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism.
The new 80-pin connectors on the Portenta
Outwardly, the new board doesn’t look far removed from the modern Arduino form factor we’re used to. The USB connector has been upgraded to a Type-C, but the Portenta still retains the dual rows of pads ready for hand-soldered headers — that’s their more recent pinout that they call the Arduino MKR form factor.
If you look on the back of the board however, you’ll see that they’ve added two 80-pin high density connectors. According to the product page, these are intended to allow the Portenta to simply be plugged into a device as a removable module. The idea being that devices in the field can easily have their Portenta swapped out for an upgraded model. Some digging into the product page documentation section turns up a schematic that lists the connectors as
Hirose DF40C-80DP-0.4V(51)
.
The base model Portenta features 8 MB SDRAM and 16 MB NOR flash, but it can be custom ordered with up to 64 MB of memory and 128 MB of flash should you need it. It’s also possible to delete various interfaces from the board when ordering, so if you don’t want network connectivity or the NXP SE050C2 crypto chip, they can simply be left off. However as of this writing it is unclear as to what minimum order quantity is necessary to unlock this level of customization, or or how much these modifications will change the unit cost.
Year of the Arduino Desktop?
The Portenta Carrier Board
The Portenta H7 is an impressive enough piece of hardware on its own, but
when it’s plugged into the optional Carrier Board
, things really start to get interesting. The Carrier Board provides full size connectors for all of the onboard peripherals, and according to documentation, turns the Portenta into an eNUC-class embedded computer. There’s even support for DisplayPort to connect a monitor, and miniPCI for expansion cards.
With a fully loaded Portenta H7 slotted into the Carrier Board, it would seem you have the makings of a low-power ARM “desktop” computer. Albeit one that wouldn’t outperform the Raspberry Pi Zero, and which costs several times more.
The Arduino press release and product page doesn’t make any mention of what kind of software or operating system said computer would run, so presumably that’s left as an exercise for the customer. While not particularly well suited to it, the ARM Cortex-M family of processors is capable of running the Linux kernel, so spinning up a “real” OS image for it should be possible. Of course with a maximum of just 64 MB of RAM, you’ll want to keep your performance expectations fairly low.
Where Does Portenta Fit?
We can’t even speculate what a maxed out Portenta would cost, and there’s no pricing or release date for the Carrier Board. But even at $99, the base model Portenta H7 would be a tough sell for hackers and makers who are used to buying dual-core ESP32 boards at 1/10 of the price, or
the Teensy 4.0 which has a 600 MHz Cortex-M7
at 1/4 of the price. Which is fine, since this board isn’t intended for the traditional core Arduino audience.
Seeing the carrier board, we can’t help but notice some parallels here with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. With connections broken out to a SODIMM header, the idea of the Computer Module was to help bridge the gap between the DIY community and the commercial one by offering up a Raspberry Pi in a more rugged form factor that would be easier to integrate into end-user products. But since it wasn’t any cheaper than the stock Pi, there wasn’t a whole lot of incentive to switch over. We haven’t seen consumer products advertising “Raspberry Pi Inside!” so it’s hard to tell if there has been any meaningful adoption from industry.
One has to wonder why any company that has the resources to integrate such an expensive board into their products wouldn’t just come up with their own custom design around the Portenta’s STM32H747XI chip, which even in single quantities, can currently be had for less than $15. The difference may end up coming down to the world-renowned community that surrounds the Arduino brand, and
the company’s efforts to modernize their toolchain
. | 92 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210992",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T21:04:20",
"content": "“Pro” is such a cool word! I feel chills run up and down my spine.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210997",
"author": "jonmayo... | 1,760,373,622.482809 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/owon-oscilloscope-teardown/ | OWON Oscilloscope Teardown | Al Williams | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"owon",
"teardown"
] | We sympathize with [learnelectronic’s] statement: “I’m ashamed. I may have bought another oscilloscope.” We get it and we enjoyed watching him
tear down the OWON SDS1102
. (Video, embedded below.) As you might guess, this is a 100 MHz, two-channel scope, and very similar to many other Chinese scopes you can get inexpensively.
The last ten minutes are so of the video below shows him removing the case. There’s only three little boards inside. One is clearly a power supply. The other two don’t have much on them. There’s a tiny RF shield over one part of the board, so you assume that’s the input section.
The larger board looks like it just mounts the user interface controls. The central board appears to have all the front end and microprocessor components. It is amazing how little there is to see.
The scope runs about $250 or so, new. Like most scopes in this price class it has a relatively small screen, and an 8-bit front end. The claimed sample rate is 1GS/s. However, the screen is larger than a Rigol DS1102E, which is pretty comparable and is about $50 more than the OWON.
We’ve asked readers to
help us pick a cheap scope
, and found that everyone has their own opinion. The last time we looked at an OWON scope, it was a confusing
digital scope impersonating an analog one
. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210994",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T21:09:51",
"content": "The supposed ‘teardown’ is far from complete, and the video is not much of a review.For example, the spec sheet indicates 400V signal input. And the video indicates the reviewer is “impressed” with the grou... | 1,760,373,622.328954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/automate-your-life-with-node-red-plus-a-dash-of-mqtt/ | Automate Your Life With Node-RED (Plus A Dash Of MQTT) | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to",
"Skills",
"Software Development"
] | [
"home automation",
"node-red",
"node.js",
"Nodejs",
"tutorial",
"web app",
"webapp"
] | For years we’ve seen a trickle of really interesting home automation projects that use the
Node-RED
package. Each time, the hackers behind these projects have raved about Node-RED and now I’ve joined those ranks as well.
This graphic-based coding platform lets you quickly put together useful operations and graphic user interfaces (GUIs), whether you’re the freshest greenhorn or a seasoned veteran. You can use it to switch your internet-connected lights on schedule, or at the touch of a button through a web-app available to any device on your home network. You can use it as an information dashboard for the weather forecast, latest Hackaday articles, bus schedules, or all of them at once. At a glance it abstracts away the complexity of writing Javascript, while also making it simple to dive under hood and use your 1337 haxor skills to add your own code.
You can get this up and running in less than an hour and I’m going to tackle that as well as examples for playing with MQTT, setting up a web GUI, and writing to log files. To make Node-RED persistent on your network you need a server, but it’s lean enough to run from a Raspberry Pi without issue, and it’s even installed by default in BeagleBone distributions. Code for all examples in this guide can be
found in the tutorial repository
. Let’s dive in!
What It Is
Node-RED is a graphical programming language built on Node.js. It implements a server and runs what are called “Flows”: programs based on Javascript. Why would you want to run a server-side IDE for your programs? Because Node-RED also makes it dead simple to spin up web apps and use them as your online information and control system.
Installation
To make your Node-RED programs persistent you do need a server, however, if you just want to play for now you can run locally. Your server can be as simple as
installing the platform on a Raspberry Pi
or an always-on computer on your LAN. Prerequisites include Node.js and npm (the Node.js package manager) which on a Linux system are an easy install.
sudo apt install nodejs
Now we can install Node-RED and, to follow the examples below, you should also install the dashboard package:
npm install node-red
npm install node-red-dashboard
To run locally you can just type
node-red
in the terminal. However, the more eloquent way to run this is as a
systemd
service. Copy the contents of
the nodered.service file
to
/etc/systemd/system/nodered.service
and update the
User
,
Group
, and
WorkingDirectory
variables in that file to match an actual user on your system. With that in place, just enable and start the service. It will now restart on a crash or system reboot from here on out.
systemctl enable nodered.service
systemctl start nodered.service
You can now load up the Node-RED IDE simply by visiting
localhost:1880
in a web browser.
Hello World
The simplest thing to do as your first “flow” in Node-RED is: click button, get timestamp. To make the image above I did nothing more than drag the “Inject” and “Debug” nodes from the left column into the center, then drag the line that connects the two nodes. You need to click the “Deploy” button on the upper right any time you make changes, and then clicking the button hanging off the left side of the inject node, which has the “timestamp” label by default, to spit out the time in the debug window. Click the bug icon in above the right window if you’re not seeing the debug output.
This example isn’t very useful, but that’s not the point of Hello World code. This drives home the power of the graphical code system. What’s also interesting is that flows can be exported as
json
files. Here’s what this Hello World looks like and it can be imported to your own Node-RED installation.
[
{
"disabled": false,
"id": "ff177395.3cf468",
"info": "",
"label": "Hello World",
"type": "tab"
},
{
"crontab": "",
"id": "1c6883be.759c24",
"name": "",
"once": false,
"onceDelay": 0.1,
"payload": "",
"payloadType": "date",
"repeat": "",
"topic": "",
"type": "inject",
"wires": [
[
"1fec91a8.ab7156"
]
],
"x": 200,
"y": 140,
"z": "ff177395.3cf468"
},
{
"active": true,
"complete": "false",
"console": false,
"id": "1fec91a8.ab7156",
"name": "",
"tosidebar": true,
"tostatus": false,
"type": "debug",
"wires": [],
"x": 370,
"y": 140,
"z": "ff177395.3cf468"
}
]
MQTT Quickstart
Node-RED feels like it’s made specifically to be used with MQTT, the popular Internet of Things protocol
for which Elliot Williams has written a fantastic guide
. It feels that way because an MQTT client is built in and most of the nodes have “topics” as well as message payloads which is all you really need to communicate with an MQTT broker.
As you can see above, I’m doing the exact same inject/debug trick but now I’ve dragged an “mqtt in” and “mqtt out” node from the “Network” column of possible nodes.
There’s slightly more setup here as we need to choose an MQTT server and select a topic to publish to and listen for. But the interface makes this very easy, just double-click one of the MQTT nodes. Here I’m using the mosquitto test server (
test.mosquitto.org
)and the topic
Hackaday/nodered/test
. Just realize that anyone looking at messages on that server can see this and if you use the exact same topic you may see other readers sending test messages. Node-RED
can actually be used as an MQTT broker
as well.
Try double-clicking the inject node and changing the payload from timestamp to a string and you can send your own custom messages. For the most part I find it easy to find my way around Node-RED and playing with settings is low-effort. Just make sure to hit the deploy button — your changes won’t actually be in place until you do.
Web Gui Hello World
Let’s get to the really exciting part of Node-Red, the ability to spin up a web app with very little effort.
Here you can see a smartphone displaying our app. The only really useful part here is the button. Click it and you’ll get “Hello Hackaday!” in the debug window of Node-RED as seen above. All it took to create this page was to install the dashboard package for Node-RED and then drag a button onto the canvas. Once deployed, your web app will be located at
localhost:1880/ui
Installation of the package is a simple one-liner:
npm install node-red-dashboard
Dragging the button onto the canvas and hooking it to a debug node is also simple, but you need to do just a bit of configuration. Double-clicking on the button node you can change the payload to affect what message is sent to the debug window, but you also need to set a Group, and within the group edit dialog you’ll need to set a Tab. This affects the web app, with Groups organizing blocks on each page of the web app, and Tabs selecting different pages from the hamburger menu at the upper left. You can name groups and tabs however you like.
Let’s Build a Web App!
Enough with the Hello World code, let’s build something useful. I’ve been using Node-RED for a month or so and have built up a couple of useful apps, one interacts with my MQTT broker to control and monitor my front porchlight, the other I use as a simple button-press to keep track of the days I exercise. Let’s build up the exercise app bit by bit because there’s more to it than merely sending MQTT packets back and forth.
Here is the current state of the exercise app, which includes a button that records today’s date to a log file and a gauge that reads the log file to display how many of the last seven days have included exercise. Let’s build it up one block at a time.
GUI Button Writing to Files
This is where the flow begins. It consists of a button from the Dashboard package that sends a timestamp when clicked. This message will be logged to two “file” nodes, the first is
exerciselog-raw.txt
which simply records one UNIX timestamp for each line. That’s not human readable, so the second file node has a function node which translates the timestamp using the following JavaScript snippet. There’s a bit of magic in there to make sure the month and day are always two digits.
var date;
date = new Date();
var year = date.getFullYear();
var month = date.getMonth();
month = (month < 9 ? '0' : '') + (month+1)
var day = date.getDate();
day = (day < 10 ? '0' : '') + day
msg.payload = year + '-' + month + '-' + day;
return msg;
Adding a User Notification
The button works as expected, but it gives no feedback to the user. To improve upon this I added a notification node from the dashboard package. It is connected after the file node to confirm that the date had been written to the log file.
Reading a File, Displaying Data, Refreshing at Startup
This last part of the flow uses the tan “file in” node to read UNIX timestamps from the raw log file and displays it on the teal “gauge” node from the dashboard package. It is activated by two different triggers, one updates after a new date is written to the log files. The other is the lavender “inject” node which has an “index once after n seconds” option to populate the initial data when Node-RED starts.
The gauge is just looking for a number to populate and this is fed by a function node (I called it Magic). The following code reads in the logfile as an array, figures out the UNIX date code for seven days ago, and then iterates back through the last seven timestamps in the log file.
//Turn incoming timestamps log into an array:
var exercisearray = msg.payload.split("\n");
if (exercisearray.slice(-1)[0] === "") exercisearray.length = exercisearray.length-1
//Get timestamp for week ago to compare against
var thismorning = new Date()
thismorning.setHours(0)
thismorning.setMinutes(0)
thismorning.setSeconds(0)
thismorning.setMilliseconds(0)
var sixdays = 1000*60*60*24*6
var oneweekago = thismorning.getTime()-sixdays
//Iterate and count past week of exercise
var count = 0
var secondsinday = 60*24*7
for (var i=1; i<8; i++) {
if (i>exercisearray.length) break;
var testval = parseInt(exercisearray.slice(-i)[0]);
if (testval >= oneweekago) ++count;
}
//Store our answer as the payload and pass along
msg.payload = count;
return msg;
Give Node-RED a Try!
One of my first concerns with the platform was version control but that’s available too. There is
git integration built-in called Node-RED projects
but it’s not enabled by default. I’m not accustomed to using a GUI for git, but then again I’m not accustomed to graphical programming interfaces so it doesn’t hurt to try something new.
The examples I’ve shown here are really the tip of the iceberg. Look around and you’ll find a ton of enthusiasm for Node-RED which translates to incredible flows and awesome web apps. For instance, I’ve been reading Scargill’s Tech Blog for years and there you’ll find a ton examples of what can be accomplished. Here we see
Scargill’s thermostat control panel
that has all kinds of customization to give it a special look. Finding examples that you like isn’t hard, and copying their code is even easier.
You can easily pick up Node-RED in an afternoon and end up with something useful. For those who want to spend more time, the sky’s the limit. If you have any kind of home automation, it’s something you must try as it unlocks the ability for anyone on your LAN to access information and control without installing an app. You can easily pull a disused smartphone out of the drawer and turn it into a dedicated control panel, something I did for the image at the top of this article with the help of an Android app called Fully Kiosk Browser Lockdown for a true fullscreen browser experience not provided by Chrome or Firefox for Android. Give it a try with your own surplus gear!
Resources:
Example code repository | 54 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210933",
"author": "Bill Gates",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T18:06:27",
"content": "Yay! more java-script craplets!I can pollute my system with NodeJS and Node-RED that installs tons of unverified crap, that wants extended access to my files.Also, I can use MQQT, the “lightweight” bro... | 1,760,373,622.779318 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/lego-drone-finally-takes-off/ | Lego Drone Finally Takes Off | Al Williams | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"drone",
"lego",
"quadcopter"
] | We were concerned when we saw [Brick Experiment Channel] test a drone propulsion pod made with Lego. After all, the thrust generated was less than the weight of the assembly. But
a few tweaks
got enough lift to overcome the assembly weight, as you can see in the video below.
The next step was to build three more pods and add some lightweight avionics and a battery. The first flight was a little dicey because the sensor orientation was off. Then there was some more software tuning before things really got airborne.
Judging from the nearby curtains, the drone puts out quite a bit of wind. However, it still needed a little more power from a bigger battery pack. It doesn’t look like the bird is a joy to fly, but it is impressive to see a bunch of Lego flying around the house. Granted the flight controller, the radio, and the battery aren’t Lego, but it looks like everything else is.
We aren’t sure we would recommend trying this project, but if you do, there is a bill of materials at the end of the video. The total cost was about $500 and you can get a pretty good commercial drone for that price. Still, the thrill of it would be worth something.
We’ve seen someone selling
a kit to make Lego drones
. If you’d rather stay on the ground, how about a
monowheel
? | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210923",
"author": "Bill Gates",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T17:45:08",
"content": "Love these videos. Shows the thought process, trials, errors, and results, good or bad. Finally something a bit more weighty than “I made an arduino do X”, or “I made a raspberry pi case from junk”.",
... | 1,760,373,622.523942 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/tetraethyl-lead-the-solution-to-one-and-cause-of-many-new-problems/ | Tetraethyl Lead: The Solution To One, And Cause Of Many New Problems | Maya Posch | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Featured",
"History",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"antiknock agent",
"engine knocking",
"TEL",
"tetraethyl lead"
] | From the 1920s until the 1970s, most gasoline cars in the USA were using fuel that had lead mixed into it. The reason for this was to reduce the engine knocking effect from abnormal combustion in internal combustion engines of the time. While lead — in the form of tetraethyllead — was effective at this, even the 1920s saw both the existence of alternative antiknock agents and an uncomfortable awareness of the health implications of lead exposure.
We’ll look at what drove the adoption of tetraethyllead, and why it was phased out once the environmental and health-related issues came into focus. But what about its antiknock effects? We’ll also be looking at the alternative antiknock agents that took its place and how this engine knocking issue is handled these days.
It’s a Matter of Octane
In an internal combustion engine (ICE), ideally the air-fuel mixture that gets injected into a cylinder will ignite at the perfect moment where the flame front will travel outwards from the point of ignition, with every bit of the air-fuel mixture burning up fully. This will allow for maximum use of the energy in the fuel mixture, while causing a clean stroke of the piston.
In reality, however, pockets of this fuel-air mixture will ignite before the flame front reaches them. These so-called ‘cool flames’ occur because of the compression by the piston combined with slight unevenness in the mixture, causing additional pressure waves in the cylinder. This raises the cylinder pressure and causes the typical metallic pinging noise that is indicative of engine knocking. Depending on how many of these pockets ignite outside of the spark plug’s flame front, the result may be increased wear on components, or even their outright destruction.
Hereby the
octane rating
of the fuel is crucial, as it essentially determines at which compression level the fuel will ignite (without spark). High octane fuels thus do burn less easily, but allow for far higher levels of compression, which effectively produces more power. In contrast, diesel engines require lower octane fuels, as they only compress air, with the fuel being injected at the end of the compression cycle, with the heat from the compressed air igniting the fuel.
Time to Knock It Off
There are fortunately a number of ways to prevent this premature ignition effect. These include:
Using a fuel with a higher octane rating.
Adding more fuel to the air-fuel mixture.
Reducing the compression level in the cylinder.
Reducing the load on the engine.
You can choose the first point by using a so-called
antiknock agent
, a chemical that raises the octane rating of the fuel by raising the temperature and pressure at which auto-ignition occurs.
Tetraethyl lead
(TEL) is one example of such an agent. Its chemical formula is
(CH
3
CH
2
)
4
Pb
.
Inside the engine’s cylinders, the function of TEL is to quench the spontaneous ignitions that occur outside of the flame front by dealing with the pyrolized radicals that would otherwise sustain the chain reaction of the cool flame. Here the lead is the actual reactive agent, while the rest of the TEL serves to allow it to dissolve into gasoline (courtesy of its alkyl groups).
As the TEL is burned, it produces carbon dioxide, water and lead:
(CH
3
CH
2
)
4
Pb + 13 O
2
→ 8 CO
2
+ 10 H
2
O + Pb
The lead can further react with oxygen to form lead(II) oxide:
2 Pb + O
2
→ 2 PbO
Left alone, the lead and lead(II) oxide would accumulate inside the engine and destroy it. To prevent this, lead-scavengers such as
1,2-dibromoethane
and
1,2-dichloroethane
are added to form
lead(II) bromide
and
lead(II) chloride
respectively (unfortunately neither are as pretty as
lead(II) iodide
). These compounds are easily removed from the engine during normal operation, from where they’d be released into the environment.
The Competition
In addition to lead, two other substances were known to increase the octane rating of gasoline fuel:
ethanol
(
C
2
H
6
O
) and
benzene
(
C
6
H
6
). For ethanol this octane rating raising property is due to ethanol being suitable as a complete (albeit more expensive)
replacement for gasoline fuel
. As ethanol has by default a higher octane rating than most gasoline fuels, mixing a percentage of ethanol into gasoline fuel causes the latter to have a higher octane, which achieves the desired anti-knocking effect.
When adding lead to gasoline was a plus. (Plazak, CC-BY-3.0)
Benzene is a hydrocarbon which appears naturally in crude oil. It’s present in gasoline as a result, where it’s also responsible for the characteristic sweet smell around gasoline refueling stations. Although now usually kept at less than 1% in gasoline due to the carcinogenic properties of benzene, before TEL’s introduction in the 1920s as a fuel additive, benzene was regarded as a good antiknock agent as it too raised the octane rating. By the 1950s TEL had virtually replaced benzene as antiknock agent.
Ethanol can be produced from oil (ethylene), as well as from biomass (sugar cane, corn, etc.). It is however a fuel type that has only seen widespread popularity since the 1970s. TEL had the benefit over ethanol as an antiknock agent that only a small amount would be needed to have the same effect, yet at similar cost. TEL however also had the additional benefit that its use as fuel-additive could be patented.
TEL Fallout
Ultimately history shows us that TEL would prevail over benzene and ethanol, with ethanol only making a resurgence in the 1970s during the phase-out of TEL. As information uncovered over the past decades shows, the reason for this was a deliberate strategy by the companies behind the
Ethyl
partnership (General Motors, ESSO and DuPont) to bury the science about the well-known harmful effects of lead, the expected blood serum lead levels from adding TEL to gasoline and the expected effects on the environment.
As
this 2005 paper by William Kovarik
(PDF) summarizes, the use of ethanol as an antiknock agent was commonplace by the time that TEL was introduced, but over the decades, the misinformation campaign by Ethyl was so effective that people came to believe that TEL was the only antiknock agent available. In the end it would take fifty years of research, as well as scientific, court and regulatory challenges to produce evidence about the harmful effects of TEL that were so damning that leaded gasoline was phased out in the 1970s in the US, though not without
Ethyl first suing the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA).
Among one of the effects noted by researchers of the effects of increased lead levels in blood serum was that of a sharp negative effect on the developing brain, leading to a lower IQ, poor impulse control and troubles at school. Later studies introduced the
lead-crime hypothesis
, which links the rise in violent crime since the 1930s and the sharp drop-off in the early 1990s with the exposure of children to high blood serum lead levels, which would have impaired brain development.
Although the Ethyl corporation still exists today, the use of TEL in gasoline has been essentially reduced to zero, aside from use in aviation fuel, antique cars, and so on. As the use of TEL is incompatible with
catalytic converters
due to lead being a catalyst poison, the requirement of adding a catalytic converter to new cars in the late 1970s US made the demise of TEL for cars a certainty. Europe, Asian nations and so on also phased out TEL until today only one plant in the world still (legally) produces leaded gasoline.
Antiknock Strategies Today
Even though modern ICEs have hardened components that can withstand engine knocking without damage, and the mixing of ethanol into the gasoline fuel is becoming ever more commonplace, other antiknock agents are still around, with
methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl
(MMT,
(C
5
H
4
CH
3
)Mn(CO)
3
) having been used for years in a number of countries.
Ferrocene
(
Fe(C
5
H
5
)
2
) is also used as a fuel additive, used as an alternative to TEL, such as for use in antique cars. Increasing the amount of
2,2,4-trimethylpentane
(iso-octane, also a petroleum product) in gasoline serves to reduce the knocking, as was originally discovered by Graham Edgar in 1926. Iso-octane forms the 100 point on the octane rating scale.
In addition to fuel additives, modern digitally controlled gasoline engines have built-in mechanisms that detect and control engine knocking, by adjusting the ignition timing and pressure. This allows for the engine to automatically adjust itself to fuels with different octane ratings. This of course comes with its own set of challenges, as for example
this 2017 paper by Peyton Jones et al.
titled “Stochastic Simulation and Performance Analysis of Classical Knock Control Algorithms” details.
Just A Historical Footnote
It’s interesting to consider these revelations and new innovations in light of the transition of the car industry from the internal combustion engine to electric motors, which do not have any of these issues. Free from the stigma of leaded gasoline and its combustion products, it will be interesting to see how we will regard this chapter in human history fifty years from now.
By then not having regenerative braking would probably seem beyond quaint, as would be the ritual of weekly (or daily) refueling or recharging. Maybe the issue of
fine particulate dust from tires and brake disks
will have become the next environmental issue.
[Main image source:
Tetraethyl Lead
by David Brodbeck CC-BY 2.0] | 101 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210874",
"author": "fonz",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T15:08:01",
"content": "using lead in fuel was developed by Thomas Midgley Jr. who also came up with Freon ….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210893",
"author": "Dan... | 1,760,373,622.671186 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/15/what-to-know-when-buying-chips-that-havent-been-made-for-three-decades/ | What To Know When Buying Chips That Haven’t Been Made For Three Decades | Erin Pinheiro | [
"Parts"
] | [
"chips",
"fake chips",
"fm synthesis",
"integrated circuits",
"yamaha"
] | Those of us who have worked with vintage sound generator chips such as the Yamaha FM synthesizers in recent years have likely run into our own fair share of “fake” or “remarked” chips, sometimes relabeled to appear as a chip different than the die inside the packaging entirely. [David Viens] from Plogue has finally released
his findings on the matter after 3 years of research
. (Video, embedded below.)
The first thing to determine is in what way are these chips “fake”? Clearly no new YM2612’s were manufactured by Yamaha in 2015, but that doesn’t mean that these are simply unlicensed clones put out by another die factory. [David] explains how these chips are often original specimens sourced from recycled electronic waste from mostly environmentally unsafe operations in China, which are then reconditioned and remarked to be passed as “new” by resellers. Thankfully, as of 2017, he explains that most of these operations are now being shut down and moved into an industrial park where the work can be done in a less polluting manner.
The next thing that [David] dives into is how these remarked chips can be spotted. He explains how to use telltale signs in the IC packaging to identify which chip plant produced them, and visible indications of a chip that has been de-soldered from a board and reconditioned. There are different ways in which the remarking can be done, and sometimes it’s possible to undo the black-top, as it’s called, and reveal the original markings underneath with the simple application of acetone with a cotton swab.
We’ve talked about
fake chips
and how
they can lead to hardware failure
here before, but in the case of chips like these which aren’t manufactured anymore, we’re not left with much choice other than
FPGA
or
software reimplementations
. Check out [David]’s 40-minute look into these chips after the break.
[Thanks Greg Kennedy for the tip!] | 29 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210846",
"author": "jwebola",
"timestamp": "2020-01-15T13:31:19",
"content": "“[David] explains how these chips are often original specimens sourced from recycled electronic waste from mostly environmentally unsafe operations in China, which are then reconditioned and remarked to b... | 1,760,373,622.855982 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/finally-a-real-set-of-gamecube-joycons/ | Finally, A Real Set Of Gamecube Joycons | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"joycon",
"joycons",
"nintendo",
"Nintendo Switch"
] | The Gamecube may not have sold as many units as its competitors in its day, but it maintains a cult fanbase to this day. Due largely to the
Smash Bros.
community, its controllers are still highly sought after. After the release of the Nintendo Switch, with plenty of fan renders around the place [Shank Mods] figured someone would create a set of Joycons with Gamecube controls. After waiting almost four years,
he decided instead to do it himself
.
The build begins with a Wavebird controller shell, chosen for its larger body, which is coincidentally the same height as the Switch. The shell was cut down the middle, and 3D printed components were created to attach Joycon mounting rails to the two halves of the controller. The large controller also has plenty of space inside, making it easy to fit all the Joycon components inside. Compatibility was a key aim of this build, so much attention was paid to make the Gamecube Joycons function properly with all Switch features. Extra buttons were added where necessary, and the formerly analog triggers were modified with plugs to match the solely digital operation of the Switch components.
It’s a project that had to overcome many hurdles, from mechanical redesigns to make everything fit, to figuring out the arcane electrical design of the Joycon hardware. The hard work paid off however, and [Shank Mods], along with a couple of talented community members, was able to create a beautiful piece of hardware.
We’ve seen Gamecube-themed Joycons before
, but this build really does take the cake. If you’ve instead modified the original Xbox controller to work with the Switch,
be sure to let us know
. Video after the break. | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210314",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T21:43:19",
"content": "Nice idea.. Though I hated the tiny little GC controller it looks pretty damn neat.Looks like the sticks were directly soldered which I’d have avoided as they will probably wear out long before the rest... | 1,760,373,622.908109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/the-way-of-the-pcb-artist-how-to-make-truly-beautiful-circuit-boards/ | The Way Of The PCB Artist: How To Make Truly Beautiful Circuit Boards | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Slider"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"badgelife",
"Hackaday Supercon",
"pcb art"
] | Getting your own PCBs made is a rite of passage for the hardware hacker. Oftentimes, it’s a proud moment, and many of us choose to immortalise the achievement with a self-aggrandizing credit on the silk screen, or perhaps a joke or personal logo. However, as far as artistically customized PCBs go, the sky really is the limit, and this is the specialty of [TwinkleTwinkie],
whose Supercon talk covers some of the pitfalls you can run into when working at the edges of conventional PCB processes.
[TwinkleTwinkie]’s creations are usually badges of one type or other — they’re meant to be worn on a lanyard around your neck, as a pin, or as a decoration added to another badge. The whole point is the aesthetic, and style is just as important as functionality. With diverse inspirations like
Futurama,
Alice in Wonderland
and the shenanigans of the GIF community, his badges blend brightly colored boards with a big helping of LEDs and artistic silkscreening to create electronic works of art.
Keeping PCB Fab Houses from Upsetting the Artwork
These days, PCB fab houses offer more choice than ever, in terms of silkscreens, soldermask colors, and other options. However, fundamentally, their primary concern is to produce reliable, accurate, electronically functional boards — and it’s something that can cause problems for #badgelife hackers designing for more aesthetic reasons.
On the left, a prototype, and on the right, a model with the black silkscreen part, showing how the LEDs appear dimmer.
[TwinkleTwinkie] ran into this very problem during the development of the
Arc Badge
, a piece designed to replicate the famous arc reactor from the
Iron Man
and
Avengers
films. The basic idea of the badge was to have a base PCB which carries all the hardware, along with a spacer, and then a third top layer consisting of a PCB which the LEDs were intended to shine through. The prototype board worked well, with the fab house producing it on 1.6mm thick FR4 with white silkscreen and red soldermask. For the final product, wanting something a little fancier, black silkscreen was chosen instead. Ordered through PCBWay, this necessitated using their “Advanced Production Fab”, and a longer lead time, but after a few weeks the boards were ready.
A comparison with the final, fixed part on the left and the black silkscreen part on the right. The final design allows much more light to pass through.
Unfortunately, despite looking great with the black silkscreen contrasting with the rich red soldermask, there was a problem. When [TwinkleTwinkie] asked for black soldermask, this also led to a change in FR4 material, to a different grade which was more opaque than the prototype board. This led to the LEDs showing up very dim, and spoiled the visual effect that was desired for the ArcBadge. The dimming was so significant that users would no longer get the glow-through effect when wearing the badge under a T-shirt, a la Tony Stark. It took comparison with the prototype to figure out what had happened. PCBWay had simply used a higher-grade material when switching to the black silkscreen. Given that PCBs are sold as electronic products, and not for their optical qualities, they hadn’t done anything wrong, per se – but regardless, the new boards weren’t fit for purpose.
Order, and Order, and Order Again
The solution was simple – the boards would need to be reordered. In order to guarantee the LEDs would shine through and be truly resplendent, precautions were taken. The final board switched back to white silkscreen. As an additional precaution, in case PCBWay kept using the new material, the new part was instead 0.8mm thick, allowing it to block less light.
The redesign left [TwinkleTwinkie] with 250 coasters to give out, but his commitment to giving his customers a quality product is commendable. Despite nobody outright making a mistake, the final product would have been a little disappointing had the redesign not taken place. The Arc Badge, as delivered, glows with the best of them, and we’re sure everyone involved is wiser for the experience! | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210311",
"author": "AVR",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T21:33:05",
"content": "On one hand I’ve very much into this and do it myself on the other hand its a complex skill that no employer values",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "62103... | 1,760,373,622.963037 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/anti-bacterial-plastic-wrap-clings-to-hope-of-stopping-superbugs-spread/ | Anti-Bacterial Plastic Wrap Clings To Hope Of Stopping Superbugs’ Spread | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"antibacterial",
"E coli",
"hospital",
"McMaster University",
"MRSA",
"salmonella",
"shrink wrap"
] | Researchers at McMaster University in Ontario have developed a plastic wrap that repels viruses and bacteria
, including some of the scariest antibiotic-resistant superbugs known to science. With the help of a scanning electron microscope, the researchers were able to watch superbugs like MRSA and Pseudomonas bounce right off the surface.
The wrap can be applied to things temporarily, much like that stuff you wrestle from the box and stretch over your leftovers. It can also be shrink-wrapped to any compatible surface without losing effectiveness. The ability to cover surfaces with bacteria-shielding armor could have an incredible impact on superbug populations inside hospitals. It could be shrink-wrapped to all kinds of things, from door handles to railings to waiting room chair armrests to the pens that everyone uses to sign off on receiving care.
Everything bounces right off the surface, including that classic blue testing liquid. Image via
SciTech Daily
According to the CDC
, there are more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections reported in the United States each year, resulting in over 35,000 deaths. These superbugs are most prevalent and dangerous in hospitals and other medical settings like nursing homes, and they’re especially threatening to the weakened immune systems of chemo patients, dialysis patients and anyone undergoing surgery.
The superbug crisis pivots on the point that antibiotics are a double-edged sword. As they fight infection, they also weaken immune systems, which allows antibiotic-resistant bugs to proliferate in easily-won battlegrounds. Doctors have little choice but to use more toxic and potentially ineffective types of antibiotics to treat antibiotic-resistant infections. On top of everything else, these drugs are often more expensive.
One of the first lines of defense for avoiding large-scale superbug threats in the first place is protecting the food supply. This fantastic plastic could really beef up sanitation practices at food-packaging plants where salmonella and E. coli lurk.
Lotus leaves, close and closer. Images via
Lotus Rock
and
William Thielicke
(inset)
The Lotus Effect
The key to this antibacterial trampoline is in the surface topography. It’s made of of microscopic wrinkles meant to mimic the lotus effect — that repellent property of lotus leaves that makes water bead on their surface.
Lotus leaves are covered with tiny pointed bumps that disrupt the surface so much that water is unable to settle and spread out. The tips of these bumps are coated in a wax secreted by the plant that furthers its hydrophobic properties. They are often described as self-cleaning, because the beaded water droplets carry dirt particles away with them.
The researchers say they also treated their plastic wrap chemically “to further enhance its repellent properties”, though it’s unclear what chemical they’re talking about. Hopefully, it’s something innocuous that acts like wax.
Door knob on the Ribe Cathedral in Denmark. Image credit: Wolfgang Sauber
CC BY-SA 3.0
Where Did All the Brass Door Knobs Go?
Our more experienced readers might recall that we already have a kind of antibacterial door knob technology, and it’s been around for quite a long time.
Copper, brass, and silver all exhibit the
oligodynamic effect
, which means they are slowly poisonous to bacteria. Many door knobs and public surfaces used to be made of brass to take advantage of the biocidal effect. This would only go so far in the hospital setting, because the effect takes several hours.
So why aren’t all door knobs still made of brass? Who can really say? Tastes change, brass tarnishes, and people forget about the oligodynamic effect. C’est la vie.
MRSA black light poster via
The Independent
Resistance May Be Futile
At first blush, this special wrap sounds like something we’d want to put absolutely everywhere, like all public surfaces and our phones. MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant superbugs don’t exist solely within hospital walls, after all. But not all forms of bacteria are bad — in fact, plenty of good bacteria called gut flora lives in our intestines. It’s an important part of our immune system that keeps us from getting sick every single time we encounter a new pathogen. If every public surface was covered in this stuff, we couldn’t pick up germs nearly as well because they wouldn’t stick anywhere.
From a practical standpoint, this stuff is only going to be useful if that special surface can stand up to the wear and tear of hospital environments without being crushed or worn away. It would also have to survive the frequent, rigorous, and probably bleach-based cleaning routines. One little scratch or ding in the armor, and you have a disgusting little critter crevice crawling with superbugs.
Let’s say this stuff is everywhere ten or fifteen years from now. Is there a downside to repelling so much bacteria? Where will it all go? Will it gang up? Would it mean an increase in airborne bacteria? And what about that secret sauce chemical they treated the plastic wrap with to make it more repellent? Will we regret exposing ourselves to it?
That said, the researchers don’t intend for this stuff to be the answer to the superbug problem, just a weapon in the arsenal. It seems to us to be worth a shot to use it in medical facilities, but of course, time will tell.
Main image via
CTV News | 45 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210243",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T18:13:39",
"content": "“So why aren’t all door knobs still made of brass?”Warning! The State of California blah, blah, bla…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210269",
... | 1,760,373,623.264361 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/habitable-exoplanets-hack-chat/ | Habitable Exoplanets Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"astronomy",
"exoplanet",
"Golidilocks",
"habitable zone",
"telescope",
"The Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, January 15 at noon Pacific for the
Habitable Exoplanets Hack Chat
with Alberto Caballero!
Many of the major scientific achievements of the last 100 years or so have boiled down to problems of picking out a signal from the noise. Think about analyzing the human genome, for instance: we each have something like two meters of DNA coiled up inside each cell in our body, and yet teasing out the information in a single gene had to wait until we developed sufficiently sophisticated methods like PCR and CRISPR.
Similarly, albeit on the other end of the scale, the search for planets beyond our solar system wasn’t practical until methods and instruments that could measure the infinitesimal affect a planet’s orbit on its star were developed. Once that door was unlocked, reports of exoplanets came flooding in, and Earth went from being a unique place in the galaxy to just one of many, many places life could possibly have gotten a foothold. And now, the barrier for entry to the club of planet hunters has dropped low enough that amateur astronomers are getting in on the action.
Alberto Caballero is one such stargazer, and he has turned his passion for astronomy into an organized project that is taking a good, hard look at some of our nearest stellar neighbors in the hope of finding exoplanets in the habitable zone.
The Habitable Exoplanet Hunting Project
is training the instruments in 33 observatories around the globe on ten stars within 100 light-years, hoping to detect the faint signal that indicates an orbiting planet. They hope to add to the list of places worthy of exploration, both from Earth via optical and radio telescopes, and perhaps, someday, in person.
Join us on the Hack Chat with Alberto as we discuss the search for habitable exoplanets. We’ll explore the project’s goals, its successes thus far, and where it’s going in the future. We’ll also find out just what the amateur astronomer needs to get in on the action, and maybe even talk a little about why the search for “Earth 2.0” is so important.
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 15 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.
Kepler-442b
image credit: Ph03nix1986 [
CC-BY-SA
] | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210524",
"author": "Jim Oss",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T16:09:41",
"content": "Somewhere out there in the vast observable universe there is a planet the conditions of which has a sentient life form based upon silicon rather than carbon as we; the ‘Siliens’. They breathe a phosphorus... | 1,760,373,623.007438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/3dbuzz-closes-with-a-final-gift/ | 3DBuzz Closes With A Final Gift | Al Williams | [
"Games",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3d modeling",
"classes",
"courses",
"education",
"game design",
"game programming"
] | If you wanted to learn about creating modern computer games, 3DBuzz had some of the best tutorials around. In fact, some of the tutorials about C#, C++, Android, and math would be useful for anyone, while the ones about game art and modeling in Maya are probably mostly for game developers. While these were once available only by subscription, the company — now defunct —
has left them available for download
via
this BitTorrent file
.
We don’t know enough about things like Blender and Maya to evaluate the material, but it is well regarded and the ones we do know something about seem very high quality. There are, for example, many videos about C++ and C# that are very professional and cover quite a few topics.
Topics include: AI programming, ASP.net, Blender, iPhone and Android apps, C#, C++, Objective C, Python, OpenGL, HTML and JavaScript, Solidworks, Photoshop, GIMP, Unity, and several game engines like Unreal 4 and Doom 3. There are also quite a few classes on 2D and 3D art as well as related math like trig and vectors.
We don’t know how long the page will remain up, and it has an SSL issue, but to save you some time, here’s a quick way to grab all the ZIP files on a page:
wget -nc -r -np --span-host -l 1 -A zip --no-check-certificate https://3dbuzz.com/index.html
However, as you might expect, the site is overloaded, so expect to not get them all in one swoop. We were surprised they didn’t make them available as torrents. (Update: the site now says downloads are temporarily disabled, but a Reddit user did start a
torrent
that is missing two small files and a
corrected torrent
with all the files, but it may not have as many seeds.)
If you want to build games with less fuss,
try this tool
. Or, maybe you’d rather go
old school
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210198",
"author": "Anon",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T16:33:57",
"content": "The “download at no cost” link seems to point to an unrelated page.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210344",
"author": "M",
"timestam... | 1,760,373,623.060938 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/why-do-resistors-have-a-color-code/ | Why Do Resistors Have A Color Code? | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"color code",
"history",
"resistor color code",
"resistors"
] | One of the first things you learn in electronics is how to identify a resistor’s value. Through-hole resistors have color codes, and that’s generally where beginners begin. But why are they marked like this? Like red stop signs and yellow lines down the middle of the road, it just seems like it has always been that way when, in fact, it hasn’t.
Before the 1920s, components were marked any old way the manufacturer felt like marking them. Then in 1924, 50 radio manufacturers in Chicago formed a trade group. The idea was to share patents among the members. Almost immediately the name changed from “Associated Radio Manufacturers” to the “Radio Manufacturer’s Association” or RMA. There would be several more name changes over the years until finally, it became the EIA or the Electronic Industries Alliance. The EIA doesn’t actually exist anymore. It exploded into several specific divisions, but that’s another story.
This is the tale of how color bands made their way onto every through-hole resistor from every manufacturer in the world.
Dots Then Bands
É
sistances anciennes annees 50
by François Collard, CC-BY-SA 4.0
By the late 1920s, the RMA was setting standards and one of them was the RMA standard for color-coding. The problem was that marking small components is difficult, especially back in the 1920s.
The solution was color bands, but not quite as we know them today. The standard for colors was the same, but the body of the resistor acted as the first band. Then there would be two or three other bands to show the rest of the value. In some cases, the third band was actually a dot. So the bulk of the resistor would be the first band color. The “tip” of the resistor would be the 2nd band and a dot would be the multiplier. Radios using this scheme started to appear in 1930. Here’s the color code chart from the 1941 Radio Today yearbook:
Ads in that magazine promoting resistors were careful to note that they were RMA color-coded. The code soon extended to capacitors (condensers, in the contemporary parlance).
The dot, as with printed piece of text on the cylindrical, might be hidden from view depending on the position of the resistor. So eventually, everyone switched to bands.
The colors are meant to follow the visible spectrum (remember ROY G BIV?). However, the RMA omitted indigo because apparently many people don’t distinguish blue, indigo, and violet as three different colors;
indigo is really a tertiary color, anyway and Newton included it because of his interest in the occult
, apparently. That leaves four slots, so dark colors represent the low end (black and brown) and bright colors the high end (gray and white).
Of course, none of this was funny if you were color blind. Reading a resistor with a meter or a bridge out of the circuit was certainly an answer. Reading one in a circuit, though, was another matter.
The Origin of E-Series Values
In 1952 the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC, another standards group) defined the E-series which dictates what values resistors come in so that you get equal spacing on a log scale for resistors. If that sounds confusing, consider an example.
The E12 series is for 10% resistors and the values on it give you 12 values per decade. The base values are
1, 1.2, 1.5, 1.8, 2.2, 2.7, 3.3., 3.9, 4.7, 5.6, 6.8, 8.2
That’s why you can get, say a 4.7 K or 47 K resistor but not a 40K resistor.
However, consider the tolerance. A 10% 39 K resistor could be off by 3.9 K. If the error pushed the resistance up that would be 42.9K, making a 40 K resistor unnecessary. That is, a 39 K resistor might well be a 40 K resistor, anyway. A low 47K resistor, on the other hand, could be 42.3 K, which is less than a high-value 39 K unit.
As you might expect, the number of values goes up as the tolerance goes down. At 2%, for example, you’ll use E48 which has 48 values per decade (if you’d guess E96 — the standard used for 1% has 96 values, you’d be right). Using E48, the values near 40 K are 38.3 K and 40.2 K. That’s 39.06 on the high side and 39.2 on the low side.
Next Time
Next time you pick up a resistor and read the code from it, you can recall the history behind it all. The legacy of color bands carries over into the surface mount realm, not as color but as three digits representing the first two numbers and multiplier for the resistor’s value. These days many electronics like wireless modules and lithium batteries include a datamatrix (something like a QR code) on them. Honestly, I’m surprised that all components — through hole and surface mount — don’t have some form of micro data matrix on it that lets you point your phone at them and see their complete datasheet. Maybe one day. | 226 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210162",
"author": "Alex Rossie",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T15:18:41",
"content": "Wow the body colour + band + dot is genuine improvement over current beige plus colours which could be anything scheme.It always seemed ludicrous that we marked them so given 10% of the male populatio... | 1,760,373,623.65524 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/model-s-motor-and-volt-battery-go-together-like-peanut-butter-and-jelly/ | Model S Motor And Volt Battery Go Together Like Peanut Butter And Jelly | Roger Cheng | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"battery pack",
"car",
"chevy volt",
"electric car",
"electric car battery",
"ev",
"EV conversion",
"Tesla Model S"
] | A common project category on this site is “put a Raspberry Pi in it”. For people who wrench on their cars, a similarly popular project is the “LS Swap”. Over the past few years, the world of electronics and automotive hacking started to converge in the form of electric car conversions, and [Jalopnik] proclaims
the electric counterpart to “LS Swap”
is to put a Telsa Model S motor and a Chevy Volt battery into a project car.
The General Motors LS engine lineup is popular with petro heads for basically the same reasons Raspberry Pi are popular with the digital minded. They are both compact, very powerful for the money, have a large body of existing projects to learn from, and an equally large ecosystem of accessories to help turn ideas into reality. So if someone desired more power than is practical from a car’s original engine, the obvious next step is to swap it out for an LS.
Things may not be quite as obvious in the electric world, but that’s changing. Tesla Model S and Chevrolet Volt have been produced in volume long enough for components to show up at salvage yards. And while not up to the levels of LS swaps or Pi mods, there’s a decent sized body of knowledge for powerful garage-built electric cars thanks to
pioneers like [Jim Belosic]
and
a budding industry
catering to those who want to build their own. While the decision to use
Tesla’s powerful motor
is fairly obvious, the choice of Volt battery may be surprising. It’s a matter of using the right tool for the job: most of these projects are not concerned about long range
offered by Tesla’s battery
. A Volt battery pack costs less while still delivering enough peak power, and as it was
originally developed to fit into an existing chassis
, its smaller size also benefits garage tinkerers fitting it into project cars.
While Pi SBCs and LS engines are likely to dominate their respective fields for the foreseeable future, the quickly growing and evolving world of electric vehicles means this winning combo of today are likely to be replaced by some other combination in the future. But even though the
parts may change
, the spirit of hacking will not.
[Photo: by Jim Belosic of
motor used in his Teslonda project
] | 55 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210121",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T12:13:14",
"content": "It would be nice when the day comes when either of those platforms start turning up in wrecking yards in Australia…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,373,623.356218 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/a-replica-from-wargames-but-not-the-one-you-think/ | A Replica FromWarGames, But Not The One You Think | Tom Nardi | [
"LED Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"alphanumeric display",
"ESP32",
"replica",
"TinyPICO",
"wargames"
] | Remember the WOPR from
WarGames
? The fictional supercomputer that went toe-to-toe with Matthew Broderick and his acoustic coupler was like a love letter to the blinkenlight mainframes of yesteryear, and every hacker of a certain age has secretly yearned for their own scaled down model of it. Well…that’s not what this project is.
The [Unexpected Maker] is as much a
WarGames
fan as any of us, but
he was more interested in recreating the red alphanumeric displays
that ticked along as the WOPR was trying to brute force missile launch codes. These displays, complete with their thoroughly 1980s “computer” sound effects, were used to ratchet up the tension by showing how close the supercomputer was to kicking off World War III.
The display as it appeared in the film.
Of course, most us don’t have a missile silo to install his recreated display in. So when it’s not running through one of the randomized launch code decoding sequences, the display doubles as an NTP synchronized clock. With the retro fourteen segment LEDs glowing behind the smoked acrylic front panel, we think the clock itself is pretty slick even without the movie references.
Beyond the aforementioned LEDs, [Unexpected Maker] is using a
ESP32 development board of his own design called the TinyPICO
. An associated audio “Shield” with an integrated buzzer provides the appropriate bleeps and bloops as the display goes through the motions. Everything is held inside of an understated 3D printed enclosure that would look great on the wall or a desk.
Once you’ve got your launch code busting LED clock going in the corner, and your
illuimated DEFCON display mounted on the wall
, you’ll be well on the way to completing the
WarGames
playset we’ve been dreaming of since 1983. The only way to lose is to not play the game! (Or something like that…) | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210536",
"author": "Dissy",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T17:28:35",
"content": "“and every hacker of a certain age has secretly yearned for their own scaled down model of it. Well…that’s not what this project is.”Finally, a non-scaled-down model that I’ve always wanted! … OhWell don’t ... | 1,760,373,625.434398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/raspberry-pi-4-and-the-state-of-video-game-emulation/ | Raspberry Pi 4 And The State Of Video Game Emulation | Drew Littrell | [
"Curated",
"Featured",
"Games",
"Interest",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"emulation",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi 4",
"Retroarch",
"retropie",
"runahead"
] | The modern ideal of pixel art is a fallacy. Videogame art crammed onto cartridges and floppy discs were beholden to the CRT display technology of their day. Transmitting analog video within the confines of dingy yellow-RCA-connector-blur, the images were really just a suggestion of on-screen shapes rather than clearly defined graphics. Even when using the superior RGB-video-over-SCART cables, most consumer grade CRT televisions never generated more than about 400 lines, so the exacting nature of digitized plots became a fuzzy raster when traced by an electron beam. It wasn’t until the late 90s when the confluence of high resolution PC monitors, file sharing, and open source emulation software that the masses saw pixels for the sharp square blocks of color that they are.
More importantly, emulation software is not restricted to any one type of display technology any more than the strata of device it runs on. The open-source nature of videogame emulators always seems to congregate around the Lowest Common Denominator of devices, giving the widest swath of gamers the chance to play. Now, that “L.C.D.” may very well be the Raspberry Pi 4. The single board computer’s mix of tinker-friendly IO at an astonishingly affordable entry price has made it a natural home for emulators, but at fifty bucks what options unlock within the emulation scene?
The Dubious Price Tag That’s Still Quite Low, All-In
The raspberry pi 4 runs a little hot out of the box.
The technological
gap between the Raspberry Pi 4 and its predecessor
is sizeable. A 22% jump in clock speed, upwards of four times the RAM, and support for 4K resolution all while retaining the same footprint should not be undersold
. Those advancements were coupled with a heightened 3A power requirement meaning extra cost as not just any PSU over USB-C will do.
All those
additional amps added up to a worryingly hot surface temperature
anywhere from 50 to 80 °C on launch firmware
. Even with updated firmware, any serious user will want an additional cooling solution in place. You will also shell out some clams for all the gaming accouterments: keyboard/gamepad, micro-HDMI cable, and flash storage. Ultimately the promise of an inexpensive emulation box fluctuates depending on the amount of pre-existing equipment. But even considering all of the add-ons, to have a dedicated gaming rig at this entry price is pretty incredible. The question is, what kind of gaming is possible?
When it comes to arcade game emulation on a Raspberry Pi, most users’ first stop is the RetroPie distribution. It provides a lightweight user interface that scales well on a variety of resolutions. RetroPie employs the use of advMAME v3.9 as its arcade machine emulation software. While plenty capable,
advMAME is actually a port of MAME v0.108 which dates back to 2006.
The bulk of emulators written in that time typically prioritized speed over accuracy in order to maintain playability, so the concept of a CRT filter or console chip-level cycle accuracy was hardly possible given the constraints of mid-2000s hardware. This example is not to denigrate any of the developers of advMAME or the RetroPie wrapper, but to point out that there is a cost to the relative convenience of a Raspberry Pi. If the proficiency of emulation is relegated to the era of the original Xbox, then why not use a Xbox instead? The rebuttal is simply two words… runahead mode. And the quad-core nature of the Pi 4 makes it particularly well suited for this.
Run (Kokiri) Forest, Run
For the uninitiated, Retroarch is a frontend that aggregates a large collection of emulation software and is part of retroPie. The development team behind Retroarch
announced Raspberry Pi 4 support for a latency-reduction process known as runahead mode
. Their description highlights the low-latency benefits of the effort: “The runahead feature calculates the frames as fast as possible in the background to rollback the action as close as possible to the input command requested.” Emulators can be resource intensive, soaking up all the available CPU horsepower and memory. Controller polling can fall out of sync with what is currently displayed on screen when a particular game sequence becomes more demanding. Things can get laggy.
Enabling Retroarch’s runahead mode on the select emulation cores for which it is available (Genesis Plus GX, Snes9x 2010, and VBA Next) can alleviate the input lag caused by the emulator itself.
Process flow diagram of two-instance runahead mode in Retroarch.
When runahead mode is properly implemented on a Raspberry Pi 4, games control more-or-less as they did on the original hardware. This means losing a life in a run n’ gun the likes of
Gunstar Heroes
is solely due to user-error. On the other hand, turn based games in the vein of Final Fantasy are safe to play without runahead mode enabled. Those behemoths sure are patient folk.
It should be noted that this revolutionary feature is predicated upon being paired with a halfway decent LCD and wired gamepad/keyboard. Unfortunately, all the simultaneous instances of a game cannot overcome a poor pixel response time or a sub-par Bluetooth radio controller.
Optical Media Shifts Into View
For the first time in the Pi-lineage, there are multiple options for disc-based console emulators.
Dreamcast, PSP, Saturn, and even PlayStation 2 cores via Retroarch v1.7.8
have all made their way onto Raspberry Pi 4. Granted the bulk of these systems do not run at full-speed quite yet, but there are some real overachievers still in their nascent beta forms. Specifically redream, a recently developed Sega Dreamcast emulator, has shown remarkable progress (video below) despite having no Raspberry Pi builds considered stable. Games play at or around sixty frames per second at a 720p resolution. The venerated
Dolphin emulator (Gamecube/Wii) has even shown signs of promise
running on the single board computer.
Beyond Gamecube, there are
an array of arcade games that have only now been emulated due to their complexity
and are not likely to run on a Raspberry Pi for years to come. Recreating the authentic 20th-century arcade experience may not be within reach in this form factor as more comprehensive emulators like the current iteration of MAME are simply too taxing to run currently. The yearly cadence of new Pi device revisions will prove difficult to retain developer’s attention, and further maturation of emulation software will only help alleviate a device’s lack of raw computing prowess. Runahead mode and access to previously inaccessible emulators certainly bolster the viability of the Raspberry Pi 4 as an all-in-one solution, though what’s most important is that these good ol’ games are being played at all. | 40 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210508",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T15:31:08",
"content": "How much of those formerly hard to emulates would benefit from the presence of an FPGA?Also I imagine a Raspberry Pi would be fun for the fantasy console branch of gaming.",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,373,625.801137 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/circuitpython-now-working-on-teensy-4-0/ | CircuitPython Now Working On Teensy 4.0 | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers",
"News"
] | [
"CircuitPython",
"Teensy 4.0"
] | Python is often touted as a great language for beginner coders to learn. Until recently, however, it simply wasn’t a viable choice in the embedded space. That’s begun to change with projects like CircuitPython,
and now it’s available on the Teensy 4.0!
This milestone is thanks in part to [arturo182], who did the ground work of getting CircuitPython to run on the iMX RT series of microcontrollers. This was built upon by [tannewt], who is the lead in charge of the CircuitPython project.
There are some bugs to work out; currently, the project is in a very early stage of development. [Paul Stoffregen], who heads Teensy development, has already pointed out that
there needs to be allowance for the 4096 byte recovery partition in the Teensy 4.0’s storage,
for example. Development continues at a rapid pace, and those with ideas about where the project should go
can weigh in online.
It’s an exciting development, which brings easy Python development to one of the more powerful embedded development platforms on the market. We look forward to seeing many more projects take advantage of the power of the Teensy 4.0 moving forward. If you’re eager to see what can be done with CircuitPython,
be sure to check out projects we’ve featured before.
Video after the break. | 33 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210478",
"author": "epitaxial",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T13:28:28",
"content": "I wish CircuitPython would explain exactly what it is. Do you code in python and it converts that to assembly?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "62... | 1,760,373,625.367133 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/node-red-laser-shooting-gallery-goes-anywhere/ | Node-RED Laser Shooting Gallery Goes Anywhere | Kristina Panos | [
"Games",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"ESP8266",
"laser",
"node-red",
"shooting gallery",
"Wemos d1"
] | When you think of a shooting gallery, you might envision a line of tin cans set up along a split-rail fence, or a few rows of ducks or bottles lined up at a carnival. But what do these have in common? You, standing in one spot, and shooting in the same general direction. You’re exposed! If those targets could shoot back, you’d be dead within seconds. Wouldn’t it be more fun if the targets were all around you in 360°? We think so, too.
So how could you possibly set up a shooting gallery this way?
[Another Maker] already solved that problem for you with ESP32s and Node-RED
(YouTube). Each target has an ESP32, a laser sensor, and an LED that lights up when the target is ready, and turns off once it’s been hit. They all make an enticing ‘shoot me’ sound that goes with their graphics, and a second mp3 plays upon direct hit.
The PVC gun houses an ESP8266, a laser module at the end of the barrel, and runs on a cylindrical USB battery slipped down in the secondary grip. [Another Maker] can spread the targets out far and wide, as long as they all stay in range of the localized WiFi access point.
The best part is that the Node-RED system is target-agnostic — it doesn’t care how many you have or how they’re made, and it can juggle up to 250 of them. Because of the way the target objects are programmed, it would be quite easy to add actuators that make them drop down or fall backward when hit. You could also implement [Another Maker]’s fantastic suggestion of hitting arcade buttons with NERF darts instead. Charge those lasers and fire at the break button to see the demo and walk-through video.
If you plan to knock the targets down or over in your implementation, you’ll want an easy way to reset them.
Here’s a scrap-built shooting gallery that uses a windshield wiper motor to set ’em back up. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210473",
"author": "Another Maker",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T12:55:50",
"content": "Thanks for posting this! I also have a companion video to shoot IR accurately and distinguish which marker hit which target,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKUF_zrhvQg",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,373,625.553569 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/in-soviet-russia-doorbell-rings-you/ | In Soviet Russia, Doorbell Rings You | Al Williams | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"dlib",
"doorbell",
"facial recognition"
] | We can imagine that the origin of the doorbell is truly ancient. if you lived in a cave, you probably had a stick and a rock nearby for people to get your attention without invading your cave. In 1817 a Scot named William Murdoch had a bell in the house that visitors rang via a compressed air system, but the electric doorbell had to wait until 1831. Since then, little has changed with the basic idea. [Erientes] — who lives in the Netherlands, not Russia — wanted a smarter doorbell. In particular, he’s read about older people being victimized by people who ring the doorbell for entry. So [Erientes] used a Raspberry Pi to make
a doorbell that supports facial recognition
.
The exercise is really more of an operations challenge than a technical one thanks to a high-quality Python library for
face recognition
powered by DLib. However, we did like the user interface aimed at non-technical users. The metaphor is a traffic light in which a red light means do not allow entry. The lights are buttons, so you can use them to whitelist or blacklist a particular person.
We could see this being coupled with a keypad to make a two-factor access control system. To unlock the door, you have to present your face and enter a code number. While it is true that the facial recognition system isn’t perfect, the chances that someone would learn your code and be able to duplicate your face well enough to fool the algorithm seems pretty slim.
If you want to play with the facial recognition online, you
won’t need to install any software
. That’s a great use of
Jupyter
. As for fooling facial recognition, maybe
this project needs a bit more work
. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210475",
"author": "Ron Johanson",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T13:08:15",
"content": "Being victimized because of a doorbell is part and parcel of living in a vibrant community.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210802",
... | 1,760,373,625.601603 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/run-java-on-an-amiga/ | Run Java On An Amiga | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"68000",
"amiga",
"commodore",
"java",
"motorola",
"retrocomputing"
] | In the modern world, we take certain tools for granted. High-level programming languages such as C or Python haven’t been around that long in the grand scheme of things, and Java has only existed since the ’90s. Getting these tools working on machines that predate them is more of a challenge than anything, and [Michael Kohn] was more than willing to tackle this one.
He recently got Java running on a Commodore Amiga
.
The Amgia predates Java itself by almost a decade, so this process wasn’t exactly straightforward. The platform has a number of coprocessors that were novel for their time but aren’t as commonplace now, taking care of such tasks such as graphics, sound, and memory handling. Any psoftware running on the Amiga needs to be in a specially formatted program as well, so that needed to be taken care of, even loading Java on the computer in the first place took some special work using a null modem cable rather than the floppy disk an Amiga would have used back in the day.
Loading Java on an antique Amiga is certainly a badge of honor, but [Michael] isn’t a stranger to Java and the Motorola 68000s found in Amigas. There’s a 68000 in the Sega Genesis as well,
and we’ve seen how [Michael] was able to run Java on that too
. | 25 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210390",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T03:05:33",
"content": "Hmmm, I’ve got a tickle in the old grey matter saying there might have been a port back in the day, mid 90s say, but it needed a ’30 @ 50mhz to be merely dog slow. It might have been something to do ... | 1,760,373,625.298041 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/active-suspension-r-c-car-really-rocks/ | Active Suspension R/C Car Really Rocks | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"active suspension",
"arduino",
"drift",
"mpu6050",
"R/C car",
"servo",
"super scale R/C"
] | When you’re a kid, remote control cars are totally awesome. Even if you can’t go anywhere by yourself, it’s much easier to imagine a nice getaway from the daily grind of elementary school if you have some wheels. And yeah, R/C cars are still awesome once you’re an adult, but actual car-driving experience will probably make you yearn for more realism.
What could be more realistic and fun than an active suspension? Plenty of adults will never get the chance to hit the switches in real car, but
after a year of hard work, [snoopybg] is ready to go front and back, side to side, and even drift
in this super scale ’63 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 wagon. We think you’ll agree that [snoopybg] didn’t miss a detail — this thing makes engine noises, and there are LEDs in the dual exhaust pipes to simulate flames.
An Arduino reads data from a triple-axis accelerometer in real time, and adjusts a servo on each wheel accordingly, also in real time, to mimic a real car throwing its weight around on a real suspension system. If that weren’t cool enough, most of the car is printed, including the tires. [snoopybg] started with a drift car chassis, but even that has been hacked and drilled out as needed.
There are a ton of nice pictures on [snoopybg]’s site if you want to see what’s under the hood. We don’t see the code anywhere, but [snoopybg] seems quite open to publishing more details if there is interest out there. Strap yourself in and hold on tight, because we’re gonna take this baby for a spin after the break.
If this is all seems a bit much for you, but you’ve got that R/C itch again,
there’s a lot to be said for upgrading the electronics in a stock R/C car
.
Via
r/duino | 27 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210362",
"author": "Lee Studley",
"timestamp": "2020-01-14T00:29:33",
"content": "That looks very realistic. Great modeling for movies!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6210363",
"author": "geocrasher",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,373,625.506271 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/13/additive-multi-voice-synth-preserves-sounds-too/ | Additive, Multi-Voice Synth Preserves Sounds, Too | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"additive synthesis",
"fft",
"lookup tables",
"organ",
"pic32",
"synthesizer"
] | For his final project in [Bruce Land]’s microcontroller design class,
[Mark] set out to make a decently-sized synth that sounds good
. We think you’ll agree that he succeeded in spades. Don’t let those tiny buttons fool you, because it doesn’t sound like a toy.
Why does it sound so good? One of the reasons is that the instrument samples are made using additive synthesis, which essentially stacks harmonic overtones on top the fundamental frequency of each note. This allows synthesizers to better mimic the timbre of natural, acoustic sounds. For each note [Mark] plays, you’re hearing a blend of four frequencies constructed from lookup tables. These frequencies are shaped by an envelope function that improves the sound even further.
Between the sound and the features, this is quite an impressive synth. It can play polyphonically in piano, organ, or plucked string mode through a range of octaves. A PIC32 runs the synthesizer itself, and a pair of helper PIC32s can be used to record songs to be played over. So [Mark] could record point and counterpoint separately and play them back together, or use the helper PICs to fine-tune his three-part harmony. We’ve got this thing plugged in and waiting for you after the break.
If PICs aren’t what you normally choose,
here’s an FPGA synth
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210100",
"author": "Daniel Lindström",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T10:12:48",
"content": "Infamous?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210124",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T12:32:05",
... | 1,760,373,625.172159 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/12/a-dna-based-computer-calculates-square-roots-up-to-900/ | A DNA-Based Computer Calculates Square Roots Up To 900 | Sharon Lin | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"biology",
"dna",
"DNA computing",
"synthetic biology"
] | While DNA-based computing may not be taking over silicon quite so soon, there is progress in the works. In a paper published by
Small
, researchers from the University of Rochester demonstrate a molecular computing system capable of
calculating square roots of integers up to 900
. The computer is built from synthetic biochemical logic gates using hybridization, a process where two strands of DNA join to form double-stranded DNA, and strand displacement reactions.
DNA-based circuits have already been shown to implement complex logic functions, but most existing circuits prior to the recent paper were unable to calculate square root operations. This required 4-bit binary numbers – the new prototype implements a 10-bit square root logic circuit, operating up to the decimal integer 900.
The computer uses 32 strands of DNA for storing and processing information. The process uses three modules, starting off with encoding a number on the DNA. Each combination is attached to a florescent marker, which changes signal during hybridization in the second module. The process for calculating the square root controls the signals, with the results deducted from the final color according to a threshold set in the third module.
We’re beginning to see the end of Moore’s Law approaching, with companies like Intel and AMD struggling to shrink transistors 10 nm wide. Nevertheless, with DNA molecules still about 10 time smaller than the best transistors today and DNA computing systems continuing to gain in sophistication, biochemical circuits could potentially be holding solutions to increasing the speed of computing beyond silicon computing. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210079",
"author": "bobbymobby",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T08:29:15",
"content": "I did not understand a single thing… Time to up my game & get up to speed… But but DNA computers?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210085",
... | 1,760,373,625.234257 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/12/take-security-up-a-notch-by-adding-leds/ | Take Security Up A Notch By Adding LEDs | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"air gap",
"attack",
"Black Hat",
"led",
"lights",
"network",
"robert fisk",
"security",
"usb",
"write"
] | All computers are vulnerable to attacks by viruses or black hats, but there are lots of steps that can be taken to reduce risk. At the extreme end of the spectrum is having an “air-gapped” computer that doesn’t connect to a network at all, but this isn’t a guarantee that it won’t get attacked. Even transferring files to the computer with a USB drive can be risky under certain circumstances, but thanks to
some LED lights that [Robert Fisk] has on his drive
, this attack vector can at least be monitored.
Using a USB drive with a single LED that illuminates during a read OR write operation is fairly common, but since it’s possible to transfer malware unknowingly via USB drives, one that has a separate LED specifically for writing operations will help alert a user to any write operations that might be trying to fly under the radar.
A recent article by [Bruce Schneier]
pointed out this flaw in USB drives, and [Robert] was up to the challenge. His build returns more control to the user by showing them when their drive is accessed and in what way, which can also be used to discover unique quirks of one’s chosen operating system.
[Robert] is pretty familiar with USB drives and their ups and downs as well. A few years ago he built a
USB firewall
that was able to decrease the likelihood of BadUSB-type attacks. Be careful going down the rabbit hole of device security, though, or you will start seeing potential attacks
hidden almost everywhere
. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6210052",
"author": "Osgeld",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T05:27:48",
"content": "1) no one will pay attention2) every os is constantly sniffing and writing to every disk on your system",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210094",
... | 1,760,373,625.853039 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/12/hackaday-links-january-12-2020/ | Hackaday Links: January 12, 2020 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | Nothing ruffles feathers more reliably than a software company announcing changes to its licensing terms. And so it goes with AutoDesk, who
recently announced
that Eagle would no longer be available as a standalone product and would now be bundled with Fusion 360. It looks like there’s still a free option for personal use, which is good even if it limits designs to two schematic sheets, two board layers, and 80 cm² board area. And perhaps this means there will be a Linux version of Fusion 360 too.
With the Y2K bug now twenty years in the rearview mirror, it’s entertaining to look back at that time and all the hype that surrounded it. Usually we talk about the effort that went into fixing vulnerable systems, but do we ever talk about the recipes of Y2K? The Advent of Computing podcast
recently did an episode
that gives a great background of the Y2K bug, plus discusses what people were planning to do for food after the bug detonated all the world’s nukes when the new millennium rolled around. Pantries stocked with canned goods, wood stoves to cook on and keep warm by when the powerplants all self-destructed on January 1 – it was all part of the vibe at the time.
We suppose when you put 60 birds into orbit at a time, it doesn’t take long to make a sizable impact on the planet’s constellation of satellites. Still, it came as a surprise that SpaceX was able to claim the title of
world’s largest commercial satellite constellation
after just three Starlink launches. We guess the operative term is “commercial” here, since some governments probably have far more satellites in service than the 182 Starlinks that have been launched so far. That’s a far cry from the 11,000 plus eventually predicted to form the Starlink constellation, but it’s
already having an impact
.
As a proud Idahoan, I feel personally triggered by what’s billed as
the world’s first smart potato
. True, I live in the part of the state with the trees and the bears, not the spuds, but still, it’s right there on our license plates. While clearly tongue-in-cheek, the Smart Potato pokes fun of our official State Vegetable, which I find beyond the pale. Seems like anything can be crowdfunded these days.
Speaking of which, check out
Kohler’s Alex-connected smart toilet
. For a mere $7,000 you can have a toilet that does everything a regular, boring old toilet does, but with lights. In fairness, the value of a good bidet can’t be overstated, but the ability to talk to your toilet and have it talk back seems a little on the iffy side. Perhaps teaming it up with
the Charmin Poop-Bot
, a self-balancing robot that connects to your phone and brings you a roll of toilet paper if you find yourself without a square to spare.
And finally,
drummer Neil Peart died this week
at the far-too-young age of 67. While there’s probably a fair number of Rush fans in the core hackaday demographic, there’s no hack or other tie-ins here. I’m just sad about it and wanted to share the news. | 44 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209997",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2020-01-13T00:21:32",
"content": "“drummer Neil Peart died this week at the far-too-young age of 67”More of a Gene Krupa fan, myself, but Peart did some good work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,625.941247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/12/diy-ionizer-clears-the-air-on-a-budget/ | DIY Ionizer Clears The Air On A Budget | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"cascade",
"Cockcroft-Walton",
"electrostatic",
"electrostatic precipitator",
"ion",
"ionization",
"ionizer",
"multiplier"
] | Have you ever had a good, deep breath of the air near a waterfall, or perhaps after a thunderstorm? That unmistakably fresh smell is due to ionized air, specifically negative ions, and many are the claims concerning their health benefits. A minor industry has sprung up to capitalize on the interest in ionized air, and while [Amaldev] wanted to clean up the Mumbai air coming into his home, he didn’t want to pay a lot for a commercial unit.
So he built his own air ionizer for only about $10
.
When [Amaldev] dropped this in the Hackaday tip line, he indicated that he’d been taking some heat for the design from Instagram followers. We imagine a fair number of the complaints stem from the cluster of sewing needles that bristle from one end of the PCB and are raised to 6,000 volts by a fifteen-stage
Cockcroft-Walton multiplier
. That’s sure to raise eyebrows, or possible the hair on one’s head if you happen to brush by the emitters. Or perhaps [Amaldev]’s critics are dubious about the benefits of ionized air; indeed, some commenters on the video below seem to think that the smoke in the closed jar was not precipitated by the ion stream as [Amaldev] claims, but rather somehow was settled by heat or some other trickery.
Neither of those bothers us as much as the direct 230-volt mains connection, though. We’d have preferred to see at least an isolation transformer in there, or perhaps
a battery-powered flyback circuit
to supply the input to that multiplier. Still, the lesson on cascade multipliers was welcome, and we found the smoke-clearing power of ionized air pretty amazing.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/81606994_136216931163169_4519509951028015416_n.mp4 | 65 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209947",
"author": "RubyPanther",
"timestamp": "2020-01-12T21:18:15",
"content": "The smell is ozone, it is rather odd to associate it with freshening the air, or generalized health benefits. I guess if you always use ionizing air purifiers then this association would develop.Incom... | 1,760,373,626.04423 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/12/awakening-a-dragon-from-its-slumber/ | Awakening A Dragon From Its Slumber | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6809",
"CoCo",
"Dragon 32"
] | For all the retrocomputing fun and games we encounter in our community, there are a few classic microcomputers that rarely receive any attention. Usually this is because they didn’t sell well and not many have survived, or were simply underwhelming machines that haven’t gathered a huge following today. One that arguably falls within both camps is the Dragon 32, a machine best known in those pre-Raspberry Pi days for being the only home computer manufactured in Wales, and for being nearly compatible with the Tandy Color Computer due to both machines’ designs coming from the same Motorola data sheet. Repeat restorer of retrocomputers, [Drygol],
has given a Dragon 32 the full restoration and upgrade treatment
, offering us a rare chance to take a look at this computer.
The Dragon arrived with a pile of contemporary books and software, but no power supply. A significant modification was made to the internal PSU board then to allow it to work with an Amiga unit, and the black-on-green Dragon text came up on the TV screen. Recapping and a replacement for a faulty op-amp fixed poor video quality, then it was time for a 64K memory upgrade with some neatly done bodge-wiring. Finally there’s a repair to the very period-looking analogue joystick, and a home-made interface for the more common Atari/Amiga style sticks.
The Dragon may be only a footnote in the history of 8-bit home computing, but with its good expandability and decent quality keyboard it perhaps deserved to reach more homes than it did. This appears to be the first time a Dragon has featured here, though its Tandy CoCo cousin
has made it into a few stories
. | 18 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209922",
"author": "Mats S",
"timestamp": "2020-01-12T18:25:06",
"content": "I own a Dragon 32. The joysticks are an… interesting… design choice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6209963",
"author": "Alphatek",
... | 1,760,373,626.097809 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/12/maze-solving-via-text-editing/ | Maze Solving Via Text Editing | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"maze",
"sed"
] | Linux scripters usually know about sed — the stream editor. It has a simple job: transform text as it whizzes from input to output. So if you wanted to solve a maze, this wouldn’t be the tool you’d think to use, right? Well, if you were [xsot],
you’d disagree
.
You build a maze using spaces for empty space and # for walls. There’s an S to mark the start position and an E to mark the end. Of course, the maze can also contain newlines. The sed script does an amazing job of solving the problem.
As the author points out:
The main difficulty lies in the lack of the luxuries usually provided in a regular programming language such as:
arithmetic
data types other than strings
more than 2 “variables”
Also, sed regex lacks features present in other regex systems such as PCRE (non-greedy matching, lookaheads, etc).
We will confess, we didn’t pull the whole
122 line script
apart to understand it, but it looks like it replaces spaces with special marker characters that relate to the direction from the end to the start. The characters U, D, L, and R indicate the direction. Then it is able to select the closest character and replaces them with arrows (well, a letter v, a caret, and the less than and greater than signs).
A very unusual hack of using sed, we think. The output is even colorized and animated. Amazing.
We can’t say we’ve ever done anything this bizarre with a scripting command. We have looked at
scripting
many times, though, if you want to brush up. Probably the closest we’ve come is using bash scripts to process
binary files
. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209894",
"author": "socksbot",
"timestamp": "2020-01-12T15:33:46",
"content": "Hackaday: showcase of the “Why, oh why” side of technology.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6209895",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
... | 1,760,373,626.152396 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/11/stacks-of-spring-washers-power-the-drawbar-on-this-cnc-mill-conversion/ | Stacks Of Spring Washers Power The Drawbar On This CNC Mill Conversion | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Belleville washer",
"cnc",
"collet",
"drawbar",
"pneumatic",
"tool",
"tooling"
] | With Tormach and Haas capturing a lot of the entry-level professional market for CNC machines, we don’t see too many CNC conversions of manual mills anymore. And so
this power drawbar conversion for a Precision Matthews mill
really caught our eye.
What’s that, you say? Didn’t [Physics Anonymous] already build a power drawbar for a mill?
They did
, and it was quite successful. But that was based on a pneumatic impact wrench, and while it worked fine on a manual mill, the same approach would be a bit slow and cumbersome on a CNC mill. For this build, they chose a completely different approach to providing the necessary upward force to draw the collet into the collet holder and clamp down on the tool: springs. Specifically,
Belleville spring washers
, which are shaped like shallow cups and can exert tremendous axial force over a very short distance.
[PA] calculated that they’d need to exert 2,700 pounds (12,000 Newtons) of force over a length of a couple of inches, which seems outside the Belleville washer’s specs. Luckily, the springs can be stacked, either nested together in “series” to increase the load force, or alternating in “parallel” to apply the rated force over a greater distance. To compress their stack, they used a nifty multi-stage pneumatic cylinder to squash down the springs and release the collet. They also had to come up with a mechanism to engage to machine’s spindle only when a tool change is called for. The video below details the design and shows the build; skip to 11:32 to see the drawbar in action.
We’re looking forward to the rest of [Physics Anonymous]’ conversion. They’re no strangers to modifying off-the-shelf machines to do their bidding, after all – witness
their improvements to an SLA printer
. | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209656",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2020-01-11T15:47:12",
"content": "I did this myself a long time ago, and made a spreadsheet to work out the force / displacement for disc springs in stacks of between 1 and 4.https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_JIG00w1hZ_2KD9WWh3Xo... | 1,760,373,626.215575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/11/building-a-real-wooden-table-saw/ | Building A Real Wooden Table Saw | Sharon Lin | [
"how-to",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"jigsaw",
"table saw",
"woodworking"
] | A table saw is one of those tools that aren’t strictly necessary to have, but immensely helpful if you do happen to have one around. The folks at [I Build It] have made a
three
part
series
that features a homemade table saw build, so you can finally get around to adding one to your makerspace.
The build uses a real table saw arbor and is made from Baltic birch plywood and solid wood, with some plastic sheets for the trunnions and top. The blade is housed in a blade lift made out wooden panels with a pivot point and slot for the lift mechanism. Bearings allow the blade the freedom of movement, while a curved cutout allows it to stay flat against the wall of the slot while the blade lift mechanism moves.
Meanwhile a reused motor from a previous table saw is dusted, cleaned, and rewired to run in reverse. While most table saws only need two trunnions, a third is used for supporting the motor, since it has to move with the lift and tilt. Once the lift/tilt mechanism is complete, the frame for the table saw is more straightforward, with many steps involving clamping, measuring, cutting, fitting, and painting the assembly. For the final few steps, a switched is mounted outside the table saw in a small box that connected to the power supply and motor, as well as a shop vac for handling dust collection from the saw. While the enclosure isn’t a metal box, as long as the connections are secured properly the wires shouldn’t come loose.
If you want to see other examples of homemade table saws, check out this
teeny tiny saw
and this
kid-friendly table saw build
. | 43 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209627",
"author": "Jan Ciger (@janoc200)",
"timestamp": "2020-01-11T12:58:39",
"content": "I would add a riving knife and a blade guard – it takes only one bad kickback to appreciate these devices. Heck, even Hackaday wrote about it in 2017:https://hackaday.com/2017/06/22/adding-a... | 1,760,373,626.62179 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/11/this-ugly-christmas-sweater-can-set-you-on-fire/ | This Ugly Christmas Sweater Can Set You On Fire | Sharon Lin | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"christmas",
"flamethrower",
"funny",
"sweater"
] | While Christmas may have just passed, there’s just enough time left in winter to justify wearing your ugly Christmas sweaters for a few more days. If you’re not one of the lucky ones with an old sweater from Grandma, you can still turn your least favorite sweater into the most epic flame-throwing Christmas sweater there ever was.
[JAIRUS OF ALL], maker of explosive and other dangerous ideas, came up with a
DIY ugly Christmas sweater
that shoots flames on command. In order to produce the flame-throwing effect, he uses piping from a fish tank airline hose with a T connector attached to one end and epoxied to the middle of the sweater. The piping runs down the sweater to a can of butane fuel that he can control from the nozzle. Once the fuel is being released, he uses a lighter to initiate the flames from the sweater.
The
flames are quite impressive
, so definitely use caution if you intend to replicate this build in any way. It would be helpful to have a friend with a CO2 fire extinguisher nearby as well.
For a less life-threatening build, fellow builder [Price] created a Christmas tree-themed sweater lined with LEDs and USB-powered figurines, connected to a power supply in his pocket. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209610",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2020-01-11T10:28:17",
"content": "i think id have used one of those canned fart simulants out there. but fire is good.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6209612",
"author": "Pek... | 1,760,373,626.54335 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/a-simple-pov-globe-via-apa102/ | A Simple POV Globe Via APA102 | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"apa102",
"led",
"POV globe"
] | POV builds come in all shapes and sizes, and typically rely on LEDs for their high light output and fast response time. With this in mind, [Great Scott] grabbed some LED strip off the shelf
and set about whipping up a POV LED globe.
Being a spinning POV build, it’s necessary to consider how to get power to the rotating elements. [Great Scott] decided to go with a simple solution of putting a LiPo battery on the rotating assembly, which runs the LEDs and Arduino Nano at the heart of the operation. The LEDs in question are of the APA102 type, making them readily addressable and capable of a wide color gamut. It’s all spun by a simple brushed DC motor, running from a separate supply at the base of the platform.
It’s very much a hacker build, held together with duct tape and zipties. Despite this, it looks tidy when in operation, as all of the important hardware is hidden at the centre of the globe. There’s a bit of a vibration problem, but [Great Scott] reckons this can be fixed with some frame modifications.
We’d love to see the build run some more advanced operations, like a representation of the Earth, or some kind of sun clock. If you’re interested in learning more about POV displays,
we’ve got the primer you need
. Video after the break. | 30 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209593",
"author": "Cluso99",
"timestamp": "2020-01-11T06:32:00",
"content": "Been done years agohttps://www.instructables.com/id/POV-Globe-24bit-True-Color-and-Simple-HW/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6209613",
"au... | 1,760,373,626.429899 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/building-a-low-tech-website-for-energy-efficiency/ | Building A Low-Tech Website For Energy Efficiency | Sharon Lin | [
"Software Hacks",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"low-tech hack",
"web design",
"web development"
] | In an age of flashy jQuery scripts and bulky JavaScript front-end frameworks, loading a “lite” website is like a breath of fresh air. When most of us think of lightweight sites, though, our mind goes to old-style pure HTML and CSS sites or the intentionally barebones websites of developers and academics.
Low-tech Magazine
, an intentionally low-tech and solar-powered website, manages to incorporate both modern web aesthetics and low-tech efficiency in one go.
Rather than hosting the site on data centers – even those running on renewable power sources – they have a self-hosted site that is run on solar power, causing the site to occasionally go off-line. Their model contrasts with the cloud computing model, which allows more energy efficiency at the user-side while increasing energy expense at data centers. Each page on the blog declares the page size, with an average page weight of 0.77 MB, less than half of the average page size of the top 500,000 most popular blogs in June 2018.
Some of the major choices that have limited the size of the website include building a static site as opposed to a dynamic site, “dithering” images, sparing a logo, staying with default typefaces, and eliminating all third-party tracking, advertising services, and cookies. Their
GitHub repository
details the front-end decisions including using unicode characters for the site’s logo rather than embedding an SVG. While the latter may be scalable and lightweight in format it requires distribution to the end-user, which can involve a zipped package with eps, ai, png, and jpeg files in order to ensure the user is able to load the image.
As for the image dithering, the technique allows the website to maintain its characteristic appearance while still minimizing image quality and size. Luckily for Low-tech Magazine, the theme of the magazine allows for black and white images, suitable for dithering. Image sprites are also helpful for minimizing server requests by combining multiple small images into one. Storage-wise, the combined image will take up less memory and only load once.
There are also a few extraneous features that emphasize the website’s infrastructure. The background color indicates the capacity of the solar-charged battery for the website’s server, while other stats about the server’s location (time, sky conditions, forecast) also help with making the website availability in the near future more visible. Who knows, with the greater conscience on environmental impact, this may be a new trend in web design. | 38 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209568",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-01-11T03:23:47",
"content": "It sounds very interesting, but i’m hesitant to follow the link and possibly bog down their server.B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210049",
... | 1,760,373,626.50085 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/arduino-pedometer-counts-your-steps/ | Arduino Pedometer Counts Your Steps | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"adxl 335",
"ADXL335",
"arduino"
] | There’s a trend in corporate America that has employees wear a step counter — technically a pedometer — and compete in teams to see who can get the most number of steps. We wonder how many people attach the device to an electric drill and win the competition easily. However if you want to do your own measurements, [Ashish Choudhary] has plans for making
a pedometer with an Arduino
. The device isn’t tiny, but as you can see in the video below it seems to work.
For the extra size, you do get some features. For one, there is a 16×2 LCD display and an ADXL335 accelerometer, and you can probably imagine some other cool features for such a device.
The Arduino computes the magnitude of the acceleration, and if it exceeds a certain threshold it adds a step to the step count. Honestly, this is a fun project but it cries out for a more compact form factor. An ESP8266 for example could ditch the display and connect via WiFi to your phone. Then again, your phone can probably do the same job, as could not to mention many smartwatches. But those don’t have nearly as much geek cred as this project.
This is
a little large for a hamster
. On the other hand, there’s
plenty you can do with the accelerometer
after you’ve had enough fun counting steps. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209588",
"author": "drenehtsral",
"timestamp": "2020-01-11T06:05:43",
"content": "Those invasive peer-pressure-heavy employee health initiatives (like the pedometer competitions, bike to work initiatives, etc. (I’ve even seen ones where they encourage employees to track their diet ... | 1,760,373,626.712683 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/retro-powerbook-gets-a-mac-mini-transplant/ | Retro PowerBook Gets A Mac Mini Transplant | Tom Nardi | [
"Mac Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"adb",
"apple",
"Apple Desktop Bus",
"mac mini",
"macintosh",
"Powerbook"
] | Around these parts, seeing a classic laptop or desktop computer get revived with the Raspberry Pi is fairly common. While we’re not ones to turn down a well-executed Pi infusion, we know they can be controversial at times. There’s an impression that such projects are low-effort, and that the combination of old and new tech gains little in the way of usability due to the usability quirks of the Pi itself.
But we think even the most critical in the audience will agree that this build by [Tylinol], which sees
the internals of a circa 1993 PowerBook 165c get replaced with that of a 2014 Mac Mini
, is something else entirely. For one thing, there’s no question that packing a modern (relatively) desktop computer motherboard into a laptop’s body takes a lot more planning and effort than hot gluing the comparatively tiny Pi into the same space. Plus as an added bonus, anyone who counts themselves among the Cult of Mac will be happy to see the vintage machine retain its Cupertino pedigree.
So how do you get a Mac Mini inside of a PowerBook?
Very carefully
. As explained by [Tylinol], the inside of the PowerBook’s case was coated in graphite and conductive enough to be a problem. So after the original hardware was removed, a layer of tape was added to insulate it; though we imagine a suitably thick spray-on coating could be used as well if you don’t have that kind of patience.
Once the case was gutted and insulated, [Tylinol] added new stand-offs to mount the Mac Mini motherboard and hard drive. For anyone wondering, the 2014 model was used because the shape of the board almost perfectly fits around the trackball PCB. A board from a newer Mac could be used, but it would likely mean using an external mouse.
Which would have been a problem for [Tylinol], because one of the main goals of this build was to get the original input working. That meant adapting the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) devices to USB, which turns out to be something of a Dark Art. But with the help of some contemporary information about the long-forgotten protocol and a Teensy 3.5,
both devices are now picked up as standard USB HID
.
But of course, that’s just scratching the surface. [Tylinol] also had to figure out how to swap the original display out for a modern panel, and then get the whole thing running on internal battery power. Even if you’re not particularly interested in retro Apple hardware, this is really a phenomenal build that deserves a thorough read-through.
For those of you who don’t mind getting a Pi in a PowerBook, we recently saw a
recreation of Lord Nikon’s laptop from
Hackers
that went that route
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209475",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T21:10:52",
"content": "I keep my Powerbook, same model, around in case I might have a need for a Mac that old. It beats keeping a Mac Classic around. Plus, I perhaps might need a terminal.That might be the better route,... | 1,760,373,626.667546 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/12/generating-beetles-from-public-domain-images/ | Generating Beetles From Public Domain Images | Sharon Lin | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"GANs",
"machine learning",
"neural networks"
] | Ever since [Ian Goodfellow] and his colleagues invented the generative adversarial network (GAN) in 2014, hundreds of projects, from style transfers to poetry generators, have been produced using the concept of contesting neural networks. Unlike traditional neural networks, GANs can generate new data that fits statistically within the same set as the training set.
[Bernat Cuni], the one-man design team behind [cunicode] came up with the idea to
generate beetles
using this technique. Inspired by material published on
Machine Learning for Artists
, he decided to deploy some visual experiments with zoological illustrations. The training data was found from a public domain book hosted at archive.org, found through the Biodiversity Heritage Library. A combination of OpenCV and ImageMagick helped with individually extracting illustrations to squared images.
[Cuni] then ran a DCGAN with the data set, generating the first set of quasi-beetles after some tinkering with epochs and settings. After the failed first experiment, he went with StyleGAN, setting up a machine at
PaperSpace
with 1 GPU and running the training for >3 days on 128 px images. The results were much better, but fairly small and the cost of running the machine was quite expensive (>€125).
Given the success of the previous experiment, he decided to transfer over to
Google CoLab
, using their 12 hours of K80 GPU per run for free to generate some more beetles. With the intent on producing more HD beetles, he used
Runway
trained on 1024 px beetles, discovering much better results after 3000 steps. The model was moved over to Google CoLab to produce HD outputs.
He has since continued to experiment with the beetles, producing some
confusing generated image
s and
fun collectibles
.
Check out the beetles here: | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209866",
"author": "robin",
"timestamp": "2020-01-12T12:27:59",
"content": "better procedural generation would be always great in games. this could achieve that",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6229496",
"author": "Val... | 1,760,373,627.022313 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/12/a-supercapacitor-might-just-light-your-way-one-day/ | A Supercapacitor Might Just Light Your Way One Day | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Parts"
] | [
"flashlight",
"led",
"supercapacitor"
] | Sometimes the simplest hacks are the most useful ones, and they don’t come much simpler than
the little supercapacitor LED flashlight
from serial maker of cool stuff [Jeremy S. Cook]. Little more than an LED, a supercapacitor, USB plug, and couple of resistors, it makes a neat little flashlight that charges from any USB A power socket and delivers usable light for over half an hour.
It’s neat, but on its own there’s not much to detain the reader until it is revealed as a “Hello World” supercapacitor project from
an article in which he delves into the possibilities of these still rather exotic components
. Its point is to explore their different properties when compared to a battery, for example a linear voltage drop in contrast to the sharp drop-off of a chemical cell. In the video below the break we see him try a little boost regulator to deliver a constant voltage, with consequent severe loss of lighting time for the LED. It’s by this type of experimentation that we learn our way around a component unfamiliar to us, and the article and video are certainly worth a look if you’ve never used a supercapacitor before. | 32 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209843",
"author": "Mike Massen in Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2020-01-12T09:15:52",
"content": "Neato,I’ve been using a set of six off 3000F supercars (2.7v max each in series) to start my 2.2L 4 cylinder Toyota camry for many years now, works a treat. They seem to se... | 1,760,373,626.971854 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/11/nanovna-tests-antenna-pattern/ | NanoVNA Tests Antenna Pattern | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"mmana",
"nanovna",
"vna"
] | When [Jephthai] wanted to build his own Yagi antenna, he turned to MMANA software for antenna modeling. This is an antenna analysis program that uses the moment method to calculate parameters for different antenna geometries. After building the Yagi, the predicted tuning and impedance matched the real antenna nicely. But what about the radiation pattern? To test that, he used
a NanoVNA and a clever test setup
.
He needed a test spot out of the antenna’s near field so he set up his workstation 18 feet away from the test antenna which was on a mount that could rotate. On the edge of the workstation table — affixed with painter’s tape — is a NanoVNA connected to a laptop.
The rest is just sweat work. First, make a measurement on the resonant frequency. Then rotate the antenna 10 degrees and repeat. After 36 measurements you have the entire circle.
Plotting the resulting data with GNUPlot matched up pretty well with the antenna’s predicted performance. This was actually the second attempt and in the report, [Jephthai] reports that keeping alignment is critical to get everything to work. You can see in his pictures some of the steps he took to maintain consistency.
Another aid to consistency was the use of the
NanoVNASaver software
. This software allows for a frequency sweep along with a display and the creation of Touchstone files.
We’ve looked at the
NanoVNA before
. If you’d rather view your antenna pattern as a 3D volume,
break out the 3D printer
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209842",
"author": "hexandflex",
"timestamp": "2020-01-12T09:04:16",
"content": "This is a simple setup to get a relative measurement of the antenna pattern. You need a known gain antenna to work out the absolute gain. There are also lots of extra stuff you need to take care of to ... | 1,760,373,626.901985 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/11/this-artist-drags-his-feet-across-sand-and-snow/ | This Artist Drags His Feet Across Sand And Snow | Sharon Lin | [
"Art"
] | [
"geometry",
"sand",
"snow",
"snowshoe"
] | You may have seen Simon Beck’s work a few years back. The snow artist, known for creating large-scale works of art with nothing but snowshoes, has been creating geometrically inspired fractals and mathematical forms for years. An orienteer and map-maker by day, he typically plans out his works in advance and chooses sites based on their flat terrain. The lack of slopes prevents skiers from traversing the area beforehand and helps with measuring the lines needed to create the drawing.
He starts off by measuring the distance he has to be from the center by using a compass and walking in a straight line towards a point in the distance, making curves based on relative position to other lines. Once the primary lines are made, he measures points along the way using pace counting and joins secondary lines by connecting the points. The lines are generally walked three times to solidify them before filling in the shaded areas. The results are mesmerizing.
He has since expanded to
sand art
, using the same techniques that gained him fame in ski resorts and national parks on the sandy shores. Unfortunately, tidal patterns, seaweed, and beach debris make it slightly harder to achieve pristine conditions, but he has managed to create some impressive works of art nonetheless. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209807",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2020-01-12T04:12:41",
"content": "And how is this a hack?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6209820",
"author": "Sigma4Brains",
"timestamp": "2020-01-12T05:10:41",
... | 1,760,373,626.760326 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/11/plucky-kalimba-plays-itself/ | Plucky Kalimba Plays Itself | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino mega",
"kalimba",
"thumb piano"
] | [Gurpreet] fell in love with the peaceful, floaty theme from the Avatar series and bought a kalimba so he could hear it resonate through his fingertips. He soon realized that although it’s nice to play the kalimba,
it would be a lot cooler if it played itself
. Then he could relax and enjoy the music without wearing out his thumbs.
After doing a bit of experimentation with printing tine-plucking extensions for the servo horns, [Gurpreet] decided to start the design process by mounting the servos on a printed base. The servos are slotted into place by their mounting tabs and secured with hot glue. We think this was a good choice — it’s functional and it looks cool, like a heat sink.
[Gurpreet]’s future plans include more servos to pluck the rest of the tines, and figuring out how feed it MIDI and play it real time. For the demo after the break, [Gurpreet] says he lapel mic’d the kalimba from the back and cut out the servo noise with Audacity, but ultimately wants to figure out how to quiet them directly. He’s going to try lubing the gears and making a sound-dampening enclosure with foam, but if you have any other ideas, let him know down below.
We don’t see too many kalimba projects around here, but
here’s one connected to a Teensy-based looper
.
Via [
r/arduino
] | 23 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209783",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2020-01-12T01:26:19",
"content": "Next you need to hook up a keyboard.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6210024",
"author": "Gurpreet Singh",
"timestamp": "2020-01-... | 1,760,373,627.075973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/11/printed-separator-separates-printed-pages/ | Printed Separator Separates Printed Pages | Kristina Panos | [
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"flexible filament",
"newspaper",
"page separator",
"page turner",
"rubber bands"
] | We all know people trapped in aging bodies who can’t do all the things they used to do. It’s easy to accept that you may never move small furniture around by yourself again, but losing the ability to do something as simple as separating the pages of your newspaper to keep reading it is an end to enjoyment.
When [Randomcitizen4] visited his grandma over the holidays, she mentioned having trouble with this, among other things. He fired up his printer and got to work designing
a device to help her get back to the funny pages
. This simple gripper mechanism uses rubber bands for tension and flexible filament to get a firm grip on the paper. The jaws default to the open position so they’re ready to grab some newsprint, and a light squeeze of the handles slides the top page back from the stack, creating a gap for Grandma’s fingers. You can see a demo
on page 32
after the break.
Although the device does work on some books and magazines, he’d like to improve the design of the grips to make the device more universally useful. [Randomcitizen4] says he tried a few things already, but we wonder if a more complex surface pattern might do the trick — maybe less like fins and more like a tire tread pattern. All the STLs are available if you want to give it a go.
If Grandma’s newspaper ever goes out of print, she should still be able to read it on a tablet or an e-reader. Then maybe [Randomcitizen4] can build
some kind of remote-controlled page turner
for her. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209724",
"author": "RP",
"timestamp": "2020-01-11T21:10:58",
"content": "“You can see a demo on page 32” +1",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6209728",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2020-01-11T21:25:35",
"conte... | 1,760,373,627.170294 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/11/an-arduino-based-flute-playing-machine/ | An Arduino-Based Flute Playing Machine | Sharon Lin | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"air flow",
"flute",
"music"
] | It’s one thing to be able to transcribe music from a flute, and it’s another to be able to make a flute play pre-written music. The latter is what [Abhilash Patel] decided to pursue in the
flute player machine
, an Arduino-based project that uses an air flow mechanism and PVC pipes to control the notes produced by a makeshift flute. It’s currently able to play 17 notes, just over two octaves starting from the lowest frequency of E.
In order to play songs, the tones have to either be directly coded and uploaded to the Arduino, composed with a random note generator, or detected from a microphone. While a real flute can be used for the machine, [Patel] uses a PVC flute, constructed with some knowledge of flute playing.
The resonant frequency is based on the effective length, hole sizes, and pipe diameter, so it is fairly difficult to correctly tune a homemade flute. Nevertheless, calculating the length as
c/2f
where
c
is the speed of sound (~345 m/s) and
f
is the frequency of the note can help with identifying the location of the holes. [Patel] cut the PVC pipe and sealed off one end, drilling a blowing hole at 1.5 x the pipe diameter. After playing the flute, the end of the pipe was filled until the frequency exactly matched the desired note.
The hole covering uses cuttings of pipe attached to a cable connecting to a servo. The motors are isolated inside a box to keep the wires clear and area all able to be powered with 5 V. As for the software, the code is primarily used to control when the fan is blowing and which holes are covered to produce a note.
Listen to the flute play “My Heart Will Go On” from
Titanic
in the video below. Now the next step might just be making the flute playing machine automatically play sheet music – imagine the possibilities! | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209749",
"author": "J. Samson",
"timestamp": "2020-01-11T22:40:06",
"content": "He drilled a hole that was 1.5 times larger than the pipe he was drilling into? Sounds difficult.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6209750",
... | 1,760,373,627.119215 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/using-lookup-tables-to-make-the-impossible-possible/ | Using Lookup Tables To Make The Impossible Possible | Dan Maloney | [
"cons",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"dictionary",
"fpga",
"hash",
"lookup tables",
"LUTs"
] | Embarrassing confession time: I never learned my multiplication tables in grade school. Sure, I had the easy tables like the twos and the fives down, but if asked what 4 x 7 or 8 x 6 was, I’d draw a blank. As you can imagine, that made me a less than stellar math student, and I was especially handicapped on time-limited tests with lots of long multiplication problems. The standard algorithm is much faster when you’ve committed those tables to memory, as I discovered to my great woe.
I was reminded of this painful memory as I watched
Charles Lohr’s 2019 Supercon talk on the usefulness and flexibility of lookup tables
, or LUTs, and their ability to ease or even completely avoid computationally intensive operations. Of course most LUT implementations address problems somewhat more complex than multiplication tables, but they don’t have to. As Charles points out, even the tables of sines and logarithms that used to populate page after page in reference books have been ported to silicon, where looking up the correct answer based on user input is far easier than deriving the answer computationally.
Yes, this is a Minecraft server all thanks to LUTs.
One of the most interesting examples of how LUTs can achieve the seemingly impossible lies in an old project where Charles attempted to build
a Minecraft server on an ATMega168
. Sending chunks (the data representations of a portion of the game world) to clients is the essential job of a Minecraft server, and on normal machines that involves using data compression. Rather than trying to implement zlib on an 8-bit microcontroller, he turned to a LUT that just feeds the raw bytes to the client, without the server having the slightest idea what any of it means. A similar technique is used by some power inverters, which synthesize sine wave output by feeding one full cycle of values to a DAC from a byte array. It’s brute force, but it works.
Another fascinating and unexpected realization is that LUTs don’t necessarily have to be software. Some can be implemented in completely mechanical systems. Charles used the example of cams on a shaft; in a car’s engine, these represent the code needed to open and close valves at the right time for each cylinder. More complicated examples are the cams and gears once found in fire control computers for naval guns, or the programming cards used for Jacquard looms. He even tips his hat to
the Wintergatan marble machine
, with its large programming drum and pegs acting as a hardware LUT.
I found Charles’ talk wide-ranging and fascinating. Originally I thought it would be an FPGA-heavy talk, but he didn’t actually get to the FPGA-specific stuff until the very end. That worked out fine, though — just hearing about all the cool problems a LUT can solve was worth the price of admission.
And for the curious, yes, I did eventually end up memorizing the multiplication tables. Oddly, it only clicked for me after I started playing with numbers and seeing their relationships using my first calculator, which ironically enough probably used LUTs to calculate results. | 60 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209428",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T19:36:54",
"content": "“Embarrassing confession time: I never learned my multiplication tables in grade school.”Very handy when being a writer. ;-)“Of course most LUT implementations address problems somewhat more complex than... | 1,760,373,627.439533 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/hide-silent-hide-deep-submarine-tracking-technologies-of-the-cold-war/ | Hide Silent, Hide Deep: Submarine Tracking Technologies Of The Cold War | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"cia",
"classified",
"cold war",
"sonar",
"sosus",
"submarine"
] | All through the cold war, there was a high-stakes game of cat and mouse in play. Nuclear powers like the United States and the Soviet Union would hide submarines armed with nuclear missiles underwater. The other side would try to know where they were so they could be targeted in the event of war. The common wisdom was that the United States had many high tech gadgets to help track enemy submarines, but that the Soviet Union was way behind in this area. This was proven false when a Soviet Victor-class boat followed a US missile submarine for six days. Now, a
recently declassified CIA report
shows how the Soviets didn’t use sonar at all but developed their own technology.
There is something fascinating about submarines. Like an old sailing ship, submarines are often out of touch with their command bases and the captain is the final authority. Like a space ship, the submarine has to survive in an inimical environment. I guess in all three cases, the crew doesn’t just use technology, they depend on it.
Although the submarine has some non-military uses, there are probably more military subs than any other type. After all, a sub is as close to a cloaking device as any real-life military vehicle has ever had. Before modern technology offered ways to find submarines using sonar or magnetic anomalies, a completely submerged submarine was effectively invisible.
There was a lot of speculation that the Soviet Union lacked sufficient technology to use sonar the way the US did. However, in some cases, they had simply developed different types of detection — many of which the West had discarded as impractical.
Modern Submersibles
Oddly enough, people have been trying to figure out how to operate underwater since the time of Alexander the Great. The first submarine that has features similar to a modern sub was the Catalan Ictineo II. It ran on a steam engine when on the surface, but submerged used chemicals to fire the boiler. The chemical reaction not only created heat for the steam engine that turned the screw but also released oxygen for the crew. A few German submarines used a similar system known as the Walter turbine.
Things progressed from there (you’ll find plenty of historical detail in the video above). The biggest problem was always how to power the craft when submerged. Prior to atomic energy, most subs ran on diesel on the surface and had batteries to power it underwater. A snorkel would allow the engine to run while staying mostly submerged, but once the ship sank completely beneath the waves, it had to use batteries which don’t last very long — especially 1940-era batteries.
Strategy and Nuclear
The technical side of the submarine directly influenced the tactical side. Although a submarine on the surface isn’t in a particularly safe place, World War II-era subs spent a lot of time on the surface, allowing them to make better speed. If a sub crew thought it might encounter the enemy, the vessel would submerge, at least to snorkel depth, to try to avoid detection.
Approaching an enemy convoy submerged, it would try to sink as many ships as possible using torpedos or whatever weapons it had. It had to work fast, though, because firing usually gives away your position and the inevitable counterattack would be swift. The Navy gave a lot of thought about how to locate and attack submarines, as you can see in the video below.
In modern times, though, submarines may use a different form of power: nuclear power. In that case, the sub can stay submerged for a very long time. This has led to military subs having two main categories: attack subs and missile subs, sometimes known as boomers.
The idea behind a missile sub is to have it leave port with a stockpile of nuclear missiles. Usually, the sub will do some crazy maneuvers to try to shake any enemy ships following it. Then it will go deep and wait. The idea is that if an enemy tries to attack first, it could wipe out ground-based missile launchers. But they can’t strike a submarine unless they know where it is, so the submarine fleet could retaliate no matter how successful a first strike was. Under the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, this would prevent either side from thinking a first strike is their best option.
In Practice
The United States relied on advanced sonar, radar, and infrared detection to find subs. It also could use very sensitive magnetic detectors to locate submerged metal objects. Some of the sensors are on ships, subs, or airplanes.
All of these have some limitations. However, the SOSUS (sound surveillance) line deployed ultrasensitive hydrophones on the ocean floor at key locations to identify and locate submarines. These microphones were connected to the shore using the same sort of cables used for long-distance circuits. Using state-of-the-art signal processing and microphones, the US could reasonably track the relatively noisy subs. You can learn more about SOSUS in the video below.
However, nuclear boomers posed some unique challenges. They can sit quietly on the bottom for a very long time. They can attack without approaching the enemy. A single submarine can launch well over 100 warheads, each with enormous destructive power.
The CIA pointed all of this out way back in 1973. Even though the Soviets had some unique technology, the CIA deemed that the “…capabilities for antisubmarine warfare fall far short of the minimum requirements…” That is to say the US boomers had nothing to fear from the Soviets. The video below shows some of the ways the US located submarines.
Detection
On page 14 of the CIA report, there is an assessment of Soviet detection capabilities. There are several pages in that area completely redacted, so you can only wonder what is there that is still secret.
The report details Soviet sonar and magnetic detection capability, but they were not overly impressed with the equipment or how the Soviets used them. They do mention briefly that circumstantial evidence indicated that some aircraft could have an infrared wake detector. But thanks to the redactions it isn’t clear what the evidence is.
Since the Soviets lacked a widespread underwater detection system like SOSUS, their best bet — according to the CIA — was to find a submarine and follow it. This is known as “trailing.”
Annex A
The real interesting bits of the report begin on Page 63 where Annex A starts. This annex analyzes methods the Soviets use to detect subs. The fact that the Soviets didn’t have something similar to SOSUS the CIA attributes to their lack of access to deep ocean and a deficiency in cable technology. In addition, the report cites a lack of signal processing ability and the predominant use of rigid hydrophones. Besides that, US subs were significantly quieter than Soviet subs of the time. Even SOSUS could not reliably detect US subs, so for the USSR to build a useful capability like SOSUS, they would have to do a better job of it than the United States had.
Perhaps the Soviets knew that, too. Instead of trying to spend more money to develop better active and passive SONAR, they turned to other ways to track subs. For example, there was interest in detecting 5 Hz noise generated by a sub’s wake. They also relied on magnetic detection using similar technology to the United States. There was also work to use radar to detect things as subtle as a submarine’s disturbance of the water on the surface above it.
Of course, the subs most valuable to track have reactors. They produce a lot of neutrons, but the water absorbs most of them so it is hard to detect them from any distance away. Antineutrinos, on the other hand, are very hard to absorb. So hard, that it is difficult to detect them, too. The CIA didn’t rule out the Soviets using such a system even though there was no evidence that they had.
However, some other radiation effects are easier to track. The Soviets claimed success tracking their own nuclear subs by measuring radioisotopes in seawater, but there is no evidence they used this technique operationally. They also could detect a submarine’s wake optically or acoustically — possibly useful if a Soviet sub was trailing another sub. There are also methods using chemical residue from a sub’s hull or using infrared.
Wake detection is how the K-147 probably followed the US sub. A system known as SOKS (System Obnarujenia Kilvaternovo Sleda) had been on some Soviet boats since 1969. The cluster of probes measured several things including nuclear byproducts and other parameters mentioned in the CIA report.
Mutually Assured Missiles
The boomer subs were a key part of cold war strategy. The US had the Ohio class submarine and its Trident missile with eight 100 kiloton warheads. The Soviets had the huge Akula with its larger R-39 missiles. The Akula — known as the Typhoon class in the West — was the largest sub ever and could hold up to ten 100-200 kiloton devices (see the video below).
The sub was known to be pretty noisy, though, so SOSUS supposedly knew where they were all the time.
Cold War
We don’t miss the cold war. But it did produce some amazing hardware and technology. Besides, there’s something thrilling about reading a document that would have been full of highly classified information in its time. Even though none of it is secret almost 50 years later, if you ever needed to detect submarines, this document would give you a lot of ideas on areas to research. | 48 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209404",
"author": "mm",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T18:36:16",
"content": "Video unavailableThe uploader has not made this video available in your country.I guess the uploader has something to hide.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,373,627.313601 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/this-week-in-security-camera-feeds-python-2-fpgas/ | This Week In Security: Camera Feeds, Python 2, FPGAs | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"fpga",
"python",
"tesla",
"This Week in Security",
"TikTok"
] | Networked cameras keep making the news, and not in the best of ways. First it was compromised Ring accounts used for creepy pranks, and now it’s Xiaomi’s
stale cache sending camera images to strangers
! It’s not hard to imagine how such a flaw could happen: Xiaomi does some video feed transcoding in order to integrate with Google’s Hub service. When a transcoding slot is re-purposed from one camera to another, the old data stays in the buffer until it is replaced by the new camera’s feed. The root cause is probably the same as the random images shown when starting some 3D games.
Python is Dead, Long Live Python
Python 2 has finally reached End of Life
. While there are many repercussions to this change, the security considerations are important too. The Python 2 environment will no longer receive updates, even if a severe security vulnerability is found. How often is a security vulnerability found in a language? Perhaps not very often, but the impact can be far-reaching. Let’s take, for instance,
this 2016 bug in zipimport
. It failed to sanitize the header of a ZIP file being processed, causing all the problems one would expect.
It is quite possible that because of the continued popularity and usage of Python2, a third party will step in and take over maintenance of the language, essentially forking Python. Unless such an event happens, it’s definitely time to migrate away from Python2.
FPGAs Accelerating Memory Attacks
Certain commercial sectors are constantly pushing for more performance, and as a result, Intel has begun shipping servers that have FPGA co-processors. These FPGAs have direct access to system memory, and can operate at very high data rates. Could it be that this integration has led to unforeseen security problems?
A group of researchers have identified at least one such problem:
Jackhammer
. Yes, it’s another fancy name for a vulnerability. This is essentially the Rowhammer attack, launched from an FPGA. In best-case scenarios, they demonstrated an attack speed of three times what could be accomplished on a CPU alone.
Tesla Hack
A very detailed attack on the Tesla Model S WiFi stack caught my attention this week. Published by the Tencent Keen Security Lab, this is
a very impressive walk-through
of how to compromise the Linux system at the heart of that vehicle.
It starts by knocking the Tesla off whatever WiFi network it’s connected to, and capturing the reconnection. With the information gathered, an attack can be launched against the WiFi chip itself. Once that is compromised, a vulnerability in the Linux wifi driver is triggered to gain execution on that system. It’s worth asking, how many drivers are written to be defensive against the very chip they support? The entire write-up is impressive, go read the whole thing.
Odds, Ends, and TikToks
TikTok is all the rage among the young folk these days. The guys at Checkpoint Research decided to take a look at the app and infrastructure, and
found a handful of vulnerabilities
.
Cisco made public
another round of security goofs
. It’s full of flaws like static shared keys and hard coded credentials.
Firefox released an unexpected point release, only a day after a scheduled release.
72.0.1
was pushed out in response to a 0-day being actively exploited. Not much is known about the vulnerability yet, other than Mozilla’s statement that it was a type confusion bug. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209402",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T18:32:35",
"content": "> It is quite possible that because of the continued popularity and usage of Python2, a third party will step in and take over maintenance of the language, essentially forking Python. Unless such an event... | 1,760,373,627.230439 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/hackaday-podcast-049-tiny-machine-learning-basement-battery-bonanza-and-does-this-uranium-feel-hot/ | Hackaday Podcast 049: Tiny Machine Learning, Basement Battery Bonanza, And Does This Uranium Feel Hot? | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams sort through all of the hacks to find the most interesting hardware projects you may have missed this week. Did you know you can use machine learning without a neural network? Here’s a project that does that on an ATtiny85. We also wrap our minds around a 3D-printed press brake, look at power-saving features of the ESP32 that make it better on a battery, and discuss the IoT coffee maker hack that’s so good it could be a stock feature. Plus we dive into naturally occurring nuclear reactors and admire the common, yet marvelous, bar code.
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 049 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Hackaday Belgrade is May 9th!
Submit your talk:
Hackaday Belgrade 2020 Call for Proposals
Article on Hackaday:
Hackaday Belgrade: Call For Proposals
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
How Low Can An ESP32 Go?
Tiny Machine Learning On The Attiny85
Classifying data using Support Vector Machines(SVMs) in Python – GeeksforGeeks
Datacenter UPS Heads Home For Off-Grid Power Solution
A detailed discussion about battery equalization, when why and how to do it
Poking Around Inside A Pair Of Classic Gaming Gifts
Teardown: “The Oregon Trail” Handheld
i2cdump(8) — i2c-tools — Debian testing — Debian Manpages
GitHub – ReFirmLabs/binwalk: Firmware Analysis Tool
BasicFUN Series Part 3: Dumping Parallel Flash via I2C I/O Expanders
Embedding A Smart Switch In A Java Factory
3D-Printed Tools Turn Bench Vise Into Expedient Press Brake
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks:
Organic Audio: Putting Carrots As Audio Couplers To The Test
3D-Printed Moiré Illusion May Just Drive You Crazy
Creating A Custom Engagement Ring With 3D-Printing
Elliot’s Picks:
Reading Light Not Quite Powered By Your Favorite Hot Beverage
Converting A Drill Press Into A Milling Machine
OpenDog: Adding Force Sensitive Feet
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Oldest Nuclear Reactor? Nature’s 2 Billion Year Old Experiment
Uranium Twisting the Dragons Tail
The Barcode Revolution: Welcome To Our Automated World
Cauzin Softstrip – Wikipedia
Data Matrix – Wikipedia
Hello, world! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209442",
"author": "Matthew",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T19:58:31",
"content": "If this was your 50th episode (0-49, zero-indexed; remember?), then congratulations! If next week is your 50th episode (the 51st podcast), then congratulations a week early!Favorite thing I’ve learned thi... | 1,760,373,627.577261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/hardware-hack-makes-robocall-blocking-service-even-better/ | Hardware Hack Makes Robocall Blocking Service Even Better | Dan Maloney | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"blocking",
"caller id",
"pots",
"ring",
"robocall",
"voip"
] | Sorry to bear sad tidings, but your car’s extended warranty is about to expire. At least that’s what you’ll likely hear if you answer one of those robocalls that have descended like a plague upon us. We applaud any effort to control the flood of robocalls, even if it means
supplementing a commercial blocking service with a DIY ring-blocker
.
The commercial service that [Jim] engaged to do his landline blocking is called Nomorobo – get it? It uses the Simultaneous Ringing feature many VoIP carriers support to intercept blacklisted robocallers, but with a catch: it needs caller ID data, so it lets the first ring go through. [Jim]’s box intercepts the ringing signal coming from his Xfinity modem using a full-wave rectifier and an analog input on an Arduino. Once the ring pattern is received, the Arduino flips a relay that connects all the phones in the house to the line, letting the call ring through. If Nomorobo has blocked the call, he’ll never hear a thing. There were a few glitches to deal with, like false positives from going off- and on-hook, but those were handled in software. There’s also a delay in displaying caller ID information on his phones, but it’s a small price to pay for peace.
Any escalation in the war on robocalls is justified, and we applaud [Jim] for his service. Should you feel like joining the fray, step one is to know your enemy.
This primer on robocalling
will help.
Thanks to [Phil] for the tip. | 69 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209355",
"author": "cliff claven",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T16:39:20",
"content": "But wasn’t this solved by the do-not-call registry?I am SHOCKED! Absolutely SHOCKED to hear this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6209379",
... | 1,760,373,627.535894 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/diy-autonomous-mower-in-the-wild/ | DIY Autonomous Mower In The Wild | Danie Conradie | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"ardupilot",
"autonomous lawnmower",
"gps",
"PixHawk",
"RTK"
] | Mowing the lawn is one of those repetitive tasks most of us really wish we had a robot for. [Kenny Trussell] mowing needs are a bit more strenuous than most backyards, so he
hacked a ride-on mower
to handle multi-acre fields all on it’s own.
The mower started out life as a standard zero turn ride on lawn mower. It’s brains consist of a PixHawk board running Ardurover, an Ardupilot derivative for ground vehicles. Navigation is provided by a RTK GPS module that gets error corrections from a fixed base station via an Adafruit LoRa feather board, to achieve centimetre level accuracy. To control the mower, [Kenny] replaced the pneumatic shocks that centred the control levers with linear actuators.
So far [Kenny] has been using the mower to cut large 5-18 acre fields, which would be a very time-consuming job for a human operator. A relay was added to the existing safety circuit that only allows the mower to function when there is weight on the seat. This relay is wired directly to the RC receiver and is controlled from the hand-held RC transmitter. It will also stop the mower if it loses signal to the transmitter. To set up mowing missions, [Kenny] uses the Ardupilot Mission Planner for which he wrote a custom command line utility to create a concentric route for the mower to follow to completely cover a defined area. He has made a whole series of videos on the process, which is very handy for anyone wanting to do the same. We’re looking forward to a new video with all the latest updates.
This mower has been going strong for two years, but in terms of hours logged it’s got nothing on this
veteran robotic mower
that’s been at it for more than two decades and still runs off an Intel 386 processor. | 35 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209257",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T12:16:51",
"content": "The CAM module in Fusion360 or FreeCAD could be used to derive optimal paths for clearing fields of arbitrary shape.(I just like the idea or programming in a 1000mm tool diameter)",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,373,627.646299 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/10/a-luggable-computer-for-the-raspberry-pi-era/ | A Luggable Computer For The Raspberry Pi Era | Tom Nardi | [
"Cyberdecks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"luggable",
"mechanical keyboard",
"portable computer",
"touch screen"
] | Today, computers are separated into basically two categories: desktops and laptops. But back in the early 1980s, when this ideological line in the sand was still a bit blurry, consumer’s had a third choice. Known as “portable computers” at the time, and often lovingly referred to as luggables by modern collectors, these machines were
technically
small enough to take with you on a plane or in the car.
Improvements in miniaturization ultimately made the portable computer obsolete, but that doesn’t mean some people still don’t want one.
[Dave Estes] has been working on his own modern take on idea that he calls Reviiser
, and so far it looks like it checks off all the boxes. With the addition of a rather hefty battery pack, it even manages to be more practical than the vintage beasts that inspired it.
In the video after the break, [Dave] walks us through some of the highlights of his luggable build, such as the fold-down mechanical keyboard, gloriously clunky mechanical power switches, and the integrated touch screen. We also really like the side-mounted touch pad, which actually looks perfectly usable given the largely keyboard driven software environment [Dave] has going on the internal Raspberry Pi 4. With a removable 30,000 mAh battery pack slotted into the back of the machine, he’ll have plenty of juice for his faux-retro adventures.
[Dave] mentions that eventually he’s looking to add support for “cartridges” which will allow the user to easily slot in new hardware that connects to the Pi’s GPIO pins. This would allow for a lot of interesting expansion possibilities, and fits in perfectly with the Reviiser’s vintage aesthetic. It would also go a long way towards justifying the considerable bulk of the machine; perhaps even ushering in a revival of sorts for the luggable computer thanks to hardware hackers who want a mobile workstation with all the bells and whistles.
Right now there isn’t a lot of detail on how you can build your own Reviiser, but [Dave] says more info will be added to his site soon. In the meantime,
you can check out some of the similar projects we’ve seen recently
to get some inspiration for your own Luggable Pi. | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209235",
"author": "Xeon",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T09:51:53",
"content": "Stunning build.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6209252",
"author": "Jack",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T11:55:48",
"content": "Fantastic build,... | 1,760,373,628.015397 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/hifi-audio-on-the-commodore-64-48khz-yo/ | HiFi Audio On The Commodore 64 – 48KHz, Yo! | Lewin Day | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"audio",
"c64",
"commodore 64",
"hi-fi"
] | Prior to the development of CD-quality audio hardware in the mid-1990s, home computers and consoles typically made do with synthesized music. Due to the storage and RAM limitations of the time, there weren’t a whole lot of other practical options. If you’re willing to ignore practicality, however, you can do some wonderful things –
such as playing high-quality audio on a Commodore 64!
The project is the work of [Antonio Savona], who set out to play hi-fi audio on a Commodore 64 using only period-correct hardware. That means no 16MB RAM expansions, and no crazy high-capacity carts. The largest carts of the era were just 1MB, as produced by Ocean, and [Antonio] intended to cram in a full 90 seconds of music.
Targeting a sample rate of 48 KHz with 8-bit samples would mean the cartridge could only fit 20 seconds of raw audio into its 1MB of storage. This wasn’t good enough, so the audio would have to be compressed, with the target being a 4:1 ratio to reach the 90 second goal. With the C64’s CPU running at just 1MHz, there are just 21 clock cycles to deal with each sample when playing at 48 KHz.
Obviously, [Antonio] had set quite the challenge, and some masterful assembly coding was used to get the job done. The final result has the audio sounding impressively good, given that it’s being pumped out by a 6502 that is surely sweating to get the job done.
We love a good C64 hack around these parts, and
it’s now even possible to build a new one from scratch
if that’s your particular itch. Video after the break. | 34 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209190",
"author": "Abdul",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T06:26:13",
"content": "Now imagine how far we’ve come by comparing that to an Arduino with DSP or a PiZero..Mind-blowing!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6209206",
"autho... | 1,760,373,627.850014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/dont-diy-this-surgical-robot-at-home/ | Don’t DIY This Surgical Robot At Home | Sharon Lin | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"funny",
"hackathon",
"robotic arm"
] | The LVL1 Hackerspace in Louisville hosted a hackathon for useless and impractical devices a couple of years ago and this makeshift
Duh-Vinci Surgical Robot
was one of the “successful” results. While it’s not necessarily a project that should ever be used for its intended purpose, its miniature setup is certainly an interesting one.
The project builds on top of the MeArm Open Source Robot and a camera controlled by a Blynk board. Servos are wired into the base of each of the robotic arms for freedom in rotating. A separate microcontroller is used for the motor controllers for the arms and for the camera, partially due to the current draw for the camera power supply. The remote control system runs on an Android tablet and is used to control each of the arms.
The ESP32-Cam supplied video input is configured as a RTSP stream. As for the operation, while the movements are jerky and the range of dexterity limited, the robot is technically able to handle the sharps. Its final setup looks a bit like a deranged game of Hungry Hungry Hippos meets Operation and definitely not something to be making its way to surgical tables anytime soon. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209158",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T03:38:43",
"content": "Although I think you might be onto something with a live remote control surgery tabletop game!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6209171",
"a... | 1,760,373,627.692606 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/add-on-board-makes-esp32-camera-board-easier-to-program/ | Add-On Makes ESP32 Camera Board Easier To Program | Dan Maloney | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"Arduino IDE",
"camera",
"ESP32",
"ESP32-CAM",
"ftdi",
"gpio",
"programming",
"reset",
"serial",
"sketch",
"usb",
"video wall"
] | Don’t you just hate it when dev boards have some annoying little quirk that makes them harder to use than they should be? Take the ESP32-CAM, a board that started appearing on the market in early 2019. On paper, the thing is amazing: an ESP32 with support for a camera and an SD card, all for less than $10. The trouble is that programming it can be a bit of a pain, requiring extra equipment and a spare finger.
Not being one to take such challenges lying down, [Bitluni] has come up with
a nice programming board for the ESP32-CAM
that you might want to check out. The problem stems from the lack of a USB port on the ESP32-CAM. That design decision leaves users in need of a USB-to-serial adapter that has to be wired to the GPIO pins of the camera board so that programs can be uploaded from the Arduino IDE when the reset button is pressed. None of that is terribly complex, but it is inconvenient. His solution is called cam-prog, and it takes care of not only the USB conversion but also resetting the board. It does that by simply power cycling the camera, allowing sketches to be uploaded via USB. It looks to be a pretty handy board, which will be available on
his Tindie store
.
To demonstrate the add-on, he programmed his ESP32-CAM and connected it to
his enormous ping pong ball video wall
. The video quality is about what you’d expect from a 1,200 pixel display at 40 mm per pixel, but it’s still pretty smooth – smooth enough to make his interpretive dance moves in the last few minutes of the video pretty interesting. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209145",
"author": "localroger",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T02:51:54",
"content": "Has anybody solved the problem that with the last version of the Arduino IDE that I tried, you could basically only write one file to the SD card and after that it would never respond or mount again?",... | 1,760,373,627.898953 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/hiking-pole-turned-lightweight-yagi-antenna/ | Hiking Pole Turned Lightweight Yagi Antenna | Tom Nardi | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"amateur radio",
"boom",
"yagi antenna"
] | Among amateur radio enthusiasts, there’s a subset of users who climb mountainous areas to use their gear from elevated positions. Anyone looking to take part in what’s known as Summits on the Air (SOTA) will obviously want to keep their equipment as light and small as possible. For [Stuart Thomas], that meant a collapsible yagi antenna he could easily pack away.
But one day he wondered why he was carrying around a separate antenna boom when his
aluminum hiking pole would make a perfectly good substitute
. All he had to do was figure out a way to mount the elements to the pole in a way that could be easily assembled in the field. He initially tried to use the sort of insulated electrical clamps used to hold down conduit, but he found they weren’t quite what he was after.
[Stuart] eventually ended up designing and 3D printing his own element mounts that use an M3 bolt to tightly clamp onto the hiking pole, preventing them from twisting while still being very lightweight and easy to adjust. To further reduce the packed size of the antenna, he cut each element in half with a pipe cutter and flared the ends slightly so he could reassemble them on location with inserts.
Even if you aren’t the type of person who owns hiking poles, let alone climbs mountains for fun, there’s still plenty of
interesting applications for a lightweight yagi antenna
. We’ve seen
custom yagis built out of carbon fiber before
and of course
cobbling one together out of PVC and tape measures
is a classic hack, but we think the solution [Stuart] has come up with strikes a nice balance between the extremes. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209019",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T21:04:56",
"content": "My camera monopod gets similar use since it’s got a retractable spike in the foot. No hacking involved for me though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment... | 1,760,373,627.947367 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/mini-space-station-keeps-tabs-on-the-real-one/ | Mini Space Station Keeps Tabs On The Real One | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Space"
] | [
"3d printed",
"iss",
"notifier",
"particle photon",
"solar-powered",
"space station"
] | Over the years, we’ve seen a number of projects that can blink an LED or otherwise notify you when the International Space Station is overhead. It’s a neat trick that brings space a little closer to home, but not exactly a groundbreaking achievement in 2020. That said, we think this version built by [Lance] deserves some special recognition
for the unbearably adorable miniature ISS he designed it around
.
Especially once you realize that its tiny little solar panels are actually functional. Well, more or less. [Lance] says conditions have to be pretty ideal for the panels to actually charge up the internal battery, so there’s the option to top things off with a USB cable if need be. To try and reduce power consumption as much as possible, he uses some pretty aggressive power saving tricks which are interesting in their own right.
As the ISS silently passes over your head several times per day, the notifier can’t spend too much time sleeping on the job. The Particle Photon needs to wake up regularly to pull down the time of the next pass given the current geographical position, then go back to sleep until right before showtime. When the Station is nearby, it blinks an Adafruit Smart NeoPixel positioned under a small 3D printed model of the Earth, and finally goes back to sleep until the process starts over.
If you’re looking for something a little less complicated, this
two dimensional representation of the Space Station might be more your speed
. Then again,
an even
more
complicated take on the idea
using lasers sounds pretty good too. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6209090",
"author": "njoi",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T23:40:21",
"content": "neat",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6209331",
"author": "Shannon",
"timestamp": "2020-01-10T15:25:45",
"content": "“The Particle Photon nee... | 1,760,373,628.057538 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/living-at-the-close-of-the-multiway-era/ | Living At The Close Of The Multiway Era | Jenny List | [
"green hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware",
"Slider"
] | [
"cables",
"recycling",
"scart",
"scsi",
"vga"
] | After over a decade of laptop use, I made the move a couple of months ago back to a desktop computer. An ex-corporate compact PC and a large widescreen monitor on a stand, and alongside them a proper mouse and my trusty IBM Model M that has served me for decades. At a stroke, the ergonomics of my workspace changed for the better, as I no longer have to bend slightly to see the screen.
The previous desktop PC was from an earlier time. I think it had whatever the AMD competitor to a Pentium 4 was, and if I recall correctly, its 512 MB of memory was considered to be quite something. On the back it had an entirely different set of sockets to my new one, a brace of serial ports, a SCSI port, and a parallel printer port. Inside the case, its various drives were served by a set of ribbon cables. It even boasted a floppy drive. By contrast the cabling on its successor is a lot lighter, with much less bulky connectors. A few USB plugs and a network cable, and SATA for its disk drive. The days of bulky multiway interconnects are behind us, and probably most of us are heaving a sigh of relief.
You Might Need That Cable One Day!
Just a small fraction of the cable chaos
The trouble with multiway cables is that they were usually quite expensive in their day, so I still ascribe a bit of value to them. Thus even when my last SCSI drive or VGA monitor has shuffled off this mortal coil I still hang on to the cables, y’know,
just in case
. There is a bulging box of them lurking on a shelf somewhere, or if you are in my makerspace in Milton Keynes, a bunch of bulging boxes. Before I have a clearout, let’s take a closer look at these artifacts, assuming you won’t be offended by taking the cutter to otherwise perfectly good cables. Scanning the pile, the most numerous come into four main groups. Parallel SCSI, VGA, parallel printer, and because this is being written in Europe, SCART multiway adiovisual cables.
As you’d expect from a parallel interface, a SCSI cable takes the form of a bundle of wires, but the surprise on taking a peek inside the plug is that there is neither any shielding between the wires, nor are they twisted pairs. The parallel printer cable has a very similar construction: it was simply an 8-bit port on the host computer. VGA and SCART cables, on the other hand, contain a selection of co-ax shielded conductors for the video signals and a few single wires for control signals.
What use is there for a box of parallel SCSI cables in 2019?
It was on considering how a cable like these might be reused that it really dawned on me how much we have moved on from the era of multiway cable interfaces. USB now covers most desktop-type devices once served by parallel SCSI, parallel, and serial ports, and nearly all audiovisual connectivity is fast heading towards HDMI. These fast serial interfaces deliver much higher data rates with much less copper involved.
It seems everywhere I look then there is a huge stack of cables that have become effectively useless. Unlike other technological shifts, such as for example from vacuum tubes to transistors, their usefulness did not tail away alongside the new technology, so it’s not as though they’ve outlived their service life. Instead they instantly became e-waste just as their technologies peaked, and it’s there we can find the origins of their ascribed value. If you have a pile of SCSI cables somewhere, did you hang onto them because you felt you’d need them again some day?
Re-Use, Keep, Or Recycle?
Burning cables to recover copper, 2018, Accra, Ghana. Muntaka Chasant [
CC BY-SA 4.0
].
So what’s to be done? Can they be used for another purpose? Who
uses
a 40-way bundle of wires or a bundle of not-very-good co-ax these days anyway? I’d be interested to hear your views in the comments.
Meanwhile I’ve have a huge pile of cables to get rid of, and here’s the problem. There’s a value to the copper they contain but in most cases their insulation is PVC can be problematic to recycle and if inefficiently burned it can release toxic chemicals. Over the years there have been a series of scandals involving e-waste from develped countries exported to developing countries where it was burned in the open to extract the metals, but even though steps have been taken to end this practice it’s still a concern that cables be disposed of responsibly.
Here, my local government has centralised recycling facilities, and in turn passes sorted recycled material to specialised recycling companies. In the case of PVC-coated cables they are shredded to separate the copper from the plastic, and then the plastic is broken down to produce hydrocarbon feedstocks for the chemical industry.
In my hackerspace, we’re going to throw a work party to bring the cable pile down to manageable proportions. We’ve lived through the passing of an era without realising it, even though
Brian Benchoff called it for Hackaday several years ago
. Intevitably some years down the line we’ll find a SCSI peripheral and regret throwing out those SCSI cables, but given the space we’ll gain I think we’ll take the risk. The question is, will you? | 97 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208935",
"author": "Jon Berg",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T18:11:09",
"content": "You have to pry my 30 yrs worth of totes from my cold dead hands… having worked AV, POS, corporate & health IT I got a cable for that… ( and Ram, and an ISA modem or 2 ) :P",
"parent_id": null,
"... | 1,760,373,628.227308 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/vintage-mini-inkjet-prints-on-demand-ascii-art/ | Vintage Mini Inkjet Prints On-Demand ASCII Art | Ted Yapo | [
"Art",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"arduino",
"ascii art",
"inkjet"
] | Readers of a certain age may fondly remember ASCII art emerging from line printers in a long-gone era of computing; for others, it’s just wonderfully retro. Well, when [Emily Velasco] found a vintage Kodak Diconix 150 inkjet at a local thrift store for $4, she knew what she had to do:
turn it into a dedicated ASCII-art machine
.
Dating to the mid-1980s, the diminutive printer she scored was an early example of consumer inkjet technology; with only 12 “jets,” it sported a resolution roughly equivalent to the dot-matrix impact printers of the day. [Emily] notes that this printer would have cost around $1000 in today’s money — this is from a time before printer companies started selling the printer itself as a loss leader to make revenue on the back end selling consumables. It seems you can’t escape the razor-and-blades model, though: [Emily] had to pay $16 for a new ink cartridge to revive the $4 printer.
With the new ink in place, and some tractor-feed paper acquired, [Emily] started work on the art generator. The concept is something that might have been sold on late-night TV ads: a “cartridge” you plug into your printer to make ASCII masterpieces. Starting with a stripped-down Centronics printer cable that matches the printer’s port, she added an Arduino nano to store and serve up the art. The user interface is foolproof: a single button press causes a random selection from one of ten ASCII images to be printed. The whole thing is ensconced within a slick 3D printed case.
One of the coolest aspects of this project is the lack of power supply. When she first hooked the Arduino to the printer’s parallel port, [Emily] noticed that it powered right up with no external supply, and in true hacker fashion, just ran with it. Upon reflection, it seems that power is being supplied by the printer status lines, Busy and/or Ack, through the input protection diodes of the Atmega328 on the nano.
We really like this project, and are more than a little bummed we tossed those old printers that were kicking around the Hackaday labs for years. If you still have yours, and would like turn out some rad ASCII art,
the code for this project is up on GitHub
.
We’re no strangers to [Emily]’s work, but if you aren’t familiar with it,
check out her inspiring talk from the 2019 Hackaday Superconference
. Meanwhile, don’t miss the excellent video about the ASCII art printer cartridge, after the break. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208883",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T16:41:58",
"content": "I have one of those kicking around somewhere… I think I paid $1 for it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6208892",
"author": "Ren",
"times... | 1,760,373,628.287363 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/beos-the-alternate-universes-mac-os-x/ | BeOS: The Alternate Universe’s Mac OS X | Erin Pinheiro | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"apple",
"BeBox",
"BeOS",
"computer history",
"Internet Appliance",
"multimedia",
"NeXT",
"virtual machine"
] | You’re likely familiar with the old tale about how Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and started his own company, NeXT. Apple then bought NeXT and their technologies and brought Jobs back as CEO once again. However, Jobs’ path wasn’t unique, and the history of computing since then could’ve gone a whole lot different.
In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for greater media capabilities unseen in personal computers at the time.
Meet The BeOS
Could you imagine emailing someone a video file in 1995? Be Inc. did.
BeOS was, at the time, a foray into a new way of doing home computing. The features it introduced that were brand new at the time are now ubiquitous — things such as preemptive multitasking, journaling filesystems and an uncluttered desktop design. In a way, it was forward-thinking enough that if you look at a screenshot of it today you’d swear it was just any other modern Linux environment, ’90s graphical aesthetic aside. The main strength pushed by its developers was the multimedia support the platform offered: not only was the operating system designed in such a way that audiovisual formats were easy to work with, but also the hardware itself was built with a variety of I/O ports to accommodate such work.
In a time when dual-core computers were still a distant dream, the very first BeBox prototype was already being developed as a
dual-processor AT&T Hobbit system
. The Hobbit was a short-lived RISC processor specifically designed for the C language. However, since AT&T stopped the production of the chip, Be Inc. quickly shifted its development to a PowerPC-based system instead, which would become the BeBox we know today.
A PowerPC BeBox, including the Blinkenlights at the lower left and right of the case.
The BeBox finally debuted in October 1995, sporting a dual-PowerPC architecture clocked at 66 MHz each, with 133 MHz models following a year later. To emphasize the innovation of having two distinct processor cores, the front of its creatively-shaped case had two stacks of LEDs called “Blinkenlights”, each one of them displaying the current load of each CPU. On top of that, it offered
interfaces no other home computer at the time had as standard
: two MIDI I/O ports, multiple line-level audio channels and a connector dubbed “Geekport”. This connector was an experimental electronic-development oriented port, featuring power pins, two bi-directional 8-bit lanes and D/A and A/D converters, doing its name rightful justice.
Coulda Been A Contender
In 1994, Apple’s System 7 was showing its age. The company invested efforts into the development of a successor, codenamed Copland, to be released as System 8. By 1996, after missed deadlines and dysfunctional management, the project was deemed unviable and was cancelled. Now on the lookout for outside sources for their next operating system, Apple showed interest in acquiring Be Inc., which was rapidly gaining notoriety as a company pioneering new desktop computing paradigms. The object-oriented BeOS did everything Apple wanted the new Mac OS to do, and more.
Unfortunately for the Be Inc. employees, Apple wasn’t so set on the deal. Gambling on a new technology, the company low-balled an offer of only $125 million USD, which Be executives refused. Later that year, Apple would announce that they were buying NeXT for over twice that amount ($425 million USD). Of course, that deal included Steve Jobs in the package, something Be Inc. couldn’t offer, and the rest is history.
The Sony eVilla, one of the appliances designed to run BeIA software.
With the lack of an acquisition, Be’s hardware was left in a state of commercial unviability; after only about 1800 units sold, the company was forced to shift its focus on the software rather than hardware. BeOS was then ported to the more commonplace x86 architecture to cope with this change, but sales continued to decline.
The company finally resorted to giving BeOS away for free and focusing on BeIA, a version of BeOS meant for use on
internet appliances
— but even that pivot wasn’t enough to save the project or the company. Be Inc. laid off the majority of its employees in 2001 and sold the company’s assets to Palm, Inc., who decided not to pursue the project further. Aside from the leak of the minor version update R5.1 “Dano”, official production on BeOS was shuttered for good.
Haiku Marches On
The commercial demise of BeOS did not spell an end to the core vision of the Be Inc. employees. Since then, a new open source project called
Haiku
was started from scratch, picking up from where BeOS left off. The first beta of this new operating system was released on September 2018, and nightly releases continue to update it. New features include a full package manager such as the ones commonly seen in Linux distributions, and support for more modern media formats.
The original experience of BeOS as it was presented two decades ago can still be recreated through emulators. Since this method uses the later x86 port of BeOS, you don’t quite get the whole bells and whistles the custom BeBox hardware could give you, but it’s still a partial glimpse into the future world of yesterday. Adafruit has written
a guide that walks you through setting up BeOS R5 using VirtualBox
, however, since I had no luck in getting it to work no matter what I did, I ended up writing
my own guide using PCem instead
in case that one doesn’t work for you either.
What’s left for us now is to wonder, how different would the desktop computer ecosystem look today if all those years ago, back in 1997, Apple decided to buy Be Inc. instead of NeXT? Would Tim Berners-Lee have used a BeBox to run the world’s first web server instead? How would Mac OS X look today, would it still have its iconic (pun intended) dock? Or maybe the tendency for technology to have a point of convergence means that eventually everything would develop the same way regardless. There’s no way of knowing, but it’s always fun to take a trip down memory lane. | 186 | 43 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208841",
"author": "Ralph Doncaster",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T15:15:16",
"content": "“The features it introduced that were brand new at the time are now ubiquitous — things such as preemptive multitasking …”No love for the Amiga? It was available about a decade earlier.",
"pa... | 1,760,373,628.515518 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/spyware-discovered-on-all-samsung-phones/ | Possible Spyware On Samsung Phones | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"app",
"china",
"osint",
"packet capture",
"phone",
"preinstalled",
"security",
"server",
"smartphone",
"virus"
] | [Editor’s note: There’s an ongoing back-and-forth about this “spyware” right now. We haven’t personally looked into it on any phones, and decoded Wireshark caps of what the cleaner software sends home seem to be lacking — it could be innocuous. We’re leaving our original text as-run below, but you might want to take this with a grain of salt until further evidence comes out. Or keep us all up to date in the comments. But be wary of jumping to quick conclusions.]
Samsung may have the highest-end options for hardware if you want an Android smartphone, but that hasn’t stopped them from making some questionable decisions on the software they sometimes load on it. Often these phones come with “default” apps that can’t be removed through ordinary means, or can’t even be disabled, and the latest discovery related to
pre-loaded software on Samsung phones seems to be of a pretty major security vulnerability
.
This software in question is a “storage cleaner” in the “Device Care” section of the phone, which is supposed to handle file optimization and deletion. This particular application is made by a Chinese company called Qihoo 360 and can’t be removed from the phone without using ADB or having root. The company is
known for exceptionally bad practices
concerning virus scanning, and the software has been accused of sending all information about files on the phone to servers in China, which could then turn all of the data it has over to the Chinese government. This was all discovered through the use of packet capture and osint, which are discussed in the post.
These revelations came about recently on Reddit from [kchaxcer] who made the original claims. It seems to be fairly legitimate at this point as well, and another user named [GeorgePB] was able to provide a
temporary solution/workaround
in the comments on the original post. It’s an interesting problem that probably shouldn’t exist on any phone, let alone a flagship phone competing with various iPhones, but it does highlight some security concerns we should all have with our daily use devices when we can’t control the software on the hardware that we supposedly own. There are some alternatives though if you are
interested in open-source phones
.
Thanks to [kickaxe] for the tip!
Photo from
Pang Kakit [CC BY-SA 3.0 DE (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)] | 118 | 33 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208793",
"author": "Xeon",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T12:47:01",
"content": "They have attacked me several times via remote exploits.I am not even a important person at all.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6208843",
"au... | 1,760,373,629.679099 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/09/engineering-overkill-motorizes-the-daily-grind/ | Engineering Overkill Motorizes The Daily Grind | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"coffee",
"coffee grinder",
"manual grinder",
"overkill"
] | You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, and you don’t come between an engineer and his coffee. And really, if all your office has for coffee is a big old BUNN that makes caffeinated trash, you don’t discourage your coworkers from the pursuit of a better brew.
[George] is over at his desk each day treating coffee like the science experiment it is: with a kettle, a Chemex, and a manual coffee grinder. Trouble is, the setup is attracting more and more attention, and [George]’s unpaid side gig as the office barista is starting to wear out his arm. He considered buying an electric grinder just long enough to laugh at the idea, and then went out to the workshop and built
this beautifully over-engineered motorized mount for his manual grinder
.
The only trouble with motorizing these hand grinders or even driving them with a drill is that many of them have a pentagonal shaft. But that problem was no match for [George] and his file. He soon had his linkage between the 100RPM motor and the grinder shaft and set about building the overly adequate frame.
The whole thing is gorgeous, but we particularly like the gas spring that holds the motor up out of the way while he pours in the beans. [George] probably ought to start a bean fund, if he hasn’t already. That kind of noise followed by the smell of coffee is bound to bring a few more fresh-ground converts into the fold. Grab a fresh cup and grind past the break to see this baby pulverize some beanage.
Not everyone goes for pour over coffee, but there are hacks to be done at all points on the coffee spectrum.
Check out [Maya Posch]’s adventures in totally tweaking an espresso machine
. | 26 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208738",
"author": "excerpstentialist",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T09:37:40",
"content": "Does anybody know what the white appliance supplying the water is called?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6208748",
"author": "Da... | 1,760,373,628.578734 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/08/3d-printable-stick-shift-for-your-racing-simulator/ | 3D Printable Stick Shift For Your Racing Simulator | Danie Conradie | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"3d printing",
"cockpit",
"racing simulation",
"simulator"
] | If you don’t get enough driving in your real life, you can top it off with some virtual driving and even build yourself a cockpit. To this end [Noctiluxx] created a very nice
3D printable stick shifter
you can build yourself.
The design is adapted for 3D printing from an older
aluminium version
by [Willynovi] over on the X-Simulator forums. Every version uses an off-the-shelf ball joint for the main pivot, below which is a guide plate with the desired shift pattern. Each position has a microswitch, which can be connected to a USB encoder from eBay which acts as a HID. The position is held in the Y-axis position by a clever spring-loaded cam mechanism above the ball joint, while the X-position is held by the bottom guide plate. The gear knob can be either 3D printed or the real deal of your choice.
This design is the perfect example of the power of the internet and open source. The original aluminium design is almost a decade old, but has been built and modified by a number of people over the years to get us to the easy to build version we see today. [amstudio] created an excellent video tutorial on how to built your own, see it after the break.
For more awesome cockpits check out this one to
fly an actual (FPV) aircraft
, and this dazzling array of 3D printable components for
your own Garmin G1000 avionics
glass cockpit. | 22 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208725",
"author": "Phrewfuf",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T07:46:20",
"content": "Am I missing something or is the stick not self-centering on the horizontal axis?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6208736",
"author": "Pet... | 1,760,373,628.631926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/08/it-turns-out-robots-need-tough-love-too/ | It Turns Out, Robots Need Tough Love Too | Sharon Lin | [
"Machine Learning",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"human in the loop",
"machine learning",
"robotics"
] | Showing robots adversarial behavior may be the key to improving their performance, according to a study conducted by the University of Southern California. While a generative adversarial network (GAN), where two neural networks compete in a game, has been demonstrated, this is the first time adversarial human users have been used in a learning effort.
The
report
was presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, describing the experiment in which reinforcement learning was used to train robotic systems to create a general purpose system. For most robots, a huge amount of training data is necessary in order to manipulate objects in a human-like way.
A line of research that has been successful in overcoming this problem is having a “human in the loop”, in which a human provides feedback to the system in regards to its abilities. Most algorithms have assumed a cooperating human assistant, but by acting against the system the robot may be more inclined to develop robustness towards real world complexities.
The experiment that was conducted involved a robot attempting to grasp an object in a computer simulation. The human observer observes the simulated grasp and attempts to snatch the object away from the robot if the grasp is successful. This helps the robot discern weak and firm grasps, a crazy idea from the researchers that managed to work. The system trained with the adversary rejected unstable grasps, quickly learning robust grasps for different objects.
Experiments like these can test the assumptions made in the learning task for robotic applications, leading to better stress-tested systems more inclined to work in real-world situations. Take a look at the interview in
the video
below the break.
[Thanks Qes for the tip!] | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208696",
"author": "TM32",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T03:59:01",
"content": "This may explain why the robots of the future want to destroy all human life… I for one welcome our new robot overlords.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,373,628.673033 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/08/fail-of-the-week-thermostat-almost-causes-a-house-fire/ | Fail Of The Week: Thermostat Almost Causes A House Fire | Dan Maloney | [
"Fail of the Week",
"Teardown"
] | [
"electric heater",
"fail of the week",
"failure analysis",
"fire",
"foresnsic",
"fotw",
"root cause",
"safety",
"teardown",
"thermostat"
] | Fair warning: any homeowners who have thermostats similar to the one that nearly burned down [Kerry Wong]’s house might be in store for a sleepless night or two, at least until they inspect and perhaps replace any units that are even remotely as sketchy as what he found when he did
the postmortem analysis
in the brief video below.
The story begins back in the 1980s, when the Southern New England area where [Kerry] lives enjoyed a housing boom. Contractors rushed to turn rural farmland into subdivisions, and new suburbs crawled across the landscape. Corners were inevitably cut during construction, and one common place to save money was the home’s heating system. Rather than engage an HVAC subcontractor to install a complicated heating system, many builders opted instead to have the electricians install electric baseboards. They were already on the job anyway, and at the time, both copper and electricity were cheap.
Fast forward 40 years or so, and [Kerry] finds himself living in one such house. The other night, upon catching the acrid scent of burning insulation, he followed his nose to the source: a wall-mounted thermostat for his electric baseboard. His teardown revealed burned insulation, bare conductors, and scorched plastic on the not-so-old unit; bearing a 2008 date code, the thermostat must have replaced one of the originals. [Kerry] poked at the nearly combusted unit and found the root cause: the spot welds holding the wires to the thermostat terminal had become loose, increasing the resistance of the connection. As [Kerry] points out, even a tenth of an ohm increase in resistance in a 15 amp circuit would dissipate 20 watts of heat, and from the toasty look of the thermostat it had been a lot more than that.
The corner-cutting of the 1980s was nothing new, of course – remember
the aluminum wiring debacle?
Electrical fires are no joke, and we’re glad [Kerry] was quick to locate the problem and prevent it from spreading. | 63 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208669",
"author": "Tom Hargrave",
"timestamp": "2020-01-09T00:53:53",
"content": "An alternate cause for your failure – a bug, the 6 leg variety.Years ago when I was a licensed electrician I replaced a similar thermostat that had failed the same way. But when I took a close look ... | 1,760,373,628.873516 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/08/making-custom-3d-printed-slide-switches/ | Making Custom 3D Printed Slide Switches | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts"
] | [
"3d printed",
"early computer",
"interface",
"replica",
"slide switch"
] | For a little over a year now we’ve been covering the incredible replicas [Mike Gardi] has been building of educational “computers” from the very dawn of the digital age. These fascinating toys, many of which are now extremely rare, are recreated using 3D printing and other modern techniques for a whole new generation to enjoy and learn from.
He’s picked up a trick or two building these replicas, such as this method for
creating bespoke slide switches with a 3D printer
. Not only does this idea allow you to control a custom number of devices, but as evidenced in the video after the break, the printed slider sounds absolutely phenomenal in action. Precisely the sort of “clunk” you want on your front panel.
Of course, [Mike] doesn’t expect anyone to create this
exact
switch. He’s designed it as part of his
Working Digital Computer (WDC-1) project that he’s documenting on Hackaday.io
, so it has a rather specific set of design parameters. But with the steps he outlines in the write-up, you should have no problem adapting the concept to fit your specific needs.
So how does it work? One half of the switch is a track is printed with indents for both reed switches and 6 x 3 mm disc magnets. The other is a small shuttle that itself has spaces for two of the same magnets. When it slides over the reed switches they’re activated by the magnet on one side, while the magnet on the other side will be attracted to the one embedded into the track. This not only gives the switch detents that you can feel and hear while moving it, but keeps the shuttle from sliding off the intended reed switch.
If you like this, you’ll absolutely love his
mostly 3D printed binary encoder
that we featured recently.
With his track record
, we’re excited to follow the WDC-1 project as it develops, and thrilled that [Mike] has brought it to Hackaday.io. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208642",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2020-01-08T22:19:09",
"content": "That is a pretty neat idea!I would think it would be more reliable than the original (no friction on the switch contacts and less switch bounce).",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}... | 1,760,373,628.926156 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/07/tiny-machine-learning-on-the-attiny85/ | Tiny Machine Learning On The Attiny85 | Danie Conradie | [
"ATtiny Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"attiny",
"attiny85",
"machine learning"
] | We tend to think that the lowest point of entry for machine learning (ML) is on a Raspberry Pi, which it definitely is not. [EloquentArduino] has been pushing the limits to the low end of the scale, and managed to get a basic
classification model running on the ATtiny85
.
Using his experience of running ML models on an old Arduino Nano, he had created a
generator
that can export C code from a
scikit-learn
. He tried using this generator to compile a support-vector colour classifier for the ATtiny85, but ran into a problem with the Arduino ATtiny85 compiler not supporting a variadic function used by the generator. Fortunately he had already experimented with an alternative approach that uses a non-variadic function, so he was able to dust that off and get it working. The classifier accepts inputs from an RGB sensor to identify a set of objects by colour. The model ended up easily fitting into the capabilities of the diminutive ATtiny85, using only 41% of the available flash and 4% of the available ram.
It’s important to note what [EloquentArduino]
isn’t
doing here: running an artificial neural network. They’re just too inefficient in terms of memory and computation time to fit on an ATtiny. But neural nets aren’t the only game in town, and if your task is classifying something based on a few inputs, like reading a gesture from accelerometer data, or naming a color from a color sensor, the approach here will serve you well. We wonder if this wouldn’t be a good solution to the pesky problem of
identifying bats by their calls
.
We really like how approachable machine learning has become and if you’re keen to give ML a go, have a look at the rest of the EloquentArduino blog, it’s a small goldmine.
We’re getting more and more machine learning related hacks, like basic
ML on an Arduino Uno
, and
Lego sortings
using ML on a Raspberry Pi. | 19 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6208141",
"author": "donotdespisethesnake",
"timestamp": "2020-01-07T12:46:47",
"content": "it seems “Machine Learning” is what we used to call “programming”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6208146",
"author": "Glen S... | 1,760,373,629.474604 |
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