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https://hackaday.com/2019/12/28/a-pocket-sized-terminal-for-mobile-python-hacking/ | A Pocket-Sized Terminal For Mobile Python Hacking | Tom Nardi | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"Adafruit Feather",
"huzzah",
"micropython",
"python",
"serial terminal",
"stm32"
] | Inspired by the good old days when your computer would boot directly into BASIC, [Le Roux Bodenstein] has created a handheld device he calls “DumbDumb” that can
drop you into a MicroPython environment at a moment’s notice
. If that doesn’t interest you, think of it this way: it’s a (relatively) VT100 compatible serial terminal with a physical keyboard that can fit in your pocket.
Being essentially just a dumb terminal (hence the name), there’s actually not a lot of hardware on the board. Beyond the 320×240 NewHaven 2.4 inch LCD, there’s just an STM32G071R8 microcontroller and a handful of passives. Plus the 57 tactile buttons that make up the keyboard, of course.
The MicroPython part comes in thanks to the spot on the back of the board that accepts an Adafruit Feather Wing. In this case, it’s the HUZZAH32 with an ESP32 on board, but it could work with other variants as well. With the wide array of Feather boards available, this terminal could actually be used for an array of applications.
So even if fiddling around with MicroPython isn’t your idea of a good time, there’s almost certainly some interesting software you could come up with for a tiny network-attached terminal like this. For example, it might be just what you need to
start working on that LoRa pager system
. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6206043",
"author": "Xeon",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T22:16:45",
"content": "m5stack built this long ago.still nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6206072",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2019-12-29T03:30:36",
"cont... | 1,760,373,642.521471 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/28/peek-inside-these-same-but-different-power-supplies/ | Peek Inside These Same-But-Different Power Supplies | Donald Papp | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Teardown"
] | [
"35-2",
"Amrel",
"power supply",
"PPS",
"PPS-2322",
"vintage"
] | When [Kerry Wong] found an Amrel PPS 35-2 Programmable Power Supply from the late 90s on eBay, he recognized it as the single-channel version of another unit he owned, the dual-channel Amrel PPS-2322. Naturally, he purchased it and
did a compare and contrast of the two models
.
From the outside, they look fairly different but weigh about the same. But the similarities on the inside make it quite clear that they share a common design. There are a few things that grab your eye and the 35-2 doesn’t seem
quite
as well thought out, with some components being soldered into awkward-looking places. Capacitors bristle like barnacles where they are soldered directly to a connector, and a blob of hot glue anchors two resistors that rise up out of the board like a couple of weeds.
The link above shows some high resolution side-by-side photos between the two models, and [Kerry] thoughtfully provides a link to
the manual for the PPS series
as well as
a dump of the firmware
(.zip) for the 35-2. A teardown video is embedded below.
Benchtop power supplies are important tools, but we’ve also seen how
modern breadboard power supplies are remarkably full-featured
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6206047",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T23:18:48",
"content": "I wonder what it would take to upgrade the single channel unit into a dual channel unit.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6206079",
"author": "Ren"... | 1,760,373,642.462236 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/28/stronger-3d-prints-glue-or-carbon-fiber/ | Stronger 3D Prints — Glue Or Carbon Fiber? | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"carbon fiber",
"glue"
] | [CNCKitchen], like many others, is looking to make strong 3D prints. Using a high tech PLA bio copolyester compound, he
printed a bunch of hooks
in two different orientations. He used several different types of glue including epoxy and superglue. You can see the video of his results, below.
In addition to the glue, he used epoxy and bulk carbon fiber, again, in two different orientations. After several days of curing, he was ready to test.
Untreated parts managed about 53 kg or not quite 25 kg, depending on their orientation. The thin superglue part got up to 58 kg. Viscous superglue didn’t do much better than the thin glue. Since the epoxy cracked before the plastic, there wasn’t much difference and in one orientation it was even weaker than the reference part.
You can get carbon fiber enhanced PLA, but you get short fibers. [Stefan] glued long pieces of carbon fiber exactly where he wanted them using epoxy. This method did provide some benefits.
Unfortunately, at least with the plastic used, none of the results were amazing. The carbon fiber technique bears more investigation, but even so, the results were — so far — not astonishing. However, this is a great application of the scientific method. Intuitively, adding some glue ought to make parts better, right? Testing like this shows that it doesn’t in this particular circumstance.
By the same token, you’d think getting superglue in your eyes would be a life-changing event. Apparently,
not so much
, although we still don’t recommend it. If you want to know more about glue — maybe more than you want to know — we
deconstructed
glue awhile ago. | 31 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205998",
"author": "Mbc",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T16:02:51",
"content": "I wonder if vacuum impregnation would work better, driving it into the pores of the material…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6206020",
"author... | 1,760,373,642.301657 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/28/a-vfd-wall-thermometer/ | A VFD Wall Thermometer | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"atmega328p",
"dht22",
"humidity",
"IV-11",
"shift register",
"thermometer",
"vfd"
] | Want to build something using VFD tubes, but don’t need yet
another
clock project? In that case, this
wall mounted temperature and humidity display created by [commanderkull]
might be exactly what you’re looking for. With six IV-11 tubes, this display is a practical way to add some of that gorgeous blue-green glow to your home or office.
The USB powered display uses a XL6009 and an XL7015 to provide the 24 V and 1.8 V needed by the IV-11 tubes, respectively. Both of which can be disconnected with jumpers to shut down the tubes without powering off the entire device, a useful feature when programming and debugging the display’s ATmega328P microcontroller. Each tube is connected to the ATmega with an 74HC595 shift register and a UDN2981 driver. Temperature and humidity data is provided, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the exceptionally common DHT22 sensor.
If you
are
looking to build another clock with these style tubes,
there’s certainly enough prior art out there to get you started
. We’ve also seen
faux VFDs that you could use for either project
, just in case you aren’t looking to deal with the voltage requirements and relative rarity of the real thing. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205985",
"author": "śmierć wiślackiej kurwie",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T12:53:47",
"content": "What the hell, you could design another PCB to hold those tubes in a neat way instead of bending their wires.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,373,642.115128 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/3d-printed-pulsejet-uses-tesla-valve/ | 3D Printed Pulsejet Uses Tesla Valve | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"jet",
"jet engine",
"pulsejet",
"Tesla valve"
] | For most people, a jet is a jet. But there are several different kinds of jet engines, depending on how they operate. You frequently hear about ramjets, scramjets, and even turbojets. But there is another kind — a very old kind — called a pulsejet. [Integza] shows how he
made one using 3D printed parts
and also has a lot of entertaining background information. You can see the video below. (Beware, there is a very little bit of off-color language and humor in the video, so you might not want to watch this one at work.)
They are not ideal from a performance standpoint, but they are easy to make. How easy? A form of pulsejet was accidentally discovered by a young Swiss boy playing with alcohol in the early 1900s. Because of their simplicity, they’ve been built by lots of different people, including rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, who mounted one to a bicycle.
Tesla — the inventor, not the car — invented a lot of things, including a one-way valve design with no moving parts. A pulsejet expels exhaust and intakes air through the same hole, so good ones use a one-way valve. Tesla’s is interesting because it is nothing more than a shaped channel that has low resistance to flow in one direction and higher resistance in the other direction. The trick is in a teardrop shape that is thin on the inlet side and fat on the outlet side. It isn’t perfect, but it does provide a basic and mechanically reliable one way action.
The biggest problem, of course, with a 3D printed jet engine is that the engine gets hot and plastic likes to melt. [Integza] used lost PVA casting with plaster which worked well. There were still plastic parts melting, though. He used a high tech PLA, but we wondered if PETg or nylon would have been better choices for heat resistance.
It took several iterations, but he finally got some pretty impressive results. Well, impressive when you consider what he’s working with. We aren’t sure you’d ever want to use a 3D printed pulsejet in an actual project, but if models like this help you understand the principles, it might lead to a more practical engine somewhere down the road.
If you think Goddard’s bicycle idea was cool, here’s a
more recent attempt
. If a bicycle isn’t your thing, a
jet sled is a possibility
. We’ve seen other attempts to make jets with at least some
3D printed parts
. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205841",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T17:26:41",
"content": "I was contemplating a Tesla valve could be used for a pulse jet the other day. It’s nice that someone tried it out.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,373,642.235395 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/russias-newest-weather-satellite-may-have-be-killed-by-space-junk/ | Russia’s Newest Weather Satellite May Have Been Killed By Space Junk | Dan Maloney | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"micrometeoroid",
"orbit",
"RTL-SDR",
"satellite",
"space debris",
"space junk",
"weather"
] | For humans and satellites alike, making a living in space is hard. First, there’s the problem of surviving the brief but energetic and failure-prone ride there, after which you get to alternately roast and freeze as you zip around the planet at 20 times the speed of sound. The latter fact is made all the more dangerous by the swarm of space debris, both natural and man-made, that whizzes away up there along with you, waiting to cause an accident.
One such accident has apparently led to the early demise of a Russian weather satellite. Just a few months after launch, Meteor-M 2-2 suffered a sudden orbital anomaly (
link
to Russian story;
English translation
). Analysis of the data makes it pretty clear what happened: the satellite was struck by something, and despite some ground-controller heroics which appear to have stabilized the spacecraft, the odds are that Meteor-M 2-2 will eventually succumb to its wounds.
Weather Watchers
To call the Meteor-M series of satellites unlucky is something of an understatement. Originally conceived as a four-satellite constellation, the birds were to be equipped with the latest in imaging and sensing instruments and launched into sun-synchronous polar orbits. They would afford Russia scientists complete coverage of the vast country every couple of days, with special emphasis on monitoring conditions in the Arctic regions.
Original plans called for a series of satellites called Meteor-3M to be launched between 1998 and 2000, but for unknown reasons the satellites were never built. The plan morphed into the Meteor-M series, which aimed to be in service by 2010. The first satellite, Meteor-M1, was launched in 2009, but spent years in an “experimental operation” mode before being listed as in full service. After only two years of nominal operation, instruments began to fail, including an X-band radar designed to monitor sea ice and a critical infrared imager. In 2014, the satellite’s attitude control system failed too, rendering the entire spacecraft useless.
Meteor-M 2-2 being integrated into its fairing in June 2019. Source: Roscosmos via
RussianSpaceWeb.com
To address some of the instrument deficiencies, an improved series of satellites, the Meteor-M2 series, was designed. The first of these, Meteor-M 2-1, made it to the launch pad at Vostochny Cosmodrome in November of 2017, but
didn’t make it much further
. An error in the navigation system programming led the upper stage to fire its engines when it was pointed the wrong way, dropping the satellite payload into the North Atlantic.
Meteor-M 2-2 fared much better in its July 2019 launch. The 2,900 kg spacecraft, along with 33 other small satellite payloads, rode to orbit successfully aboard a Soyuz-2-1b. The programming errors that doomed its predecessor had been corrected, and Meteor-M 2-2 entered its assigned orbit and began returning data. It seemed like the satellite was on its way to a long and useful career as a weather watcher.
Trouble Upstairs
The textbook operations of Meteor-M 2-2 wouldn’t last long, though, and as is often the case, an amateur radio operator was among the first to notice. Dmitry Pashkov (R4UAB), a satellite monitoring fan, had been capturing images from weather satellites for years. But when he tried to find Meteor-M 2-2 on December 18, 2019, all he got was dead air. It seemed like the satellite was gone, and once
he announced his findings
, it wasn’t long before other satellite watchers pieced together a story, one that would eventually be confirmed by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.
Based on the data, it appears that Meteor-M 2-2 was struck by a micrometeoroid – either a natural chunk of space rock or some piece of man-made debris. The SUV-sized satellite was sent spinning violently out of control by the impact. It immediately put itself into a safe mode to protect its instrumentation and give ground controllers time to regain control, which they eventually did. Subsequent
analysis of the orbital data
revealed that the satellite had also lost two kilometers of orbital altitude immediately after the impact.
Meteor-M 2-2 quickly lost altitude after the event. Source:
Dr. Marco Langbroek
Such a violent disruption of a satellite as big as Meteor-M 2-2 would imply a large, very energetic collision. But that would likely break the satellite into multiple pieces, and there’s no evidence that anything like that happened. That means the impactor was small, which appears at odds with the outsized effect it had on the spacecraft. That leaves operators considering whether the impact penetrated a pressurized part of the satellite’s hull. That could explain the drastic change in attitude and altitude.
Unfortunately, it could also mean the end of Meteor-M 2-2’s mission. Many of the instruments aboard the satellite require constant temperatures to work, and the electronics controlling the bird may now be exposed to the vacuum of space. Roscosmos has regained control of the spacecraft and damped down its spin, and there are even reports that an X-band signal from the satellite has been detected.
With a depressurized hull, the spacecraft is likely doomed to follow in the sad footsteps of its predecessors. It’s yet another in a long string of failed or marginal weather satellites, the passing of each which is mourned by the satellite monitoring community. There are still plenty of satellites up there providing realtime weather and climate imagery, but the likely loss of Meteor-M 2-2 shows just how dangerous it can be up there. | 27 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205824",
"author": "Arthur Wolf",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T15:02:11",
"content": "“Have been” ( in title ). Feel free to delete comment.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205826",
"author": "McNugget",
"timesta... | 1,760,373,642.371856 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/apple-homekit-accessory-development-kit-gets-more-accessible/ | Apple HomeKit Accessory Development Kit Gets More Accessible | Kerry Scharfglass | [
"home hacks",
"iphone hacks",
"News"
] | [
"apple",
"Apple Homekit",
"HomeKit",
"IoT",
"smarthome"
] | Every tech monopoly has their own proprietary smart home standard; how better to lock in your customers than to literally build a particular solution into their homes? Among the these players Apple is traditionally regarded as the most secretive, a title it has earned with decades of closed standards and proprietary solutions. This reputation is becoming progressively less deserved when it comes to HomeKit, their smart home gadget connectivity solution. In 2017 they took a big step forward and removed the need for a separate authentication chip in order to interact with HomeKit. Last week they took another and
released a big chunk of their HomeKit Accessory Development Kit (ADK)
as well. If you’re surprised not to have heard sooner, that might be because it was combined the the even bigger news about Apple, Amazon, the Zigbee Alliance, and more working together on
more open, interoperable home IoT standards
. Check back in 2030 to see how that is shaping up.
“The HomeKit ADK implements key components of the HomeKit Accessory Protocol (HAP), which embodies the core principles Apple brings to smart home technology: security, privacy, and reliability.”
– A descriptive gem from
the README
Apple’s
previous loosening-of-restrictions
allowed people to begin building devices which could interact natively with their iOS devices without requiring a specific Apple-sold “auth chip” to authenticate them. This meant existing commercial devices could become HomeKit enabled with an OTA, and
hobbyists could interact in sanctioned, non-hacky ways
. Part of this was a release of the (non-commercial)
HomeKit specification itself, which is available here
(with Apple developer sign in, and license agreement).
Despite many breathless mentions in
the press release
it’s hard to tell what the ADK
actually is
. The README and documentation directory are devoid of answers, but spelunking through the rest of the GitHub repo gives us an idea. It consists of two primary parts, the
HomeKit Accessory Protocol
itself and the
Platform Abstraction Layer
. Together the HAP implements HomeKit itself, and the PAL is the wrapper that lets you plug it into a new system. It’s quite a meaty piece of software; the
HAP’s main header
is a grueling 4500 lines long, and it doesn’t take much searching to find some
fear-inspiring 50 line preprocessor macros
. This is a great start, but frankly we think it will take significantly more documentation to make the ADK accessible to all.
If it wasn’t obvious, most of the tools above are carefully licensed by Apple and intended for non-commercial use. While we absolutely appreciate the chance to get our hands on interfaces like this, we’re sure many will quibble over if this really counts as “open source” or not (
it’s licensed as Apache 2.0
). We’ll leave that for you in the comments. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205817",
"author": "Joseph Sammarco",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T14:17:53",
"content": "I made a smart home bridge. Just need a Mac and Indigo home automation.https://github.com/jsammarco/IndigoHomekitBridgehttp://consultingjoe.com",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,373,642.628806 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/think-you-know-curl-care-to-prove-it/ | Think You Know CURL? Care To Prove It? | Donald Papp | [
"Games",
"Linux Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"cluster",
"curl",
"dns over https",
"game",
"HTTP",
"linux",
"scalable",
"vm",
"you can't curl under pressure"
] | Do you happen to remember a browser-based game “You Can’t JavaScript Under Pressure”? It presented coding tasks of ever-increasing difficulty and challenged the player to complete them as quickly as possible. Inspired by that game, [Ben Cox] re-implemented it as
You Can’t cURL Under Pressure!
In it, the user is challenged in their knowledge of how to use the ubiquitous
curl
in a variety of different ways. Perhaps this doesn’t sound terribly daunting, especially if your knowledge of curl is limited to knowing it is a command-line tool to fetch something from a web server. But curl has a
staggering
number of features. The man page is
over 4500 lines in length
.
The software’s main site offers a (free) 250+ page guide on how to use curl and libcurl
. Reflecting on this is exactly what led [Ben] to create his challenge.
It’s a wonderful piece of work, but things get
really
interesting once [Ben] starts talking about the infrastructure behind it all. At its core the game works by giving the user a problem and a virtual machine, and catching outgoing HTTP calls to see whether they look correct. If the outgoing HTTP call is the right solution for the problem, terminate the current VM and start up the next one with the next problem. He’s put a lot of work into getting suitable VMs up and running quickly, securely, and properly isolated. The code can be found on
the project’s GitHub repository
for those who want a closer look.
But that’s not all. [Ben] says that in the past he’s had a bad habit of presenting interactive features in his blog posts that can’t keep up with sudden demand. So to address that, the system auto-scales as needed with a small Linux cluster; small brick-sized PCs are started and shut down automatically to meet demand. Hey, the only thing cooler than a functioning cluster is a cluster doing an actual job,
like this one that detects NSFW images
. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205771",
"author": "Daren Schwenke",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T09:35:21",
"content": "+1 for doing this using a proper VM.Many, many times I have produced the desired output in some testing similation, only to fail because I did not do arrive at the accepted solution exactly as the ... | 1,760,373,642.173071 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/word-clock-does-the-job-with-laser-etched-acrylic/ | Word Clock Does The Job With Laser-Etched Acrylic | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"edge-lit",
"word clock"
] | As far as telling the time, word clocks go out of their way to spell it out for you. As long as you know the language, they’re a stylish and effective way to get the message across. [Simon] built an elegant, stripped-back word clock of his own,
with a laser cutter helping to get the job done.
The core of the build is an Arduino Nano, hooked up to a string of 22 WS2812B LEDs, driven via the FastLED library. An NXP PCF8563T serves as the real-time clock, to ensure stable and accurate timekeeping. The electronics are all housed inside an enclosure that appears to be constructed from PCBs, with instructions on operating the clock printed on the base.
The actual display is via laser-cut and laser-etched acrylic. The display piece slides into the top of the clock, with the LEDs edge lighting various segments to display the relevant words that make up the current time. The clock is designed in such a way that these display slides can be easily switched out to change the look of the clock, with different fonts and designs.
It’s a quick and clean take on the popular word clock design, and one any makerspace could whip up in a weekend. As far as word clocks go, however,
the sky really is the limit when it comes to complexity
. Video after the break. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205763",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T08:26:34",
"content": "I’m impressed – I’ve never seen individual “fingers” of a single plate acrylic lit separately like that, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. I would have expected a lot more coupli... | 1,760,373,642.417162 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/3d-printing-paper-sort-of/ | 3D Printing Paper — Sort Of | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"mold",
"molding",
"paper"
] | There are only a few truly ancient engineered materials, and among the oldest is paper. Traditionally, paper is flat and can be bent into shapes. However, paper can be molded into for example packing material or egg cartons. [XYZAidan] has a process that can
recycle paper into 3D cardboard-like objects
. You need a 3D printer, but it doesn’t actually print the paper. Instead, you use the printer to create a mold that can form paper pulp you make out of recycled paper and a blender.
[Aidan] provides seven different molds ranging from a desk tray and a dish to simple cubes and coasters. The molds are made in three parts to assist in removing the finished product.
The 3D printed molds have to be very strong because you’ll use a vise to squeeze the water out of the pulp. You can use almost any kind of paper unless it is glossy or has a plastic coating. You can tear up pieces by hand or use a shredder. A blender will create the pulp but you’ll also have to add water and a binder. [Aidan] shows that you can use PVA glue, rice paste, or cornstarch. You can make rice paste easily from ordinary rice by cooking it until it becomes paste-like.
There are some downsides. You have to let the paper dry for hours or even a day or two. In addition, the pulp shrinks as it dries, so getting exact dimensions could be a problem. The material is very wood-like but it doesn’t do well when wet.
Most of the papercraft we see here is
more akin to origami
. We’ve seen cloth used in papercrafts and we wondered if adding cloth fibers to the pulp might work out in some strange way. | 31 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205728",
"author": "Dane",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T04:13:50",
"content": "woah, really neat!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6205729",
"author": "starhawk",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T04:14:39",
"content": "That gunk... | 1,760,373,642.587631 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/folding-an-off-the-shelf-3d-printer/ | Folding An Off-The-Shelf 3D Printer | Danie Conradie | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D printer mod",
"3d printer upgrade",
"3d printing",
"Creality",
"mobile hackerspace"
] | Most 3D printers don’t take up a lot of space, but they can be pretty bulky and awkward to travel with. [Jón Schone] needed a
compact folding 3D printer
for a secret project on his YouTube channel ProperPrinting, so he decided to modify a Creality Ender 3 Pro to achieve this.
Starting with a brand new Ender 3 Pro, and his first steps were to move the display and power supply unit into the bottom frame to make space for the folding top frame. For the folding mechanism, he settled on a
four bar linkage
that allows the vertical frame to translate to the front of the printer as it folds down, which lets it become a really compact package with minimal wasted space. The joints consist of fitting 3D printed in carbon fibre reinforced nylon, with bolts for shafts. The entire mechanism is made adjustable for fine-tuning by using threaded rod and sliding mounting points on the extruded frame. Small brackets on each side of the frame allows the printer to snap securely into both its upright and folded positions.
All in all we think this is well-designed and beautifully executed hack, enough to make us really want to build one for ourselves. It will remain to be seen if any slop develops with repeated folding and use, especially at the snap-in end stops, but that should still be an easy fix if it happens.
We’ve previously featured [Jón]’s custom
3D printed D-sub connectors
, also for his Ender 3. Also check out another folding printer, the
X-printer
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205710",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T01:43:47",
"content": "I like it, super clever.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6205711",
"author": "Douggie",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T01:53:22",
"content": "I’m g... | 1,760,373,642.800295 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/28/ben-krasnows-take-on-diy-air-bearings/ | [Ben Krasnow]’s Take On DIY Air Bearings | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"air bearing",
"captive",
"fluid bearing",
"garnet",
"graphite",
"grinding",
"machining",
"precision",
"vacuum"
] | We’ve got to admit that watching
[Ben Krasnow]’s new video on air bearings
is tough. We found our eyes constantly checking the spherical air bearing in the foreground, which for the first eight minutes of the video just kept going. It was strangely hypnotic, and made it hard to concentrate on all the other cool stuff [Ben] was up to.
If the topic of air bearings seems familiar, it might be because
we recently reported
on DIY air bearings made from used EDM electrodes. [Ben] saw that too, and dusted off his old air bearing project. Literally, as it turns out, because the graphite blocks whose porosity and softness make them the perfect material for air bearings also makes for a dusty workshop. We’d recommend breathing protection of some sort while machining graphite. In addition to simple puck bearings, [Ben] came up with more complicated designs, including the aforementioned spherical bearing. He used the steel ball itself as a precision tool to grind the graphite out, first by coating it with abrasive and then by cutting grooves in it to act like a file. A cylindrical bearing was also cut, this time with sandpaper glued directly to the ground steel rod that would seat in the bearing.
[Ben]’s other innovation is vacuum preloading, where he applies both vacuum and pressure to the bearing plenum. The vacuum provides the force needed to capture the moving element while the pressure bears the load. It’s a careful balancing act, but it works well enough to capture the large steel ball and keep it turning effortlessly.
We really liked [Ben]’s take on air bearings, especially his thoughts on creating fully enclosed cylindrical bearings. Those could be useful for low-friction linear drives, and we look forward to seeing more on those. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205986",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T13:20:19",
"content": "Just roughly taper the end of the rod for the fully enclosed bearing. Connect the pressurised air [ perhaps at slightly reduced pressure ] and then the tooling marks of the taper will do the cutting, it wi... | 1,760,373,642.955097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/fpga-6800-uses-python-toolbox/ | FPGA 6800 Uses Python Toolbox | Al Williams | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"6800",
"cpu",
"fpga",
"nmigen",
"python"
] | Usually, when you think of designing — or recreating — a CPU on an FPGA, you assume you’ll have to use Verilog or VHDL. There are other options, as well, but those are the biggest two players in FPGA configuration. [Robert Baruch] has a multipart series
where he uses nMigen
— a Python toolbox — to recreate a 6800 CPU like the one used in many vintage video games and pinball machines.
Unlike some tools that try to convert software written in some language to an FPGA configuration, nMigen uses Python as a scripting language to create code in FHDL. This is similar in concept to VHDL or Verilog, but gives up the event-driven paradigm, opting instead to allow designers to explicitly call out synchronous and combinatorial logic.
Interestingly the tool hinges on Yosys, so it can target several Lattice parts as well as FPGAs from Intel/Altera and Xilinx. It turns out that the n in nMigen is for new, and you might find some of the
documentation for regular old Migen
to be useful.
As for the 6800, it is one of the older CPUs used in hobby computers. The 8 bit CPU had about 72 instructions, depending on how you counted them. This was before reduced instruction sets were the rage, so it is a little extra work to implement a rich instruction set.
There are other Python options, such as
MyHDL
and
PyCPU
, for example. You can even try
using .NET
. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205953",
"author": "slincolne",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T06:14:08",
"content": "Does anyone know how many Megahertz the resulting CPU clocked at?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205959",
"author": "Etienne",
... | 1,760,373,643.109386 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/magic-angle-twisted-bilayer-graphene-yes-thats-the-scientific-name/ | Magic-Angle Twisted Bilayer Graphene – Yes, That’s The Scientific Name | Sharon Lin | [
"Science"
] | [
"graphene",
"research",
"superconductor"
] | In the world of physics research, graphene has been gaining popularity as one of the most remarkable materials in the last 15 years. While it may appear unassuming in common household goods such as pencil leads, the material boasts a higher strength than steel and a higher flexibility than paper. On top of all that, it is also ultra-light and an excellent conductor of electric current and heat.
Recently, physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered that stacking two sheets of graphene and twisting a small angle between them reveals an
entire new field
of material science – twistronics. In a paper
published in
Nature
,
researchers have taken a look into this new material, known as the magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene. By modifying the graphene’s temperature, they were able to cause the material to shift from behaving like an insulator to transforming into a superconductor.
A
graphic in the
New York Times
demonstrates some of the interesting properties that arise from stacking and twisting two sheets. Scientists have long known that graphene is a one-layer-thick honeycombed pattern of carbon atoms, but actually separating a single sheet of graphene has been fairly difficult. A low-tech method pioneered by two physicists at the University of Manchester involves using sticky tape to pull apart graphene layers until a single layer is left.
Small imperfections that arise from slightly misaligned sheets manifests in a pattern that allows electrons to hop between atoms in regions where the lattice line up, but unable to flow in regions that are misaligned. The slower moving electrons are thus more likely to interact with each other, becoming “strongly correlated”.
The technique for measuring the properties of this new twisted graphene is similarly low-tech. After a single layer of graphene is separated by sticky tape, the tape is torn in half to reveal two halves with perfectly aligned lattices. One of the sides is rotated by about 1.3 degrees and pressed onto the other. Sometimes, the layers would snap back into alignment, but other times they would end up at 1.1 degrees and stop rotating.
When the layers were cooled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, they were observed to become a superconductor, an incredibly discovery for the physicists involved in the experiment. Further studies showed that different permutations of temperature, magnetic field, and electron density were also able to turn the graphene into a superconductor. On top of this, the graphene was also able to exhibit a form of magnetism arising from the movement of electrons rather than the intrinsic properties of the atoms. With so many possibilities still unexplored, it’s certain that twistronics will reveal some remarkable findings pretty soon.
[Thanks Adrian for the tip!] | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205946",
"author": "ROB",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T04:33:42",
"content": "While covalent carbon structures may appear unassuming in common household goods such as pencil leads, graphene boasts a higher strength than steel and a higher flexibility than paper.Perhaps?",
"parent_i... | 1,760,373,643.165144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/drill-thrice-solder-once/ | Drill Thrice, Solder Once | Brian McEvoy | [
"how-to",
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"copper",
"drill",
"fr4",
"ground plane",
"hole",
"pcb",
"Printed Circuit Board",
"solder",
"wire wrap"
] | If you design printed circuit boards, then you will have also
re
designed printed circuit boards. Nobody gets it right the first time, every time. Sometimes you can solder a scrap of 30gauge wire, flip a component 180°, or make a TO-92 transistor do that little pirouette thing where the legs go every-which-way. If you angered the PCB deities, you may have to
access a component pad far from an edge
. [Nathan Seidle], the founder of Sparkfun, finds himself in this situation, but all hope is not lost.
Our first thought is to desolder everything, then take a hot iron and tiny wires to each pad. Of course, this opens up a lot of potential for damage to the chip, cold joints, and radio interference. Accessing the pin in vivo has risks, but they are calculated. The idea is to locate the pin, then systematically drill from the backside and expose the copper. [Nate] also discovers that alcohol will make the PCB transparent so you can peer at the underside to confirm you have found your mark.
In a real, “fight fire with fire” idea, you can
rework with flex PCBs
or push your PCB Fu to the next level and use
PCBs as your enclosure
. | 28 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205917",
"author": "ERIC S CHAPIN",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T00:40:16",
"content": "I’ve made mistakes before. Missing wire between 2 chip, forgot to do DRC to discover crossed trace, and once used SOIC footpad for a TSOP chip. Trying to wire up a dozen chips x 16 pins each wasn’... | 1,760,373,643.019716 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/breathe-easy-with-this-online-dust-sensor-box/ | Breathe Easy With This Online Dust Sensor Box | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Science"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"bme280",
"dust sensor",
"environmental monitoring",
"ESP8266",
"particle sensor"
] | It’s an unfortunate reality that for many of us, our air isn’t nearly as clean as we’d like. From smog to wildfires, there’s a whole lot of
stuff
in the air that we’d just as soon like to keep out of our lungs. But in order to combat this enemy, you first need to understand it. That means figuring out just what’s in the air you breathe, and how much of it. That’s where
devices like the Dust Box from [The IoT GURU]
can come in handy.
Inside the 3D printed enclosure is a Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266 development board, sitting on a custom breakout PCB. This board gives you some easy expandability to add your own sensors and hardware, though in this particular configuration, the Dust Box is using the BME280 sensor for general environmental monitoring and the SDS011 laser particle sensor to determine what’s in the air. Just plug it into a convenient USB power source, make sure it’s connected to the WiFi, and off it goes.
But where does all that lovely data end up? That’s up to you, but in this case, the [The IoT GURU] is pushing everything out to a web interface that allows the user to view yearly, monthly, and weekly historical data for each of the parameters the Dust Box can check. This is probably a bit more granular than most of us need, but it’s a good example of what’s possible should you need that much information.
For a similar project that allows you to take your sensors a bit farther off the beaten path,
checkout FieldKit
, which was
recently crowned winner of the 2019 Hackaday Prize
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205901",
"author": "tim21",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T23:10:50",
"content": "Looks pretty similar to whathttps://luftdaten.info/en/home-en/is doing. They have initiated the construction of thousands of fine dust sensors in a kind of citizen science project. Data from all these senso... | 1,760,373,643.067814 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/bend-it-like-bhoite-circuit-sculptures-shatter-the-bounds-of-flatland/ | Bend It Like Bhoite: Circuit Sculptures Shatter The Bounds Of Flatland | Dan Maloney | [
"Art",
"cons"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"art",
"beam",
"brass",
"Circuit Sculpture"
] | As electronics hobbyists, we live in a somewhat two-dimensional world. Our craft is so centered around the printed circuit board that our design tools are specifically geared to spit out files tailored to the board house, who can then ship us a study in fiberglass and copper. We daub on flux and solder, add components, apply heat, and like magic, our circuits come to life, all within a few millimeters above and below the PCB.
Breaking out of this self-imposed Flatland can be therapeutic. At least
that’s how Mohit Bhoite sees his free-form circuit sculptures
, which he spoke about at length at the Hackaday Superconference this year. By way of disclosure, I have to admit to being a longtime fan of Mohit’s work, both at his day job as a designer at Particle, and with his spare time hobby of creating sculptures from electronic components and brass wire
which can be followed on his Twitter feed
. He ended up joining us for
a circuit sculpture Hack Chat
just before heading to Supercon, too, so not only was I looking forward to meeting him, I was sure his talk would reveal the secrets of his art and give me the inspiration to start doing some of my own. I wasn’t disappointed on either score.
Not a Secret; Just a Lot of Careful Work
As for his secret methods, it turns out that there really are none. Tooling is remarkably simple: high-quality pliers and flush-cutters with eyeball-sparing wire retainers, a 50-watt soldering station, and alignment tools such as machinist’s squares. Most of his sculptures are built from stiff brass rods from 0.3 mm to 1.0 mm in diameter, which are easily bent. He uses full-scale paper templates to guide his bends, although 3D-printed jigs come into play for jobs such as building matrices of discrete LEDs. Components float suspended within the wire frameworks, leading to open, airy structures that invite you to look at them from every angle.
Mohit offered plenty of inspiration to go along with his approachable methods and materials. Many of his early works stem from his interest in BEAM robotics, with simple circuits that do little else but
flash an LED
or make interesting sounds. Some sculptures are more practical, such as
bedside digital clocks
. Others are explorations of patterns and forms, like
his TIE fighter with Arabesque wings
. There are even a few more interactive projects, like
the handheld game console
that lets you play the Snake on a small matrix of LEDs, or the
Nyan-spewing POV robot
built on a chassis of brass tubes.
I think the thing that strikes me most about Mohit’s circuit sculptures is their personality. He even mentions that at the start of his talk, and it really comes through in his designs. There’s something about the angles he uses, the way displays and LEDs are positioned, and the general feel of each piece that lets you know right away when you’re looking at one of his pieces. There’s also something calming about his pieces, as if they somehow captured the relaxation and escape from the stress of an engineer’s workday such a hobby is meant to provide.
Looking at Mohit’s sculptures is a little like gazing upon one of those Zen rock gardens. Except that rather than being inspired to pick up a rake to arrange gravel and sand, his works and his talk have inspired me to pick up pliers and wires and just start bending. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205966",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T08:40:22",
"content": "This is Art!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6205995",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2019-12-28T15:38:21",
"content": "These scul... | 1,760,373,643.211374 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/2019-as-the-hardware-world-turns/ | 2019: As The Hardware World Turns | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d prining",
"alexa",
"boeing",
"commercial space",
"fpga",
"internet of things",
"led bulb",
"security",
"Supercon badge",
"Year in Review"
] | Well, this is it. The end of the decade. In a few days the 2010s will be behind us, and a lot of very smug people will start making jokes on social media about how we’re back in the “Roaring 20s” again. Only this time around there’s a lot more plastic, and drastically less bathtub gin. It’s still unclear as to how much jazz will be involved.
Around this time we always say the same thing, but once again it bears repeating: it’s been a fantastic year for Hackaday. Of course, we had our usual honor of featuring literally thousands of incredible creations from the hacking and making community. But beyond that, we also bore witness to some fascinating tech trends, moments that could legitimately be called historic, and a fair number of blunders which won’t soon be forgotten. In fact, this year we’ve covered a wider breadth of topics than ever before, and judging by the record setting numbers we’ve seen in response, it seems you’ve been just as excited to read it as we were to write it.
To close out the year, let’s take a look at a few of the most popular and interesting stories of 2019. It’s been a wild ride, and we can’t wait to do it all over again in 2020.
A Bevy of New Boards
In June we saw the
somewhat surprising release of the Raspberry Pi 4
. Not that anyone doubted there would be a new entry into this monstrously popular (
to the tune of 30 million units
, apparently) line of Linux Single Board Computers (SBCs), of course. The surprise was in the timing: the Pi 3B+ had just been released in 2018, and in interviews conducted only a few months prior, Eben Upton was pretty noncommittal about the foundation’s plans for a successor.
As it turns out,
this Pi might have needed a bit more time in the oven
. After hackers started getting their hands on them,
they started finding some pretty odd quirks
. We’re not just talking about the (still baffling) decision to use dual micro HDMI ports either. There’s enough legitimate gripes around 2019’s Pi that many are sticking with the previous iteration until things settle down.
The 2019 Hackaday Supercon Badge
But the Raspberry Pi isn’t the only SBC game in town. It’s not even the only one with a cute “Pi” name, for that matter.
We saw significant interest in the Atomic Pi
, which delivered the power of a quad-core Intel Atom processor at a size and price not far from that of its berry-flavored peer. We’ve since featured
a number of impressive modifications
to the powerful board, but the discovery that the Atomic Pi was actually surplus hardware purchased from the now defunct Mayfield Robotics raised some valid questions about the long-term viability of the product.
Of course, no piece of hardware got us quite as excited as
this year’s Hackaday Superconference Badge
. Not only because it’s an exceptionally cool conference badge (
something there’s no shortage of
), but because it represented something of a turning point for FPGA technology. Thanks to a ballooning number of projects, products, and yes conference badges, leveraging FPGAs and to
vast improvements to open source toolchains
, we’ll look back on 2019 as the year that many hackers got to play with an FPGA for the first time. If the
projects that came out of the Badge Hacking competition are any indication
, we think they liked it.
Let there Be Light
Despite the perennial interest in such things, the most talked about piece of hardware this year wasn’t a pocket sized Linux computer. It was, if you can believe it, the humble light bulb. Well, more specifically, the state-of-the-art in home lighting technology.
Ted’s look inside the modern LED bulb is a must read.
It’s true. As of this writing, our most popular piece of 2019 was
Ted Yapo’s phenomenal deep-dive into the occasionally disappointing reality of modern LED bulbs
. We’ve all experienced LED bulbs doing dark years (or even decades) before their advertised lifespan is up, and this article aimed to figure out just what keeps killing these 21st century marvels of solid-state illumination.
We also saw considerable concern about the security of so-called “smart” light bulbs, or more accurately, the lack thereof. The discovery that
many of these bulbs stored the user’s WiFi credentials in clear-text
was made all the worse as we found out
just how easy it was to get physical access
to the microcontrollers that power the latest generation of Internet connected bulbs.
Which is probably why we also saw an uptick of DIY smart lighting projects this year; if you can’t trust what’s on the market,
you might as well build it yourself
. The security of such devices is still very much up for debate, but we could say that for a lot of the projects that have graced these pages over the years.
Resin Gets Reasonable
SLA printing brings unique challenges.
Speaking of light, 2019 will also go down as
the year desktop SLA printers finally hit a hacker-friendly price
. These printers, which form three dimensional objects out of light-activated resins, are capable of resolutions far beyond what you can do with more traditional FDM machines. Of course top of the line models are still outside the average tinkerer’s budget, but a number of companies are currently offering entry level LCD-based resin printers in the exceptionally enticing $200 to $300 price range.
But buyer beware: even for the 3D printing aficionado, these machines can pose a challenge. Resin printers have their own special quirks and limitations which are wholly different from the quirks and limitations you’ve begrudgingly become accustomed to with FDM printing. As Donald Papp explained in a
personal look at his own experiences with a low-cost SLA printer
, prospective buyers need to understand what they’re getting into before they trip the light fantastic.
Peeking Inside Alexa
On paper, the hacking community should hate Amazon’s Alexa. A device that connects our homes (and now even cars) to a retail juggernaut would be the kind of thing that, under normal circumstances, we’d terminate with extreme prejudice. But Amazon managed to convince enough of us to install the things that adding Alexa compatibility to gadgets has become a fairly common hack.
But in 2019, we saw what may be the first signs of cracks forming in our tremulous relationship with Amazon’s family of high-tech hockey pucks. There was an incredible amount of interest in
the teardown Brian Dorey did on the third generation Echo Dot
, as well as his subsequent reverse engineering that
revealed the smart speaker had a hidden USB port
you could access with a DIY adapter.
We also saw a brilliant hardware add-on that ensures Amazon and Google’s devices
are only “assisting” you when you want them to
. As hackers, we not only want to know what makes these devices tick, but how to bend them to our will.
Of course, the perception of these gadgets as a security liability certainly wasn’t helped by the fact some madlads managed to
whisper sweet nothings to them with laser beams
.
Following the New Space Race
For the last couple of years, we’ve had front row seats to a brand new Space Race. But this time it’s not world superpowers seeing who can push higher and farther, this battle is being fought between billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson.
The cost of putting a payload into space is dropping like a stone, to the point that
satellite networks with more than 10,000 individual spacecraft
are financially viable.
NASA’s even trying to get back to the Moon
, though it’s still unclear if their lumbering SLS rocket can remain relevant in an era where private industry is making such huge technological leaps.
SpaceX has all but perfected
an engine design that was once considered nearly impossible to build
, and they’re
currently flying the most powerful rocket in the world
. Rocket Lab is putting satellites into orbit using a booster that
has an empty weight rivaling a pickup truck
. Several companies are working on spacecraft and boosters that can be 3D printed (either on or off world), and they’re
a lot closer to demonstrating workable prototypes than you might think
.
Make no mistake, space travel is still incredibly difficult and dizzyingly expensive. But there hasn’t been this much activity above our heads since the 1960s, and there’s no sign of things slowing down anytime soon. For those of us who’ve had a lifelong fascination with the final frontier,
it’s a very exciting time to be alive
.
Boeing’s Very Bad Year
Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a banner year for everyone. Case in point, aerospace giant Boeing. In the century-long history of the legendary company, 2019 will surely be remembered as one of the most publicly embarrassing.
Every 737 MAX aircraft in the world has been grounded since March after it was determined that
issues in the plane’s flight control systems were directly responsible
for the loss of 346 lives; the longest and costliest grounding of an airliner in United States history. It’s still unknown when the aircraft will be allowed to resume commercial service, but one has to wonder how much consumer confidence will be left when all is said and done. Especially since we now know
mechanical failures have been identified in other members of the 737 family
.
More recently, the company’s
CST-100 Starliner failed to reach the International Space Station
during its inaugural flight. It wasn’t a catastrophic failure, and it’s unclear how it will impact NASA’s overall plans to use the Starliner to start ferrying US astronauts to the Station next year, but it’s certainly a very public misstep made all the worse by how effortlessly SpaceX seems to be sailing through similar trials.
All the bad press certainly seemed to get the attention of the Boeing board members. On December 23rd, just one day after the troubled Starliner hobbled its way to an earlier than expected landing in New Mexico, CEO Dennis Muilenburg was fired. Merry Christmas.
The Road Ahead
So what’s in store for us in 2020 and beyond? For one thing, it’s hard to imagine that ARM single board computers are going to make many leaps and bounds in the next 12 months. Even considering all its faults, the Raspberry Pi 4 is still an impressively powerful computer at an incredible size and price; and
with the 600 MHz Teensy 4 dropping over the summer
, we’d say that microcontroller platforms are also starting to hit a performance plateau. That means hackers will increasingly be pushed towards parallel programming and FPGAs for their high-performance computing needs, so you might as well start learning it now.
We also expect big improvements in battery cost and availability. As if our mobile devices weren’t power hungry enough, every auto manufacturer in the world is scrambling to add electric vehicles to their product lineup. The economies of scale on 18650 cells will only get better, but if we’re really lucky, the demand for high capacity cells with fast recharge times will help spur the development of totally new battery chemistries.
The close of the year is not only the perfect time to reflect on all the incredible things we’ve seen, but also to thank you, the Constant Reader. Without our dedicated audience, we simply couldn’t do the things we do. Whether you’re
supplying us with a regular flow of tips
from your particular corner of the Internet, attending our live events and meetups, or simply checking in every day and reading what’s new, know that we don’t take it for granted.
There’s no shortage of information on the Internet, and whether you’ve just joined us this year or been around since the very beginning, everyone here at Hackaday is supremely grateful that you’ve decided to make us part of your life.
Now go out there and build something amazing for 2020. We’ll keep an eye out for it. | 31 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205856",
"author": "Jamie",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T18:17:51",
"content": "Actually 2020 is the last year of this decade, not the first of a new decade – people start counting at one not zero…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,373,643.375207 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/circuit-sculpture-teaches-binary-plays-pong/ | Circuit Sculpture Teaches Binary, Plays PONG | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"atmega328",
"Circuit Sculpture",
"dip switch"
] | We sure wish we’d had a teacher like [Danko Bertović]. He built this beautiful circuit sculpture to teach his students how to count in binary and convert it to decimal and hexadecimal. If you don’t already know binary,
you get to learn it on DIP switches and a dead-bugged ATMega328
in his latest
Volos Projects
video after the break. Lucky you!
Once the students have the hang of entering binary input on the switches, they can practice it on the four-banger calculator. This educational sculpture can also take text input and scroll it, but it takes a bit of work. You have to look up the ASCII value of each character, convert the decimal to binary, and program it in with the switches. There’s one more function on the menu — a one-player PONG game to help the students relax after a long day of flipping switches.
Funny enough, this project came to be after [Danko] came upon the DIP switch in his parts box and wasn’t quite sure what it was called. How great is it that he learned something about this part, and then used that knowledge to build this machine that uses the part to teach others? It’s surely the best fate that parts bin curiosities can hope for.
Don’t have the patience for circuit sculpture?
You can make a pretty nice binary calculator with a bit of paper and a lot of compressed air
.
Via [
r/arduino
] | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205589",
"author": "admin",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T15:20:54",
"content": "simple but nice work",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6205612",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T16:36:37",
"content": "Wow. Go... | 1,760,373,643.246971 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/diy-scalar-network-analyzer/ | DIY Scalar Network Analyzer | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Prize",
"ad",
"dds",
"Network analyzer",
"Scalar Network Analyzer",
"SNA"
] | [Steven Merrifield] built his own
Scalar Network Analyzer
and it’s a beauty! [Steve]’s SNA has a digital pinout matching a Raspberry Pi, but any GPIO could be used to operate the device and retrieve the data from the ADC. The design is based around a few tried and true chips from Analog Devices. He’s taken some care to design it to be nice and accurate which is why he’s limited it to 1kHz to 30Mhz. We think it’s quite a fetching board once the shielding is in place.
We’ve covered
network analyzers
and their usefulness before. If you want to know how, for example, a mystery capacitor from your junk bin will respond to certain frequencies, a network analyzer could tell you. We’ve even taken a stab at
hacking together our own
.
There is more documentation on his
website
as well as some additional example curves. The board is easily ordered from
OSHpark
and the source code is available for review.
The
Hackaday
Prize2019
is Sponsored by: | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205892",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T21:55:26",
"content": "What happened to the comment asking about the difference between VNA and SNA?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,373,643.286968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/a-car-that-runs-on-homemade-chemical-reactions/ | A Car That Runs On Homemade Chemical Reactions | Sharon Lin | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"chemical engineering",
"chemical reactions",
"university"
] | The race for chemical engineering is quite literally on. Every year, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AlChE) brings together hundreds of university students to face-off to design the fastest car using techniques they’ve learned from chemical engineering courses.
The
Chem-E-Car competition
races cars which are only powered by chemical reactions. The goal is to come up with an elegant solution – you can’t simply jettison matter out the back as the method of locomotion. In particular, the rules don’t allow the use of liquid or obnoxious odor discharge, commercial batteries, brakes, or electrical/mechanical timing devices. However, this doesn’t mean that electronics are absent from these designs. Many teams must gather data in order to design a control system to improve the performance of their car.
Students have to build a power system, stopping mechanism, circuitry, and mechanical assembly for the body of the car, all to fit in a size constraint not much bigger than a shoebox. The competition primarily judges the accuracy of the chemical reaction for stopping the car more so than speed or power. Given that the load the car must carry is typically unknown until the day of the competition, this is a significant challenge, allowing teams to find a way to design a flexible reaction that can accommodate a range of loads and distances.
For example, this
2015 entry from the Rice University team
(PDF) uses a fuel cell for locomotion and an iodine clock reaction as a timer for braking. The fuel cell powers an Arduino which monitors a light-dependent resistor. In between the LED and that LDR, the clock reaction turns opaque at a predictable time and triggers the motors to stop turning.
While many schools choose not to disclose their designs in order to gain a competitive edge, we applaud the teams who have shared the story of their builds. Kudos to the Rice team mentioned above, to the 2014 Rutger’s team whose
white paper outlines the construction of aluminum air batteries
worthy of Walter White, to the car from the Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia
powered by a thermoelectric generator
(PDF), the UC Berkeley team for outlining
numerous approaches
to developing their power system, and the two Ohio State team’s entries seen winning the regional competition in the video below.
If you were on a team that compete the the Chem-E-Car,
we want to hear about it
! | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205508",
"author": "seishinnokage",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T02:19:34",
"content": "Seems to me that whatever surface they were running over was not solid, but covered with some kind of plastic film, which probably eats some small amount of energy due to additional friction it caus... | 1,760,373,643.421152 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/finishing-fdm-prints-with-sls-resin/ | Finishing FDM Prints With SLS Resin | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"FDM",
"print finishing",
"sls",
"UV resin"
] | [Thomas Sanladerer] has a filament-based 3D printer and a resin one. Can the two types of raw material combine to make something better?
[Thomas] did some experiments
using some magnets to suspend the parts and a hot air soldering gun to heat things up.
The trick turns out to be cutting the resin with alcohol. Of course, you also need to use a UV light for curing.
The parts looked pretty good, although he did get different results depending on a few factors. To see how it would work on a practical part, he took a very large printed alien egg. The problem is, the egg won’t fit in the curing station. A few minutes with a heat sink, a drill press, and an LED module was all it took to build a handheld UV curing light.
The good news is
you don’t need a resin printer
to take advantage of the process — just the resin. He also points out that if you had parts which needed to maintain their dimensions because they mate with something else, you could easily mask the part to keep the resin away from those areas.
If this video (and the results it shows) has you interested, then you’ll love the in-depth account that [Donald Papp] wrote up last year about
his own attempts to smooth 3D printed parts with UV resin
. | 17 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205462",
"author": "Waterfowl",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T21:16:37",
"content": "So almost plating the print with resin cool.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6205463",
"author": "anszom",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T21:21:5... | 1,760,373,643.529937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/honoring-chuck-peddle-father-of-the-6502-and-the-chips-that-went-with-it/ | Honoring Chuck Peddle; Father Of The 6502 And The Chips That Went With It | Bil Herd | [
"Biography",
"Featured",
"History",
"Slider"
] | [
"6502",
"apple",
"atari",
"bil herd",
"c64",
"Chuck Peddle",
"commodore",
"motorola"
] | Chuck Peddle, the patriarch of the 6502 microprocessor, died recently. Most people don’t know the effect that he and his team of engineers had on their lives. We often take the world of microprocessor for granted as a commonplace component in computation device, yet there was a time when there were just processors, and they were the size of whole printed circuit boards.
Chuck had the wild idea while working at Motorola that they could shrink the expensive processor board down to an integrated circuit, a chip, and that it would cost much less, tens of dollars instead of ten thousand plus. To hear Chuck talk about it, he got a cease-and-desist letter from the part of Motorola that made their living selling $14,000 processor boards and to knock off all of the noise about a $25 alternative.
In Chuck’s mind this was permission to take his idea, and the engineering team, elsewhere. Chuck and his team started MOS Technologies in the 1970’s in Norristown PA, and re-purposed their work on the Motorola 6800 to become the MOS 6502. Lawsuits followed.
If you asked Chuck about his contribution he would dismiss the claim that he was the father of the KIM-1 single board microcomputer of the early era, “Look at the keyboard, you can tell that was done by someone on the calculator side of things” I believe I heard him say.
When asked about the 6502, his reply was that he was more proud of the peripherals, the Input/Output (I/O) chips that supported a microprocessor. These support chips made it possible for a user to interact with the microprocessor and his reply was something along the lines of the fact that you couldn’t have a terminal or cash register system unless there was a way to read the user’s keys and display something back.
Bruno Gandpa, Al Alcorn, Chuck Peddle, Leonard Tramiel, Bil Herd at the release of Growing the 8 Bit Generation. Photo courtesy of Robert Bernardo.
The story of the venerable 6502 is one of those that we will never know just how much influence it had on people’s computing experience, even today. You may have not played an Atari game yourself, but the chances are good that the architect/designer/programmer of your computer did. The designer of the game Minecraft started on a Commodore C128, a 6502 based system as was its famous predecessor the C64, and if you have ever seen a TV show about the 1980’s they inevitably show an Apple computer, based on the 6502.
Chuck and crew were gone by the time I got to Commodore, though I was officially hired by MOS first. We sat in their same chairs in their same offices and could feel their presence, I used to joke about a still warm cigar in the ashtray or spotting Peddle’s unicorn down the hall, a reference to the wizard-like aura we attributed to the early guys. I also used to call the early team the “Motorola 5”, in tribute to their “on the run” status from Motorola, though there may have actually been 6 of them.
In the video below, Jeri Ellsworth and Bil Herd ask Chuck Peddle if he is really an Evil Genius bent on world destruction.
I have seen the original 6502 schematic, it was as close to a religious experience as I have felt, it seemed to me that the lights dimmed and thought I could smell incense and hear chanting as the schematic was pulled from the lowest drawer… apparently early schematics were printed on parchment such was the condition of the old hand drawn schematic. My friend Benny, father of many a disk drive that you may never have heard of, brushed at something written lightly on one of the pad symbols and then laughed when he read what had been penciled in. What was written was in a sense a tribute to Chuck on a pin that he had lobbied for specifically to be included in the 6502, the Set Overflow (SO) pin, the pad had been renamed CPS for the Chuck Peddle Special pin.
To Chuck Peddle, one of the fathers of the modern processor AND the chips that made it usable: 1937-2019 | 77 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205437",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T19:01:26",
"content": "Technically it was the 6501 that launched things. It ran 6502 opcodes, but was plug in compatible with the 6800. So it could directly replace the 6800 hardware wish. The 6501 was n the original r... | 1,760,373,643.781151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/need-hackable-melodies-heres-the-tetris-theme-and-more/ | Need Hackable Melodies? Here’s The TETRIS Theme And More | Donald Papp | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"chiptune",
"melody",
"music",
"tone"
] | [Robson Couto] started to get interested in musical projects and as a side effect created
downloadable code with simple notation for a good variety of themes, songs, and melodies
. They are all for the Arduino and use only the built-in
tone()
function, but don’t let that distract you. If you look past that, you’ll see that each sketch is a melody that consists of single notes and durations; easily adapted to other purposes or simply used as-is. After all, [Robson] wanted the source of each tune to be easily understood, easily modified, and to have no external dependencies.
All that may sound a bit like MIDI, but MIDI has much more in common with hardware events than music notation because it includes (among other things) note starts and note ends as separate elements. Converting MIDI into a more usable format was a big part of a project that
fed Bach music to a neural network and got surprisingly good results
.
When doing music projects, sometimes having a recognizable melody represented very simply as notes and durations with only one note at a time can be an awfully handy resource, and you can
find them on GitHub
. There’s a brief video of the Tetris theme (actual name:
Korobeiniki
) being played after the break. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205472",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T21:48:32",
"content": ".muz files are in an odd format but human readable/editable as are the menu entries. DOS program but they should be easy to translate for raspi or arduino.http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/dos/RbbsInABoxV... | 1,760,373,643.565679 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/team-scores-big-points-with-pinball-final-project/ | Team Scores Big Points With Pinball Final Project | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"bruce land",
"ece4760",
"pic32",
"pinball"
] | For their final project in [Bruce Land]’s class on designing with PIC32 microcontrollers, [Sujith], [Julia] and [Andrew] wanted to do something fun. And what could be more fun than bending to the electromechanical siren song of the pinball machine?
This machine looks great
, and as you can see in the demo video after the break, it plays and sounds great, too. We particularly like the boomerang obstacle and the game state-driven LED strip. The more points you score, the brighter they go. We also like that this machine combines traditional scoring methods with a few really clever ones, like the boomerang target near the top and the scoring triggers made from copper tape.
The team started by designing the heart of any pinball machine, the flippers. Though we have seen car door lock actuators used in homebrew machines, the team went with traditional solenoids to drive them. Unfortunately the solenoids caused a lot of interference, but the team got around it with filter capacitors and aluminium foil Faraday cages around the wires.
If all this pinball talk has your circuits lit up,
why not try making your own machine
? | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205416",
"author": "gówno na zębach matki bożej",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T17:30:32",
"content": "PICs are least preferable choice because Microchip either forces you to buy their bloody expensive compiler or use a cheaper but incredibly shoddy CCS-C “compiler”.",
"parent_id": ... | 1,760,373,643.86093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/compact-3d-printed-hovercraft-is-loungeroom-floor-fun/ | Compact 3D Printed Hovercraft Is Loungeroom Floor Fun | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"hovercraft",
"radio control",
"rc"
] | Hovercraft come in all shapes and sizes. and while they’ve largely disappeared as a major commercial transit option, they remain popular in the hearts and minds of makers everywhere. [RCLifeOn’s] latest project concerns
a compact, indoor-sized hovercraft piloted via FPV,
and it looks to be brilliant fun.
The build consists of a 3D printed chassis, with a skirt cut out of a garbage bag and held on with press-fit clamps. Twin ducted fans are employed, one for propulsion, the other for levitation. A 5GHz FPV camera is nestled on top of the rear fan housing to provide a video feed for the pilot.
The craft was somewhat uncontrollable in initial testing. Tweaks to the weight distribution and the addition of a bigger rudder helped tame the rig. [RCLifeOn] also demonstrates a unique way of balancing damaged fan assemblies in the field; it’s a technique we’ll keep in the back of our mind for future use.
The trick to a good hovercraft build is light weight, big control surfaces, and a good skirt. You can even go off-book and use the Coanda effect,
if you’re so inclined.
Video after the break. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205683",
"author": "Gigawipf",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T22:41:27",
"content": "Little FPV hovercrafts are a lot of fun :)But cutting the skirt and balancing is some horrible work…I made 3d printed one in a simliar style too but with 1106 motors instead of ducted fans and a bit simp... | 1,760,373,643.821059 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/handheld-mqtt-remote-for-home-automation/ | Handheld MQTT Remote For Home Automation | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"home automation",
"home-assistant",
"mqtt",
"NodeMCU",
"remote"
] | If you’re working on a home automation project, you’re probably knee-deep into MQTT by now. If not, you should be. The lightweight messaging protocol is an ideal choice for getting your “Things” on the Internet, and controlling them all can be done easily through a simple web interface or an application on your mobile device. Or if you’re [serverframework],
you make yourself a handsome little all-in-one MQTT remote
.
The hardware here is pretty simple; inside there’s just a NodeMCU ESP8266 development board, some buttons, an RGB LED to give feedback, and a 3.7v 1200mAh LiPo battery with associated charging module. Everything is held inside a nice little wooden box that looks like it would fit right in with the living room decor. We’d like to see some kind of a cover over the exposed perfboard the circuit is assembled on, but that’s arguably a personal preference kind of thing.
Most of the magic in this project is actually happening on the software side. Not only does the provided source code handle all the MQTT communications with Home Assistant, but it provides a clever user interface that allows [serverframework] to perform 25 functions with just five buttons. No, you aren’t seeing things. There are actually six buttons on the device, but one of them is a dedicated “power” button that wakes the remote out of deep sleep.
If you’d like to learn more about getting this protocol working for you, our resident MQTT guru [Elliot Williams] has plenty of thoughts on the subject. From
his talk at the 2017 Hackaday Supercon
to
his home automation tutorial series
, there’s plenty of information to get you started. | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205708",
"author": "Arturo Araya",
"timestamp": "2019-12-27T01:31:18",
"content": "MQTT is so 2017… Just use Esphome with home assistant and you’re done…. ;) Seriously though, this is awesome work.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,373,643.992361 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/ask-hackaday-drone-swarms-replace-fireworks-where-are-the-hackers/ | Ask Hackaday: Drone Swarms Replace Fireworks; Where Are The Hackers? | Al Williams | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"drone hacks",
"Rants"
] | [
"choreography",
"drone",
"rants",
"uav"
] | Your mom always warned you that those fireworks could put an eye out. However, the hottest new thing in fireworks displays is not pyrotechnic at all. Instead, a swarm of coordinated drones take to the sky with different lighting effects. This makes some pretty amazing shows possible, granting full control of direction, color, and luminosity of each light source in a mid-air display. It also has the side benefit of being safer — could this be the beginning of the end for fireworks accident videos blazing their way across social media platforms?
For an idea of what’s possible with drone swarm displays, check out the
amazing pictures found on this site
(
machine translation
) that show off the 3D effects quite well. Note that although it appears the camera is moving during many of these, the swam itself could be rotated relative to a stationary viewer for a similar effect.
What I couldn’t find was much going on here in the hobby space. Granted, in the United States, restrictive drone laws might hamper your ability to do things like this. But it seems that in a purely technical terms this wouldn’t be super hard to do — at least for simple designs. Besides, there must be some way to do this in US airspace since
drone performances
have been at the Super Bowl, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Folsom, CA.
So if the regulations were sorted, what would it take to build a swarm of your own performing drones?
The Challenge of Air Traffic Control
The hardest part would be keeping the aircraft in tight formation. Depending on how tight you wanted it, GPS might be sufficient, with the option of springing for differential GPS or some other higher resolution solution. The more difficult bit is avoiding mid-air collisions. Drones take a bit of real estate to correct from unexpected velocity change and even a small bump between two could cascade like three-dimensional dominoes through the swarm. You’d need to make sure none of them were crossing the same volume of space at the same time with enough margin of error to account for position uncertainty, wind gusts, and so forth.
According to an article from earlier in the year,
many companies build their own hardware and software
, some specializing in outdoor GPS-based shows while other focus on indoor presentations. That article mentions the distance between drones can be between 1.5 and 3 meters. To help with safety concerns, some companies use tiny drones which also makes a lot of sense in terms of maneuverability.
I’ve have seen some
control software
for setting up shows. It supports many different kinds of drones, including the relatively cheap Spark. There is a
GitHub
with some examples of using it — it is apparently using Blender for the animation parts. Of course, there are also
competitors
.
So Where is the Open Source?
I’m frankly surprised at the lack of open source or DIY projects. The most obvious limitation would be cost, as even a small display will call for dozens of drones, which need to be built, stored, transported, and tested. But considering
some of the huge installations build for hacker camps
it’s not outside of the realm of possibility. The widespread hunger for consumer drones means a wide set of ready-made drones are both available and affordable and
much has been done to reverse engineer firmware on the most ubiquitous models
.
I think almost everything you need on the software side is already out there in some form. Obviously, Blender can do the animation. There are already Open Source autopilots. There was some work on something called
OpenDroneControl
, but it hasn’t been active for awhile.
So am I just missing it? Are there some open source tools that are at least marginally easy to use? Or is this a ripe ground for some hacking projects? Tell us in the comments if you’ve done any swarming and how you did it. Or, if you know of any tools we should be aware of, chime in with that, too. | 27 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205648",
"author": "Erik",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T19:21:29",
"content": "Drones as a replacement for firework is like watching firework on TV, it is no replacement but a totally different thing.I like smoke, explosions you can feel in your stomach and all the sounds involved.(And... | 1,760,373,644.048132 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/open-source-analytical-balance-pits-gravity-against-electromagnetism/ | Open-Source Analytical Balance Pits Gravity Against Electromagnetism | Jenny List | [
"Science"
] | [
"analytical balance",
"balance",
"instrument"
] | As the open-source movement has brought its influence to more and more fields, we’ve seen an astonishing variety of things once only available at significant expense become accessible to anyone with access to the tools required to create them. One such arena is that of scientific instrumentation, and though we have seen many interesting developments there has been one which has so far evaded us. An analytical balance, a very specialised weighing machine designed to measure the tiniest of masses, remains available only as a new unit costing a fortune, or as a second-hand one with uncertain history and possible contamination. Fortunately, friend of Hackaday [Zach Fredin] is on the case, and as part of one of his MIT courses he chose to
create an open-source analytical balance
.
The write-up is interspersed with his course notes as he learns a series of fabrication techniques, but in addition to the milled Delrin finished model he treats us to
his prototype
and gives us an explanation of how these instruments work. It’s a technique that’s rather different to a traditional weighing machine: instead of measuring deformation of a spring in some way it produces a force from an electromagnet to oppose that exerted by gravity on the mass to be measured, and quantifies how much electrical energy is required to do that. The mechanism incorporates feedback through a vane and an optical sensor, which he admits he’s not yet had time to set up properly.
It’s an interesting project not least because it exposes some of the inner workings of an analytical balance, and we look forward to his completing it. If this whet your appetite for the topic it’s worth also looking at [Ben Krasnow’s] video of
a balance made using a moving coil meter
for an explanation of the technique. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205617",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T16:55:19",
"content": "Wow, just wow!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6205621",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T17:07:09",
"content": "“it produces a for... | 1,760,373,644.190015 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/new-part-day-sonoff-usb-smart-adaptor-taps-a-new-wifi-chip/ | New Part Day: Sonoff USB Smart Adaptor Taps A New WiFi Chip | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"Microcontrollers",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [
"CKW04",
"New Part Day",
"QFN-48L",
"sonoff",
"USB Power"
] | For decades, we dreamt of a future where all of our electronics used a standardized power connector. Most of us probably didn’t expect that USB would ultimately fill that role, but we’ll take what we can get if it means a future without getting a new wall wart for every piece of tech we buy. From soldering irons to laptops, the number of things you can power with a lowly USB cable these days is pretty incredible.
Which makes it all the more surprising it took so long for somebody to come up with a way to toggle USB devices off and on over the network. The Sonoff “USB Smart Adaptor”,
which the company says will start shipping before the end of the year
, is the logical evolution of their exceptionally popular mains voltage smart switches. The Smart Adapter is designed to go between the device and its existing power supply, allowing the user to drag any USB powered device kicking and screaming into their existing smart home setup. All for the princely sum of $6.50 USD.
In the video after the break, Sonoff gives a few potential uses of the Smart Adapter: from controlling a string of LEDs to limiting how long a smartphone is allowed to charge for. But really, there’s a nearly limitless number of devices which could be easily and cheaply integrated into your home automation routines thanks to this gadget.
On the other end of the spectrum, those who are looking to keep a tighter control on the ears and eyes that are active in their home could use the Smart Adapter to make sure their Google and Amazon
listening devices
assistants are only powered up during certain hours of the day.
Unfortunately, there’s a catch. Sonoff smart switches are best known, at least among the type of folks who read Hackaday, for the fact that they’re based on the eminently hackable ESP8266 microcontroller. Given the size of this product and its intended use, it would seem logical enough to assume this device also utilizes the insanely popular chip. But according to a Sonoff representative, the USB Smart Adapter won’t be using an ESP at all; leaving its hackability an open question until people can actually get their hands on them and start poking around.
A Challenger Appears
So if there’s not an ESP heart beating at the core of this device, what is there? Sonoff says the chip is called the CKW04, which is apparently so new that there’s very little information available about it online. The best source of information we have right now is
a cache of Chinese technical documents posted to GitHub
by the manufacturer, CoolKit.
The tiny QFN-48L chip measures just 6 x 6 mm, and provides an all-in-one WiFi solution just like the ESP8266. According to the documentation, it also seems to have some sort of integrated timer functionality to trigger a dedicated GPIO pin on either a delay or a regular interval.
Whatever other advancements they made with their chip, it looks like the fine folks at CoolKit haven’t managed to improve on the ESP’s high energy consumption, though. The documents list a maximum current of 345 mA at 3.3 V, with an average energy consumption during normal operation of approximately 80 mA.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there’s any information about the software side of things, such as what the toolchain would look like to get your own firmware on the CKW04. Nor does it appear that any of the documents actually lists the chip’s specifications. Beyond the quick mention that pins 10 and 11 can be used to flash a new firmware, you wouldn’t even know the thing is programmable.
There’s plenty of hackers out there who want
to write (or at least modify) the firmware that runs on their devices
, and the ease with which you could do that on Sonoff’s ESP8266-based products was a definite selling point. With a new and only lightly documented chip under the hood of the USB Smart Adapter, it looks like the Sonoff hacking community is going to have to play catch up.
But who knows? The success of the ESP8266,
originally intended as little more than a WiFi to serial bridge
, took everyone by surprise. Perhaps by this time next year, the CKW04 will be the hot new MCU that everyone’s hacking on. | 49 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205592",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T15:25:07",
"content": "How likely is it that this is a scratch build? Hopefully it uses a toolchain in common with something wr’ve already got.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,373,644.136942 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/custom-control-panels-with-photogrammetry/ | Custom Control Panels With Photogrammetry | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"3D printed parts",
"3d scanning",
"control panel",
"Photogrammetry"
] | One of the best applications for desktop 3D printing is the creation of one-off bespoke components. Most of the time a halfway decent pair of calipers and some patience is all it takes to model up whatever part you’re after, but occasionally things get complex enough that you might need a little help. If you ever find yourself in such a situation, salvation might be just a few marker scribbles away.
As [Mangy_Dog] explains in a recent video
, he wanted to model a control panel for a laser cutter he’s been working on, but thought the shapes involved were a bit more than he wanted to figure out manually. So he decided to give photogrammetry a try. For the uninitiated, this process involves taking as many high-resolution images as possible of a given object from multiple angles, and letting the computer stitch that into a three dimensional model. He reasoned that if he had a 3D model of the laser’s existing front panel, it would be easy enough to 3D print some replacement parts for it.
That would be a neat enough trick on its own, but what we especially liked about this video was the tip that [Mangy_Dog] passed along about increasing visual complexity to improve the final results. Basically, the software is looking for identifiable surface details to piece together, so you can make things a bit easier for it by taking a few different colored markers and drawing all over the surface like a toddler. It might look crazy, but all those lines give the software some anchor points that help it sort out the nuances of the shape.
Unfortunately the markers ended up being a little more permanent than [Mangy_Dog] had hoped, and he eventually had to use acetone to get the stains off. Certainly something to keep in mind. But in the end, the 3D model generated was accurate enough that (after a bit of scaling) he was able to design a new panel that pops right on as if it was a factory component.
Hackaday readers may recall that when we last heard from [Mangy_Dog] he was putting the finishing touches on
his incredible “Playdog Blackbone” handheld gaming system
, which itself is a triumph of mating 3D printed components with existing hardware. | 22 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205564",
"author": "James Purcell",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T13:00:52",
"content": "You know, I actually likes the red scribble look of the surround :0",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6205571",
"author": "Ostracus",
"ti... | 1,760,373,644.252226 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/26/adding-usb-c-to-the-ts100-but-not-how-you-think/ | Adding USB-C To The TS100, But Not How You Think | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"soldering iron",
"ts100",
"USB C",
"USB Power Delivery",
"USB-PD"
] | USB-C has its special Power Delivery standard, and is capable of delivering plenty of juice to attached hardware. This has led many to modify their TS-100 soldering irons to accept the connector. [Jana Marie] is the latest,
though she’s taken rather a different tack than you might expect.
[Jana] didn’t want to modify the original hardware or hack in an adapter. Instead, she struck out on her own, developing an entire replacement PCB for the TS-100 iron. The firmware is rough and ready, and minimal work has been done on the GUI and temperature regulation. However, reports are that functionality is good, and [Jana]’s demonstration shows it handling a proper desoldering task with ease.
Files are on Github
for those that wish to spin their own. The PCB is designed to snap neatly inside the original case for a nice fit and finish. Power is plentiful too, as the hardware supports USB Power Delivery 2.0, which is capable of running at up to 100 W. On the other hand, the stock TS-80 iron, which natively supports USB-C, only works with Quick Charge 3.0, and thus is limited to a comparatively meager 36 W.
We’ve seen plenty of TS-100 hacks over 2019.
Some have removed the standard barrel jack and replaced it with a USB-PD board.
Meanwhile,
others have created adapters that plug in to the back of the iron.
However, [Jana] is dictating her own terms by recreating the entire PCB. Sometimes it pays to go your own way!
[Thanks to elad for the tip!] | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205546",
"author": "Jonas",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T09:38:43",
"content": "Does the new board solve the earthing problem ? Nowaday a earth screw is present and a cable has to be joined to make a connection to earth when using a laptop adapter (with floating earth) to prevent damag... | 1,760,373,644.298831 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/arduino-polygraph-shows-how-its-done/ | Arduino Polygraph Shows How It’s Done | Donald Papp | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"biometrics",
"breath sensor",
"gsr",
"polygraph",
"pulse sensor",
"python",
"reference design"
] | Sometimes, a project comes along that makes a good reference design for anyone doing similar work. In this particular case, it’s
a DIY USB polygraph-like machine by [Juangg]
using an Arduino and sensors on the hardware side, and a Python front end for data visualization. It’s even complete with 3D printed enclosure and sensor elements.
[Juangg] designed it to use three sensors: a pulse sensor, a breath sensor, and one to measure Galvanic Skin Response (GSR). The pulse sensor uses a piezo element pressed against a fingertip to detect changes in pressure resulting from blood flow. It can be picky about placement, but finding sweet spot can
yield remarkably good readings
. The breath sensor works on a similar principle but uses a 3D printed fixture to hold the sensor between a strap and the subject’s chest, so that breathing in and out can be detected. The GSR sensor is a voltage divider used to measure small changes in skin conductivity. How well does it all work? That depends on what one is looking to get out of it, but the documentation and design files are available from the
project page
and
the GitHub repository
if anyone wants a reference for similar work.
The polygraph may have a mixed reputation, but it makes a good project that demonstrates just how messy biometrics can be from an engineering perspective. And in case you missed it, here’s a reminder that
Wonder Woman and the polygraph have much more in common than you might realize
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205388",
"author": "C",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T15:01:39",
"content": "So authentic! Just like a real one it can’t tell if you’re lying! :DI can say that because I’ve taken more than twenty actual polygraphs lol",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,644.345023 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/25/laser-welding-with-a-tattoo-removal-gun/ | Laser Welding With A Tattoo Removal Gun | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"laser welding",
"tattoo",
"tattoo removal"
] | Dating as far back as the early 1960’s, researchers were
zapping tattoo inks with laser light
was an effective way to remove the markings from human skin. At the time it was prohibitively expensive. But the desire to have an undo-button for badge choices is strong, and thus the tattoo removal gun was born.
These days you can pick up one of these zappy, burn-y wonders for far less than a flagship cellphone put their high-power-output to alternative use. [Andrew] recently
discovered that these devices can be readily repurposed into a laser welding tool
with just a bit of work under the hood.
He first came across the technology via videos from [styropyro],
whose work we’ve featured before.
The tattoo removal gun features a YAG laser, which is pulsed to create a high power density. In initial testing, the pulses were too short and of too high intensity to effectively weld with; instead, the pulses simply cratered the metal.
After delving in further, [Andrew] discovered that by removing the Q-switch optical component, the pulses from the laser could be lengthened. This reduces the power density, and allows the tool to weld various materials even on its lower power settings. Success was found welding steel, titanium, and other materials, though attempts to weld copper and silver faced little success. Test pieces included razor blades and small screws, which could easily be welded with the tool. Results of the razor blade welding is spectacular, with a high-quality welding bead achieved by taping the laser to a CNC mill for precise movement.
It could prove to be a useful tool for those experimenting with complex projects involving bonding metals at very fine scales. If you’re pursuing something exotic yourself,
we want to hear about it
! | 49 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205371",
"author": "Leigh",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T10:53:16",
"content": "This is soooooo dangerous it’s unbelievable. You need the correct laser safe glasses that can protect your eyes and then the correct protective gloves and clothing as the laser energy from direct exposure a... | 1,760,373,644.436535 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/color-coded-clock-runs-on-roman-numerals/ | Color Coded Clock Runs On Roman Numerals | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"LED clock",
"roman numerals"
] | Roman numerals are, by modern standards, a bit unusual. By virtue of using designations for both 5 and 10, and not scaling well to higher numbers, they’ve fallen out of favor outside of some specific uses. One of those is in time keeping, in which many clocks use the classical numerals instead of the more popular Arabic replacements. [Nicola]’s clock does too,
albeit in a rather unusual way.
A diagram of the clock displaying the times 18:40 and 23:04.
The build begins with a faux-neon palm tree LED decoration, which is gutted and refitted with a WS2812B LED strip, run by an Arduino Nano. An RTC is used to keep accurate time, and the time is set by running a one-off program to initialise the clock.
To tell the time, the LEDs are color coded. However, instead of using a binary representation that many can find unfamiliar, colors are chosen instead to correspond to Roman numerals. Blue, green, red and yellow are chosen to represent 1, 5, 10, and 50, or I, V, X, and L respectively.
The Github has more details for the curious
. The clock uses 24 hour time, and we think we’ve figured out how the display works – with hours on the left and minutes on the right.
It’s fun to see an LED clock that takes a different bent on the usual themes. We’ve seen plenty over the years, from the
byte clock
to
this stunning blinkenlights build.
If you’ve cooked up your own special timepiece,
be sure to let us know. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205424",
"author": "O",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T18:00:03",
"content": "That’s fucking weird, but a cool way to tell time, especially if you don’t want to allocate the space for a clock, or if you can’t find one that matches your decor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,644.59525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/luaradio-gives-insight-into-sdr/ | LuaRadio Gives Insight Into SDR | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"GnuRadio",
"grc",
"lua",
"LuaRadio",
"sdr"
] | In theory, you shouldn’t need any help to develop a software-defined radio (SDR) application. But in real life you really don’t want to roll your own code every time to read the IQ samples, perform various transformations on them, and then drive audio output. At worst, you’ll use some libraries (perhaps GNU Radio) but usually, you’ll use some higher-level construct such as GNU Radio Companion (GRC). GRC is a bit heavyweight, though, so if you’ve found it daunting before, you might check out some of the material on the
LuaRadio website
.
We’ve looked at LuaRadio several years ago, but it has undergone a lot of changes since then and has some excellent documentation. Like Lua itself, LuaRadio emphasizes fast scripting. It
supports quite a few pieces of common hardware
and nearly anything that feeds data through a soundcard.
Why not use GNU Radio? LuaRadio has an
official answer
. However, LuaRadio doesn’t have a GUI — at least, not yet. Maybe a Hackaday reader will fix that. It also isn’t as mature as GNU Radio, but it does have a lot of positive features such as a small footprint, easy embedding, and a simple way to add additional features.
If you have an RTL-SDR, there are a number of examples:
WBFM Broadcast Mono and Stereo Receivers
NBFM Receiver
AX.25 Packet Radio Receiver
POCSAG Receiver
RDS Receiver
AM Receiver (envelope and synchronous)
SSB Receiver
The project
GitHub
page shows recent updates to version 0.6.0. Just as an example, the flowgraph at the top of this post looks like this in Lua code:
local radio = require('radio')
radio.CompositeBlock():connect(
radio.RtlSdrSource(88.5e6 - 250e3, 1102500), -- RTL-SDR source, offset-tuned to 88.5MHz-250kHz
radio.TunerBlock(-250e3, 200e3, 5), -- Translate -250 kHz, filter 200 kHz, decimate by 5
radio.FrequencyDiscriminatorBlock(1.25), -- Frequency demodulate with 1.25 modulation index
radio.LowpassFilterBlock(128, 15e3), -- Low-pass filter 15 kHz for L+R audio
radio.FMDeemphasisFilterBlock(75e-6), -- FM de-emphasis filter with 75 uS time constant
radio.DownsamplerBlock(5), -- Downsample by 5
radio.PulseAudioSink(1) -- Play to system audio with PulseAudio
):run()
Not too hard, even without too much documentation. If you’d rather tackle GRC, we have
a tutorial for that
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205504",
"author": "Henry",
"timestamp": "2019-12-26T02:00:56",
"content": "Sad, no comments. Lua is such a great language. Messed around with previous version on a pi many months back. Had more dependencies than I thought and was sort of burnt out by the time I got it running. Exc... | 1,760,373,644.632566 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/minimalist-mate-maker-keeps-you-caffeinated/ | Minimalist Mate Maker Keeps You Caffeinated | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"mate",
"tea",
"ultrasonic distance sensor",
"yerba mate"
] | Americans love their coffee. The Brits adore their tea. In South America, the number one way to get through the day is with yerba mate, a tea made from the yerba plant. It is typically shared in a social setting, with one person preparing the beverage for everyone to enjoy. Although caffeine certainly deserves a ceremony, it never needs one. Hit the streets and you’ll see people everywhere with a thermos under one arm, keeping water hot and ready to refill the cup of mate in their hand.
The Stanley vacuum thermos is quite a popular choice for drinkers on the go, but the Argentinian government recently placed new restrictions foreign imports. [Roni Bandini] decided to build
a minimum viable mate machine
so he always has perfectly hot water on tap.
An Arduino Nano heats the water and displays the rising temperature on an LCD screen. When the temperature is just right, the display asks for your cup. An ultrasonic sensor detects the cup and dispenses a certain amount of water determined in the sketch. Yerba leaves can be used a few times before losing their flavor, so the machine keeps track and lets him know when it’s time to replace them. You can sip on a brief demo after the break.
Let’s say you don’t have perfectly-prepared mate, and it always comes out too hot. That’s better than too cold, but still not ideal.
Why not make a temperature-sensing coaster that alerts you when it has cooled to perfection
? | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205319",
"author": "Federico H",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T01:03:12",
"content": "As a mate drinker, this is awesome! Nice project!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6205337",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2019-12-25T0... | 1,760,373,644.667691 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/now-even-your-business-card-can-run-linux/ | Now Even Your Business Card Can Run Linux | Tom Nardi | [
"hardware",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"Allwinner",
"business card",
"Embedded Linux",
"F1C100s",
"linux",
"micropython",
"pcb business card"
] | It takes a lot of work to get a functional PCB business card that’s thin, cheap, and robust enough to be practical. If you can even blink a few LEDs on the thing and still hand them out with a straight face, you’ve done pretty well for yourself. So you can imagine our surprise when [George Hilliard] wrote in to tell us about his
$3 business card computer that boots into a functioning Linux environment
. If this were a bit closer to April, we might have figured it was just a joke…
Of course it helps that, as an embedded systems engineer, [George] literally does this kind of thing for a living. Which isn’t to say it was
easy
, but at least he keeps close enough tabs on the industry to find a suitable ARM solution at a price that makes sense, namely the Allwinner F1C100s. This diminutive chip offers both RAM and CPU in a single package, which greatly simplifies the overall design and construction of the card.
With a root filesystem that weighs in at just 2.4 MB, the environment on the card is minimal to say the least. There’s no networking, limited I/O, and forget about running any heavy software. But it does boot in about six seconds, and [George] managed to pack in a MicroPython interpreter and a copy of the classic Unix dungeon crawler
rogue
.
Oh yeah, and it also has his resume and some samples of his photography onboard. It is, after all, a business card. All the user has to do is plug it into the USB port of their computer and wait for the virtual serial port to pop up that will let them log into the system running on the card. It also shows up as a USB Mass Storage device for recipients who might not be quite as adept at the command line.
In addition to the high-level documentation for this project,
[George] has also prepared a deeper write-up
that goes into more technical detail for anyone who might be looking to follow in his footsteps. Thanks to all of the source code that he’s made available, it should be a lot easier for the next person to get their own disposable pocket computer up and running.
We’ve seen all manner
of
electronic business cards
over the years, but never anything quite like this. Which, of course, is quite the point. If you’re ever given a business card that doubles as a computer running a full-fledged operating system on it, you aren’t likely to forget it anytime soon. | 50 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205267",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T21:07:13",
"content": "E-Ink would have helped right where the text is.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205276",
"author": "David Bordowitz",
"timestamp... | 1,760,373,644.749981 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/tiny-tree-is-a-thermometer-for-christmas-fever/ | Tiny Tree Is A Thermometer For Christmas Fever | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"christmas tree",
"google trends",
"LED christmas tree",
"neopixel",
"pytrends",
"raspberry pi"
] | Tired of the usual methods for animating all those RGB LEDS for your holiday display?
How about using trendiness in a non-trendy way
?
[8BitsAndAByte] caved in to increasing holiday madness and bought the cutest little Christmas tree. A special tree deserves special decorations, so they packed it with NeoPixels that turn from red to green and back again one by one. Here’s where the trendiness comes in: the speed at which they change is determined by the popularity of “Christmas” as a search term.
The NeoPixels are controlled by a Raspberry Pi 3B+ that uses PyTrends to grab a value from Google Trends once an hour. The service returns a value between 0 to 100, where 100 means the search term is extremely popular, and 0 means it’s probably the dead of January. Each NeoPixel is wired to the underside of a translucent printed gift box that does a great job of diffusing the light.
You know how Christmas trees have a tendency to stick around well into the new year? This one might last even longer than usual, thanks to the bonus party mode. Press the arcade button on the box cleverly disguised as a present, and the lights change from red to green and back at warp speed while the speaker inside blasts the party anthem of your choice. Be sure to check out the demo/build video waiting for you
under
after the break.
How could this little tree get any more special? Well,
a rotating platform
couldn’t hurt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdYQyiK1drk | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,373,644.789262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/possible-fifth-force-of-nature-found/ | Possible Fifth Force Of Nature Found | Kristina Panos | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"electromagnetism",
"forces of nature",
"gravity",
"megaelectronvolt",
"strong force",
"weak force",
"X17"
] | Over the years, humans have come up with four forces that can be used to describe every single interaction in the physical world. They are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force that causes particle decay, and the strong nuclear force that binds quarks into atoms. Together, these have become the standard model of particle physics. But the existence of dark matter makes this model seem incomplete. Surely there must be another force (or forces) that explain both its existence and the reason for its darkness.
Image via
Business Insider
Hungarian scientists from the Atomki Nuclear Research Institute led by Professor Attila Krasznahorkay
believe they have found evidence of a fifth force of nature
. While monitoring an excited helium atom’s decay, they observed it emitting light, which is not unusual. What is unusual is that the particles split at a precise angle of 115 degrees, as though they were knocked off course by an invisible force.
The scientists dubbed this particle X17, because they calculated its mass at 17 megaelectronvolts (MeV). One electron Volt describes the kinetic energy gained by a single electron as it moves from zero volts to a potential of one volt, and so a megaelectronvolt is equal to the energy gained when an electron moves from zero volts to one million volts.
What Are Those First Four, Again?
Let’s start with the easy one, gravity. It gives objects weight, and keeps things more or less glued in place on Earth. Though gravity is a relatively weak force, it dominates on a large scale and holds entire galaxies together. Gravity helps us work
and
have fun. Without gravity, there would be no water towers, hydroelectric power plants, or roller coasters.
Lightning via
Wikimedia Commons
The electromagnetic force is a two-headed beast that dominates at the human scale. Almost everything we are and do is underpinned by this force that surrounds us like an ethereal soup. Electricity and magnetism are considered a dual force because they work on the same principle — that opposite forces attract and like forces repel.
This force holds atoms together and makes electronics possible. It’s also responsible for visible light itself. Each fundamental force has a carrier particle, and for electromagnetism, that particle is the photon. What we think of as visible light is the result of photons carrying electrostatic force between electrons and protons.
The weak and strong nuclear forces aren’t as easy to grasp because they operate at the subatomic level. The weak nuclear force is responsible for beta decay, where a neutron can turn into a proton plus an electron and anti-neutrino, which is one type of radioactive decay. Weak interactions explain how particles can change by changing the quarks inside them.
The strong nuclear force is the strongest force in nature, but it only dominates at the atomic scale. Imagine a nucleus with multiple protons. All those protons are positively charged, so why don’t they repel each other and rip the nucleus apart? The strong nuclear force is about 130x stronger than the electromagnetic force, so when protons are close enough together, it will dominate. The strong nuclear force holds both the nucleus together as well as the nucleons themselves.
The Force of Change
Suspicion of a fifth force has been around for a while. Atomki researchers observed a similar effect in 2015 when they studied the light emitted during the decay of a beryllium-8 isotope. As it decayed, the constituent electrons and positrons consistently repelled each other at another strange angle — exactly 140 degrees. They dubbed it a “protophobic” force, as in a force that’s afraid of protons. Labs around the world made repeated attempts to prove the discovery a fluke or a mistake, but they all produced the same results as Atomki.
Professor Attila Krasznahorkay and his team
published their observations in late October
, though the paper has yet to be peer-reviewed. Now, the plan at Atomki is to observe other atoms’ decay. If they can find a third atom that exhibits this strange behavior, we may have to take the standard model back to the drawing board to accommodate this development.
So what happens if science concludes that the X17 particle is evidence of a fifth force of nature? We don’t really know for sure. It might offer clues into dark matter, and it might bring us closer to a unified field theory. We’re at the edge of known science here, so feel free to speculate wildly in the comments.
Main image via
Index | 47 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205221",
"author": "Macsboost",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T18:13:21",
"content": "Space force!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205237",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T18:53:42",
"content... | 1,760,373,645.216672 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/addressable-led-strings-in-your-usb/ | Addressable LED Strings In Your USB | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"neopixel",
"ws2812",
"ws2812b"
] | WS2812Bs, or NeoPixels, or whatever else you call them brought full-color LEDs to maker projects a meter at a time in recent years. Hooked up to a microcontroller, they make creating vibrant, full-color glowables a cinch. They won’t work on their own though, and a some point you want to ditch the dev board and let the blinking stand on its own two feet.
Enter the USB LED Otter
.
This small square of PCB lets you plug an LED strip directly into a USB port. The PCB itself has four traces on the back that mate with any USB port, and three pads for soldering the strip’s ground, 5 V line, and data. An STM32F072 microcontroller serves as the brains of the operation, packing plenty of horsepower and full compatibility with USB 2.0.
Code is flashed to the chip over USB using Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU) and once written the strip can then be driven by jamming the string into a suitably powerful USB wall charger. The woman behind the build, [Jana Marie], has mentioned that
Open Pixel Control could be implemented
but that may be an exercise left to the reader.
It’s a useful little tool, and one that promises to do even more with a little more development. Whipping up a few boards should be an easy task for anyone with a reflow oven and a free weekend. Oh, and if you’re tired of the WS2812?
There’s other addressable LEDs out there, too! | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205203",
"author": "marcus",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T16:44:45",
"content": "interesting..but..just interesting ..nothing more than that",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205296",
"author": "¯\\_(ツ)_/¯",
"times... | 1,760,373,644.828955 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/amd-introduces-new-ryzen-mini-pcs-to-challenge-intel/ | AMD Introduces New Ryzen Mini PCs To Challenge Intel | Tom Nardi | [
"computer hacks",
"Featured",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"amd",
"edge computing",
"Intel NUC",
"mini pc",
"NUC",
"Ryzen",
"Small Form Factor"
] | For the majority of hacker and maker projects, the miniature computer of choice these last few years has been the Raspberry Pi. While the availability issues that seem to plague each new iteration of these extremely popular Single Board Computers (SBCs) can be annoying, they’ve otherwise proven to be an easy and economical way to perform relatively lightweight computational tasks. Depending on who you ask, the Pi 4 is even
powerful enough for day-to-day desktop computing
. Not bad for a device that consistently comes in under a $50 USD price point.
Intel NUC compared to the Raspberry Pi
But we all know there are things that the Pi isn’t particularly well suited to. If your project needs a lot of computing power, or you’ve got some software that needs to run on an x86 processor, then you’re going to want to look elsewhere. One of the best options for such Raspberry Pi graduates has been the Intel Next Unit of Computing (NUC).
NUCs have the advantage of being “real” computers, with upgradable components and desktop-class processors. Naturally this means they’re a bit larger than the Raspberry Pi, but not so much as to be impractical. If you’re working on a large rover for example, the size and weight difference between the two will be negligible. The same could be said for small form-factor cluster projects; ten NUCs won’t take a whole lot more space than the same number of Pis.
Unfortunately, where the Intel NUCs have absolutely
nothing
on the Raspberry Pi is price: these miniature computers start around $250, and depending on options, can sail past the $1,000 mark. Part of this sharp increase in price is naturally the vastly improved hardware, but we also can’t ignore that the lack of any strong competition in this segment hasn’t given Intel much incentive to cut costs, either. When you’re the only game in town, you can charge what you want.
But that’s about to change.
In a recent press release, AMD announced an “open ecosystem”
that would enable manufacturers to build small form-factor computers using an embedded version of the company’s Ryzen processor. According to Rajneesh Gaur, General Manager of AMD’s Embedded Solutions division, the company felt the time was right to make a bigger push outside of their traditional server and desktop markets:
The demand for high performance computing isn’t limited to servers or desktop PCs. Embedded customers want access to small form factor PCs that can support open software standards, demanding workloads at the edge, and even display 4K content, all with embedded processors that have a planned availability of 10 years.
Power at the Edge
There are a number of current and upcoming Ryzen-based devices, which AMD apparently wants to call “Mini PCs” to distance themselves from the NUC terminology, and the common goal between them all is simple: to pack as much computing power as possible into a small and rugged case. Rather than the sleek consumer-friendly outward appearance that many Intel NUCs have, these first-generation AMD powered boxes have a distinctive industrial look. It seems the manufacturers most interested in putting Ryzen chips in their small form-factor computers expect them to live a very harsh life.
Simply NUC Sequoia
OnLogic ML100G-40
In fact many of the announced computers, built by relatively small firms like ASRock and OnLogic, make it clear they’re not intended for consumer use. These machines are designed for commercial applications such as driving high-resolution digital signage, or for use in communication networks. You aren’t supposed to be putting one of these things under your TV, and it shows.
All of these Mini PCs are part of the growing trend towards “Edge Computing”, where powerful processors and large amounts of RAM are brought closer to where they’re needed instead of being accessed remotely. Rather unsurprisingly, the need for an always-on broadband Internet connection can be a problem in many applications. If this sounds an awful lot like how we used to do things before “The Cloud” took over, you wouldn’t be wrong.
Professional Price
While there already seems to be a healthy number of entries into AMD’s new Mini PC ecosystem, one thing seems painfully missing: a product we can actually afford to hack on.
Being that these devices primarily target industrial and commercial applications, they unfortunately have a sticker price to match. For even a relatively barebones AMD Mini PC, the
starting
price looks to be around $500. Granted pricing and availability on several of the upcoming models isn’t currently available, but with just a glance at their construction and specs, it’s painfully obvious that the lowly hardware hacker isn’t the target audience.
This is obviously disappointing for those of us looking for something to roll into our projects immediately, but it’s important to remember that competition doesn’t always develop overnight. With their push into the small-form factor market, AMD is getting an overdue foot in the door. It’s logical that the first wave of machines would target where the money is, but as production of Ryzen Embedded chips ramp up, it seems inevitable that other companies will see the opportunity to spin off more consumer oriented products to put them in. | 55 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205182",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T15:19:40",
"content": "Newegg has the AMD mini-PCs for about $200 cheaper than what the article states. In case anyone was wondering…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205185... | 1,760,373,645.048106 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/advancing-the-state-of-cyberdeck-technology/ | Advancing The State Of Cyberdeck Technology | Tom Nardi | [
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"18650",
"3D printed enclosure",
"cyberdeck",
"ergonomic keyboard",
"Intel NUC"
] | It’s somewhat rare to be able to witness the birth and subsequent evolution of a technology, at least on a short enough time scale to appreciate it, but right now we’re lucky enough to see it happening within the burgeoning community of cyberdeck builders. We’ve seen an absolute explosion of cyberdeck projects in the last year or so, but
this latest entry from [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] truly pushes the state of the art forward
. Short of actually transmitting your consciousness into the Matrix, we’re not sure how much closer you could get to William Gibson’s original vision.
The design is based around a split ergonomic keyboard, with an Intel NUC in the center and a 1920×1200 IPS panel on a tilting mount off to one side. Since the display started its life as a DSLR monitor it doesn’t have a touch panel, but those who’ve yet to master a mouse-free workflow will be happy to know there’s a touch pad built into the lid of the NUC. Thanks to a clever dovetail joint, the deck also separates in half if you want to put some more space between your hands, or just to make the whole thing slightly less intimidating while carrying it on your back through the Sprawl.
Power is provided by a custom 18650 battery pack running at 18 V that [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] (naturally) assembled with a homemade spot welder. He’s included both buck and boost converters so the cyberdeck can be powered with a wide array of voltages should he find himself in need of some juice in the field. To maximize battery life he’s also worked in a relay to cut power to the monitor when the NUC is sleeping, and there’s a physical master switch that can completely disconnect everything for long periods of inactivity.
The
very first cyberdeck featured on Hackaday was built by [Tinfoil_Haberdashery]
, and we’re glad to see he’s not resting on his laurels. While that first deck was certainly impressive in its own right, this build
takes inspiration from the incredible work
we’ve
seen from other hardware hackers
and raises the bar on what’s possible from this dedicated community. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205155",
"author": "Magster",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T12:02:52",
"content": "Amiga 500 will always be a popular model for a computer because of the Shadowrun game?? :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205166",
"autho... | 1,760,373,644.87556 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/24/hard-drive-data-recovery-why-not-diy/ | Hard Drive Data Recovery – Why Not DIY? | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"data recovery",
"hard drive"
] | Hard drive failures can be tough to bear, particularly for the average person who doesn’t back up. When it comes to data recovery, there’s always those bleating from the sidelines that it’s a job that must be left to the professionals. However, this is
Hackaday
, not
HireSomeoneADay,
so [Matt]’s video on do-it-yourself hard drive repair is just what we like to see.
The video begins with plugging the non-functional drive into an external caddy, and using a microphone to listen to the sounds it makes. Upon analysis, [Matt] concludes that the drive is not spinning up, and suspects the heads may be stuck, causing the problem. When tapping the drive fails to unstick the heads, the next step is disassembly.
Despite the best advice from armchair commentators, this can be achieved at home without a clean room. [Matt] opens the drive carefully, and notes that the head is indeed stuck to the platter, instead of sitting in its home position. Using a screwdriver, the platters are rotated in their usual direction while gentle pressure is applied to pull the head away, being sure to use a light touch to avoid ripping the heads off entirely. With this done, the drive is reassembled and powered up. Amazingly, the repair is successful, and data is able to be recovered!
It’s important to note that this is a highly risky procedure, and not guaranteed to succeed. Truly valuable data should be left to the professionals, but if you’re skint or simply unbothered, it doesn’t hurt to have a go yourself. Be sure to avoid dust entering the drive, and take care not to touch the platters themselves. Of course, if you brick the device,
you can always scavenge it for parts
. Video after the break. | 53 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205124",
"author": "Dodo",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T09:19:15",
"content": "I also did this once myself long ago. The data was backed up but there were a few things I would have liked to recover but wouldn’t mind if it failed.I made an improvised clean-room in the bathroom by lettin... | 1,760,373,645.131638 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/ted-the-talking-toaster/ | Ted The Talking Toaster | Sharon Lin | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"Chatroom",
"microphone",
"speech to text"
] | The team behind [8 Bits and a Byte] have built a
talking toaster
. More accurately, they retrofitted their existing toaster with some hardware components to make it appear to talk and get angry at its users. While the actual toaster functionality isn’t necessary for the build, it certainly allows the project to have a more whimsical vibe.
The project uses a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Google AIY kit, consisting of a HAT, microphone, and speaker. Servos control the movement of the toaster’s eyebrows with the help of the HAT. Some decorative materials in the form of googly eyes and pipe cleaners help bring other features of the talking toaster to life.
The control flow for the chatbot makes use of Google’s speech-to-text for picking up text from audio input, the
Dialogflow API
to match intent, and Text-to-Speech to pipeline possible answer back to the Raspberry Pi to play over a speaker. They also used
Remo.tv
to broadcast live updates from the toaster to anyone on an online feed, allowing users in a chatroom to talk directly to Ted.
While Ted’s communications may be quite limited, there’s certainly no limit to the number of interactions he’ll be having online now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEd3NvMYt48 | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205101",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T06:20:48",
"content": "I haven’t watched the video yet, as my significant otter is asleep next to me, but please tell me they use sound clips from Red Dwarf?https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,373,645.260307 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/robot-insect-survives-swatting/ | Robot Insect Survives Swatting | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"EPFL",
"muscle",
"robot"
] | There is an old saying, that ‘the hand is quicker than the eye;, but somewhat slower than the fly.” However, with a little practice you can swat a fly, although it sometimes doesn’t seem to faze the fly. École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has announced they have used nanotech to build a 1 gram possibly untethered,
autonomous robotic insect
that has enough processing power and sensors to recognize black and white patterns. Artificial muscles provide propulsion. But there’s the kicker: it can survive a strike with a fly swatter.
In the video you see below, the robots can move at 3 centimeters per second and there are two different versions. The first is a tethered system using ultra-thin wires. This is the version that can be folded, smacked, or even squashed by a shoe and continue moving.
The autonomous version weighs in at under 1 gram but has everything it needs including a tiny battery. The propulsion system uses dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs). These hair-thin muscles consist of an elastomer membrane and two soft electrodes.
Applying a voltage to the electrodes attracts them to each other, compressing the membrane. When you turn the voltage off, the membrane returns to its original shape much like a spring.
This kind of muscle usually requires a very high voltage, but the new insects use a design that doesn’t require high voltages, allowing the bug to carry its battery and other electronics on its back. Not bad for under a gram.
This reminded us somewhat of
muscle wire
, but on a much smaller scale. We’ve even seen robot muscles made from
fishing line and nichrome wire
. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205080",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T03:10:15",
"content": "“This kind of muscle usually requires a very high voltage, but the new insects use a design that doesn’t require high voltages…”What? The thing requires unobtainum until it doesn’t?",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,373,645.296303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/replacing-a-non-replacable-laptop-keyboard/ | Replacing A Non-Replacable Laptop Keyboard | Lewin Day | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"laptop",
"laptop repair"
] | Spilling a drink on a laptop is a terrifying experience. If you’re lucky you’ll ruin just a keyboard, and if not, your entire machine could go up in smoke. Assuming you’ve just suffered the latter, you can still be out of luck, as many laptops come with fancy integrated keyboards that are not designed to be removable. It’s not always the case however,
as this ingenious hack from [InsideMyLaptop] bears out.
The hack begins with removing the top case assembly from a HP Pavilion laptop. The keyboard is riveted into the top plate assembly, along with the trackpad, which would normally necessitate their replacement as a total unit. However, if properly armed with a soldering iron, these plastic rivets can be melted to allow the backing plate and keyboard to be removed. A replacement part can then be sourced, and the remaining rivet stubs can be remelted to hold the new part in place.
It’s a simple hack, but one that goes to show one shouldn’t always take “
No User Servicable Parts Inside
” as an answer. We’ve seen other useful work from [InsideMyLaptop] before –
like this power jack repair way back in 2011. | 30 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205058",
"author": "starhawk",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T00:29:31",
"content": "Former, not latter ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205059",
"author": "darkspr1te",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T00:32:56",
... | 1,760,373,645.404077 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/motorizing-a-plasma-cutter-on-the-cheap/ | Motorizing A Plasma Cutter On The Cheap | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"machine tools",
"metal working",
"plasma cutter",
"scrap metal"
] | A hand-held plasma cutter is an excellent tool to have if you are working with sheet metal, but it’s not particularly well suited to making long or repetitive cuts. Which is why [workshop from scratch] worked his usual scrapheap magic and
built his own motorized track for making perfectly straight cuts
.
Most of the frame, and even the small truck that rides on it, is made out of square stock in various sizes. A couple of bearings are enough to make sure the movement is smooth and doesn’t have too much slop. Motion is provided by a long threaded rod and two nuts, which are welded to the side of the truck.
If you had the patience (and forearm strength) you could just put a crank on the rod and be done with it, but in this case [workshop from scratch] used the motor, gearbox, and chuck from an old electric drill to grab onto the threaded rod and do the spinning for him. He rigged up an enclosure for the side of the rack that holds the motor, DC power supply, and motor controller, along with a couple of switches and a knob to control the speed.
A modification allows him to enable the plasma cutter with one of the switches on the panel, which gives the setup a much more complete feel than just putting a zip tie on the trigger. With this design, the plasma cutter itself can still be removed from the mount and used normally. You can even remove the motorized component with a few bolts if you just wanted to do manual cuts on the bed.
In the video after the break, the keen-eyed viewer may notice a few familiar pieces of gear in the background, such as the
hydraulic bench vise we covered earlier in the year
. As the name of the channel implies, [workshop from scratch] is all about building the workshop tools that many take for granted, and they’ve all been phenomenally fascinating projects. While we admire the gumption it takes to try and
build a lathe out of scrap granite slabs
, there’s something to be said for DIY tools that end up looking nearly as good as commercial offerings. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205066",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2019-12-24T01:39:31",
"content": "I love these welding/machinery posts, but they all look like they’d take 6 months for a mortal to build. Considering all the measuring and figurin’ out that would be required.Maybe having plans and a brief... | 1,760,373,645.341301 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/supercon-talk-emily-velasco-wants-you-to-work-weird/ | Supercon Talk: Emily Velasco Wants You To Work Weird | Kristina Panos | [
"cons"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference"
] | Emily Velasco seems to absolutely delight in the weird, and we think that is wonderful. Weird brings us together. If you can be weird with someone else, you’ll have a special bond for life. In
her inspiring 2019 Supercon talk
(embedded below), Emily explains why she is drawn to weird things, and why you should be, too. Her enthusiasm is both palpable and infectious, so don’t be surprised if you suddenly want to drop everything to accompany her on a treasure hunt adventure and spend the rest of the day making things.
Emily doesn’t try to push making weird things on to you, but her reasons for working in weird are quite compelling. Weird things catch the eye and interrupt the tedium of our lives. They give us pause and invite us to look again. You can choose to turn away if you want. But if you look closer, you might find that ugly, weird, and annoying things begin to charm you.
Emily says the formative force that pulled her toward the weird was the gang of mutant toys that the villainous Sid made in
Toy Story
. They force you to look closer and to consider them. But Emily is far from mean-spirited — she builds her creations with love, and not to act out or to spite her little sister. They’re not what you expect, and even if someone finds them off-putting at first, they are undeniably interesting.
‘Normal’ is Relative; ‘Annoying’ is Contextual
Emily mostly wants other people to make weird things so they can have more fun in their lives. As she says, there’s nothing wrong with normal, but there’s nothing inherently right about it, either. And normal is relative, anyway. When you make something weird, you can change people’s perceptions and make them enjoy new things.
When you make something weird, you set off a chain of broadened horizons that begins with your own experience. Emily tells the story of a circuit bent toy she built into an old cigar box, and how she took the toy to her parents’ house to show it to them.
Her dad hated it as soon as he heard it, but then she handed it to him. Before long, he turned into a child, gleefully exploring the buttons and dials and body contacts. By changing the context in which Dad heard the annoying noise box, she had changed his experience and broadened his horizons.
Found is Fabulous
You know what they say — one man’s trash is another man’s foundation for a synthesizer. When Emily finds discarded things, she gives them new life and new meaning while keeping them out of the landfill. Sometimes it’s mother nature’s trash, like bird skulls on the beach. Other times the maker gods drop things in her path, like the time an arcade cabinet fell off a truck and smashed to the ground like an electronics piñata.
The point is this: you can buy all the parts and make a thing just like you want it. That’s all fine and good. But if you take a chance on incorporating found materials, you will surprise yourself. Found objects come with their own quirks and present unique challenges that Emily finds intriguing. If you build things using found objects, you will expand your worldview in the process. Sharing those things with other people will expand their worldview, and you might start a domino effect of enlightenment.
In closing, Emily invites us to interview ourselves whenever we encounter weird, ugly, and/or annoying things, rather than just passing them over because they ruffle our feathers. In the process of staring it down, you will probably feel your gaze soften as you become more familiar with it. And who knows? You may even find that it brings you happiness, or even sparks new ideas. And really, that’s what it’s all about. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205026",
"author": "Femto",
"timestamp": "2019-12-23T20:39:58",
"content": "That was a good talk! Excellent presentation, well thought out, coherent, and convincing!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205034",
"author":... | 1,760,373,645.450808 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/linux-fu-wsl-tricks-blur-the-windows-linux-line/ | Linux Fu: WSL Tricks Blur The Windows/Linux Line | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"linux",
"Linux Fu",
"windows",
"wsl"
] | We have to admit, we have an odd fascination with WSL — the Windows subsystem for Linux. On the one hand, it gives us more options on Windows 10 for running the software we love. On the other hand, we wonder why we aren’t just running Linux. Sometimes it is because our cool laptop doesn’t work well on Linux. Other times we are using someone else’s computer that we aren’t allowed to reload or dual boot. Still, as long as we have to use Windows, we are glad to have WSL. A recent blog post by [Hanselman] shows some
very cool tricks for using WSL that make it even better
.
Exploring WSL
Did you know you can use WSL to run Linux commands in a Windows command shell? For example, you have a long directory and you want to run grep:
dir c:\archive\* | wsl grep -i hackaday
Of course, from bash you could access the same directory:
ls /mnt/c/archive | grep -i hackaday
Extensions
Many of the tricks rely on the fact that bash doesn’t assume any executable file extension. If you try to run explorer, for example, from a bash shell, nothing happens. But if you append the .exe extensions, Windows programs will run and, by default, the usual Windows directories are in the path.
You do need to watch out for path name conversion. For example, if you provide “.” as an argument to explorer, you will open up a network share //wsl$/Ubuntu/home/user_name, for example. Of course, that’s another trick. You can access your WSL directories from windows using that notation (obviously, Ubuntu and user_name may be different for your installation). However, ordinary paths do not work.
Path Conversion
You can, however, use the wslpath utility to convert paths in both directions:
$ wslpath
Usage:
-a force result to absolute path format
-u translate from a Windows path to a WSL path (default)
-w translate from a WSL path to a Windows path
-m translate from a WSL path to a Windows path, with '/' instead of '\'
For example:
$ explorer.exe `wslpath -w /bin`
X11 and More
[Hanselman] discusses a number of tips, including some about using development tools and git. You can also install multiple WSL flavors and export them to other Windows machines. He also mentions running X11 using paid tools Pengwin and X410. We say just use
Swan
.
Speaking of Swan, it is a great alternative to WSL on any Windows version, not just Windows 10. In truth, it is just Cygwin with X11 preconfigured, but it is much easier than trying to get X11 running on a bare Cygwin install. On the one hand, this is a much more desktop Linux solution than WSL. On the other hand, WSL loads real distributions and integrates nicely with Windows 10. But if you load both, you can get the advantages of both, too.
Sell Out?
Given the choice, we’ll just use Linux. Honestly, if your workflow is mostly Web-based, it hardly matters anymore. You load Chrome or your choice of browser and everything works. Of course, our Linux boxes tend to be way more efficient and also stay running better than Windows.
However, if you find yourself using Windows, Cygwin has long been a big help. Now WSL is another tool to get your Linux tools on a Microsoft-controlled box. | 51 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205005",
"author": "Somewhat Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2019-12-23T18:51:38",
"content": "Now that sytemd is bringing the simplicity and reliability of Windows to Linux the blurring of lines goes in both directions.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,373,645.548323 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/slack-now-on-windows-3-1/ | Slack, Now On Windows 3.1 | Lewin Day | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"16-bit",
"slack",
"virtual machine",
"windows 3.1"
] | Slack is either an online collaboration tool, or a religion, depending on who you talk to. Naturally, it’s accessible across all manner of modern platforms, from Windows and MacOS to smartphones. However, some prefer to go further back. At a recent company hackathon,
[Yeo Kheng Meng] decided to create a Slack client for Windows 3.1.
This is how you learned to program before the Internet.
Programming for an older OS, in this case, Windows For Workgroups 3.11, requires setting up a viable development environment. Visual C++ 1.52 was pressed into service in this case, being the last version capable of targeting Windows 3.11. The development environment is run on a Windows 2000 virtual machine running on a Mac laptop. This was chosen for its ability to run 16-bit apps, and its Samba compatibility with both Windows 3.11 and Windows 10 and modern Macs.
There were several challenges to face along the way. Old school Windows simply isn’t capable of dealing with HTTPS, necessitating a proxy to handle the exchange of packets with Slack servers. Additionally, memory management was a hassle due to the limits of the 16-bit architecture. Thankfully, an old programming manual from the era was of great help in this regard.
At the end of the hackathon, a usable Slack client was up and running, complete with garish colors from the early Windows era. There’s a few key features missing, such as the ability to resolve user IDs, but overall, the concept works.
We’ve seen [Yeo]’s work with this vintage OS before too
. Video after the break. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204983",
"author": "Mario; Call TOAD @36c3 (@tinnef101)",
"timestamp": "2019-12-23T16:49:00",
"content": "I need this for GNU/Linux with HTTPS.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205045",
"author": "Gravis",
"ti... | 1,760,373,647.28663 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/see-you-on-the-dark-side-of-the-moon-chinas-lunar-radio-observatory/ | See You On The Dark Side Of The Moon: China’s Lunar Radio Observatory | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"big bang",
"china",
"moon",
"radio",
"science",
"space"
] | For nearly as long as there has been radio, there have been antennas trained on the sky, looking at the universe in a different light than traditional astronomy. Radio astronomers have used their sensitive equipment to study the Sun, the planets, distant galaxies, and strange objects from the very edge of the universe, like pulsars and quasars. Even the earliest moments of the universe have been explored, a portrait in microwave radiation of the remnants of the Big Bang.
And yet with all these observations, there’s a substantial slice of the radio spectrum that remains largely a mystery to radio astronomers. Thanks to our planet’s ionosphere, most of the signals below 30 MHz aren’t observable by ground-based radio telescopes. But now, thanks to an opportunity afforded by China’s ambitious lunar exploration program, humanity is now listening to more of what the universe is saying, and it’s doing so from a new vantage point: the far side of the moon.
Bouncing Both Ways
As any amateur radio operator can tell you, the key to direct global radio communication is the Earth’s ionosphere – those layers of charged particles that ebb and flow 50 to 600 miles (80 to 1000 km) above our heads. Produced by the constant stream of radiation flowing from the Sun and interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field, the ionosphere has long been known to refract radio waves. The degree to which radio waves are refracted depends on things like the structure of the ionosphere, which changes diurnally, as well as the angle at which the radio waves strike the charged particle layers. But refraction also depends heavily on the wavelength of the incident waves, with the 10-meter band, or 28 MHz, normally considered the upper limit for useful ionospheric bounce.
The refraction of radio waves below 30 MHz or so represents the core problem for ground-based low-frequency radio astronomy. (Nomenclature note: while commercial and amateur radio operators consider the space between 3 MHz and 30 MHz to be the “high frequency” (HF) band for historical reasons, the frequencies reflected by the ionosphere are very low for ground-based radio astronomy.) The ionosphere is nearly as efficient a reflector of radio waves coming from space as it is to those from terrestrial sources, and so acts as a blanket, isolating us from what the universe is telling us in those wavelengths. To be able to do any useful observations below 30 MHz, radio astronomers need to cast off that blanket, and the easiest way to do that is to build a space-based radio telescope.
The Magpie Bridge
The Chinese
Chang’e-4 lunar mission
presented a perfect opportunity to test what’s possible with low-frequency radio astronomy, and to potentially pave the way for larger-scale efforts in the future. Part of the ambitious, multi-decade Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP), which may culminate with a crewed mission in the 2030s, Chang’e-4 is a complicated mission made more so by the fact that it was designed to explore the far side of the Moon.
Queqiao
relay satellite at Earth-Moon L
2
, showing its vantage point for line-of-sight to both Earth and the far side of the moon. Note the NCLE package with three antennas deployed on the top. Source:
China Academy of Space Technology
.
Thanks to
tidal locking
, the Moon rotates on its axis with exactly the same period as it rotates around Earth, meaning it only ever presents one face to us. So anything on the far side will be blocked off from radio contact with Earth. A practical far-side mission must therefore necessarily include some kind of relay system, to allow for communication between the Earth and Moon. While this could be accomplished with a satellite in lunar orbit, capable of buffering far-side signals until it’s back in sight of Earth ground stations, Chinese mission planners came up with a far more interesting idea: they’d place their relay satellite so that full-time communications would be possible.
To accomplish this, the Chang’e-4 mission planners aimed their relay satellite
Queqiao
at the Lagrangian point L
2
, a point in space that lies on the line between the Earth and the Moon, but 65,000 kilometers (40,000 miles) beyond the Moon.
Queqiao
orbits the L
2
point in a halo orbit, an elliptical path around the point but with the orbital plane more or less perpendicular to the line between the Earth and the Moon. That gives the satellite, with its massive 4.2-meter dish antenna, full-time line-of-sight to both the
Chang’e
lander and the
Yutu-2
rover on the lunar far side, as well as the ability to stay connected to ground stations on Earth. This also gives it full exposure to the Sun, allowing it to be powered by solar panels rather than RTGs.
(
Queqiao
literally means “magpie bridge”, and stems from a Chinese myth where magpies would flock to form a bridge once a year so that the daughter of the Goddess of Heaven could cross the Milky Way to be with her husband. Poetic, no?)
Slightly Stuck
Queqiao
has been on-station and fulfilling its primary mission as a communications relay since June of 2018. But
Queqiao
‘s unique position made it the perfect place to do some science too. The Chinese Academy of Science teamed up with astronomers from Radboud University in the Netherlands to design the
Netherlands-China Low-Frequency Explorer
, or NCLE. The ten kilogram package includes a sensitive broadband software-defined radio (SDR) receiver and digital signal processing capabilities, fed by a trio of monopole antennas that can be extended to a length of five meters each.
Deployment of the antennas was supposed to happen early in the mission, but
Queqiao
‘s primary mission had priority and the antennas remained stowed for most of the last 18 months. The command to unfurl the antennas was only recently sent, and while one antenna deployed to its full 5-meter length, the other two antennas appear to be stuck with only about 2.5 meters exposed. It’s possible that the extended stowage time led to lubrication problems like those that afflicted
the high-gain antenna of the
Galileo
probe
, but whatever the problem, the science that can be done by NCLE at this point is limited.
If the NCLE is able to fully deploy all the antennas, there’s a vast amount of science waiting to be done. The observatory is perfectly poised to listen in on drastically red-shifted emissions on the 21-cm hydrogen line. Normally in the L-band section of the UHF part of the spectrum, the H-line is the characteristic spectrum of the most abundant element in the universe, and thereby provide a map of its distribution. H-line emissions from the earliest parts of the Big Bang, the so-called “dark ages” that occurred when the universe was only 800 million years old, is extremely red-shifted, lowering its frequency to the point where the ionosphere and terrestrial interference make terrestrial observation impractical. NCLE’s quiet spot in space aboard
Queqiao
would let cosmologists listen in on the very earliest period of the Big Bang in ways never before possible.
Schematic of the evolution of the universe. Fully deployed, NCLE will be able to see back to the “Dark Ages” period, and beyond. Source:
NASA/WMAP team
.
The music of the universe is not the only thing NCLE will be listening to. Using beam-steering, the NCLE antennas will be able to observe the Sun, Jupiter – an extremely bright radio source – and the Earth. Astronomers will have a vantage point to study the interactions between the Sun and the Earth’s ionosphere at lower frequencies than ever before possible, and even to characteristic the “leakage” of man-made radio signals through the ionosphere. And all the planned observations will inform decisions on how to improve low frequency space-based radio astronomy, including possibly building a permanent observatory on the Moon’s far side, or orbiting more satellites to improve resolution through
very-long baseline interferometry
.
Queqiao was designed to last five years, so the NCLE team has a while to work out the antenna bugs and get the observatory up and running. Here’s wishing them the best of luck as they explore the low-frequency domain from the dark side of the Moon. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6205052",
"author": "JT",
"timestamp": "2019-12-23T23:13:08",
"content": "ITS NOT THE DARK SIDE!!!! IT GETS JUST AS MUCH SUN AS THE EARTH-FACING SIDE!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6205070",
"author": "Hirudinea",
... | 1,760,373,647.177442 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/quadruped-robot-disguises-itself-as-a-ball/ | Quadruped Robot Disguises Itself As A Ball | Danie Conradie | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"ble",
"quadruped",
"robot",
"servos",
"sls",
"transformer robot"
] | When the Skynet baseball bot swarms attack, we’ll be throwing [Carl Bugeja] some dirty looks for getting them started.
He’s been working on 4B
, a little quadruped robot that can transform itself into a sphere almost perfectly.
Before [Carl] was distracted by the wonders of
PCB actuators
more than a year ago, he started working on this little guy. He finally found some time to get it moving on its own, and the preliminary results look promising to say the least. Inside the 6 cm sphere is a total of 12 servos, 3 for each leg. All of the mechanical parts were 3D printed in nylon on an SLS machine, and the custom PCB has a BLE microcontroller module, an IMU and IR proximity sensors onboard. Everything is open source with all the files available on the Hackaday.io project page.
The microcontroller runs a full inverse kinematic model, so only the desired tip and base coordinate for each leg is input and the servo angles are automatically calculated. Ultimately [Carl] aims to have the robot both walking and rolling controllably. So far he’s achieved some degree of success in both, but it still needs some work (see the videos below. We’re eager to see what the future holds for this delightfully creepy bot.
Walking robots are always an interesting challenge. For more of our future overlords, check out this
adorable little cat
and this
truly terrifying strandbeest
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204942",
"author": "IT-Wizard",
"timestamp": "2019-12-23T12:43:07",
"content": "Hi, I heard about this kind of robot years ago :http://zentasrobots.com/robot-projects/morphex-mkiii/Nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "620495... | 1,760,373,647.728596 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/23/194-led-ball-is-free-form-soldering-on-another-level/ | 194 LED Ball Is Free-Form Soldering On Another Level | Jenny List | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"addressable led",
"led",
"LED sphere"
] | We’ve all seen plenty of impressive free-form soldering in these pages, maybe some of us have even had a go ourselves. Using nothing but bare conductors, electronic components, and solder, complex and beautiful electronic sculptures can be created.
But the latest free-form project from [Jiří Praus]
takes the medium to a new level, as he’s taken no less than 194 bare surface-mount addressable LEDs and formed them into a perfect sphere supported by nothing more than soldered copper wire.
This feat was achieved with the aid of a 3D printed hemispherical jig with spaces for each LED, and each half was assembled in a marathon soldering session. Some significant fault-finding was required due to a few dry joints, and an ESP32 board and Li-Po cell were fitted in between the two halves as they were joined. The result is a triumph, a Christmas bauble like no other, and one which we aren’t sure we could manage to solder so well even on a good day.
If you recognise [Jiří ]’s work, it’s probably because we’ve featured several of his creations previously. It’s always difficult to pick a favorite, but the one which caught our eye the most was
his fully functional freeform Arduino Uno
. | 20 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204919",
"author": "Andy",
"timestamp": "2019-12-23T09:33:47",
"content": "My back starts hurting just by looking at this; awesome, however",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6204927",
"author": "bushi",
"timestamp": "2019... | 1,760,373,647.346252 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/build-a-dslr-photo-booth-the-easy-way/ | Build A DSLR Photo Booth The Easy Way | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"arcade button",
"led matrix",
"MAX7219",
"photo booth",
"photography"
] | It’s a well-known fact in capitalist societies that any product or service, if being used in a wedding, instantly triples in cost. Wanting to avoid shelling out big money for a simple photo booth for a friend’s big day,
[Lewis] decided to build his own.
Wanting a quality photo output, a Canon DSLR was selected to perform photographic duties. An Arduino Nano is then pressed into service to run the show. It’s hooked up to a MAX7219 LED matrix which feeds instructions to the willing participants, who activate the system with a giant glowing arcade button. When pressed, the Nano waits ten seconds and triggers the camera shutter, doing so three times. Images are displayed on a screen hooked up to the camera’s
USB
HDMI port.
It’s a build that keeps things simple. No single-board PCs needed, just a camera, an Arduino, and a monitor for the display. We’re sure the wedding-goers had a great time, and we look forward to seeing what [Lewis] comes up with next.
We’ve seen a few of his hacks around here before, too
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204915",
"author": "Muphins",
"timestamp": "2019-12-23T08:36:16",
"content": "Nice build!Small error in the article : The screen is connected on the camera’s HDMI port, not USB ;-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204918",
... | 1,760,373,647.125584 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/fran-is-helping-santa-slay-this-year/ | [Fran] Is Helping Santa Slay This Year | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"audio amplifier",
"greeting card",
"guitar amp",
"lm386"
] | We know at least one person who ought to make Santa’s ‘nice’ list this year. [Fran] was probably near the top of it already, but sending Santa
a handmade greeting card with a fully-functioning guitar amp inside
will probably make him rewrite her name in glitter, or silver Sharpie.
This stocking stuffer-sized amp is based around the LM386 and the bare minimum components necessary to make it rock. Everything is dead-bug soldered and sandwiched between two pieces of card stock. The first version with a single 386 sounded okay, but [Fran] wanted it louder, so she added another stage with a second 386. [Fran] glued the rim of the speaker directly to the card so it can act like a cone and give a better sound than the speaker does by itself.
All Santa needs to rock out is his axe and a small interface made of a 1/4″ jack and a 9 V wired to a 3-pin header that plugs into the card. He can take a break from Christmas music and let some of those cookies digest while he jams. Be sure to check out the build video after the break if you want to stay off the ‘naughty’ list.
Want to make your own musical greeting card? If you can program an ATtiny85,
you won’t need much more than that to send a smile
. If visual art is more your thing,
3D print them a 2D picture
.
Thanks for the tip, [Käpt’n Blaubär]! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204867",
"author": "Stuart Longland",
"timestamp": "2019-12-23T03:27:21",
"content": "Don’t forget to send that interface cable… that’ll have the elves rather confused otherwise.I wonder if a ground-plane made of copper tape might work for a bit of shielding. Nice effort though.",... | 1,760,373,647.224867 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/hackaday-links-december-22-2019/ | Hackaday Links: December 22, 2019 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"bunnie",
"Eben Upton",
"Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen",
"ev",
"gigatron",
"hackaday links",
"hybrid",
"kitting",
"lulzbot",
"manufacturing",
"raspberry pi",
"shenzhen",
"volkswagen"
] | It’s hard to believe it, but the Raspberry Pi has been on the market for only seven years now. The single-board computer has become so entrenched in the hobby electronics scene that it’s hard to imagine life without it, or what we did before it came along. And with
the recent announcement
that the 30 millionth Raspberry Pi was recently manufactured, now we have some clarity on the scale of its success. Just roll that number around in your head for a bit – that’s one Pi for every nine or so people in the USA. Some of the other facts and figures in the linked article boggle the mind too, like Eben Upton figured they’d only ever sell about 10,000 units, or that the factory in Wales where most Pis are made can assemble 15,000 units a day.
Speaking of manufacturing, have you ever considered what goes into getting a small-scale manufactured product ready for shipping? The good folks over at Gigatron know all about the joys of kitting, and have put together
an interesting un-unboxing video
for their flagship TTL-only retro computer. It’s a nice riff on the unboxing videos that are somehow popular on YouTube these days, and shows just how much effort they put into getting a Gigatron out the door. All told, it takes about an hour to ship each unit, and the care put into the process is evident. We especially like the part where all the chips are placed into antistatic foam in the same orientation they’ll be on the completed board. Nice touch.
Last time we checked in on the Lulzbot saga
, the open source 3D printer manufacturer had been saved from complete liquidation by a company named FAME 3D. Now we’re getting the first solid details
about where things go from here
. Not only will thirteen of the remaining Lulzbot employees be staying on, but FAME 3D plans to hire 50 new employees to get operations back up as quickly as possible. The catch? The “F” in FAME 3D stands for Fargo, North Dakota, where Fargo Additive Manufacturing Equipment 3D is based. So Lulzbot will be moving north from Loveland, Colorado in the coming months.
For the last few years, adventure travelers making the pilgrimage to Shenzhen to scour the electronics markets have stuffed a copy of Andrew “Bunnie” Huang’s
The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen
into their soon-to-be-overflowing backpacks. The book is a goldmine of insider information, stuffed with maps and translation tables critical for navigating a different culture with no local language skills. Bunnie’s book has only been available in dead-tree format and now that all but the last few copies have been sold,
he decided to make a web version available for free
. We’d have to think a tablet or phone would be a bit harder to use in the heat of negotiation than the nice spiral-bound design of the print copy, but the fact that the insider information will now be widely available probably makes this a net positive.
And finally, if you’ve ever nearly been run over by an EV or hybrid silently backing out of a parking space, you’ll no doubt appreciate attempts to legislate some sort of audible presence to these vehicles. But what exactly should an electric vehicle be made to sound like? Volkswagen has begun to address that question, and while you can certainly read through the fluff in their
press release
, all you really need to do is
listen to the sample
. We’ve got to say that they pretty much nailed what a car of the future should sound like. Although they
might have missed a real opportunity here
. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204823",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2019-12-23T00:23:30",
"content": "In fact some of the Tesla cars out there might be exempt from that one. They do not have the speakers positioned outside to make the appropriate sounds. Those that do, reports indicate the owners are consi... | 1,760,373,647.56483 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/listen-to-your-feet-they-have-a-lot-to-tell-you/ | Listen To Your Feet, They Have A Lot To Tell You | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Prize",
"foot",
"force",
"gait",
"insole",
"sensors",
"sole"
] | [Umar Qattan] is in tune with his
sole and is trying hard to listen to what it has to say.
At a low level, [Umar] is building an insole with an array of force sensors in it. These sensors are affixed to a flexible PCB which is placed in a user’s shoe. A circuit containing a ESP32, IMU, and haptic feedback unit measure the sensors and send data back to a phone or a laptop.
What’s most interesting are the possibilities opened by the data he hopes to collect. The first application he proposes is AR/VR input. The feedback from the user’s feet plus the haptics could provide all sorts of interesting interaction. Another application is dynamically measuring a user’s gait throughout the day and exercise. People could save themselves a lot of knee pain with something like this.
[Umar] also proposes that an insert like this could record a user’s weight throughout the day. Using the data on the weight fluctuation, it should be possible to calculate someone’s metabolism and hydration from this data.
The
Hackaday
Prize2019
is Sponsored by: | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204795",
"author": "vactor20",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T21:19:49",
"content": "Impressive how convergent works, I just finished my master thesis with a prototype very similar to this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6204813",
... | 1,760,373,647.500217 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/diy-electric-roller-bender-can-handle-the-thicker-stuff/ | DIY Electric Roller Bender Can Handle The Thick(er) Stuff | Danie Conradie | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bar bending",
"bending",
"machining",
"metalworking",
"welding"
] | Every serious metal worker will end up getting themself a roller bender at some point, but if you’re as dedicated as [Meanwhile in the Garage], you might just start building the things yourself. His
heavy-duty electric roller bender
, demonstrated in the video after the break, is perfect for the thicker steel and bigger radii his
smaller manual machine
can’t handle.
The basic concept is the same in both machines, with two fixed rollers and a third adjustable opposing one between them. Most of the components are pieces of scrap metal, and each shaft runs on bearings mounted in homemade pillow blocks. The two fixed shafts are connected together by a chain drive, and a scrap industrial motor provides the rotating power through a worm gearbox. There are two adjustable bushings on each shaft to keep the work piece aligned. The lead screw from an old car jack is used to adjust the position of the moving roller.
We picked up a few interesting tips from the video, like how to properly align a cylindrical workpiece in a drill press for drilling radial holes. He also used toggle switches as limit switches in a pretty ingenious way, and F-clamps on the work piece to activate them when it reaches the end.
Building your own tools at home is a time-honoured hacking tradition, which we have never seen a shortage of here on Hackaday. Check out this
DIY drill press
and
vertical CNC mill
. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204811",
"author": "Dane",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T22:43:45",
"content": "Nicely put together video, really liked the simple design. Looks like the bend radius is limited to the spacing of the two outer rollers, i wonder if making them adjustable is simple enough.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,373,647.080098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/is-that-cheap-multimeter-as-good-as-a-fluke-lets-find-out/ | Is That Cheap Multimeter As Good As A Fluke? Let’s Find Out | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"aneng",
"fluke",
"multimeter"
] | When [learnelectronics] talks about cheap meters, he always says, “If you are doing this for a living, get yourself a Fluke.” But he realized he’s never shown the inside of a Fluke meter, so he rectified that in
his most recent post
. For comparison, he opens up a Fluke 26-III and an Aneng AN870 (retailing at about $500 and $30, respectively).
The initial opening shows that the Fluke has hefty brand name fuses, but the Aneng has little generic fuses. In addition, the Fluke has an internal case that helps keep you away from live voltage. The Fluke also has a proper rotary switch, while the cheap meter has a switch that is etched on the PC board; a cost-cutting trick that’s often a point of failure on these cheap meters.
The Fluke also has a significantly larger number of protection devices and heftier components, you presume can take more punishment. Of course, if you don’t have a few hundred volts running through your meter, it probably doesn’t matter. The cheap meters are certainly good enough, even though you do get what you pay for, as you might expect.
As long as you have a meter open, you might as well
hack it to have WiFi
. Or, if you prefer, a
serial port
. | 68 | 35 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204728",
"author": "stickben",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T15:15:29",
"content": "Im going to guess no….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6204731",
"author": "JP",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T15:30:00",
"content": "Please ... | 1,760,373,647.674369 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/arcade-buttons-make-a-great-multimedia-keyboard/ | Arcade Buttons Make A Great Multimedia Keyboard | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"hid",
"keyboard",
"media keyboard"
] | [Giovanni Bernardo] has a very important job – managing the audio for several Christmas events. Desiring a simple and effective control interface,
he designed a dedicated media keyboard to run the show.
The project began with an Arduino Leonardo, commonly used in projects that aim to create a USB Human Interface Device. [Giovanni] then installed
the HID-Project library from [Nicohood]
. This was used to enable the device to emulate media buttons typically found on keyboards, something the standard Arduino HID libraries were unable to do. It’s a useful tool, and one that can be implemented on even standard Arduino Unos
when used in combination with the HoodLoader2 bootloader.
For ease of use and a little bit of cool factor, arcade buttons were used for the media functions. Simple to wire up, cheap, and with a great tactile feel, they’re a popular choice for fun human interface projects. It’s all wrapped up in a neat plastic box with Dymo labels outlining the functions. It’s a neat and tidy build that should make running the Christmas show a cinch! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204712",
"author": "Doctor Wizard",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T14:17:44",
"content": "That nifty box will make starting and stopping the music a cinch. As for the rest of the show…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6204904",
"... | 1,760,373,647.766931 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/optical-communication-using-leds-alone/ | Optical Communication Using LEDs Alone | Jenny List | [
"LED Hacks",
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"led",
"network",
"PJON"
] | We’re all used to the humble LED as a ubiquitous source of light, but how many of us are aware that these components can also be used as photodiodes? It’s something [Giovanni Blu Mitolo] takes us through as he
demonstrates a simple data link
using just a pair of LEDs and a couple of Arduinos. It’s a showing off his PJON networking layer, and while you’d need a bit more than a couple of LEDs on breadboards for a real-world application, we still think it’s a neat demonstration.
PJON itself is very much worth a look, being an implementation of a robust and error-tolerant network for Arduinos and other small microcontroller platforms. It has a variety of communication strategies for various different media, and as this LED demonstration shows, its strength is that it’s capable of working through media that other networks would balk at. Whether it’s controlling home automation through metal heating ducts or providing an alternative to LoRa at 433 MHz, it’s definitely worth a second look.
We’ve mentioned it before
, but remain surprised that we haven’t seen it more often since. Take a look, the video is below the break.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BeGYMjg-DI | 53 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204657",
"author": "ChrisMicro",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T10:12:00",
"content": "Funny, I used this principle 6 years ago:https://github.com/ChrisMicro/LedDataTransmission",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204660",
"au... | 1,760,373,647.855973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/diving-with-an-unlimited-air-supply/ | Diving With An Unlimited Air Supply | Al Williams | [
"News"
] | [
"diving",
"exolung",
"scuba",
"snorkel",
"swimming"
] | If you want to explore underwater, you have a few options. You can hold your breath. You can try to recycle your air. You can carry your breathing air with you as in SCUBA. You can stick a tube up like a snorkel, or you can have air sent down to you from the surface.
EXOlung falls into this last category
, but unlike many other surface solutions, it has a twist: it never runs out of power before you do. Watch the video below and you’ll see how it works.
A buoy puts a snorkel up out of the water, and a tube lets you dive up to 5 meters away. There’s a small tank on your chest, and your body’s motion serves to fill the tank from the outside air supply. As your legs extend and retract, you fill the tank and then put the tank’s air at ambient pressure so you can breathe. As a bonus, by varying how you inhale and exhale, you can control your buoyancy and, therefore, your depth.
The system does require you to strap your legs up to the apparatus. However, other similar systems have compressors or batteries which can fail or run down, meaning there can be a limit on how long you can stay under. EXOlung claims there is no limit to how long you can stay under.
The cost looks to be around 300 Euro, although for a bit more you can get one that uses different materials to withstand higher pressures. That one has a 7-meter hose.
Another approach is to just carry a little air and remove the CO
2
from it and
rebreathe
it. We’ve also seen a risky
surface air pump that uses wind power
. | 82 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204633",
"author": "purplepeopleated",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T06:23:36",
"content": "3 breaths untill death.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204715",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T14:40:45",
... | 1,760,373,648.143962 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/eight-motors-speed-this-boat-along/ | Eight Motors Speed This Boat Along | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"boat",
"electric boat",
"Electric motor",
"motor"
] | Messing about in boats has always held a curious appeal for the hardware hacker. Perhaps that’s because it remains an approachable way to make something that moves under its own power with a bit of speed, and barring calamities, the worst that can happen to the unwary boater is a soaking. [NASAT Channel] is a Vietnamese hacker who is a serial producer of small motorised boats, and
one of his latest is a particularly impressive example
.
The boat itself is a relatively conventional expanded polystyrene hull covered with fiberglass, but the motive power is something a little special. He’s taken eight of the ubiquitous 775 DC brushed motors and used them in a star configuration with beveled gears, which in turn drives a flexible shaft which goes straight to a propeller under the craft. Each motor shares a water cooling pipe serviced by a small pump, and the drive comes from a pair of cheap PWM motor controllers. We see him zipping up and down a stretch of river next to some moored boats, and if we’re honest, we wouldn’t mind a go ourselves.
We’re not entirely convinced such a rough-and-ready eight-way gearbox will be reliable for long-term use, and we’d be interested to know just how equally so many motors are actually sharing the load. But we like it for its sheer audacity, and we think you will too. Take a look at the video below the break, and if you’re inspired then grab
a hammock
, some friends,
and have a go
.
Thanks [Wouter WW] for the tip. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204611",
"author": "geocrasher",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T03:13:20",
"content": "I like the “do what you can with what you have” aspect of it, but I think most people here could think of more reliable ways to gang those motors. The unsupported pinions are begging for a bearing supp... | 1,760,373,647.948065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/diy-circuitpython-brain-snakes-into-small-spaces/ | DIY CircuitPython Brain Snakes Into Small Spaces | Kristina Panos | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"castellated",
"CircuitPython",
"module",
"SAMD51"
] | Whether you’re new to electronics and programming, or you were bit-banging bare metal long before hair metal, CircuitPython is a great tool for getting a project up and working without all the fuss. The boards show up as mass storage devices, and programming consists of editing the Python file and saving it back to the board.
The only hard part about CircuitPython is trying to cram those official boards into small projects. [Kevin Neubauer] got tired of making his own board every time and came up with
a slim system-on-module that has all the core functionality of CircuitPython
. CircuitBrains Deluxe has regular holes for using headers, but also has castellated pads so he can solder these modules directly to a larger project PCB. [Kevin] says these are still in the testing and cost-optimization phase, but we would totally buy a few of them.
[Kevin] probably has a programming method for this module in mind already. But if you find yourself mystified by castellated pads,
take a look at this pogo pin programmer
built for ESP8266s. If your problem is pitch-related, maybe you can
save the day with a breakout board
.
Thanks to [Drew Fustini] for the tip! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204601",
"author": "Kevin Neubauer",
"timestamp": "2019-12-22T02:37:30",
"content": "Ahh. So this explains the spike in my website traffic. Thanks Drew! Thanks Hackaday! :-)I am waiting on another board revision and then I hope to do a small production run to have some stock for me... | 1,760,373,647.89781 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/building-a-limitless-vr-desktop/ | Building A Limitless VR Desktop | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"The Hackaday Prize",
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Prize",
"desktop",
"Prelimutens",
"vr"
] | [Gabor Horvath] thinks even two monitors is too little space to really lay out his windows properly. That’s why
he’s building a VR Desktop
straight out of our deepest cyberpunk fantasies.
The software runs on Windows and Android at the moment. The user can put up multiple windows in a sphere around them. As their
head moves,
the window directly in front grows in focus. Imagine how many stack overflow windows you could have open at the same time!
Another exciting possibility is that the digital work-spaces can be shared among multiple users. Pair programming isn’t so bad, and now the possibility of doing it effectively while remote seems a little more possible. Even pair CAD might be possible depending on how its done. Imagine sharing your personal CAD session on another user’s screen and seeing theirs beside yours, allowing for simultaneous design.
Overall it’s a very cool tech demo that could turn into something more. It makes us wonder how long it is before tech workers on their way to lunch are marked by a telltale red circle on their face.
The
Hackaday
Prize2019
is Sponsored by: | 44 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204534",
"author": "pac",
"timestamp": "2019-12-21T21:16:57",
"content": "I mean, it’s cool. Very Johnny Mnemonic, Thompson eye-phones, GPL stealth modules, etc.But as far as usability? Meh. I realize it’s a tech demo, but I just don’t think that would increase productivity, at all... | 1,760,373,648.028373 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/amazon-ring-neighbors-leaking-data-on-neighbors/ | Amazon Ring: Neighbors Leaking Data On Neighbors | Jenny List | [
"home hacks",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Amazon Neighbors",
"Amazon Ring",
"IoT",
"security"
] | For a while now a series of stories have been circulating about Amazon’s Ring doorbell, an Internet-connected camera and entry system that lets users monitor and even interact with visitors and delivery people at their doors. The adverts feature improbable encounters with would-be crooks foiled by the IoT-equipped homeowner, but the stories reveal a much darker side. From reports of unhindered access by law enforcement to privately-held devices through mass releases of compromised Ring account details to attackers gaining access to children via compromised cameras, it’s fair to say that there’s much to be concerned about.
One cause for concern has been the location data exposed by the associated Amazon Neighbors crowd-sourced local crime paranoia app, and for those of us who don’t live and breathe information security there is
an easy-to-understand Twitter breakdown of its vulnerabilities from [Elliot Alderson]
that starts with the app itself and proceeds from there into compromising Ring accounts by finding their passwords. We find that supposedly anonymized information in the app sits atop an API response with full details, that there’s no defense against brute-forcing a Ring password, and that a tasty list of API and staging URLs is there for all to see embedded within the app. Given all that information, there’s little wonder that the system has proven to be so vulnerable.
As traditional appliance makers have struggled with bringing Internet connectivity into their products there have been a few stories of woeful security baked into millions of homes. A defense could be made that a company with roots outside the Internet can be forgiven for such a gaffe, but in the case of Amazon whose history has followed that of mass Web adoption and whose infrastructure lies behind so much of the services we trust, this level of lax security is unforgivable. Hackaday readers will be aware of the security issues behind so-called “smart” devices, but to the vast majority of customers they are simply technological wonders that are finally delivering a
Jetsons
-style future. If some good comes of these Ring stories it might be that those consumers finally begin to wake up to IoT security, and use their new-found knowledge to demand better.
Header image: Ring [
CC BY-SA 4.0
] | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204498",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2019-12-21T18:46:28",
"content": "The Jetsons future was a safe future. This carbon-copy? Not so much.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204583",
"author": "qwert",
... | 1,760,373,648.401238 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/dtmf-to-your-computer-with-a-gamepad/ | DTMF To Your Computer, With A Gamepad | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"dtmf",
"gamepad",
"interface"
] | Though many of us will never have experimented with it, most readers should be familiar with DTMF as the tones used by the telephone system for dialling. If your youth was not misspent mashing 4-4-2-6-4-6-2, 4-4-2-6-4-1 into a keypad, then you haven’t lived!
As you might expect there are a variety of chipsets to handle DTMF, and one of them has been used by [ackerman]
in a slightly unusual way
. Many desktop computers do not have a convenient array of GPIOs upon which to hang a piece of hardware, but a constant among them is to support some form of gaming controller. Hence he’s taken a commodity joypad and interfaced a MT8870 DTMF decoder to its switch lines with a simple transistor buffer, and is able to pull the resulting information out in the host operating system. So far there are versions for Windows, DOS, Amstrad CPC, Arduino, and even PSX ( the original PlayStation console ).
One might ask why on earth you might want a DTMF input for your desktop PC, but to do so is to miss the point. We are surrounded by computing devices from our mobile phones upwards that do not have any form of interface that can easily be used by our electronic projects, and this serves as an example of how with a bit of ingenuity that can be overcome. It’s a subject we’ve touched upon before, when we asked
why people aren’t hacking their cellphones
. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204452",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2019-12-21T15:46:40",
"content": "Okay, I guess I’m an ignorant guy who never lived, but for the sake of all others who are unfamiliar with this sequence I’ll be the goober who asks: What does “4-4-2-6-4-6-2, 4-4-2-6-4-1” represent an... | 1,760,373,648.338756 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/autonomous-boat-for-awesome-video-hyperlapses/ | Autonomous Boat For Awesome Video Hyperlapses | Danie Conradie | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"drone hacks"
] | [
"ardupilot",
"autonomous boat",
"autopilot board",
"drone",
"foam",
"gimbal",
"GoPro"
] | With the ever-increasing capabilities of smart phones, action cameras, and hand-held gimbals, the battle for the best shots is intensifying daily on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Hyperlapse sequences are one of the popular weapons in the armoury, and [Daniel Riley] aka [rctestflight] realised that his autonomous boat could be an awesome
hyperlapse platform
.
This is the third version of his autonomous boat, with
version 1
suffering from seaweed assaults and
version 2
almost sleeping with the fishes. The new version is a flat bottomed craft was built almost completely from pink insulation foam, making it stable and unsinkable. It uses the same electronics and air boat propulsion as version 2, with addition of a GoPro mounted in smart phone gimbal to film the hyper lapses. It has a tendency to push the bow into the water at full throttle, due to the high mounted motors, but was corrected by adding a foam bulge beneath the bow, at the cost of some efficiency.
Getting the gimbal settings tuned to create hyperlapses without panning jumps turned out to be the most difficult part. On calm water the boat is stable enough to fool the IMU into believing that it’s is not turning, so the gimbal controller uses the motor encoders to keep position, which don’t allow it to absorb all the small heading corrections the boat is constantly making. Things improved after turning off the encoder integration, but it would still occasionally bump against the edges of the dead band inside which the gimbal does not turn with the boat. In the end [Daniel] settled for slowly panning the gimbal to the left, while plotting a path with carefully calculated left turns to keep the boat itself out of the shot. While not perfect, the sequences still beautifully captured the night time scenery of Lake Union, Seattle. Getting it to this level cost many hours of midnight testing, since [Daniel] was doing his best to avoid other boat traffic, and we believe it paid off.
We look forward to his next videos, including an update on his
solar plane
. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204432",
"author": "ameyring",
"timestamp": "2019-12-21T14:02:42",
"content": "Nice! A prop (just one on a servo for direction) are what I chose for my hacked boat because I was doing some shallow-river boating and didn’t want to stir up sediment when I was videoing underwater. Now... | 1,760,373,648.284967 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/21/diy-lawnmower-doesnt-cut-grass-short/ | DIY Lawnmower Doesn’t Cut Grass Short | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"electric",
"grass",
"lawn",
"lawnmower",
"weed whacker"
] | [nodemcu12ecanada] is serious about saving water, which is why they built this
strange lawnmower that can cut grass taller.
Short lawns are one of those clever marketing victories, like convincing people to eat a lot of sugar, that’s been doing more harm than good ever since the victory was won. Short grass is weak grass, with shallow roots, weakness to weeds, and a lot of water requirement. On top of that the grass is always in a state of panic so it grows extra fast to get to a more “natural” height. It’s great if you want to sell fertilizer, seeds, and
lawnmowers
. Maybe not so great for the environment.
Most lawnmowers can’t even be set high enough for healthy grass so [nodemcu12ecanada] took three electric weed whackers and bolted them to an angle iron frame. It has a lot of advantages. It’s light. You don’t need to sharpen a blade. It’s quiet. It’s electric. It’s strange appearance will scare your neighbors off from borrowing any of your tools. We love it! | 81 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204389",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2019-12-21T09:28:10",
"content": "The problem with these string trimmers, that nobody seems to think about, is that they use plastic strings to cut grass. And the whole spool of strings quite quickly “disappear”. Except that it does not re... | 1,760,373,648.594553 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/hackaday-is-going-to-the-36th-chaos-communication-congress/ | Hackaday Is Going To The 36th Chaos Communication Congress | Elliot Williams | [
"cons"
] | [] | It’s that time of year again here in Germany. The mulled wine flows all night long at the Christmas markets, the Krampus runs wild in the streets, and hackers are perched frantically behind their keyboards and soldering irons, trying to get their last minute projects “finished” for the
36th annual Chaos Communication Congress
(36C3) in Leipzig.
We’ll have an assembly for all fans and friends of the Jolly Wrencher, so if you’re coming to Congress, you can
come join us
or at least stop by and say hi. [
Elliot
] and [
Sven
] and a number of Hackaday.io luminaries will be on hand. (Ask us about secret stickers and an as-yet unannounced upcoming Hackaday conference.)
Even if you’re not able to make it, you should keep your eyes on Hackaday from the 27th to the 30th, because we’ll be reporting on the best of Congress. But you don’t have to take our word for it: the Chaos Computer Club makes all of the talks available on
livestream
during the event, many with simultaneous translation, and
final edited versions
often appearing just a few hours afterwards.
We’ve looked through the
schedule
, and it’s going to be a hum-dinger! Gather ’round the glowing box with your friends at your own local hackerspace, or call in sick from work and make yourself some popcorn. This is must-see nerd TV.
Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, swing by our assembly if you’re going to be in Leipzig for the last few days of 2019. See you there! | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204390",
"author": "Gérald",
"timestamp": "2019-12-21T09:32:41",
"content": "27-30.12.2019, just between Christmas and new year’s eve is a strange choice. Not very practical if you want to come from foreign countries…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,648.760826 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/open-source-50-water-turbine-from-repurposed-parts/ | Open Source $50 Water Turbine From Repurposed Parts | Danie Conradie | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"generator",
"hover board",
"hydropower"
] | Easy access to reliable electrical power is something a lot of us take for granted, but in developing countries or after natural disaster, it can be a rare commodity. [Daniel Connelly] has been working hard to develop infrastructure people can build themselves, and his latest project is a
200 W water turbine
(video after the break) that can be built for about $50.
The core of the system is a wheel and motor from a hoverboard. What looks like 110 mm PVC tubing is connected together in a U-shape that can be mounted over the wall of a man-made channel. The inlet side is shorter than the outlet, and the system must be filled with water to allow the flow to start, like a siphon. The first two versions had the impeller sitting on the end of the outlet tube. V1 used a scrap plastic radial impeller of unknown origin, and did not work at all. V2 had a 3D printed impeller that worked pretty well, but the rotation speed wasn’t high enough to produce the voltage that [Daniel] wanted.
V3 used a large computer fan that was mounted in the short horizontal piece of section of tubing at the top of the system. It worked spectacularly well, producing about 55 V AC over a single phase of the motor, which should hopefully end up producing about 90 V DC and 200-500 W after rectifying the 3-phase motor output. This only however indicative, we would really like to see it tested with different loads connected. The output will also be dependent on the flow rate and head pressure of a particular stream/channel/river, and [Daniel] admits that they had pretty much ideal conditions for their tests. If hoverboard motors are hard to come by, a motorcycle alternator should also work well.
[Daniel] is still working out the kinks of the system, but as with his other designs on
OpenSourceLowTech
he will release the full open source design and tutorials as soon as he is ready. We are looking forward to seeing the system implemented out in the wild. For off-grid power,
home built
and
3D printed wind generators
are another popular topic around here, if you don’t have a handy channel nearby. | 37 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204387",
"author": "Thomas Anderson",
"timestamp": "2019-12-21T09:03:26",
"content": "If you get 50v open circuit, doesn’t mean you get 50V under an actual load.. Am I mistaken here?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204451",
... | 1,760,373,648.715334 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/tiny-bubbles-in-the-clock/ | Tiny Bubbles In The Clock | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"clock hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"bubble display",
"clock",
"glycerine"
] | When [DonHo] sang about tiny bubbles, he probably wasn’t thinking of them embedded in glycerine. But that’s where the bubbles in [ShinodaY]’s
clock
reside. The viscous fluid holds the bubbles better allowing the time to be read more easily. You can watch the relaxing display in the video below.
The theory of operation is simple and reminds us somehow of a reverse Tetris game. Solenoid valves at the base release air bubbles to form a row of the display. The bubbles rising makes room for the next row. The display has as many columns as there are air outlets at the bottom. Spacing the bubble pixels is as simple as adjusting the timing between air bubbles.
An ESP8266 controls the whole thing thanks to an I/O expander. Some Neopixel LEDs make the whole thing look cooler.
This is the second version of the clock. The first version (see the second video, below) used water, and we think you’ll agree the glycerine makes all the difference.
The project is as much aquarium work as electronics. We also had to wonder what else you could display like this? Maybe some crude graphics or tweets? Perhaps using it as a form of interesting game would be cool, especially if it were significantly scaled upwards.
For example, we remember one
very large bubble display
(note: the outbound link has
changed
). You can even make a
3D display
— sort of. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204347",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2019-12-21T03:27:23",
"content": "“Tiny bubbles, in the clock, if you don’t like them, you can suck a …”This would be good for reading tweets, maybe have people tweet the bubble display, make a video of the display and then post the vid... | 1,760,373,648.640959 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/boeings-starliner-fails-to-reach-space-station/ | Boeing’s Starliner Fails To Reach Space Station | Tom Nardi | [
"Featured",
"News",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"boeing",
"CST-100",
"failure",
"international space station",
"nasa",
"spaceflight",
"Starliner"
] | After a decade in development, the Boeing CST-100 “Starliner” lifted off from pad SLC-41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station a little before dawn this morning on its first ever flight. Officially referred to as the Boeing Orbital Flight Test (Boe-OFT), this uncrewed mission was intended to verify the spacecraft’s ability to navigate in orbit and safely return to Earth. It was also planned to be a rehearsal of the autonomous rendezvous and docking procedures that will ultimately be used to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station; a capability NASA has lacked since the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle.
Liftoff at 6:36 AM Eastern
Unfortunately,
some of those goals are now unobtainable
. Due to a failure that occurred just 30 minutes into the flight, the CST-100 is now unable to reach the ISS. While the craft remains fully functional and in a stable orbit, Boeing and NASA have agreed that under the circumstances the planned eight day mission should be cut short. While there’s still some hope that the CST-100 will have the opportunity to demonstrate its orbital maneuverability during the now truncated flight, the primary focus has switched to the deorbit and landing procedures which have tentatively been moved up to the morning of December 22nd.
While official statements from all involved parties have remained predictably positive, the situation is a crushing blow to both Boeing and NASA. Just days after announcing that production of
their troubled 737 MAX airliner
would be suspended, the last thing that Boeing needed right now was another high-profile failure. For NASA, it’s yet another in a long line of setbacks that have made some question if private industry is really up to the task of ferrying humans to space. This isn’t the first time a CST-100 has faltered during a test, and back in August,
a SpaceX Crew Dragon was obliterated
while its advanced launch escape system was being evaluated.
We likely won’t have all the answers until the Starliner touches down at the White Sands Missile Range and Boeing engineers can get aboard, but ground controllers have already started piecing together an idea of what happened during those first critical moments of the flight. The big question now is, will NASA require Boeing to perform a second Orbital Flight Test before certifying the CST-100 to carry a human crew?
Let’s take a look at what happened during this morning’s launch.
A Matter of Time (and Fuel)
It’s important to understand that there was no catastrophic failure aboard the CST-100 this morning. The spacecraft and the United Launch Alliance Atlas V that carried it into space were operating normally during what has been described as a perfect launch. But upon separating from the booster rocket and continuing on its own independent flight, the CST-100 failed to achieve the necessary altitude to rendezvous with the ISS. While the craft is still fully functional, it simply doesn’t have enough propellant onboard to correct the situation.
Boeing currently believes the failure lies with the spacecraft’s Mission Event Timer (MET), an internal clock that starts running as soon as the spacecraft leaves the launch pad and is used to orchestrate automated systems during the mission. For reasons that are not yet known, the MET either failed or was not properly synchronized, which led to the engines not firing according on schedule. To make matters worse, the CST-100’s Reaction Control System (RCS) depleted the vehicle’s propellant reserves by attempting to make maneuvers that were unnecessary at the time.
Starliner shown docking with ISS in a promotional render.
Quite simply, the Starliner was confused about what tasks it was supposed to be performing after separation from the Atlas V booster. Normally, ground control would have been able to see the error and intervene, but as luck would have it, the event occurred during an expected communications blackout.
Once ground control reestablished communications with the vehicle and got it back on course, it became clear the planned rendezvous with the Station was out of the question. Both NASA and Boeing have been quick to point out that, had there been a human crew aboard this mission, they would likely have been able to switch over to manual control and resolve the issue on their own.
Because of this, there’s some debate as to how this situation will play out in terms of the CST-100’s certification for human flight. While issues with the autonomous systems obviously need to be addressed, astronauts are trained to handle precisely these sort of computer glitches. For better or for worse, there’s a long history of human crews having to
take over when their vehicle’s systems have gone haywire
.
In a post-launch interview, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine downplayed the issue, hinting that the failure doesn’t necessarily mean the CST-100 isn’t ready to start carrying human occupants:
What it really comes down to is automation. What we were trying to do is make sure we could do this entire mission end-to-end completely automated and that didn’t work. But here’s what’s important, the spacecraft is in orbit, the spacecraft is safe. If we would have had astronauts on board, they would have been safe. In fact, if we had astronauts on board, they probably would have taken over manually and would be flying to the International Space Station right now.
Critical Next Steps
While the Starliner won’t be able to demonstrate the critical rendezvous and docking maneuvers, the test is far from a complete loss. Being the first flight of a completely new spacecraft, the fact that the craft was able to reach orbit and maneuver on its own is itself a considerable success. Indeed, when SpaceX performed the first flight of their Dragon spacecraft in 2010, the vehicle only flew in space for a little over three hours before returning to Earth. The Dragon didn’t even attempt to reach the ISS until its second flight two years later. One could argue that the fact the CST-100 will remain in orbit for several days means that Boeing still outperformed rival SpaceX as far as inaugural missions go.
But that assumes the CST-100 touches down safely on Sunday. Should the vehicle fail to perform its deorbit burn, break up on reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere, or be unable to land safely, NASA will have no choice but to reevaluate the spacecraft’s flight readiness and further delay the Commercial Crew program. As it stands, if the next Starliner mission carries a human crew, it will do so with an untested ability to actually rendezvous and dock with the Space Station; a concerning reversal of the safety-first principles the agency has operated under
since the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia
. | 89 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204325",
"author": "Waterfowl",
"timestamp": "2019-12-21T00:32:46",
"content": "I bet that a tube failed. i’m calling it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204343",
"author": "John McCann",
"timestamp": "2019-1... | 1,760,373,648.882167 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/numitron-clock-is-a-tidy-70s-throwback/ | Numitron Clock Is A Tidy ’70s Throwback | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"display",
"numitron"
] | As far as hacker clock builds go, the more obscure the parts involved, the better. By this yardstick,
[sjm4306] has a great piece on his hands with this Numitron-based build.
The Numitron was a type of display popular in the 1970s, and often used in aircraft avionics and other high-end hardware. The display is a 7-segment type, but using filaments instead of LEDs. [sjm4306] was able to lay his hands on four of these devices, along with some bulbs to act as the digit seperator and AM/PM indicator. Due to being incandescent in nature, multiplexing wasn’t a practical option, with lower duty cycles drastically dimming the display. Instead, a 32-bit cascaded shift register was used to enable all the segments to be driven at the same time.
It’s a great build that uses some genuine original display hardware to create a clock with a compelling vintage aesthetic. This would make a great gift to a pilot from the era, or any hacker that likes the unusual display technologies of yesteryear.
You can even build a Numitron watch, if you’re so inclined.
Video after the break. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204309",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T21:37:27",
"content": "I’m pretty sure the 1971 Cessna 172 I got my pilot certification in, back in 2000, was still using these for its Bendix/King radios. They sure looked good and they were clearly visible in broad day... | 1,760,373,648.929948 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/kerry-scharfglass-secures-your-iot-things/ | Kerry Scharfglass Secures Your IoT Things | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Microcontrollers",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"iot security",
"security",
"Supercon"
] | We’ve all seen the IoT device security trainwrecks: those gadgets that fail so spectacularly that the comment section lights up with calls of “were they even thinking about the most basic security?” No, they probably weren’t. Are you?
Hackaday Contributor and all around good guy Kerry Scharfglass thinks about basic security for a living,
and his talk is pitched at the newcomer to device security
. (Embedded below.) Of course “security” isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition; you need to think about what threats you’re worried about, which you can ignore, and defend against what matters. But if you’ve never worked through such an exercise, you’re in for a treat here. You need to think like a maker, think like a breaker, and surprisingly, think like an accountant in defining what constitutes acceptable risks.
Kerry works through three products, an IoT medical training device, a smart deadbolt, and an IoT dockless shared scooter. While you might think that the medical device would demand high security, it was actually the simplest on his list. It’s used by medical professionals on-site, in a controlled environment, and there’s not much else you can do with it. They took some effort to make flashing the wrong firmware difficult, including flashing only over USB, but basically they decided that the bare-minimum of security was acceptable.
Contrast the medical device with the IoT lock. The lock is all about security and securing your house. Worse, if it fails, it would lock you out of your house. And the threat surface is large. Imagine using the lock on your door to let people in to your AirBnB rental — now you have a stranger with extended physical access to the device, who could even dismount it without looking too odd.
There are privacy concerns, denial of service attacks, and the possibility to use it to pivot into your home network. Needless to say, the firmware update mechanism here was a lot more complex, involving authentication
and
encryption, and Kerry goes into the whole chain here.
Finally, the scooter. The device itself is cool, stealable, a public safety hazard if it fails, and if you could figure out a way to turn them off remotely, you know videos would show up on YouTube. In short, it’s a security nightmare. Half of this was solved by having the scooter techs frequently get hands on the devices. Firmware can only be flashed locally with a cable. The techs could see if anything was added to the PCBA. Etc. The other half was solved by dedicating a separate microcontroller to the throttle and brakes, disconnecting the most important driving functions from the IoT stuff.
What’s most interesting about the scooter case study is all the things the company chose
not
to fight against. User stupidity? Nope. Theft? They only have an expected life of 6 months anyway, and aftermarket “brains” are available on Amazon for anyone who really wants to steal it.
There are tons of other threats, but the overarching theme of Kerry’s talk is identifying which risks you can mitigate, and which you can’t. Focusing your efforts on the basic stuff gets you past the basic threats. And that’ll keep the companies that Kerry worked for from ending up shamed in the Hackaday comment section. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204302",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T21:00:14",
"content": "Articles like this are why I keep reading Hackaday. Thank you, Elliot, for an excellent article! 👍",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6204317",
"au... | 1,760,373,648.973974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/macro-foot-stool-helps-me-get-a-leg-up-on-work/ | Macro Foot Stool Helps Me Get A Leg Up On Work | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"Lifehacks",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Arcade buttons",
"assistive device",
"footstool",
"macro",
"macro keyboard"
] | Macros are meant to make our lives easier, but they live up to this promise with mixed results. Generally speaking, a macro is a special combination of keys on the keyboard that execute a custom task — their goal is to speed up your productivity by getting away from mousing through menus. But once a macro requires more than two keys, they can get a bit cumbersome to input. I have personally found that repeated use of macros that require
ctrl
+
shift
can
potentially cause problems
. I don’t know about you (and your repetitive stress mileage may vary), but personal injury is the polar opposite of what I want from something that’s supposed to be convenient.
The more I thought about
how nice it would be to have a field of dedicated one-punch macro keys
, the more incomplete my life seemed without it. Every uncomfortable three-key shortcut I chorded was more motivational than the last.
I love keyboard shortcuts, and not just because I prefer keyboard navigation in general. A lot of little things about writing for the web can be streamlined with shortcuts, like writing
html
tags and doing image manipulation. And I’m always looking for a better workflow to pin down my fleeting mental fragments, at least until that dark day that I can turn on Dropbox Thoughts™ and burn my brainwaves directly to disk.
Why a Foot Stool?
Most macro machines resemble keyboards and live on the desk surface. My desk surface is covered in loose papers, legal pads, folders, and felines, and I don’t want to worry about keeping another input device uncovered. Also, the cat and I don’t need another permanent fixture taking up valuable space. I was already using a footstool anyway because my desk is weirdly tall, and I have to raise the chair pretty high to sit comfortably at it and type.
One of the reasons I had for
making a foot-fed keyboard
specifically is to improve my focus. I wanted a way to have shortcuts that wouldn’t take my fingers away from the act of creating with words. The more shortcuts I have, the more time I can spend in the zone, perfecting my pun game. Most of the shortcuts are for post-making minutiae. For instance, see that subheading that begins the next section? It’s a specialized
<h2>
tag that plays nicely with images.
Once I managed to get it memorized, I got tired of typing them out, only to have WordPress convert them on the sly to a plain
<h2>
tags once in a while. I also have a shortcut that spits out an
<a href>
tag. Both of them use a
for
loop to move the cursor to the right spot, so I can just keep on typing. None of the shortcuts by themselves save a great deal of time, but the effect is cumulative.
Toe-Tapping Toolbox
Physically there are only four buttons on the stool, but there is a “bank” system that expands the stool it to 20 potential macros. Each button gets a new macro based on which of the buttons is illuminated — or the default where no button is lit — for a total of five banks. At the moment, I have more available macro real estate than I know what to do with. This is a good thing, like having empty drawers in a parts cabinet. It means I have room to grow.
When the stool is in the default bank, none of the LEDs are lit, though they do light momentarily when the button is pushed. I can access the different color banks by long-pressing the corresponding button. Once that’s done, the LED will stay lit until I change banks. One nice feature is that I can switch directly to another bank without going back to the default bank first. And I can get back to the default bank just by long-pressing the active color bank’s button again.
I wrestled a bit with trying to decide what kind of shortcuts to deposit in each bank. Would I be better served to group shortcuts by context, or by type? For now, they’re organized by type. The default bank is all
ctrl
+
shift
+
letter
combinations, and the red bank is all snippets — stuff like the fancy
<h2>
tag and the
<a href>
tag.
How It’s Made
I’ll be honest – I wanted this to be easy. The sooner I got this keystool under my feet, the sooner I could stamp out lost seconds and shortcut fatigue.
The brains of the operation is an ItsyBitsy M0, programmed in CircuitPython. It’s a huge help that the board already presents as an HID, and coding is as easy as editing a text file on a mass storage device. Sure, it feels good to program in Arduino or C or on bare metal, but the point of this was to boost productivity.
As soon as I think of a new shortcut I’d like to have at my toes, all I have to do is switch my text editor to
main.py
, write a new method, call the method in the appropriate bank, and save the file. Programmatically speaking, it’s quite a portable device.
Micro Macro Foot Stool
Within the first day of using the foot stool, I was hooked. But it only had the default bank and a grand total of four slots at that point. I wanted to keep improving on it, but I didn’t want to mess it up with my experimentation or stop using it in the meantime. I had no choice but to build a second, smaller version.
The only functional differences are that the micro macro foot stool uses a Trinket M0 instead of an ItsyBitsy M0, and there are no LEDs, so I can’t test changes to those.
A Learning Experience
I learned a few things making this stool, which is the mark of any good project. For one, I’d never drilled such huge holes before, or done much drilling in plastic. Now I can go forth and confidently drill any decently rigid plastic without fear. Enclosure-wise, the folding stool turned out to be quite hackable, because it comes apart easily and lays flat for drilling. Makes me wonder what else could be done to these stools.
Another perk was the chance to get down in the grass with CircuitPython. I hadn’t done a whole lot with it before this project, but it has snaked its way into my heart. I’m grateful to live in a time where a project like this can have such a low barrier to entry. Whether you want to build something like this to prevent repetitive stress injury or for better noob pwnage, CircuitPython makes it easy.
I don’t wear shoes here in the Hackaday home office, but if I did, you can bet I would try using
stompbox switches
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204268",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T18:34:44",
"content": "our little fuzzy overlords demand more desk space!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6204290",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2019-12... | 1,760,373,649.068616 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/hackaday-podcast-047-prusa-controversy-bottle-organ-breakdown-pcbs-bending-backwards-and-listen-to-your-led/ | Hackaday Podcast 047: Prusa Controversy, Bottle Organ Breakdown, PCBs Bending Backwards, And Listen To Your LED | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"36C3",
"bottle organ",
"flex PCB",
"Hackaday Podcast",
"LiFi",
"pen plotter",
"prusa",
"Prusa Mini",
"warranty"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams get together for the 47th and final Hackaday Podcast of 2019. We dive into the removable appendix on Prusa’s new “Buddy” control board, get excited over the world’s largest grid-backup battery, and commiserate about the folly of designing enclosures as an afterthought. There’s some great research into which threaded-inserts perform best for 3D-printed parts, how LEDs everywhere should be broadcasting data, and an acoustic organ that’s one-ups the traditional jug band.
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 047 Show Notes:
New This Week:
Join Elliot and Sven at 36C3 next week!
Mike built the midTbot
Lack Of Space Is No Longer An Excuse For Not Having A Pen Plotter
Demo video and closeup images
Generating gcode directly
We’re off next week but will be back on January 3rd!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Tidy Board Rework Uses Flex PCBs, No Wires
Hackaday Superconference: Nick Poole On Boggling The Boardhouse
How To Build Beautiful Enclosures From FR4 — Aka PCBs
Bottle Organ Breakdown
Forming Fipples And Accompanying Accoutrements
Modulated Pilot Lights Anchor AR To Real World
LinkRay
Bokode, A New Barcode
Hackaday Explains: Li-Fi & Visible Light Communications
Joe Grand Is Hiding Data In Plain Sight: LEDs That Look Solid But Send A Message
These Lessons Were Learned In Enclosure Design, But Go Far Beyond
Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth From Threaded Inserts?
Threading 3D Printed Parts: How To Use Heat-Set Inserts
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Universal Interface Board Comes To The Rescue Of Bigger Projects
What Does An Electronics Tinkerer’s Workbench Need?
Escher: Etch-a-Sketch As A Service
Mike’s Picks:
Use Blueprint Process To Print On Fabric With Lasers
A Modular System For Building Heavy Duty 18650 Battery Packs
Sleek, Sophisticated Skittle Sorter
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Hornsdale Power Reserve And What It Means For Grid Battery Storage
Prusa Dares You To Break Their Latest Printer
(Erratum: eight years. I say I’ve had a Prusa Mk II for “ten years”. It’s circa 2012. Printed in plastic by Jo Pru himself, in Smurf Smoothie. It’s been a great ride!) | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204294",
"author": "Karlotta Harrumphed",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T20:14:59",
"content": "Arghhh! Transcripts, please! Watching videos has it’s place, listening to podcasts has it’s place, but put an end to the lazyness and PLEASE provide transcripts, if nothing else then for the s... | 1,760,373,649.016998 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/all-your-sdr-software-in-a-handy-raspberry-pi-image/ | All Your SDR Software In A Handy Raspberry Pi Image | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"radio",
"raspberry pi",
"sdr"
] | The SDR revolution has brought a bonanza of opportunities for experimentation to the radio enthusiast, but with it has come a sometimes-confusing array of software for which even installation can be a difficult prospect for an SDR novice. If you’re bamboozled by it all then help may be at hand courtesy of [Luigi Cruz], who has
packaged a suite of ready-to-go popular SDR software in an OS image for the Raspberry Pi
.
On board the Raspbian-based OS image are SDR Angel, Soapy Remote, GQRX, GNURadio, LimeUtil, and LimeVNA. In hardware terms the RTL-SDR is supported, along with the LimeSDR, PlutoSDR, Airspy, and Airspy HF. All are completely ready-to-go and even have desktop shortcuts, so if the CLI scares you then you can still dive in and play. More importantly it’s designed for use with SDR transmitters as well as receivers, so the barrier for full SDR operation for radio amateurs has become significantly lower too.
This year has seen the seven-year anniversary of the RTL-SDR hack that probably did most to kickstart the use of SDRs in our community. Our colleague [Tom Nardi]
wrote a retrospective
that’s worth a look for its overview of some SDR tricks that have evolved over that time. Meanwhile if you don’t mind restricting your outlook somewhat, it’s possible to
turn the Raspberry Pi 3 into an SDR all without any extra hardware
. | 29 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204259",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T17:37:20",
"content": "I am so going to give this a try. Might even be worth it to replace my 2012-era RTL-SDR with a more modern one, if this works as well as it looks like it should.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,373,649.27156 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/this-week-in-security-unicode-truecrypt-and-npm-vulnerabilities/ | This Week In Security: Unicode, Truecrypt, And NPM Vulnerabilities | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"NPM",
"openbsd",
"This Week in Security",
"unicode"
] | Unicode, the wonderful extension to to ASCII that gives us gems like “✈”, “⌨”, and “☕”, has had some unexpected security ramifications. The most common problems with Unicode are visual security issues, like character confusion between letters. For example, the English “M” (U+004D) is indistinguishable from the Cyrillic “М” (U+041C). Can you tell the difference between IBM.com and IBМ.com?
This bug, discovered by [John Gracey] turns the common problem
on its head
. Properly referred to as a case mapping collision, it’s the story of different Unicode characters getting mapped to the same upper or lowercase equivalent.
'ß'.toLowerCase() === 'SS'.toLowerCase() // true
// Note the Turkish dotless i
'John@Gıthub.com'.toUpperCase() === 'John@Github.com'.toUpperCase()
GitHub stores all email addresses in their lowercase form. When a user sends a password reset, GitHub’s logic worked like this: Take the email address that requested a password reset, convert to lower case, and look up the account that uses the converted email address. That by itself wouldn’t be a problem, but the reset is then sent to the email address that was requested, not the one on file. In retrospect, this is an obvious flaw, but without the presence of Unicode and the possibility of a case mapping collision, would be a perfectly safe practice.
This flaw seems to have been fixed quite some time ago, but was only recently disclosed. It’s also a novel problem affecting Unicode that we haven’t covered. Interestingly, my research has turned up an almost
identical problem at Spotify
, back in 2013.
TrueCrypt and German Secrets
TrueCrypt is an amazing piece of software that literally changed the world, giving every computer user a free, source-available solution for hard drive encryption. While the source of the program was made freely available, the license was odd and restrictive enough that it’s technically neither Free Software, nor Open Source Software. This kept it from being included in many of the major OS distributions. Even at that, TrueCrypt has been used by many, and for many reasons, from the innocent to reprehensible. TrueCrypt was so popular, a crowdfunding campaign raised enough money to fund a professional audit of the TrueCrypt code in 2013.
The story takes an odd turn halfway through the source code audit. Just after the initial audit finished, and just before the in-depth phase II audit was begun, the TrueCrypt developers suddenly announced that they were ending development. The TrueCrypt website still shows the announcement: “WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues.” Many users thought the timing was odd, and speculated that there was a backdoor of some sort that would be uncovered by the audit. The in-depth audit was finished, and while a few minor issues were discovered, nothing particularly serious was uncovered.
One of the more surprising users of TrueCrypt is the German government. It was recently discovered that the BSI, the information security branch of the German government,
did an audit on TrueCrypt
back in 2010.
Many governments have now have laws establishing
the freedom of information
, granting a “right-to-know” to their citizens. Under these laws, a citizen may make an official request for documentation, and if such documentation exists, the government is compelled to provide it, barring a few exceptions. A German citizen made
an official request for information
regarding TrueCrypt, particularly in regards to known backdoors in the software. Surprisingly, such documentation did exist!
Had the German government secretly backdoored TrueCrypt? Were they part of a conspiracy? Probably not. After some red tape and legal wrangling, the text of the audit was finally released and cleared for publication. There were some issues found back in 2010 that were still present in the TrueCrypt/Veracrypt source, and got fixed as a result of this report coming to light.
NPM Binary Planting
The Node Package Manager, that beloved repository of all things Javascript, recently pushed out an update and
announced a pair of vulnerabilities
. The vulnerabilities, simply stated, were both due to the lack of any sanity checking when installing packages.
First, the binary install path wasn’t sanitized during installation, meaning that a package could attempt to interact with any file on the target filesystem. Particularly when running the NPM CLI as root, the potential for abuse is huge. While this first issue was taken care of with the release of version 6.13.3, a second, similar problem was still present in that release.
Install paths get sanitized in 6.13.3, but the second problem is that a package can install a binary over any other file in its install location. A package can essentially inject code into other installed packages. The fix for this was to only allow a package to overwrite binary files owned by that package.
The upside here is that a user must install a compromised package in order to be affected. The effect is also greatly mitigated by running NPM as a non-root user, which seems to be good practice.
Google Cloud Shell
Google provides a bunch of services around their cloud offering, and provides the very useful web-based Cloud Shell interface for managing those services. A researcher at Offensi spent some time looking for vulnerabilities, and
came up with 9 of them
. The first step was to identify the running environment, which was a docker image in this case. A socket pointing back to the host system was left exposed, allowing the researcher to easily escape the Docker container. From there, he was able to bootstrap some debugging tools, and get to work finding vulnerabilities.
The vulnerabilities that are detailed are interesting in their own right, but the process of looking for and finding them is the most interesting to me. Google even sponsored a YouTube video detailing the research, embedded below:
Odds and Ends
Using an iPhone to break the security of a Windows machine
? The iPhone driver sets the permissions for a certain file when an iPhone is plugged into the machine. That file could actually be a hardlink to an important system file, and the iPhone driver can unintentionally make that arbitrary file writable.
The Nginx web server is currently being held hostage
. Apparently the programmers who originally wrote Nginx were working for a technology company at the time, and now that the Nginx project has been acquired, that company has claimed ownership over the code. It’s likely just a fraudulent claim, but the repercussions could be far-reaching if that claim is upheld.
OpenBSD has fixed a simple privilege escalation
, where a setuid binary is called with a very odd LD_LIBRARY_PATH — a single dot, and lots of colons. This tricks the loader into loading a user owned library, but with root privileges. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204239",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T15:43:56",
"content": "sigh….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6204243",
"author": "jme",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T16:09:23",
"content": "Have a read about the tru... | 1,760,373,649.20809 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/movie-style-hacking-with-a-wall-of-glowing-hex/ | Movie-Style Hacking With A Wall Of Glowing Hex | Tom Nardi | [
"LED Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"alphanumeric",
"hex dump",
"LED display",
"stm32"
] | Over the years, the media has managed to throw together some pretty ridiculous visual depictions of computer hacking. But perhaps none have gone as far down the road of obfuscation as
The Matrix
, where the most experienced hackers are able to extract information from a display of cascading green glyphs like a cyberpunk version of reading tea leaves. It’s absolutely ridiculous, with zero basis in reality.
Well, maybe not anymore. Taking a page from these outlandish visions of hacking, [Erik Bosman] has constructed
a dedicated hex dump display out of fourteen segment alphanumeric LEDs
that looks like it could be pulled from a movie set. But make no mistake, it’s more than just a pretty face. By cleverly varying the brightness of the individual characters, he’s managed to make his so-called “hexboard” completely usable despite the fact that everything’s the same color.
While he says the project is not quite at 100% yet, he’s already released the firmware, computer-side software, and even the PCB design files for anyone who might want to build their own version. Though as you might imagine, it’s quite a tall order.
The display is broken up into segments holding eight Houkem-5421 LED modules apiece, each with its own STM32F030F4 and two TC7258E LED controllers. The bill of materials on this one is a bit intimidating, but when the end result look this good it’s hard to complain.
To build a somewhat smaller version that also features a more retro vibe, you might consider doing something similar by
chaining together vintage LED “bubble” displays
. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204214",
"author": "Daniel G (@shDaniell)",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T12:10:22",
"content": "His example video on twitter (https://twitter.com/brainsmoke/status/1207409708694474753) shows a cool animation using the board.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,373,649.732603 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/19/learn-arduino-in-time-and-in-tune-for-christmas/ | Learn Arduino In Time And In Tune For Christmas | Erin Pinheiro | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"breadboard",
"christmas tree",
"diy",
"electronic art",
"guides"
] | If you’re one of the lucky ten thousand today who still haven’t tried programming electronics with the Arduino platform,
this detailed guide
by [Dafna Mordechai] should hopefully give you enough incentive to pick it up now and make a simple bit of Christmas-themed decoration with it.
The guide isn’t exactly aimed at complete ground-up beginners but it does give some pointers on where to look up whatever information you don’t have in order to follow along. Other than that, it’s very simple and has well-detailed steps, showing you how to turn a breadboard into a simple animated arrangement of LEDs in the shape of a Christmas tree, along with a piezo buzzer playing “Jingle Bells”. If you’ve never done this sort of stuff before, [Dafna] explains in pretty good detail which part of the code does what, making it pretty simple if you want to play around with it and customize it to your taste.
Once you’ve gotten the hang of the basics of Arduino, why not try a project that’s a little more elaborate? Without having to stray too far from your comfort zone, you can easily build
a kid’s toy full of switches and lights
or even
a very extra clock that has no shortage of lights and dials
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204005",
"author": "PeTe",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T17:17:22",
"content": "XKCD reference!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204045",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T18:40:48",
"content": "... | 1,760,373,649.504221 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/19/the-birth-of-the-modern-robot/ | The Birth Of The Modern Robot | Sharon Lin | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"history",
"research",
"robotics",
"robots",
"science fiction"
] | When Isaac Asmiov was writing
I, Robot
, the field of robotics was still in its infancy. As he notes in
The Complete Robot
, as the field began to mature, it started showing signs of conforming to the popular ideas held by science fiction writers about what robotics ought to be. Notions of humanoid robots, the functions that robots would have in domestic settings, even the ethical quandaries that AI ethicists face today were all themes of early sci-fi writers.
The idea of a robot – at least of automata – predates the field of robotics. The idea of an independent automata may have existed as early as the ancient Egyptians Chinese, and Greeks, who attempted to build self-operated machines that resembled animals and humans. Myths of
clay golems
in Jewish legends and
clay giants
in Norse legends perpetuated the idea of an artificial being that could mimic the actions of living creatures. A
400 BC myth from Crete
spoke of a man of bronze who guarded their island from pirates.
In 1066, the Chinese inventor [Su Song] constructed a
water clock
consisting of a tower with mechanical features that would chime the hours. The tower had programmable drums with pegs that would bump into levers to operate the percussion instruments. Later, in the 13th century, Muslim scientist [Ismail al-Jazari] created a
humanoid waitress
that could serve tea to customers. Drinks were stored in a reservoir tank. The drinks would drip from a bucket into a cup, which the waitress could then serve through an open door. Centuries later, [Leonardo da Vinci] would sketch plans for a mechanical knight that would sit up, wave its arms, and move its head.
It wasn’t until 1920, however, that the term robot began being used to describe these automata. The Czech writer [Karel Čapek] published a play titled
R.U.R.
about artificial bodies without souls, which borrowed their name from the Czech word for peasant slaves (“robota”). The story told of mechanical men working on factory assembly lines who rebelled against their human masters, a recurring storyline in what would become a major sub-genre of science fiction writing.
In 1932, inventor [W. H. Richards] exhibited one of the first humanoid robots at the Model Engineers Society in London. The frame consisted of an aluminum body with eleven electromagnets and a motor powered by a 12 V power source. In 1948, [William Grey Walter] from the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol created the first
complex autonomous robot
, based on his theory that the connections between brain cells could give rise to complex behaviors. Elmer and Elsie, the robotic tortoises, were constructed with a phototropic plastic shell that doubled as a bump sensor. The devices showed the interaction between a light sensitive and touch sensitive control mechanism mimicking nerve cells with tactile and visual input. The systems interacted well enough that the tortoises appeared to exhibit behavior when navigating around obstacles.
While there is contention over the exact origins of the field, the notion that analog electronics could simulate brain processes – an idea [Alan Turing] and [John von Neumann] were also famed for entertaining – may have jump-started subsequent robotics research.
Kentucky inventor [George C. Devol] is often credited with creating the first modern robot in 1954, known as
Ultimate
Unimate. The robot was the first industrial machine, working on a General Motors assembly line. With the help of his business associate [Joseph Engelberger], the pair started the first robot manufacturing company. The job of the robots was to transport die castings from an assembly line and weld the parts onto auto bodies. It was a particularly useful task to automate since the work was especially dangerous for human workers, who could be poisoned by toxic fumes or injured if they weren’t careful.
As far as robotics research goes, the scientific study remains an interdisciplinary branch between mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. Much of the theory that plays into the field is borrowed from aspects of controls, design, information processing, and other subfields of these branches. Given how wide the applications of robotics can be – from autonomous vehicles to prosthetics to industrial robots – the many branches of robotics span numerous adjacent fields.
Back to Sci-Fi
The most famous laws of robotics were probably those proposed by [Asimov] – the
Three Laws of Robotics:
First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
These laws governed the underlying universe behind Asimov’s robot stories, intended as a safety feature for their interactions with humans and one another. Whenever one of his robots would act counter-intuitively, it was often a direct consequence of one of the laws being applied to the situation. While they may have originated as a facet of fiction, they have become incorporated into the study of the ethics of artificial intelligence as well.
As the study of robotics has matured and incorporated more applications of research into artificial intelligence and intelligent agents, the ideas of ethics has become more prominent as a real barrier to further work in the field. While early robots may have been hard-wired to perform certain rote actions, as robots have become more free agents with the ability to select actions based on their optimizations of reaching certain goals, the subtleties of the algorithms used to govern these actions has come more into question. Questions in the ethics of AI tackle ideas from whether artificial general intelligence is possible, whether the machines are inherently dangerous and if there are ways to curb this danger, and whether machines have some semblance of a consciousness and certain rights. The same ideas covered by
Black Mirror
are very much real problems that today’s philosophers are dealing with solving.
As for the current state of robotics research, opinions range widely depending on who you ask. As one analogy puts it, tasks that are difficult for a human adult – such as quickly identifying differences in a vast database – can be easy for a robot. However, tasks that are easy for a human baby – such as grasping and throwing a ball – can be nearly impossible for robots. Even in
rescue work
, robots may not be ready to act as the sole responders simply due to deficiencies in their speed, versatility, and ease of use.
The biggest change and future outlook for robotics is probably the level to which autonomous agents will invade our society. With the rise of global opportunities for companies capable of building better state-of-the-art technologies for transportation, manufacturing, medicine, and other high-profit fields, there will only be more robots deployed in roles that were once filled by human workers. We may not be living in a robot dystopia proposed by [Asimov] just yet, but it isn’t just science fiction anymore. | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203975",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T16:08:55",
"content": "The first robot was the Unimate, not Ultimate. The company George C. Devol founded was called Unimation.Also, Engelberger was his “associate”, not associated.My dad worked for Unimation in the early days."... | 1,760,373,649.671076 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/19/you-may-trust-driverless-cars-but-do-you-trust-driverless-barbers/ | You May Trust Driverless Cars, But Do You Trust Driverless Barbers? | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"barber",
"haircut",
"robot"
] | Although it is getting more common to have self-driving cars on the road, we have to admit we are still a bit uneasy. After all, we know first hand how hard it is to think of every case and how unreliable things can be. But what about having your hair cut by a robot? At least a car can have airbags and automatically stop at any sign of trouble. But letting a robot hold a sharp instrument up to your head? That’s what Buzz Robotics wants to do and they are starting with a neck trim that you can see in the video below.
Honestly, since the trimmers are probably not that dangerous, we feel a little better. But the fact that the screen says “Calibrated Bad” doesn’t install confidence. While the robobarber might not be able to cut your head off, it could certainly ruin your coiffure.
Right now, most of the information on Buzz seems to be on
Twitter
. The neck gets scanned and a program computes the angles and rotations. We aren’t sure what happens when you move your head.
On the face of it, it makes sense. If you could have an autobarber that could cut your hair for $10 and doesn’t need a tip, it could really change the low-end haircut market. But it seems unlikely that people who see a barber shop or a beauty shop as a social event are going to switch. Not to mention unless the robot can deal with a lot of head motion, kids haircuts are out, too.
People are pretty conservative with their hair cutting equipment. Remember
Flowbee
? Then again, if you want to merge with technology, there are some advantages to
long hair
. | 47 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203904",
"author": "anon",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T12:04:51",
"content": "This is probably about 1000% safer then Telas “Autopilot” (but please don’t treat it like an autopilot no no we just name it that to confuse and mislead you) and any other complete driverless car solution. W... | 1,760,373,649.466248 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/19/universal-interface-board-comes-to-the-rescue-of-bigger-projects/ | Universal Interface Board Comes To The Rescue Of Bigger Projects | Donald Papp | [
"cnc hacks",
"hardware",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"Industrial Control",
"logic",
"universal interface"
] | As soon as a project involves other assemblies, parts, or modules, things get more complicated. Devices like fans, cooling units, probes, pumps, or lighting might have simple electrical requirements, but they are rarely identical. As a result, one’s tidy project ends up having to deal with, for example, a pump that is controlled with 5 V active high logic, a sensor that outputs 5 V active low, lights that expect to be switched with 24 VDC, and a fan that needs a relay right now. But that might change in the future.
That’s exactly what led [Lukas Fässler] to design and build the
Universal Interface
, a board intended to be a kind of universal translator and interface for all such devices. The idea is to have one Universal Interface board for every external device. For each board, a wide variety of input combinations controls a single output. The boards are “hardware programmable” in the sense that jumpers (zero-ohm resistors) are used to spell out in black and white exactly what combinations of inputs result in which output state. In this way, some standardization and clarity of control can be enforced while still being flexible enough to accommodate changes.
Jumper-configured logic table defining with utter clarity which combination of inputs results in an OFF or ON.
Each Universal Interface board has three inputs and an enable line, each with their own indicator LED visually confirming its state. The inputs are 24 V tolerant and each can be configured with a pull-up, a pull-down, and as an active high or active low. There is one output, but it takes several forms: a sturdy relay, a powerful open-collector output, a 5 V logic output, and a 24 V logic output. Configuring which output state corresponds to what combination of inputs is set by jumpers, so the board is very much WYSIWYG.
[Lukas] is currently using four of these devices with his CNC mill project, all in different configurations, and they’re working reliably. Interested? The
GitHub repository for the project
has all the board design files. | 31 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203879",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T09:17:20",
"content": "Looks like the attention from this article overloaded the author’s page – getting a database error",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6203883",
"... | 1,760,373,649.901797 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/santa-claws-sharpen-your-skills-for-a-good-cause/ | Santa Claws: Sharpen Your Skills For A Good Cause | Kristina Panos | [
"Holiday Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"charity",
"claw machine",
"pi face",
"raspberry pi",
"remote control"
] | Want to do a bit of good this holiday season without leaving your couch or battle station? Well step right up and try your hand at
Santa Claws
, the charitable claw machine created by UK-based firm Liberty Games. For every toy you can maneuver to the chute, Liberty Games will donate money to Crisis, a national charity devoted to ending homelessness.
The machine is filled with special Christmas-themed stuffed animals that represent different cash values from £1 to £5. And these toys are doing double duty — after the holiday, they’ll all be donated to a good cause. In order to make this playable worldwide, Liberty used a Raspberry Pi, two Pi Face boards to interface the claw machine’s controls, and a Pi Face rack to everything together. They have the machine set on ‘generous’, so go have fun.
Has this rekindled a longing for your own claw machine? Yeah, us too.
Here’s a full-size machine that runs on a Teensy
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203931",
"author": "Steven",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T13:56:10",
"content": "Unfortunately the game isn’t working right now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204256",
"author": "Kristina Panos",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,373,649.776074 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/annealing-3d-prints-a-scientific-approach/ | Annealing 3D Prints: A Scientific Approach | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"aba",
"abs",
"annealing",
"PETG",
"PLA",
"prusa"
] | We’ve all been taught the scientific method: Form a hypothesis, do some experiments, gather some data, and prove or disprove the hypothesis. But we don’t always do it. We will tweak our 3D prints a little bit and think we see an improvement (or not) and draw some conclusions without a lot of data. Not [Josef Prusa], though. His team printed 856 different parts from four different materials to generate data about how
parts behaved when annealed
. There’s a video to watch, below.
Annealing is the process of heating a part to cause its structure to reorganize. Of course, heated plastic has an annoying habit of deforming. However, it can also make the parts firmer and with less inner tension. Printed parts tend to have an amorphous molecular structure. That is to say, they have no organization at all. The temperature where the plastic becomes soft and able to reorganize is the glass transition temperature.
Common glass transition temperatures are 65C for PLA, 75C for PET or PETG, and 105C for ABS, in fact those are the minimum temperatures. Until the plastic melts, the temperature is technically a glass transition temperature. However, the hotter you get, the more likely the plastic is to warp, shrink or deform.
There’s a lot of data in the post about how different temperatures affect PLA, ABS, ASA, and PETG. They measured the change in dimensions, how much force it takes to break a part, and the resulting part’s tensile strength.
After reviewing the data, the post and the video talk about how you might do the same thing in a home electric oven. We had to wonder whether a convection oven would be better for eradicating hot spots.
This isn’t the
first time we’ve seen this
, but it might be the first one to use a few hundred test prints. Even so, the results are
consistent
with some we’ve seen in the past. | 28 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203845",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T03:14:33",
"content": "Might be a good application for my temp controlled convection dryer toaster oven.Still need to publish the build and software on that one.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,373,649.965785 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/watch-a-sand-cast-slingshot-made-from-start-to-finish/ | Watch A Sand-Cast Slingshot Made, From Start To Finish | Donald Papp | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"aluminum",
"casting",
"mold",
"sand casting",
"slingshot"
] | Sand-casting metal parts is a technique that has been around for a very long time, but it can be educational to see the process from start to finish. That’s exactly what [Frederico] shows us with
his sand-cast slingshot of his own design
, and it’s not bad for what he says is a first try!
First, [Frederico] makes a two-part
green sand
mold of the slingshot body. Green sand is a sand and clay mix, and is only
green
in the sense that it is wet or “raw” and not further processed. After the mold is made, it’s time to melt aluminum in the propane-powered furnace, and the molten aluminum is then poured into the mold.
After cooling, [Frederico] breaks up the sand to reveal the rough cast object. There is post-processing to do in the form of sprues to cut and some flashing around the seams to remove, but overall it looks to have turned out well. You can watch the whole process in the video, embedded below.
Sand casting is an old technology, but it makes friends easily and
isn’t afraid to be seen with new kids on the block like 3D printing
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203829",
"author": "macona",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T00:22:57",
"content": "Do not use steel as a crucible for aluminum. Molten aluminum will dissolve steel. Its a good way to end up with a boot of molten aluminum. Graphite or clay crucibles are pretty cheap in this size, use them... | 1,760,373,649.828708 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/escher-etch-a-sketch-as-a-service/ | Escher: Etch-a-Sketch As A Service | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"cloud",
"etch a sketch",
"Feather",
"g-code",
"huzzah",
"NEMA-17"
] | For better or for worse, the tech world has fully committed to pushing as many of their products into “The Cloud” as possible. Of course, readers of Hackaday see right through the corporate buzzwords. It’s all just a fancy way of saying you have to poke some server over the Internet every time you want to use the service. In a way,
[Matt Welsh] has perfectly demonstrated this concept with Escher
. It’s a normal Etch-a-Sketch, but since somebody else owns it and you’ve got to have an active Internet connection to use it, that makes it an honorary citizen of the Cloud.
Escher takes the form of a 3D printed mount and replacement knobs for the classic drawing toy that allow two NEMA 17 steppers to stand in for human hands. Thanks to the clever design, [Matt] can easily pull the Etch-a-Sketch out and use it the old fashioned way, though admittedly the ergonomics of holding onto the geared knobs might take a little getting used to. But who wants to use their hands, anyway?
In terms of the electronics, the star of the show is the the Adafruit Feather HUZZAH32 development board, paired with a motor controller that can provide 12 V to the steppers. [Matt] even went through the trouble of making a custom voltage regulator PCB that steps down the stepper’s voltage to 5 V for the Feather. Totally unnecessary, just how we like it.
For the software folks in the audience, [Matt] goes into considerable detail about how he got his hardware talking to the web with Google Firebase. Even if the Internet of Sketches doesn’t quite tickle your fancy, we imagine his deep-dive on pushing G-Code files from the browser into the Feather will surely be of interest.
It probably will come as little surprise to hear
this isn’t the first automatic Etch-a-Sketch
that’s
graced these pages over the years
, but this might be the most fully realized version we’ve seen yet. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203802",
"author": "Dr. Pepper",
"timestamp": "2019-12-18T21:28:37",
"content": "Anyone have the access code?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6203803",
"author": "Bill Gates",
"timestamp": "2019-12-18T21:29:27",
"co... | 1,760,373,650.012088 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/hackaday-superconference-nick-poole-on-boggling-the-boardhouse/ | Hackaday Superconference: Nick Poole On Boggling The Boardhouse | Jenny List | [
"cons"
] | [
"2019 Hackaday Superconference",
"badgelife",
"pcb",
"Printed Circuit Board"
] | By now we are all used to the role of the printed circuit board in artwork, because of the burgeoning creativity in the conference and unofficial #BadgeLife electronic badge scenes. When the masters of electronic design tools turn their hand to producing for aesthetic rather than technical reasons, the results were always going to be something rather special.
Nick Poole is an ace wrangler of electrons working for SparkFun, and as such is someone with an impressive pedigree when it comes to PCB design. Coming on stage sporting a beret with an
awesome
cap badge,
his talk at the recent Hackaday Superconference
concerned his experience in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in PCB manufacture. It was a primer in the techniques required to create special work in the medium of printed circuit boards, and it should be essential viewing for anybody with an interest in this field.
Though he starts with the basics of importing graphics into a PCB design package, the meat of his talk lies in going beyond the mere two dimensions of a single PCB into the third dimension either by creating PCBs that interlock, or by stacking boards.
As an example anyone who has ever soldered two PCBs together at right angles will know the pain of lifting an area of copper as the heat delaminates the PCB. His tip of placing vias to anchor the layers is typical of the kind of expert knowledge contained in the talk.
Continuing on through mouse bites, translucent displays, and switches using the springiness of PCB fingers, he uses his space invader badge as an example. This badge sports three layers and an array of APA102 addressable LEDs shining through a milled-out middle layer and a translucent top layer. Along the way we learn yet more valuable tips. Putting notes for the board house technicians as text in the off-board parts of layers that make it to the Gerbers helps immensely when boundaries are being pushed, as often the staff will question something that departs significantly from their norm.
Whether it is conquering the inside corner problem, ensuring crenelations for plated edges, or joining multiple boards together in a stack, we think there should be plenty here to keep you occupied as you take your PCB work to the next level. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203787",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2019-12-18T19:38:54",
"content": "I want a Jolly Wrencher beret!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6203979",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T16:15:34... | 1,760,373,650.060798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/retrotechtacular-mechanical-arithmetic-for-the-masses/ | Retrotechtacular: Mechanical Arithmetic For The Masses | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"calculator",
"mechanical calculator",
"olivetti",
"Summa 20"
] | Last month we carried a piece looking at the development of the 8-bit home computer market through the lens of the British catalogue retailer Argos and their perennial catalogue of dreams. As an aside, we mentioned that the earliest edition from 1975 contained
some of the last mechanical calculators on the market
, alongside a few early electronic models. This month it’s worth returning to those devices, because though they are largely forgotten now, they were part of the scenery and clutter of a typical office for most of the century.
The Summa’s internals, showing the register on the right and the type wheels on the left.
Somewhere in storage I have one of the models featured in the catalogue, an Olivetti Summa Prima. I happened upon it in a dumpster as a teenager looking for broken TVs to scavenge for parts, cut down a pair of typewriter ribbon reels to fit it, and after playing with it for a while added it to my store of random tech ephemera. It’s a compact and stylish desktop unit from about 1970, on its front is a numerical keypad, top is a printer with a holder for a roll of receipt paper and a typewriter-style rubber roller, while on its side is a spring-loaded handle from which it derives its power. It can do simple addition and subtraction in the old British currency units, and operating it is a simple case of punching in a number, pulling the handle, and watching the result spool out on the paper tape. Its register appears to be a set of rotors advanced or retarded by the handle for either addition or subtraction, and its printing is achieved by a set of print bars sliding up to line the correct number with the inked ribbon. For me in 1987 with my LCD Casio Scientific it was an entertaining mechanical curiosity, but for its operators twenty years earlier it must have represented a significant time saving.
The history of mechanical calculators goes back over several hundred years to Blaise Pascal in the 17th century, and over that time they evolved through a series of inventions into surprisingly sophisticated machines that were capable of handling financial complications surprisingly quickly. The Summa was one of the last machines available in great numbers, and even as it was brought to market in the 1960s its manufacturer was also producing
one of the first desktop-sized computers
. Its price in that 1975 Argos catalogue is hardly cheap but around the same as an electronic equivalent, itself a minor miracle given how many parts it contains and how complex it must have been to manufacture.
We’ve put two Summa Prima videos below the break. T.the first is a contemporary advert for the machine, and the second is a modern introduction to the machine partially narrated by a Brazilian robot, so consider translated subtitles. In that second video you can see something of its internals as the bare mechanism is cranked over for the camera and some of the mechanical complexity of the device becomes very obvious. It might seem odd to pull a obsolete piece of office machinery from a dumpster and hang onto it for three decades, but I’m very glad indeed that a 1980s teenage me did so. You’re probably unlikely to stumble upon one in 2019, but should you do so it’s a device that’s very much worth adding to your collection.
Header image: ElioAngelo at Italian Wikipedia [
CC BY-SA 4.0
]. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203782",
"author": "Frank Smith",
"timestamp": "2019-12-18T19:23:58",
"content": "Oh my. I have just gone down the rabbit hole of time, I worked on both the machines mentioned in the text and many others made by Olivetti an Italian company. I went on to make my living in Electronic... | 1,760,373,650.17954 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/use-blueprint-process-to-print-on-fabric-with-lasers/ | Use Blueprint Process To Print On Fabric With Lasers | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"art",
"cyanotype",
"laser",
"photography",
"printing"
] | [Shih Wei Chieh] has built a
laser cyanotype printer for fabrics.
You know, for art!
How do you get an inkjet head on a shoe or a couch? Most printing processes require a flat surface to print. But hearkening back to the days when a blueprint was a
blueprint
, a mixture of an iron salt and an acid are mixed and applied to a surface an interesting reaction occurs when the surface is exposed to UV light. The chemicals react to form, of all things,
prussian blue
. After the reaction occurs simply washing away the remaining chemicals leaves a stable print behind.
[Shih Wei Chieh] uses two galvanometers and a laser to cure the fabric. He uses a slightly newer
process
which reduces the exposure time required. This lets him print very large pictures, but also on uneven surfaces. As you can see in the
video
, viewable after the break, the effect is very pretty. There’s a new way to have the coolest pen plotter on the block. | 11 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203749",
"author": "RoboMonkey",
"timestamp": "2019-12-18T17:27:41",
"content": "What about using DLP to expose it? Would that work faster, or does it need the intensity of a laser to do the print?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_... | 1,760,373,650.114202 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/wonder-woman-and-the-real-lasso-of-truth/ | Wonder Woman And The Real Lasso Of Truth | Al Williams | [
"Biography",
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art"
] | [
"comic",
"comics",
"lie detection",
"marston",
"polygraph",
"wonder woman"
] | You might think it is strange that a story about technology would start off talking about Wonder Woman. When you realize the technology in question is a lie detector, you might think, “Oh, that’s right. Wonder Woman had the lasso of truth, so this is just a lame association.” You might think that, but you’d be wrong. Turns out, Wonder Woman and real life polygraphs have a much deeper connection; both the polygraph and Wonder Woman share a common creator.
It makes a good story to say that William Marston — an internationally famous psychologist — created the polygraph, but as you might expect it wasn’t the result of a single person’s effort. However, Marston played a key role and also was behind promoting the technology. So, too, even though he is credited as Wonder Woman’s sole creator, the truth is probably a bit more complex.
The real wonder of Wonder Woman is that she exists at all. In 1942, a powerful female superhero was a pretty bold marketing risk. The fact that she was “not sufficiently dressed” (as one critic reported) didn’t help, either. Comic books were still relatively new media in 1942. Superman dates back to 1938 and Batman to 1939. Some would argue there weren’t any modern comic books before 1933 when Maxwell Gaines devised the first four-color saddle-stitched newsprint magazine. Like all new media, the old media was not amused. Respected newspapers called them “sex-horror serials” and a “national disgrace.”
Granted, in the 1940’s comics did have a lot of things that were objectionable. Female characters were often relegated to the “Damsel in Distress” plotline. Tied down to railroad tracks or at threat of being burnt at the stake, the hero would arrive in the nick of time and save the day so you never actually dealt with the burned or dismembered corpse of the heroine.
With the Wonder Woman comic, Marston set out to break this tired mold. In 1940, a reporter named Olive Richard interviewed Marston who said he saw “great educational potential” in comic books. This comment caught the attention of Maxwell Gaines who ran All-American Comics, along with the co-owner of Detective Comics (which would become DC), Harry Donenfield. The two comic publishers maintained close relations until Donenfeld bought out Gaines in 1946. In 1940, Gaines decided to create an editorial advisory board and hired Marston to serve on it. New to the comic scene, Marston was already well-known in other fields.
Truth, Behavior, and the Origins of Wonder Woman
To say William Marston had an unconventional life is like saying Jupiter is large. He had three degrees from Harvard, one a PhD in psychology. He had worked as a lawyer and as a professor. In 1928 he wrote a paper about
DISC
theory, which formed the basis for an early behavioral assessment test.
Marston’s wife Elizabeth Halloway Marston, herself an attorney and psychologist, once observed that when she got mad or excited her blood pressure would go up. This led William to experiment with observing blood pressure changes as an indicator of prevarication (a sneaky lie). This became one part of the modern polygraph, created by John Larson.
Marston did a lot of work with the polygraph, trying to commercialize it. As a result of his work, he became convinced that women were more honest than men and he also thought they could work faster and more accurately at many jobs. This was pretty radical thinking for the 1930s.
While Elizabeth was instrumental in suggesting the link between telling a lie and blood pressure, there was another woman in William’s life, too. In 1925, William was Olive Byrne’s psychology professor at Tufts University. They fell in love and William gave his wife an ultimatum. Olive would come to live with them or he would leave her to be with her. While a polyamorous relationship isn’t that scandalous these days, in 1925 it was not something most people would even think about. They lived as a family and Marston had two children with each woman. The Marston’s officially adopted Byrne’s children, doubtlessly for legal reasons.
Oh, and Olive Byrne’s pen name was Olive Richard: the same person who wrote the interview that brought Marston to the attention of comic book publisher Gaines. Even after Marston’s death, the women continued to live together as a family.
The Comic Connection
As part of the editorial board, Marston noted that the biggest problem with comics was their “blood-curdling masculinity.” He apparently shared with Elizabeth that he envisioned a superhero that would conquer with love instead of fists or firepower. Elizabeth suggested he make her a woman. Gaines was receptive to the idea. However, he told Marston he’d have to write the strip himself.
Marston developed Wonder Woman as a powerful female lead
modeled partly after Elizabeth and William’s life partner Olive
. In the comics, Wonder Woman was given a golden lasso. While bound with it, anyone was compelled to tell her the truth and do as she commanded. The lasso worked much better than a polygraph — actually compelling the person to tell the truth — but the influence is clear.
Polygraph
The modern polygraph uses blood pressure as one test out of many. Marston actually wasn’t the first to attempt this. In 1895, Cesare Lombroso tried the same thing with some success. Marston’s own work was on German prisoners of war and showed a strong correlation between lying and systolic blood pressure.
Other items polygraphs can measure include breathing, pulse, galvanic skin response, and muscular activity. The subject is asked a set of pretest questions to establish a baseline and measure reactions when the subject is being deceptive. Responses are then recorded during the interview and compared to the pretest measurements.
Does it work? It apparently does, but not universally. There are many instances of people lying yet passing polygraph tests. There is also a fear of false positives, and there have been many high profile cases of that, too. For these reasons, polygraph tests are usually inadmissible in court.
Some think that the way an examiner administers the test can cause enough anxiety in an innocent person to sway the test and there are methods for attempting to negate that effect. In Japan, for example, the examiner doesn’t know the details of the crime and asks questions in multiple choice format. The examiner isn’t really looking at the answers, but the reaction to the potential answers which can then match up with the known correct answers.
Sometimes, though, just the idea of a polygraph is enough to compel people to tell the truth. This is sometimes known as the “bogus pipeline” where a researcher will connect a subject to meaningless wires and told it is a polygraph. People are apparently less likely to lie in that situation.
Cleve Backster was a polygraph operator with the CIA. He used the machine to show that plants feel pain and have ESP. Of course, the scientific community didn’t find his experiments compelling.
There are several other lie detection technologies and strategies ranging from microexpression analysis, the silent talker detector, and voice stress analysis. We can’t help but wonder if anyone has just thought about feeding a bunch of videos into a machine learning system. We certainly have plenty of videos of people lying. Being sure about the truthful videos might be a little harder.
Meanwhile, next time you see Wonder Woman use her lasso of truth, you’ll think about the unconventional Dr. Marston and his connection to the lie detector. Not to mention the visionary creation of a female superhero at a time when that was almost unthinkable. | 33 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203729",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2019-12-18T16:28:42",
"content": "At my age, I no longer care, so call me a sexist. My wife, has a built-in ‘lasso of truth’ – her eyes. My married male friends all suffer from their wife’s similar powers.When I was in the military (back w... | 1,760,373,650.380621 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/giant-3d-printer-for-giant-projects/ | Giant 3D Printer For Giant Projects | Danie Conradie | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"large scale 3d printing",
"reprap",
"scratch built"
] | Established FDM 3D printers designs generally lead themselves well to being scaled up, as long as you keep frame stiffness, alignment and movement in mind. [Ivan Miranda] needed a
big printer
for his big projects (videos below), so he built
his own i3 style printer
with a 800 mm × 500 mm usable print bed and about 500 mm vertical print height.
The frame of the new machine is built using 20×20 and 20×40 aluminium V-slot extrusions with some square tubing for reinforcement. To move all the weight, all 3 axes are driven by double NEMA17 steppers, via a DUET3D board with an expansion board for the extra motors. The extruder is the new E3D Hemera with a 0.8 mm nozzle. The print bed is a mirror, on top of the aluminium plate, headed by a large silicone heat pad. The first bed version used a smaller heat pad directly on the back of the mirror, but it heated up unevenly and the mirror ended up cracking. Look out for the ingeniously lightweight and simple cable management to the extruder. When all was said and done he printed a 800 mm long size 66 wrench as a test piece with zero warp, which is pretty good even for PLA. This project is also a perfect example of the power of 3D printing for rapid iterative development, as lot of the printed fittings went through multiple versions.
Although [Ivan] received most of the components for free, a printer like this is still within reach of the rest of us. We look forward to a lot of big prints by [Ivan] in his signature red, like a
massive nerf gun
and the
ridable tank
he is currently working on. | 21 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203694",
"author": "snail",
"timestamp": "2019-12-18T13:45:13",
"content": "This is an example on how you should study before atempting .. What is the speed ??",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6203712",
"author": "spelling n... | 1,760,373,650.306544 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/18/these-lessons-were-learned-in-enclosure-design-but-go-far-beyond/ | These Lessons Were Learned In Enclosure Design, But Go Far Beyond | Donald Papp | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"camera remote",
"dfm",
"enclosure",
"enclosure design",
"product design",
"silver",
"wireless"
] | [Foaly] has been hard at work making an open-source long range camera remote, and recently
shared a deeply thoughtful post about how it is never too early to consider all aspects of design, lest it cost you in the end
. It all started with designing an enclosure for a working prototype, and it led to redesigning the PCB from scratch. That took a lot of guts, and we recommend you make some time to click that link and read up on what he shared. You’ll either learn some valuable tips, or just enjoy nodding sagely as he confirms things you already know. It’s win-win.
Note the awkward buttons right next to the antenna connector, for example.
The project in question is
Silver
, and calling it a camera remote is selling it a bit short. In any case, [Foaly] had a perfectly serviceable set of prototypes and needed a small batch of enclosures. So far so normal, but in the process of designing possible solutions, [Foaly] ran into a sure-fire sign that a project is in trouble: problems cropping up everywhere, and in general everything just seeming harder than it should be. Holding the mounting-hole-free PCB securely never seemed quite right. Buttons were awkward to reach, ill-proportioned, and didn’t feel good to use. The OLED screen’s
component
was physically centered, but the
display
was off-center which looked wrong no matter how the lines of the bezel were sculpted. The PCB was a tidy rectangle, but the display ended up a bit small and enclosures always looked bulky by the time everything was accounted for. The best effort is shown here, and it just didn’t satisfy.
[Foaly] says the real problem was that he designed the electronics and did the layout while giving
some
thought (but not
much
thought) to their eventual integration into a case. This isn’t necessarily a problem for a one-off, but from a product design perspective it led to so many problems that it was better to start over, this time being mindful of how everything integrates right from the start: the layout, the components, the mechanical bits, the assembly, and the ultimate user experience. The end result is wonderful, and we’re delighted [Foaly] took the time to document his findings.
Enclosure design is a big deal and there are many different ways to go about it. For a more unique spin, be sure to
check out our how-to make enclosures from the PCBs themselves
. For a primer on more traditional enclosure manufacture and design, take a few minutes to
familiarize yourself with injection molding
. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6203651",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2019-12-18T09:10:20",
"content": "Excellent write-up and a professional-looking product",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6203664",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2019-12... | 1,760,373,650.64754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/20/programming-arduinos-with-voice-commands/ | Programming Arduinos With Voice Commands | Lewin Day | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"alexa",
"arduino",
"voice"
] | Programming is a valuable skill, though one that can be daunting to learn. Throw hardware in the mix, and things ratchet up another level again. However, there are many projects that have sought to reduce the level of difficulty for newcomers.
HeyTeddy is a new project that allows users to program an Arduino with voice commands, and the help of on-screen tutorials.
It’s a system that initially sounds cumbersome, but through smart design, is actually quite streamlined. Users can talk to the system, which uses an Amazon Alexa device for natural language voice recognition. This enables HeyTeddy to respond to questions like “how do I use a flex sensor?” as well as direct commands, such as “Set pin 10 to 250”.
The demo video does a great job of demonstrating the system
. While the system is not suited to professional development tasks, its has value as an educational tool for beginners. The system is able to guide users through both hardware setup on a breadboard, as well as guide them through tests when things don’t work. Once their experience level builds, code can be exported to the Arduino IDE for direct editing.
It’s a great tool that has plenty of promise to bring many more users into the hardware hacking fold. It’s out of the workshop of [MAKInteract],
whose work we’ve seen before.
Video after the break. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204202",
"author": "Stuart Longland",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T09:56:11",
"content": "I already do something like this in an open-plan office…“WTF is wrong with my RS-485 ports?”“Why the hell didn’t you erase that block like I asked you to, SPI flash?”“Ohh FFS node-coap, are you go... | 1,760,373,650.594878 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/19/interactive-core-memory-shield-helps-explains-the-past/ | Interactive Core Memory Shield Helps Explains The Past | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"core memory",
"featherwing",
"led",
"stylus"
] | [Andy Geppert] sends in his incredibly clever
interactive core memory shield.
In a great display of one hacker’s work being the base for another’s, [Andy] started out with [Jussi Kilpelainen]’s
core memory shield for Arduino.
As he was playing with the shield he had a desire to “see” the core memory flipping and got the idea to add an LED matrix aligned behind the individual cores.
The first iteration worked, but it only showed the state that the Arduino believed the core memory to be in. What he really wanted was a live read on the actual state. He realized that an Adafruit Featherwing 8×8 matrix display also fits behind the core memory. Now the LEDs update based on the read state of the core memory. This allows him to flip the individual bits with a magnetic stylus and see the result. Very cool.
You can see a
video
of it working after the break. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204223",
"author": "SamWibatt",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T13:27:16",
"content": "That is SO COOL. I’ve never seen core-store actually in use, though I did once find a PCB with 1K of memory on it, 32×32 cores about 1mm in diameter. Beautiful board, the wiring was done with red-coated... | 1,760,373,650.551135 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/19/a-box-with-a-pocket-sized-boom/ | A Box With A Pocket Sized Boom | Gerrit Coetzee | [
"ATtiny Hacks"
] | [
"ATiny",
"boom box",
"portable",
"sound",
"speaker",
"wav"
] | [Discreet Electronics Guy] sends in his
very pocket sized boom box.
One thing we love about [Discreet Electronics Guy]’s projects is how they really showcase that a cool hack is possible without access to 3D printers, overnight PCB services, and other luxuries. Everything in this board is hand made by electronics standards. The board is etched, the vias are wires, and even the case seems to be a modified plastic mint container.
The boombox itself uses an ATiny85 at its core which plays .wav files from an SD card. This is routed through an audio amp which powers two small speakers. We love the volume knob being a board mount potentiometer. The device even features its own small LiON battery pack. If you don’t want to enjoy the deep sound of the two small speakers there’s a headphone jack.
He’s got a great write-up on the circuit design on his
website
and you can see a video of him presenting the project
here
or after the break. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204166",
"author": "Old Guy",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T03:08:40",
"content": "What is a “via”? I get that it’s a wire, but how would you define “via”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204191",
"author": "Elliot Willi... | 1,760,373,650.867098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/19/super-easy-small-robot-wheels/ | Super Easy Small Robot Wheels | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"combat robot",
"hose",
"jig",
"robot",
"silicone",
"wheel"
] | Anyone who has delved into DIY wheels knows that they are a trickier than it may seem, especially if the wheels aren’t just for show and need to provide things like decent traction and durability. 3D printers have helped a lot, but they’re not a cure-all.
Check out how [Robert K.]
makes wheels from segments of automotive silicone hose
, which are constructed with fibers embedded within them for durability and structure. Not only are these hoses easily sourced, but the silicone makes a great wheel surface and the hoses themselves are highly durable. He uses a 3D printed jig to cut a slice of hose that press-fits perfectly onto a 3D printed hub. [Robert] finds that a 28 mm hose pulled over a 35 mm diameter wheel is a perfect fit.
These wheels are for a Beetleweight class combat robot, which are limited to three pounds (1.36 kg) or less. You can see some video of
[Robert]’s previous Beetleweight robot named ‘Bourbon’
, and
we have featured what goes into the even-smaller Antweight class
(one pound or less) in the past. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204146",
"author": "darius",
"timestamp": "2019-12-20T00:56:21",
"content": "Please, don’t cut my automotive silicone hose into your DIY wheels",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6204150",
"author": "jeroen l",
"... | 1,760,373,650.710156 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2019/12/19/degassing-epoxy-resin-on-the-very-cheap/ | Degassing Epoxy Resin On The (Very) Cheap | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"degassing",
"epoxy",
"epoxy casting",
"resin",
"vacuum degassing"
] | Anyone who’s tried to encapsulate something in epoxy resin knows how much of a hassle air bubbles can be. If you’re trying to get a perfectly clear finish, the last thing you want is a bunch of microscopic bubbles frozen in time. The best way to prevent this is to put the parts in a vacuum chamber so all the air works its way out before the epoxy cures, but that’s a considerable investment for a one-off project.
But assuming your parts are small enough, [Jasper Sikken] has a great tip that
allows you to construct a simple vacuum chamber for just a few dollars
. He shows his homemade chamber off in the video after the break, and we think you’ll agree that the change between before and after is pretty dramatic. The best part is that if you want to build your own version, you only need two parts.
The first one is a airtight container large enough to hold the piece you’re working on. Remember that the larger the chamber is the more time it will take to pump down to a suitable vacuum, so avoid the temptation to use something larger than necessary. [Jasper] used a glass jar with a locking lid, which is not only cheap and readily available, but has a decently large internal volume.
Obviously, the second component is the vacuum pump itself. This might normally be a tall order, but [Jasper] recently found that you can buy small battery-powered gadgets designed for sucking the air out of food containers for as little as $5 USD from the usual import sites. All you need to do is pop a hole in the lid of your container, hold the device over the hole, and watch the magic.
This method is great for anything smaller than a paperweight, but if you’ve got something bigger than that,
you’ll need to step up your chamber game
. Luckily even
larger vacuum chambers can be built cheaply at a pinch
. | 36 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6204097",
"author": "ConsistentMeat",
"timestamp": "2019-12-19T21:20:10",
"content": "Generally you want to use a pressure pot for materials that set hard (eg. resin) and a vacuum chamber for flexible materials (eg silicone molds). Resin tends to be too viscous for the bubbles to re... | 1,760,373,650.943471 |
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