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https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/kinetic-cyclic-scissors/ | Kinetic Cyclic Scissors | Abe Connelly | [
"Art"
] | [
"art",
"kinetic art",
"math"
] | [Henry Segerman] and [Kyle VanDeventer] merge math and mechanics to create a
kinetic cyclic scissors sculpture
out of 3D printed bars adjoined together with M3 bolts and nuts.
The kinetic sculpture can be thought of as a part of an infinite tiling of self similar quadrilaterals in the plane. The tiling of the plane by these self similar quadrilaterals can be realized as a framework by joining the diagonal points of each quadrilateral with bars. The basic question [Henry] and [Kyle] wanted to answer was under what conditions can the realized bar framework of a subsection of the tiling be made to move. Surprisingly, when the quadrilateral is a parallelogram, like in a scissor lift, or “cyclic”, when the endpoints lie on a circle, the bar framework can move. Tweaking the ratios of the middle lengths in a cyclic configuration leads to different types of rotational symmetry that can be achieved as the structure folds in on itself.
[Henry] and [Kyle] go into more detail in their
Bridges Conference paper
, with derivations and further discussions about the symmetry induced by adjusting the constraints. The details are light on the actual kinetic sculpture featured in the video but the bar framework was chosen to have a mirror type of symmetry with a motor attached to one of the central, lower bars to drive the movement of the sculpture.
The bar framework is available for
download
for anyone wanting to 3D print or laser cut their own. Bar frameworks are useful ideas and we’ve seen them used in
art sculptures
to
strandbeests
, so it’s great to see further explorations in this space.
Video after the break! | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6525168",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2022-10-27T06:47:31",
"content": "Wonder if they’ve taken some inspiration from Kempe’s classic 1877 treatise ‘How to draw a straight line: a lecture on linkages’:https://archive.org/details/howtodrawstraigh00kemprich/page/42/mod... | 1,760,372,518.083684 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/cat9-and-lash-want-to-change-your-linux-command-line/ | Cat9 And LASH Want To Change Your Linux Command Line | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"command line",
"linux"
] | It is no secret that to be a true Linux power user you have to deal with the command line. Many people actually prefer to use the command line. However, the shell — the program that provides that command line — is mired in a back history which means it has to work with existing things no matter how modern it tries to be. However, a new set of projects wants to replace most of your user interface stack starting with the shell. At the top of that stack is
Cat9
which is technically a shell, but
not in the way you probably imagine a shell
.
A traditional shell lets you run programs one at a time, feed them input, and observe their output. Sure, you can stash the output away for later use. You can run programs in the background or in parallel, but that requires special attention. In Cat9, everything is asynchronous and results stay around until you deliberately drop them. It is trivial to grab data from a previous command or, for example, to switch to a directory that was in use by an earlier task.
According to the documentation, Cat9 uses
Arcan
which is painful to build (their words). It also uses LASH and, potentially, one of several unusual window managers. If you want to see what it can do — watch the video below.
You’ll notice that commands get tracked as jobs. A job number can be absolute (#5) or relative (#-1, the previous job). There are also special identifiers like #csel for the job that has the cursor or #last as a synonym for #-1.
If you simply run a command you essentially create a job, and start collecting its output. A job remembers its environment. The only problem is if you want to directly interact with a program like, say, a text editor. There is a way to force that type of execution so the normal way an ordinary shell runs a program is an exception for Cat9. You can, however, switch between jobs for input. You can also signal jobs, just as you can in a normal shell.
You can force commands to work in a job. For example, to see what directory the 4th job is using:
#4 pwd
Of course, you also need a way to get the data from a running job and that can be passed as input to other commands. There are more commands to control the view of output, so you can split screens, scroll through data, and more. Another important concept is that you can create triggers that execute when a job succeeds or fails.
Will you try cat9? It is hard to displace the existing window management and shell infrastructure. Wayland has been trying for 14 years and still has some ways to go. Odd shells come and go. Many language-specific shells that often model on other languages have strong niche followings, but rarely catch on in a significant way. Maybe Cat9 can be different. Or maybe some of its ideas will leak out into mainstream shells.
Some of the ideas are simple. For example, the prompt disappears after you move to a new line. Of course, if you are documenting a test run, that might break your workflow, but for most use cases, that makes sense. Why clutter the output with unnecessary data?
If you want a different shell that is closer to the norm,
we looked at a number of them
. Keep in mind, it isn’t really that Cat9 does
anything a conventional shell can’t
. It just, presumably, makes it easier. | 44 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6525144",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2022-10-27T03:34:06",
"content": "Is Cat9 from Outer Space?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6525162",
"author": "Mats",
"timestamp": "2022-10-27T05:58:07",
"c... | 1,760,372,518.372734 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/skull-lamp-illuminates-the-cyberpunk-future/ | Skull Lamp Illuminates The Cyberpunk Future | Navarre Bartz | [
"hardware",
"LED Hacks",
"Medical Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"body mod",
"body modification",
"cyberpunk",
"flashlight",
"LED eye",
"prosthetic",
"prosthetic eye",
"skull lamp",
"titanium",
"wearable"
] | Cyberpunk is full of characters with cool body mods, and [bsmachinist] has made a
prosthetic eye flashlight
(TikTok) that is both useful and looks futuristic. [via
Reddit
]
[bsmachinist] has been machining titanium prosthetic eyes for over five years now, and this latest iteration, the Skull Lamp, has a high brightness LED that he says is great for reading books at night as well as any other task you might have for a headlamp. Battery life is reported as being 20 hours, and the device is switched by
passing a magnet
(Instagram) near the prosthetic.
We love seeing how prosthetics have advanced in the last few years with the proliferation of advanced tools for makers. Some other interesting prosthetics we’ve covered are this
DIY Socket for Prosthetics
with a built-in charger and power supply and several different prosthetic projects for kids including these
Heroic Prosthetics by Open Bionics
, the
E-Nable Alliance
, and a
Kid Who Designed his Own Prosthetic
.
@bsmachinist
A brief demonstration of my Titanium Cyborg Eye as a flashlight!
#technology
#eyes
#flashlight
#led
#prostheticeye
#prosthetics
#ocularprosthetics
#oneeyegang
#oneeye
#cyborg
#cyborgeye
#cyberpunk
#cyberpunkedgerunners
♬ Phonky Tribu – Funk Tribu | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6525106",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T23:15:24",
"content": "Hey i tried making something like this! I discovered that things are a bit harder when you have both eyes….https://hackaday.io/project/164544-cyborg-eyeball-project",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,518.28812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/digital-hourglass-counts-down-the-seconds/ | Digital Hourglass Counts Down The Seconds | Adam Fabio | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"ferromagnetic",
"hourglass",
"iron filings",
"magnets"
] | If someone asked you to build a digital hourglass, what would your design look like? [
BitBlt_Korry] took on that challenge, creating a functional art piece that hits it right on the nose:
an hourglass with a digital display
.
Iron filings fall between two pieces of plexiglass while ghostly numbers appear, counting down 30 seconds. Just as quickly as they appear, the numbers disappear – dropping down to the bottom of the enclosure. Each second is punctuated by what might be the loudest clock tick we’ve ever heard.
Of course, it’s not all magic. The hourglass is controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico running code in MicroPython. The pico drives a series of transistors, which in turn are used to control 14 solenoids. The solenoids serve double duty — first, they move pieces of flat “fridge magnet” material close enough to attract iron filings. Their second duty is of course provide a clock tick that will definitely get your attention.
Tilt sensors are the user input to the hourglass, letting the Pi Pico know which end is up when it’s time to start a new 30-second countdown.
[
BitBlt_Korry] mentions that the hardest part of the project was setting the screws at the top and bottom of the hourglass to get the perfect uniform flow of iron filings.
[
BitBlt_Korry] calls his creation “
「時場(じば)」”. Google translates this to “Jiba”, which means “magnetic field”. We’re not native speakers, but we’re guessing there is a double meaning there.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen
humble iron filings stand up and dance at our command
. If iron dust is too dry a topic, we’ve got
plenty
of
ferrofluid
projects
as well
! | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6525071",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T20:32:31",
"content": "Extremely cool.Well done.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6525210",
"author": "Cesar Torres",
"timestamp": "2022-10-27T11:56:43",
... | 1,760,372,518.571847 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/2022-cyberdeck-contest-prototype-cyberdeck-is-anything-but-questionable/ | 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Prototype Cyberdeck Is Anything But Questionable | Jenny List | [
"contests",
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"2022 Cyberdeck Contest",
"cyberdeck",
"lcd",
"raspberry pi"
] | We see many projects here at Hackaday, about which their creators are unreasonably modest. We like a good cyberdeck, and we think [
betaraybiff
] is one of those creators from their project description for a
Prototype Cyberdeck of Questionable Practical Use
. It may be a prototype, but we think it could be quite a practical computer.
At its heart is the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi 4 paired with a PiSugar power supply and a minimalist mechanical keyboard. The case is the interesting part, because it’s well-designed to be 3D printed in sections with the HDMI display hinging up from above the keyboard. The Pi is open and visible on top of the deck, but this could easily be covered with another printed piece if desired.
So we disagree on the practicality, given a train journey and this cyberdeck we think we could easily crack out a Hackaday article or two. Never undersell your creations, like this one they’re almost certainly better than you think.
If you’d like to see more of the 2022 Cyberdeck Contest,
take a look at the best of the best
. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6525050",
"author": "Ian Williams",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T19:10:08",
"content": "It’s literally a cyberdeck contest…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6525059",
"author": "Ted",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T19:40:46",
"... | 1,760,372,518.693939 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/2022-supercon-schedule-released-and-odd-jayy/ | 2022 Supercon: Schedule Released, And [Odd Jayy] | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"2022 Hackaday Supercon",
"badge hacking"
] | It’s finally time! We’ve put together the
2022 Supercon Schedule
, and you can check out all the talks, workshops, and events in one place – right now.
Badge hacking heating up (photo by
@hackerwarehouse
)
It all starts off with breakfast on Friday morning to power you up for a full day of badge hacking, workshops, and general mixing and mingling before the Friday night party. Fridays are significantly less formal, but swing by Supplyframe HQ any time to get registered, get your badge, and get a mellow head start on Supercon.
Saturday morning, the talks begin! After a brief introduction and welcome, keynote speaker Joe Grand takes the stage to kick things off. And from then on, it’s two tracks of talks on two stages until your brain explodes. Or at least until the Hackaday Prize Awards ceremony at 7:00 PM, followed by the awards after-party.
Pull yourself out of bed Sunday morning for another full day of stellar talks. And squeeze in some more last minute badge-hacking time somehow, because we close up Sunday evening with the always entertaining badge hacking contest and awards.
Jorvon [Odd Jayy] Moss to Speak
Plus, we’ve got one last bit of great news: Jorvon [Odd Jayy] Moss is giving a talk on his adventures in making companion robots, and his latest forays into adding more intelligence into his animatronic and artistic creations.
So if you haven’t bought your tickets yet,
do it
. ‘Nuff said. See you at Supercon!
And if you’re not able to make it live, all of the talks on the LACM Stage will be streamed live on our YouTube channel, and you can join in the discussion over at the
Hackaday Discord server
or on
Hackaday.io’s Supercon Chat channel
. And all the talks that we can’t stream, we’re recording for later release, so you can always catch up later. | 14 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6525037",
"author": "Wesley",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T18:24:00",
"content": "Wow, I’m super disappointed that all of the workshops I wanted to attend were immediately sold out. These are the #1 reason I attend Supercon. I’m considering cancelling my tickets if I can get a refund fo... | 1,760,372,518.50969 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/flashing-booby-trapped-cisco-ap-with-openwrt-the-hard-way/ | Flashing Booby-Trapped Cisco AP With OpenWrt, The Hard Way | Arya Voronova | [
"how-to",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"bricked",
"bricking",
"cisco",
"e-fuse",
"meraki",
"meraki mr33",
"openwrt",
"parallel flash"
] | Certain manufacturers seriously dislike open-source firmware for their devices,
and this particular hack
deals with quite extreme anti-hobbyist measures. The Meraki MR33, made by Cisco, is a nice access point hardware-wise, and
running OpenWrt on it
is wonderful – if not for the Cisco’s
malicious decision
to permanently brick the CPU as soon as you enter Uboot through the serial port. This AP seems to be part of a “hardware as a service” offering, and the booby-trapped Uboot was rolled out by an OTA update some time after the OpenWrt port got published.
There’s an older Uboot version available out there, but you can’t quite roll back to it and up to a certain point, there was only a JTAG downgrade path noted on the wiki – with its full description consisting of a “FIXME: describe the process” tag. Our hacker, an anonymous user from the [SagaciousSuricata] blog, decided to go a different way — lifting, dumping and modifying the onboard flash in order to downgrade the bootloader, and guides us through the entire process. There’s quite a few notable things about this hack, like use of Nix package manager to get Python 2.7 on an OS which long abandoned it, and a tip about a workable lightweight TFTP server for such work, but the flash chip part caught our eye.
The flash chip is in TSOP48 package and uses a parallel interface, and an iMX6.LL devboard was used to read, modify and flash back the image — hotswapping the chip, much like we used to do with old parallel-interface BIOS chips. We especially liked the use of FFC cables and connectors for connecting the flash chip to the devboard in a way that allows hotswapping – now that we can see it, the TSOP 0.5 mm pitch and 0.5 mm FFC hardware are a match made in heaven. This hack, of course, will fit many TSOP48-equipped devices, and it’s nice to have a toolkit for it in case you don’t have a programmer handy.
In the end, the AP got a new lease of life, now governed by its owner as opposed to Cisco’s whims. This is a handy tutorial for anyone facing a parallel-flash-equipped device where the only way appears to be the hard way, and we’re glad to see hackers
getting comfortable
facing such challenges, whether it’s
parallel flash
,
JTAG
or
power glitching.
After all, it’s great when your devices can run an OS entirely under your control – it’s historically been that you
get way more features that way,
but it’s also that the manufacturer can’t pull the rug from under your feet
like Amazon did
with its Fire TV boxes.
We thank [WifiCable] for sharing this with us!
(Ed Note: Changed instances of “OpenWRT” to “OpenWrt”.) | 48 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524967",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T15:34:25",
"content": "yup, putting in a flexi connector instead of the 0.5 mm pins is clever.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6524973",
"author": "Alphatek",
... | 1,760,372,518.656288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/robots-are-folding-laundry-but-they-suck-at-it/ | Robots Are Folding Laundry, But They Suck At It | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Robots Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"automation",
"clothes",
"folding laundry",
"laundry",
"laundry folding",
"robot",
"robotics"
] | Robots are used in all sorts of industries on a wide variety of tasks. Typically, it’s because they’re far faster, more accurate, and more capable than we are. Expert humans could not compete with the consistent, speedy output of a robotic welder on an automotive production line, nor could they as delicately coat the chocolate on the back of a KitKat.
However, there are some tasks in which humans still have the edge. Those include driving, witty repartee, and yes, folding laundry. That’s not to say the robots aren’t trying, though, so let’s take a look
at the state of the art
.
The Challenges of Folding At Home
Robots are great at jobs with simple, repetitive motions.
They’re less good at jobs where they have to figure out what the right moves are. Credit:
Phasmatisnox
, CC-BY-SA-3.0
Laundry automation was a game changer for home life when it first hit the mainstream. The washboard and the mangle gave way to the automatic washing machine and the clothes dryer, and the busy working people of the world rejoiced. No longer would they toil for hours just to get some clean clothes!
However, the next step in the process, folding, has not seen mainstream automation just yet. This is largely due to the fact that folding laundry is simply a much more complicated task than washing or drying. Those tasks simply involve chucking a bunch of clothes into a tub, and shaking them about with either water and soap or heat applied. It’s a batch process whose primary control input is the RPM of a single motor.
Folding first requires a single piece of laundry to be separated from the pack and identified. Machine vision has come a long way in the last decade, but this is still a challenging task. Plus, clothes can become entangled with others in a pile, further complicating the issue for a hypothetical robot folder. Towels, socks, skirts, and jeans are all different, and require their own techniques to deal with. Fancy clothes with straps and buckles and unique structures only add further challenges.
State of the Art
Researchers from UC Berkeley and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have developed a robot capable of folding laundry so quickly that they’ve termed the process “SpeedFolding.” It uses a robot with two “hands” which work together to fold clothes, much like we do. As per
the research paper
, the team claims the robot can fold 30-40 garments in an hour. That’s pretty much an order of magnitude faster than previous robotic folding efforts, which achieved fold times more on the order of 3-6 garments folded per hour.
The robot begins by scanning the laundry item to be folded with an overhead camera. It then uses a neural network trained on 4,300 different actions to identify how to get the randomly-aligned garment into the necessary initial state for folding. Various motions are used by the robot to achieve this, including moving the garment or parts of the garment around, flinging it around, or dragging it along a surface.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=em675-X2jfM
The neural network was trained in a variety of ways, with the primary smoothing step a key part of the process. The robot was allowed to perform different actions autonomously with the set goal of maximising the garment’s surface area. This was a useful way to teach the robot to get the garment into a controlled initial state for folding. Once the garment is in such a state, prescribed actions can be executed to complete the folding process. Useful techniques from the human world are applicable to the robot, too. The classic “2-second fold” that can be used on T-shirts is used by the robot to fold an already-flat tee in under 30 seconds. However, the general process takes longer than that. The full procedure of garment identification, state initialization, and then folding takes about two minutes on average.
The SpeedFolding setup uses a twin-arm ABB Yumi robot to fold clothes. It can fold randomly-aligned clothes at a rate of approximately 30-40 garments per hour. Credit:
Youtube, Griffig
As it stands, though, the technology is still very much at the demo stage. The
twin-armed robot
used is an advanced device costing tens of thousands of dollars, and the industrial 3D vision system likely doesn’t come cheap either. Plus, it’s not mobile, so can only work in a small space in front of its base.
The folding results obviously aren’t up to human speeds, but they also leave something to be desired in quality, too. The pincer manipulators are capable of picking up many different articles of clothing, but they lack finesse. The garments folded by the robot aren’t particularly neat and tidy, and certainly wouldn’t pass muster at your average
Hot Topic
or
The Gap.
However, those keen to delve into the world of laundry automation can benefit from this cutting-edge research. Not only is the research paper available online, but the
datasets
and
code repository
are too.
SpeedFolding marks a major leap forward in the world of robot laundry folding, and we can’t wait to see the next one. Who knows where we’ll be in another ten or twenty years? Maybe we’ll all be running our laundry-folding robots off of affordable fusion power! We can only hope. | 36 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524940",
"author": "Marvin",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T14:15:11",
"content": "Imagining the caps at the shoulder joints as eyes makes it even funnier!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6524949",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"... | 1,760,372,518.454202 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/fiber-laser-your-way-to-flexible-pcb-success/ | Fiber Laser Your Way To Flexible PCB Success! | Jenny List | [
"cnc hacks",
"Laser Hacks"
] | [
"fibre laser",
"flexible PCB",
"laser engraver"
] | It’s not often we feel that something we’re featuring is a genuinely new and groundbreaking technique, but a team from the University of Maryland’s Small Artifacts Lab may have done just that with their foldable and flexible PCBs
created using a fiber laser engraver
.
Laser engraving a PCB is nothing new, but they’ve taken a custom PCB material made using Kapton tape and copper foil, and fine-tuned the engraver to not only selectively remove copper, but also to create in-place folds in the Kapton substrate. They have even used the laser to melt solder paste and solder components, though we’re not so convinced about the quality as seen in the video below the break. This means that they can not only create 3-dimensional PCB sculptures but also useful structures such as their example of an all-PCB micro switch. To make things easy they’ve even created a custom CAD package for designing in this medium.
Perhaps best of all, there appears to be nothing here that couldn’t be also performed outside the lab by anyone with enough Kapton and copper, and a fiber laser. We’re looking forward to where this technique will go. If you’re interested,
you can read their paper here
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524900",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T11:18:39",
"content": "“Fiber” laser only marginally describes the laser technology used. It just points that the light produced by the laser unit travels in an optical fiber to the tool head. The more correct designation is “fiber... | 1,760,372,518.819946 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/26/3d-printing-gets-small-in-a-big-way/ | 3D Printing Gets Small In A Big Way | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"News"
] | [
"3d printing",
"bioprinting",
"metamaterials",
"photolithography"
] | If you have a 3D printer in your workshop, you probably fret more about how to get bigger objects out of it. However, the University of Amsterdam has a new technique that allows for fast large-scale printing with sub-micron resolution. The technique is a hybrid of
photolithography and stereolithography
.
One of the problems with printing with fine detail is that print times become very long. However, the new technique claims to have “acceptable production time.” Apparently, bioprinting applications are very much of interest to the technology’s first licensee. There is talk of printing, for example, a kidney scaffold in several hours or a full-sized heart scaffold in less than a day.
Another example application is the production of a chromatography instrument with 200 micron channels and 20 micron restrictions. This requires a printer capable of very fine detail. There are also applications in semiconductors and mechanical metamaterials. Of course, we always take note of photolithography processes because we use them to make PC boards and even integrated circuits. A desktop printer that could do photolithography might open up new ideas for producing electronic circuitry.
If you want to play with photolithography today, [Ben Krasnow]
has some advice
. Of course, there are several ways to produce PC boards, even with
a garden-variety 3D printer
. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524897",
"author": "stappers",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T10:43:06",
"content": "Today I learnt that Lattice is not a name (of a manufactor), but a partially ordered set with unique least upper bounds and greatest lower bounds. Thanks again Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latt... | 1,760,372,518.861805 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/theremin-baguette-brings-new-meaning-to-breadboarding/ | Theremin Baguette Brings New Meaning To Breadboarding | Navarre Bartz | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"bread",
"bread board",
"electronic instrument",
"music",
"musical instrument",
"theremin"
] | Theremins are a bit of an odd instrument to begin with, but [AphexHenry] decided to put one where no theremin has gone before:
into a baguette
.
The “baguetophone” is a theremin and piezo-percussion instrument inside a hollowed-out baguette. Starting with a
DIY theremin tutorial
from Academy of Media Arts Cologne, [AphexHenry] added some spice with a piezo pickup inside the baguette to function as a percussion instrument. One noted downside of squeezing the instrument into such an unusual enclosure is that the antenna doesn’t respond as well as it might with a more conventional arrangement. Outputs from the piezo and antenna are run through Max/MSP on a computer to turn the bread into a MIDI controller. Like many DIY theremins, it appears that this build neglects the volume antenna, but there’s no reason you couldn’t add one. Maybe disguised as a piece of cheese?
Outside smuggling an instrument into a French café for a flash mob performance, this could also prove handy if you’re someone who gets hungry while playing music. We don’t recommend snacking on the Arduino even if it is
ROHS compliant
though.
If you want to learn more about how theremins work, check out
Theremin in Detail
. After that, you might want to
browse all of our theremin articles
or look at this project where they
used a 555 instead
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524901",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T11:19:29",
"content": "A donut antenna would have do a better job.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6524955",
"author": "tinfish",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T14:... | 1,760,372,518.909454 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/the-300000-3d-printed-car/ | The $300,000 3D Printed Car | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"car hacks"
] | [
"Cadillac",
"electric vehicle"
] | We’ve noticed an uptick in cars–especially pricey ones–using 3D-printed parts. However, these are usually small and nonstructural parts with a few exceptions. This isn’t the case with the 2024 Cadillac Celestiq. The $300,000 luxury electric vehicle boasts
115 3D-printed parts
, according to a post on [TheDrive].
It appears part of the drive–no pun intended–is to allow ultra customizations for people who need more than a car that costs more than a quarter of a million dollars. For example, if you buy an Escalade — another Cadilac vehicle — you have to tolerate that the switches that operate the window are the same as Joe Sixpack has in his Tahoe. Not so, the Celestiq since it has 3D printed switches that could even be customized for a specific owner. The post mentions that the large steering wheel trim is all printed so having, for example, your name, family crest, or company logo embedded in it would be feasible.
If you think about it, the economics of 3D printing makes more sense for these luxury cars. A common production vehicle needs parts to feed an assembly line that is cranking out nearly 1,000 cars a day. GM — the maker of Cadilac — will never produce more than two Celestiqs a day. The web site notes they are “by inquiry only.”
We have seen some concept cars using
sophisticated 3D prints for structural parts
. Of course, you can still 3D print
an enhancement for your VW Golf
. | 25 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524837",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T02:16:52",
"content": "Is it made of concrete? Fifty years ago there was an interest in ferro cement boats.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6524839",
"author": "... | 1,760,372,519.036296 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/using-google-calendar-for-machines-to-keep-track-of-human-days/ | Using Google Calendar For Machines To Keep Track Of Human Days | Danie Conradie | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"google calendar",
"javascript",
"timing"
] | Daily triggers for automation are simple in theory, unless it needs to keep track of the calendar that humans actually live by. Seasonal changes, shifting public holidays, or just being on vacation are all exceptions you may need to account for. [Jeremy Rode] likes using Google Calendar to stay on top of events, so he created
CalendarScraper
, a simple script to make his machines use it too.
Jeremy needed a timer for his spa heater that would reduce costs by only switching it on when his local time-of-use-based electricity rates were favorable. The rates varied based on the time of day, day of the week, and even seasons and public holidays. Instead of trying to set up everything manually in a
cron
job, he created a short and easy-to-modify JavaScript script to keep track of events on a Google Calendar.
We’ve seen some other projects that pull data from Google Calendar, including a
recycling day reminder
, and even a
physical desktop calendar
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524903",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T11:48:36",
"content": "I despise making myself vulnerable by too much internetting.These days state-sized adversaries can erase pipelines, so why will they spare glassfibre cables? Or cellphone stations?For such purposes I use re... | 1,760,372,519.080318 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/less-is-more-when-it-comes-to-sensor-power/ | Less Is More When It Comes To Sensor Power | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"embedded systems",
"energy harvesting"
] | It used to be the cost of a microcontroller was a big inhibitor to putting brains in everything, but those days are long gone. Even 32-bit CPUs are now cheap enough that you can throw them into anything. The biggest factor now is probably power. Do you really want to charge your electric toilet seat or change batteries every few weeks? A company called
Everactive
wants you to ditch your battery using their sensor platform they claim harvests energy from a variety of sources and they are about to deliver their first
developer’s kit
.
The sensor can measure temperature, humidity, pressure, magnetic field, and acceleration on three axes. The device claims to harvest energy from radio frequencies, vibrations, small temperature differentials or light, even indoors. Our guess is that the sensor package runs on very little and when you poll the device wirelessly, the incoming radio signal supplies power for communication. The company claims its device uses 1000 times less power than competing solutions.
We aren’t sure if these claims are well founded or not, but we do agree that batteries are the bane of the embedded system. However, there are some cases — say a vending machine — where power is available and there are still other cases where you might not need a battery for low-power sensors, but you still need it for something else. For example, sensing a tank to turn on a heater, still needs power for the heater.
There are, though, other cases where having a self-powering sensor package will be just the ticket. We just don’t think it applies to every situation. We do like energy harvesting, but sometimes you can do a better job if you understand what you are building. For example, there are
automatic flush valves that use the water flow to generate enough electricity to operate the device
. If the energy storage device (like a rechargeable battery or a supercapacitor) gets low, you simply flush to recharge.
Of course, you can do like the Matrix and
harvest power from humans
. It might
not be as ridiculous as it sounds
at first. | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524773",
"author": "hinspect",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T20:09:45",
"content": "That would be ideal for water leak detectors!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6524775",
"author": "zog",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T20:27:43",... | 1,760,372,519.197654 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/cyberdeck-contest-2022-gibson-rev-001-thinks-outside-the-pelican-case/ | Cyberdeck Contest 2022: Gibson Rev 001 Thinks Outside The Pelican Case | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"2022 Cyberdeck Contest",
"e-ink",
"pelican case",
"Raspberry Pi 4"
] | As we’ve gushed previously in these pages, we saw an incredible turnout for our first-ever cyberdeck contest — so many cool ‘decks rolled in that it made judging them all quite the feat, and we would be remiss if we didn’t feature the favorites that, for whatever reason, didn’t make the cut. One of these is the aptly-named
Gibson Rev 001
from [Gadjet].
This cyberdeck may be on the pocket-sized side of things, but don’t let that fool you, because it’s loaded with I/O and sensors galore. A Pimoroni Breakout Garden provides particle/smoke and pulse oximetry, temperature/pressure/altitude, an air quality sensor, and a UVA/UVB light sensor — plenty of feelers for judging conditions on the fly. As you might expect, the brains of the operation is a Raspi 4, which is running Twister OS.
We love the dual-display thing going on with the 7″ touchscreen and the color e-ink display — really gives it a cobbled-together-yet-polished, futuristic feel. May the rest of the post-apocalypse gadgetry have such clean lines and cheerful colors (if that’s what you’re into). | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524874",
"author": "concretedog",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T07:49:15",
"content": "You missed the best bit! Its got a symbiotic Pwnagotchi built in!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6524976",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly... | 1,760,372,519.133088 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/2022-hackaday-supercon-joe-kingpin-grand-keynote-and-workshops-galore/ | 2022 Hackaday Supercon: Joe [Kingpin] Grand Keynote And Workshops Galore | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Supercon",
"cellphone",
"extravaganza",
"hacking",
"joe grand",
"keynote",
"radio",
"workshops"
] | It’s our great pleasure to announce that Joe [Kingpin] Grand is going to be our keynote speaker at the
2022 Supercon!
If you don’t know Joe, he’s a hacker’s hacker. He’s
behind the earliest DEFCON electronic badges
, to which we can trace our modern #badgelife creative culture. He was at the
l0pht
when it became the most publicly visible hackerspace in the USA, at the dawn of what we now think of as cybersecurity. And moreover, he’s a tireless teacher of the art of hardware hacking.
Joe’s talk at DEFCON 22 about
reverse engineering PCBs on a hacker budget
is on our top-10 must watch playlist, and his
JTAGulator
debug-port enumeration device has been present at the start of countless hacking sessions. But again, it’s his enthusiasm for creating, his inspiring “what if I poke at this thing this way?” attitude, and overwhelming
hacker spirit
that make Joe a long-overdue speaker at Supercon!
His keynote talk is, of course, about a project he’s working on. Aiming to bring back the best part of the 1980s, aside from the BBS, Joe made “The World’s Thinnest Boom Box,” an open source, Raspberry Pi-based music player complete with custom artwork, capacitive touch sensing buttons, and ultra-thin piezo speaker elements. Is this the largest single panel “badge” ever created? Joe will discuss his engineering process, the complex circuit board fabrication techniques used in the project — like laser-drilled via-in-pad and controlled depth routing — and the challenges he faced along the way. We can’t wait!
Workshops!
We have seven (7) amazing workshops planned for Saturday and Sunday, each with a ticket price of $15 and attendance limited to 20, and you should go sign up now at
the main Supercon tickets page
. We’ll also have a bonus badge workshop for as many people as we can fit in the room, led by badge creator and hardware hero Voja Antonic, and our own Adam Zeloof.
Christina Cyr
Build Your Own Phone with the Rephone Kit Create
Let’s get together and have a little fun while assembling your very own 2G phone. If you want to take your creation a step further after the assembly, bring your laptop with a micro-USB cable and I’ll show you how to upload your own ringtones and change the code.
Mike Szczys and Chris Gammell
Open Source RTOS on a Connected ePaper Badge
This workshop is to quickly get people building custom firmware using Zephyr, an open-source Real Time Operating System (RTOS). We will be programming a MagTag badge from Adafruit, a low-cost sensor platform that also has an ePaper display on it.
Nathan Jones
Beyond Arduino: Getting to “Blinky” (and beyond!) on a New Microcontroller
If you’ve ever wanted to use a development board that wasn’t “Arduino-compatible” but didn’t know how, this workshop is for you! Participants will learn how microcontrollers are programmed, which tools are needed, and where to find that information — all while starting to build their own project with an STM32 microcontroller.
Debra Ansell
Motion Reactive LED Wearables
Workshop participants will build an LED headband (can be adapted to a hat) based on the Seeeduino XIAO nrf52840 Sense microcontroller which contains an accelerometer and microphone. Using the CircuitPython LED Animation library framework, they will learn to create and adapt motion responsive animations.
Rikke Rasmussen, Beau Ambur
Build a portable directional antenna
Amateur Operators KN6KZF & K6EAU (a.k.a. Rikke & Beau) enjoy cruising the air waves as a conveniently socially distanced hobby. They have enjoyed reaching out from lighthouses, mountain tops, national parks and even via the International Space Station. Combining the fun of geocaching, balloons and radios has led to a great way to spend time together and get outdoors both launching and recovering various devices. Most recently that involved running Ground Control for Parachute Mobile Mission 42 while 3 skydivers made successive jumps to make both VHF and HF radio contacts while descending from over 10,000 feet under chute.
Alex Lynd
Cat-Themed Soldering & USB Hacking Workshop! (Build a USB Nugget)
Want to build your own cat-shaped hacking tool and learn how hackers exploit unlocked computers in seconds? You’ll learn to solder our “USB Nugget” circuit board kit, and walk away from this workshop with the resources & knowledge to create your own USB attacks on our cute, cat-themed platform!
Matt Venn
Tiny Tapeout – design your own chip and get it made!
In this workshop, you will get the opportunity to design and have manufactured your own design on an ASIC!
You will learn: The basics of digital logic, the basics of how semiconductors are designed and made, how to use an online digital design tool to build and simulate a simple design, and how to create the GDS files for manufacture on the open source Sky130 PDK.
Participants will have the option to submit their designs to be manufactured on the next shuttle as part of the Tiny Tapeout project.
Participants will need a laptop, and that’s it. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524737",
"author": "fid",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T17:27:44",
"content": "Will any of the workshops happen at the same time? I don’t see the one about RTOS, and there is one listed for Paul Beech, not listed here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,519.608784 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/build-your-own-concrete-3d-printer/ | Build Your Own Concrete 3D Printer | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"Concrete Printer"
] | We didn’t notice [Nikita]’s post about
building a concrete 3D printer
, a few months ago, but the idea seems sound: build a basic CNC XY axis and then add a mortar pump and hose to deposit concrete. The video, below, shows the machine in operation.
While it looks interesting, there is essentially no real Z-axis, so this would be limited to some sort of relatively thin forms unless you, perhaps, did a few layers and then further lifted the machine. We also assume wet concrete won’t bridge at all. Still, this might be an interesting project, especially if you have a spare CNC XY axis floating around.
If you buy everything, though, you are looking at an estimated cost of around $7,000 USD. We presume there is enough weight in the concrete that a conventional 3D printer probably isn’t going to cut it. We did wonder, though, if there would be any merit to connecting a conventional plastic-extruding nozzle to be able to lay down support for the concrete.
This might be a good jumping-off point for a more sophisticated machine. In particular, [Nikita] points out that a progressive cavity pump with a variable frequency drive is ideal, because it allows you to vary the extrusion rate and provides a steady flow of concrete. Armed with that knowledge, you could probably figure out the rest pretty easily if you’ve ever built a 3D printer or CNC machine.
Not the first
concrete printer
we’ve seen, of course. The one we saw before was capable of some
pretty amazing things
. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524714",
"author": "metalman",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T15:42:13",
"content": "its grout,not concrete,which has agregate(rocks)grout has no real monolithic strength",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6524718",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,520.369971 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/mastercards-new-card-safer-from-quantum-attacks/ | Mastercard’s New Card: Safer From Quantum Attacks? | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"card",
"credit card",
"debit card",
"payment card",
"post-quantum cryptography",
"quantum computer",
"quantum cryptography"
] | Quantum computers present a unique threat to many aspects of modern information technology. In particular, many cryptographic systems could be at risk of compromise in the event a malicious actor came into possession of a capable quantum computer.
Mastercard is intending to stay ahead of the game in this regard. It has launched a new contactless credit card that it says
is impervious to certain types of quantum attack.
Hack-Proof?
The card is based on new industry standards from
EMVco
, a technical body that works in the secure payment space. Known as the
EMV Contactless Kernel Specifications
, they outline functionality for payment devices like ATMs and point-of-sale terminals to process transactions. The specification includes a new “Secure Channel” method of communication between card and reader that aims to protect against common attacks like eavesdropping, relay, and man-in-the-middle attacks. The new cards are intended to be compatible with existing payment hardware out in the field.
The main highlight of the new cards, though, is in how they operate, cryptographically speaking. Traditionally, payment card systems have relied on public-key cryptography, using methods like the ever-popular RSA algorithm. As explained in our public key encryption primer,
the theory is simple.
A private key is two prime numbers, and the public key is their product. Encrypt a message using the public key, and it can only be decrypted with the prime numbers in the private key. The problem for attackers is that even though they know the public key, it’s very difficult to figure out the private key, simply because finding two large prime factors of an even larger number is hard.
IBM quantum computer
, with 50 qubits. Your credit card is safe, for now.
That is, unless you have the help of
a quantum computer.
A quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits can run
Shor’s algorithm
to quickly find prime factors of very large numbers. This can be used to reveal the private key for a wide variety of encryption algorithms. This would crack open everything from world financial systems to the encrypted documents of governments and companies around the globe. The one benefit we currently have is that no quantum computer with enough entangled qubits yet exists to break our commonly-used algorithms. Experts believe it’s only a matter of time, however, and even the US government is rapidly moving to alternative
quantum-secure encryption methods.
Mastercard’s new plastic will thus shift towards new algorithms it says are “quantum-resistant,” and thus not subject to these attacks. This will also involve the use of longer key lengths to further increase the robustness of the encryption method. Ease of use is also important, though, so the new system will keep the authentication process to under 0.5 seconds.
Interestingly, the documentation from EMVco indicates that the new cards will include Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for authentication purposes. Traditional ECC is not actually considered quantum-secure. In fact, for the key lengths currently in common use, ECC is likely slightly easier to break than RSA with a quantum computer.
So it could just be marketing bluster from Mastercard. It would seem foolhardy for one of the world’s largest payment processors to roll out new technology that was already known to be incapable of solving the stated problem. Instead, it’s perhaps more likely that Mastercard is using some new variant of ECC that is potentially secure against typical quantum computing attacks. Various ideas have sprouted in this area, though some
have recently been proven insecure.
Maybe they are focusing on some other algorithm, but will also support ECC. But then how to stop degrade attacks?
Overall, it’s a good thing that companies like Mastercard are already pursuing quantum security. Rolling out such infrastructure takes plenty of time, after all. Plus, once a quantum computer is up and running in the hands of a malicious actor, it will be far too late to act. However, at the same time, new encryption methods must be rigorously explored to ensure they indeed deliver on the security we need them to have. Here’s hoping the new cards have been subject to such due diligence.
Headline image: “Credit Card With Money Ver3” from
ccPix.com | 28 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524692",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T14:10:54",
"content": "I think someone as rich as to afford a quantum computer with more than 8192 working stable cubits (impossible right now) might not need my pittance of a low grade academic :)But I appreciate SSH for examp... | 1,760,372,519.889638 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/scripting-coils-for-pcb-motors/ | Scripting Coils For PCB Motors | Jenny List | [
"Parts",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"inductor",
"KiCAD",
"PCB inductor"
] | PCB inductors are a subject that has appeared here at Hackaday many times, perhaps most notably in the electromagnetic exploits of [Carl Bugeja]. But there is still much to be learned in the creation of the inductors themselves, and [atomic14] has recently been investigating their
automatic creation through scripting
.
A simple spiral trace is easy enough to create, but when for example creating a circular array of coils for an electric motor there’s a need for more complex shapes. Drawing a trapezoidal spiral is a surprisingly difficult task for a script, and we’re treated to a variety of algorithms in the path to achieving a usable design.
Having perfected the algorithm, how to bring it into KiCAD? The PCB CAD package has its own Python environment built-in, but it’s not the most flexible in which to develop. The solution is to write a simple JSON interpreter in KiCAD, and leave the spiral generation to an external script that passes a JSON. This also leaves the possibility of using the same code in other PCB packages.
You can watch the whole video below the break. Meanwhile for more PCB electromagnetics,
watch [Carl Bugeja]’s 2019 Supercon interview
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524646",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T11:32:01",
"content": "What a wonderful and helpful script!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6524663",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T12:25:38",
"conte... | 1,760,372,519.731735 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/25/flight-simulator-focuses-on-the-other-side-of-the-cockpit-door/ | Flight Simulator Focuses On The Other Side Of The Cockpit Door | Dan Maloney | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"airliner",
"arrival",
"ESP32",
"flight simulator",
"landing",
"omxplayer",
"passenger",
"Raspberry Pi Zero"
] | When one thinks of getting into a flight simulator, one assumes that it’ll be from the pilot’s point of view. But
this alternative flight simulator
takes a different tack, by letting you live out your air travel fantasies from the passenger’s point of view.
Those of you looking for a full-motion simulation of the passenger cabin experience will be disappointed, as [Alex Shakespeare] — we assume no relation — has built a minimal airliner cabin for this simulator. That makes sense, though; ideally, an airline pilot aims to provide passengers with as dull a ride as possible. Where a flight is at its most exciting, and what [Alex] captures nicely here, is the final approach to your destination, when the airport and its surrounding environs finally come into view after a long time staring at clouds. This is done by mounting an LCD monitor outside the window of a reasonable facsimile of an airliner cabin, complete with a row of seats. A control panel that originally lived in an airliner cockpit serves to select video of approaches to airports in various exotic destinations, like Las Vegas. The video is played by a Pi Zero, while an ESP32 takes care of controlling the lights, fans, and attendant call buttons in the quite realistic-looking overhead panel. Extra points for the button that plays the Ryanair arrival jingle.
[Alex]’s simulator is impressively complete, if somewhat puzzling in conception. We don’t judge, though, and it looks like it might be fun for visitors, especially when
the drinks cart
comes by. | 22 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524605",
"author": "Duderino",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T08:23:19",
"content": "It’s missing the seat in front crushing your legs and the crying baby in the row behind. Build those in then shut up and take my money.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,519.815194 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/24/one-of-the-worst-keyboards-ever-now-an-arduino-peripheral/ | One Of The Worst Keyboards Ever, Now An Arduino Peripheral | Jenny List | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"memberane keyboard",
"zx81"
] | For British kids of a certain age, their first experience of a computer was very likely to have been in front of a Sinclair ZX81. The lesser-known predecessor to the wildly-successful ZX Spectrum, it came in at under £100 and sported a Z80 processor and a whopping 1k of memory. In the long tradition of Sinclair products it had a few compromises to achieve that price point, the most obvious of which was a 40-key membrane keyboard. Those who learned to code on its frustrating lack of tactile feedback may be surprised to see
an Arduino project presenting it as the perfect way to easily hook up a keyboard to an Arduino
.
Like many retrocomputing parts, the ZX81 ‘board has been re-manufactured, to the joy of many a Sinclair enthusiast. It’s thus readily available and relatively cheap (we think they can be found for less than the stated 20 euros!), so surprisingly it’s a reasonable choice for an Arduino project. The task of trying to define by touch the imperceptible difference in thickness of a ZX81 key will bring a true retrocomputing experience to a new generation. Perhaps
if it can be done on an Mbed
then someone might even make a ZX81 emulator on the Arduino.
We’re great fans of the ZX81 here at Hackaday
, for some of us it was that first computer. Long may it continue to delight its fans! | 39 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524613",
"author": "Taper",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T08:38:55",
"content": "Folks from the US of a similar age may remember this as from the Timex Sinclair 1000. I’ve never been entirely clear on why Timex wanted their own home computer, or why they thought a rebadged ZX81 (with do... | 1,760,372,520.013693 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/24/simulating-temperature-in-vr-apps-with-trigeminal-nerve-stimulation/ | Simulating Temperature In VR Apps With Trigeminal Nerve Stimulation | Dan Maloney | [
"Virtual Reality"
] | [
"capsaicin",
"eucalyptol",
"olfactory",
"simulation",
"stimulation",
"trigeminal nerve",
"Vive",
"vr"
] | Virtual reality systems are getting better and better all the time, but they remain largely ocular and auditory devices, with perhaps a little haptic feedback added in for good measure. That still leaves 40% of the five canonical senses out of the mix, unless of course
this trigeminal nerve-stimulating VR accessory
catches on.
While you may be tempted to look at this as a simple “Smellovision”-style olfactory feedback, the work by [Jas Brooks], [Steven Nagels], and [Pedro Lopes] at the University of Chicago’s Human-Computer Integration Lab is intended to provide a simulation of different thermal regimes that a VR user might experience in a simulation. True, the addition to an off-the-shelf Vive headset does waft chemicals into the wearer’s nose using three microfluidics pumps with vibrating mesh atomizers, but it’s the choice of chemicals and their target that makes this work. The stimulants used are odorless, so instead of triggering the olfactory bulb in the nose, they target the trigeminal nerve, which also innervates the lining of the nose and causes more systemic sensations, like the generalized hot feeling of chili peppers and the cooling power of mint. The headset leverages these sensations to change the thermal regime in a simulation.
The video below shows the custom simulation developed for this experiment. In addition to capsaicin’s heat and eucalyptol’s cooling, the team added a third channel with 8-mercapto-p-menthan-3-one, an organic compound that’s intended to simulate the smoke from a generator that gets started in-game. The paper goes into great detail on the various receptors that can be stimulated and the different concoctions needed, and full build information is available in the GitHub repo. We’ll be watching this one with interest. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524554",
"author": "not.wackaday.com",
"timestamp": "2022-10-25T02:20:15",
"content": "This will obviously never be used for anything remotely related to adult human sexuality or intimacy, right?Also, one should ask the kinkier community what senses TENS, well, simulates because it... | 1,760,372,519.934931 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/23/errf-22-baby-belt-promises-infinite-z-for-under-200/ | ERRF 22: Baby Belt Promises Infinite Z For Under $200 | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"cons"
] | [
"28BYJ",
"belt printer",
"ERRF 22",
"infinite build volume"
] | Hackaday has been reporting on belt printers for around a decade now, since MakerBot released (and then quickly pulled) an automated build platform for their very first Cupcake printer. Turns out that not only has the concept been difficult to pull off from a technical perspective, but a murky patent situation made it tricky for anyone who wanted to bring their own versions to market. For a long time they seemed like the fusion reactors of desktop 3D printing — a technology that remains perennially just outside of our grasp.
But finally, things have changed. The software has matured, and there are now several commercial belt printers on the market. The trick now, as it once was for traditional desktop 3D printing, is to bring the costs down.
Enter the Baby Belt
, created by [Rob Mink]. This open-source belt printer relies on light-duty components and a largely 3D printed structure to get the price point down, though some will find its diminutive dimensions a bit too limiting…even if one of its axes is technically infinite.
If you’ve already got a printer and filament to burn, [Rob] is
selling the part kit for just $130 USD
. But even if you opt for the full ready-to-build kit, it will only set you back $180. Considering even the cheapest belt printers on the market now have a sticker price of more than $500, that’s an impressive accomplishment.
Of course, it’s hard to compare the Baby Belt with anything else on the market. For one thing, save for a few metal rods, its frame is made almost entirely from 3D-printed parts. Rather than the NEMA 17 stepper motors that are standard on even the cheapest of traditional desktop 3D printers, this little fellow is running on the dinky 28BYJ-48 steppers that you’d expect to find in a cheap toy. Then again, considering the printer only offers 85 x 86 mm in the X and Y axis, the structure and motors don’t exactly need to be top of the line.
What really sets this machine apart is the belt — while we’ve seen other makers go all out with their belt material, [Rob] has come up with an impressively low-tech solution. It’s a simple stack-up of construction paper, carpet tape, and fabric that you could probably put together with
what you’ve got laying around the house right now
.
Between that outer cloth layer and the printed frame, the Baby Belt offers a lot of room for customization, something which was on clear display at the
2022 East Coast RepRap Festival
. The machines dotted several tables on the show floor, and you could tell their builders had a lot of fun making each one their own | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523990",
"author": "Raster",
"timestamp": "2022-10-23T09:17:29",
"content": "Lovely!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6524074",
"author": "Autodrop3d (@autodrop3d)",
"timestamp": "2022-10-23T16:04:31",
"content": "... | 1,760,372,520.137247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/22/building-a-local-network-with-lorawan/ | Building A Local Network With LoRaWAN | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"chirpstack",
"gateway",
"internet of things",
"IoT",
"long range",
"LoRa",
"LoRaWAN",
"networking",
"wan"
] | At its core, the Internet is really just a bunch of computers networked together. There’s no reason that there can’t be other separate networks of computers, or that we all have to tie every computer we have to The One Internet To Rule Them All. In fact, for a lot of embedded systems, it doesn’t make much sense to give them a full network stack and Cat6e Ethernet just to report a few details about themselves. Enter LoRaWAN, a wireless LAN that uses extremely low power for Internet-of-Things devices,
and an implementation of one of these networks in an urban environment
.
The core of the build is the LoRaWAN gateway which sits at the top of a tall building to maximize the wireless range of all of the other devices. It’s running ChirpStack on the software side and uses a Kerlink Wigrid station to broadcast. The reported range is a little over 9 km with this setup. Other gateways can also be added, and the individual LoRa modules can report to any available gateway. From there, the gateways all communicate back to the central server and the information can be sent out to the wider network, Internet or otherwise.
The project’s creator [mihai.cuciuc] notes that this sort of solution might not be best for everyone. There are other wide area networks available, but using LoRaWAN like this would be likely to scale better as more and more devices are added to the network. For some other ways that LoRa can be used to great effect, take a look at
this project which builds an off-grid communications network
with it. | 40 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523992",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-10-23T09:23:49",
"content": "Makes me wish it would be possible to put antennas on the tallest 2 buildings of my town and create a LoRaWAN for all citizens. It is a small city and would work, but I doubt there would be much interest ... | 1,760,372,520.215614 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/22/the-commodordion-turns-two-c64s-into-a-single-instrument/ | The Commodordion Turns Two C64s Into A Single Instrument | Robin Kearey | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"accordion",
"commodore 64",
"Commodore SID",
"musical instruments"
] | One of the main reasons the Commodore 64 became an icon of the 1980s was its MOS 6581 “SID” sound chip that gave it audio capabilities well beyond those of other microcomputers of the 8-bit era. The SID became something of a legend by itself among chiptune enthusiasts, and several electronic instruments have been designed that generate their sound through a SID chip. Not many of those look anything like traditional musical instruments however, so we’re delighted to see [Linus Åkesson]’s new project: two Commodore 64s joined back-to-back using a bellows to form
a wonderful new instrument called the Commodordion
. It can be played in a similar way one plays a traditional accordion: melodies are played with the right hand, chords with the left, and volume is adjusted by varying the pressure in the bellows.
The two computers are basically unmodified, and boot Commodore BASIC like they normally would. A custom circuit board emulates a cassette player and provides the software to be loaded into memory. Both computers run the same program and can be switched between the right-hand and left-hand role by pressing a specific key combination. The software in question is called
Qwertuoso
, and basically maps notes and various features of the SID chip to keys on the Commodore’s keyboard.
Of course, it’s the bellows that makes this instrument a true member of the accordion family. Made from 5.25″ floppy disks and sticky tape, it forms a more-or-less air-tight system linking the two computers. The airflow in the bellows is measured through a microphone placed next to the air intake: the amount of noise generated is roughly proportional to the amount of air being expelled or inhaled. This information is then used to modulate the volume generated by the two SID chips.
By [Linus]’s own admission it’s not the most ergonomic of instruments, so we’re doubly impressed by the amount of skill he demonstrates while playing it in the video embedded below. It’s not the first time either that he has turned a Commodore 64 into a musical instrument: he previously built a
church organ
and a
theremin
. While the Commodordion may look complicated, it’s actually much simpler in construction than
a mechanical accordion
. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523942",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-10-23T02:15:24",
"content": "Easier to build*, much harder to play!*If you already have C64s",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6523948",
"auth... | 1,760,372,520.074351 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/22/2022-cyberdeck-contest-qaz-personal-terminal/ | 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: QAZ Personal Terminal | Navarre Bartz | [
"contests",
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"2022 Cyberdeck Contest",
"35% keyboard",
"4:1",
"4:1 LCD",
"Banana Pi",
"cyberdeck",
"equations",
"math input",
"QAZ keyboard",
"slab",
"slabtop",
"waveshare 7.9"
] | The slabtop form factor has had a resurgence in the cyberdeck community, and [
Greg Leo
] has designed the
QAZ Personal Terminal
to be about as small as a slabtop could be while still having full-sized keys.
Since the device is using a 35% QAZ keyboard as its primary input device, [Leo] has helpfully given a quick overview of how text is input in the video below. Coupled with that surprisingly popular 4:1 LCD screen we’ve
seen elsewhere
, this cyberdeck looks like a modern interpretation of a
TRS-80 Model 100
. The Banana Pi powering the QAZ Personal Terminal is running Debian with
spectrwm
, a tiling window manager making arranging windows a breeze with either a mouse or keyboard. The integrated mouse layer on the keyboard means you don’t need a separate mouse at all if you don’t want to spoil the 1980s mobile chic.
[Leo] has another video all about
doing calculus
on this cyberdeck with the math shortcuts integrated into the keyboard. Fractions, exponents, and common Greek letters are demonstrated. We can see this being a really great note-taking device for engineering and math courses if you wanted something more portable than a laptop.
It’s hard to get very far hacking without a little math. For more math-focused input devices, check out
the Mathboard
or the
MCM/70
. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523929",
"author": "Redhatter (VK4MSL)",
"timestamp": "2022-10-23T00:32:04",
"content": "I see you’d have some fun minding your P’s and Q’s with that keyboard until you got used to it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6523943"... | 1,760,372,520.419099 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/22/when-elon-says-no-just-reverse-engineer-the-starlink-signal/ | When [Elon] Says No, Just Reverse Engineer The Starlink Signal | Dan Maloney | [
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"global positioning",
"gps",
"ku-band",
"ofdm",
"orthogonal frequency division multiplexing",
"reverse engineering",
"Starlink",
"synchronization"
] | We all know that it’s sometimes better to beg forgiveness than ask permission to do something, and we’ll venture a guess that more than a few of us have taken that advice to heart on occasion. But [Todd Humphreys] got the order of operations a bit mixed up with his attempt to
leverage the Starlink network as a backup to the Global Positioning System
, and ended up doing some interesting reverse engineering work as a result.
The story goes that [Todd] and his team at the University of Texas Austin’s Radionavigation Lab, on behalf of their sponsors in the US Army, approached Starlink about cooperating on a project to make their low-Earth orbit constellation provide position, navigation, and timing capabilities. Although initially interested in the project, Starlink honcho [Elon Musk] put the brakes on things, leaving [Todd]’s team high and dry. Not to be dissuaded, they bought a Starlink user terminal, built what amounts to a small radiotelescope — although we’ve seen
something similar done with just an RTL-SDR
— and proceeded to reverse-engineer the structure of Starlink’s Ku-band downlink signal. The
paper
(PDF link) on their findings is densely packed with details, such as the fact that Starlink uses an orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme.
It’s important to note that their goal was not to break encryption or sniff in on user data; rather, they wanted access to the synchronization and timing signals embedded in the Starlink data structures. By using this data along with the publically available ephemera for each satellite, it’s possible to quickly calculate the exact distance to multiple satellites and determine the receiver’s location to within 30 meters. It’s not as good as
some GPS-Starlink hacks
we’ve seen, but it’s still pretty good in a pinch. Besides, the reverse engineering work here is well worth a read.
Thanks to [Adrian] for the tip! | 37 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523885",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T20:17:10",
"content": "This guy has a lot of fans and enemies, it’s absolutely inane. I remember when they shifted from “don’t buy twitter” to “you must buy twitter”. Their sole opinion is to be contrarians now of what Elon wan... | 1,760,372,520.609536 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/22/velomobile-gets-electric-assist/ | Velomobile Gets Electric Assist | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"bike",
"ebike",
"kit",
"speed",
"torque sensing",
"tsdz2",
"velomobile"
] | What do you get when you throw all accepted bicycle designs out the window and start fresh? Well, it might look a bit like [Saukki’s]
velomobile
.
Most bikes come in a fairly standard, instantly-recognizable shape which has been popular for over a century now. While it’s a vast improvement over its predecessor, the penny-farthing bicycle, there’s no reason that a bike
needs
to have this two-triangle frame shape other than that a pretentious bicycle racing standards group says they have to. If you want to throw their completely arbitrary rulebook out of the window, though, you can build much more efficient, faster bikes like recumbents or even full-fairing velomobiles. And if you want to go even faster than that, you can always add a standard ebike motor kit to one.
This is a lot harder than putting a motor on a normal bicycle. Bicycles tend to have standardized parts and sizes, and [Saukki]’s
velomobile
is far from the standard bike. First, he needed custom mounts for the display and also for the battery, which he needed to make extra wide so its weight wouldn’t rip through the carbon fiber body. The emergency brake lever motor cutoff needed to be dismantled to work with his control system too, and finally the mid-drive motor needed a custom mount as well. It’s a TSDZ2 motor that comes with torque-sensing pedal assist.
The changes didn’t stop there. The velomobile max speed is much higher than a standard bike. This called for some gear ratio changes, in the form of a monster 60-tooth chain ring.
This leads to the one major problem with this build which is that the velomobile can achieve such high speeds on its own that the electric assist cuts out for most of the ride. There is a legal requirement over much of Europe that e-bikes only have pedal assist (without a throttle) and that they stop assisting above a specific speed. But if you want to build an e-bike that pushes the boundary of the law instead of strictly adhering to it,
take a look at this one which uses a motor from a washing machine
. | 37 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523863",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T17:32:30",
"content": "The 1ph limit only applies if you don’t want to register it as a motorcycle. If you do that, it’s fine.(Or do I have been led to believe)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,520.530223 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/22/retrofitting-robots/ | Retrofitting Robots | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Robots Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"automation",
"newsletter",
"robot"
] | Al Williams
wrote up a neat thought piece
on why we are so fascinated with robots that come in the shape of people, rather than robots that come in the shape of whatever it is that they’re supposed to be doing. Al is partly convinced that sci-fi is partly responsible, and that it shapes people’s expectations of what robots look like.
What sparked the whole thought train was the ROAR (robot-on-a-rail) style robot arms that have been popping up, at least in the press, as robot fry cooks. As the name suggests, it’s a robot arm on a rail that moves back and forth across a frying surface and uses CV algorithms to sense and flip burgers. Yes, a burger-flipping robot arm. Al asks why they didn’t just design the flipper into the stovetop, like you would expect with any other assembly line.
In this particular case, I think it’s a matter of economics. The burger chains already have an environment that’s designed around human operators flipping the burgers. A robot arm on a rail is simply the cheapest way of automating the task that fits in with the current ergonomics. The robot arm works like a human arm because it has to work in an environment designed for the human arm.
Could you redesign a new automatic burger-flipping system to be more space efficient or more reliable? Probably. If you did, would you end up with a humanoid arm? Not necessarily. But this is about patching robotics into a non-robotic flow, and that means they’re going to have to play by our rules. I’m not going to deny the cool factor of having a robot arm flip burgers, but my guess is that it’s actually the path of least resistance.
It feels kind of strange to think of a sci-fi timeline where the human-looking robots come first, and eventually get replaced by purpose-built intelligent machines that look nothing like us as the environments get entire overhauls, but that may be the way it’s going to play out. Life doesn’t always imitate art.
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523836",
"author": "Winchell Chung",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T14:28:57",
"content": "There is science fiction about a world where humanoid robots were developed first but were later replaced by purpose built robots. Anthony Boucher’s short stories Q.U.R. and Robinc.https://www.isfd... | 1,760,372,520.739436 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/23/diy-arduino-hearing-test-device/ | DIY Arduino Hearing Test Device | Dave Walker | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"audiometer",
"hearing",
"hearing loss",
"oled",
"rotary encoder",
"ws2812"
] | Hearing loss is a common problem for many – especially those who may have attended too many loud concerts in their youth. [mircemk] had recently been for a hearing test, and noticed that the procedure was actually quite straightforward. Armed with this knowledge,
he decided to build his own test system
and document it for others to use.
Resultant audiogram from the device showing each ear in a different color
By using an Arduino to produce tones of various stepped frequencies, and gradually increasing the volume until the test subject can detect the tone, it is possible to plot an audiogram of hearing threshold sensitivity. Testing each ear individually allows a comparison between one side and the other.
[mircemk] has built a nice miniature cabinet that holds an 8×8 matrix of WS2812 addressable RGB LEDs. A 128×64 pixel OLED display provides user instructions, and a rotary encoder with push-button serves as the user input.
Of course, this is not a calibrated professional piece of test equipment, and a lot will depend on the quality of the earpiece used. However, as a way to check for gross hearing issues, and as an interesting experiment, it holds a lot of promise.
There is even an extension, including a Class D audio amplifier, that allows the use of bone-conduction earpieces to help narrow down the cause of hearing loss further.
There’s some more information on
bone conduction here
, and we’ve covered an intriguing
optical stimulation cochlear implant
, too. | 18 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524218",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T05:08:09",
"content": "Doesn’t someone who tries to self-diagnose have a fool as a doctor?Will this be followed up by a homebuilt hearing aid?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,520.667413 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/23/sight-and-sound-combine-in-this-engaging-synthesizer-sculpture/ | Sight And Sound Combine In This Engaging Synthesizer Sculpture | Dan Maloney | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"12AU7",
"audio",
"Circuit Sculpture",
"ESP32",
"generative",
"OverDrive",
"sequencer",
"synthesizer"
] | We’ll always have a soft spot for circuit sculpture projects; anything with components supported on nice tidy rows of brass wires always captures our imagination. But add to that a little bit of light and a lot of sound, and you get something like
this hybrid synthesizer sculpture
that really commands attention.
[Eirik Brandal] calls his creation “corwin point,” and describes it as “a generative dual voice analog synthesizer.” It’s built with a wide-open architecture that invites exploration and serves to pull the eyes — and ears — into the piece. The lowest level of the sculpture has all the “boring” digital stuff — an ESP32, the LED drivers, and the digital-to-analog converters. The next level up has the more visually interesting analog circuits, built mainly “dead-bug” style on a framework of brass wires. The user interface, mainly a series of pots and switches, lives on this level, as does a SeeedStudio WIO terminal, which is used to display a spectrum analyzer of the sounds generated.
Moving up a bit, there’s a seemingly incongruous vacuum tube overdrive along with a power amp and speaker in an acrylic enclosure. A vertical element of thick acrylic towers over all and houses the synth’s delay line, and the light pipes that snake through the sculpture pulse in time with sequencer events. The video below shows the synth in action — the music that it generates never really sounds the same twice, and sounds like nothing we’ve heard before, except perhaps briefly when we heard something like the background music from
Logan’s Run
.
Hats off to [Eirik] for another great-looking and great-sounding build; you may remember that his
“cwymriad”
caught our attention earlier this year. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524363",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T15:13:02",
"content": "This seems like it’s best use might be to record this machine constantly, then listen to the output and when you hear something awesome, you store it and deconstruct it so you can insert it into your own m... | 1,760,372,520.947131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/23/hackaday-links-october-23-2022/ | Hackaday Links: October 23, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"AirTag",
"anosmia",
"cern",
"COVID",
"cryogenic",
"DFW",
"energy crisis",
"global positioning",
"gps",
"hackaday links",
"jamming",
"lhc",
"Lufthansa",
"olfactory",
"outage",
"prosthetic"
] | There were strange doings this week as Dallas-Forth Worth Airport in Texas experienced
two consecutive days of GPS outages
. The problem first cropped up on the 17th, as the Federal Aviation Administration sent out an automated notice that GPS reception was “unreliable” within 40 nautical miles of DFW, an area that includes at least ten other airports. One runway at DFW, runway 35R, was actually closed for a while because of the anomaly. According to
GPSjam.org
— because of course someone built a global mapping app to track GPS coverage — the outage only got worse
the next day
, both spreading geographically and worsening in some areas. Some have noted that the area of the outage abuts Fort Hood, one of the largest military installations in the country, but there doesn’t appear to be any connection to military operations. The outage ended abruptly at around 11:00 PM local time on the 19th, and there’s still no word about what caused it. Loss of GPS isn’t exactly a “game over” problem for modern aviation, but it certainly is a problem, and at the very least it points out how easy the system is to break, either accidentally or intentionally.
In other air travel news, almost as quickly as Lufthansa appeared to ban the use of Apple AirTags in checked baggage,
the airline reversed course on the decision
. The original decision was supposed to have been based on “an abundance of caution” regarding the potential for disaster from its low-power transmitters, or should a stowed AirTag’s CR2032 battery explode. But as it turns out, the
Luftfahrt-Bundesamt
, the German civil aviation authority, agreed with the company’s further assessment that the tags pose little risk, green-lighting their return to the cargo compartment. What luck! The original ban totally didn’t have anything to do with the fact that passengers were shaming Lufthansa online by tracking their bags with AirTags while the company claimed they couldn’t locate them, and the sudden reversal is unrelated to the bad taste this left in passengers’ mouths. Of course, the reversal only opened the door to more
adventures in AirTag luggage tracking
, so that’s fun.
Energy prices are much on everyone’s mind these days, but the scale of the problem is somewhat
a matter of perspective
. Take, for instance, the
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs a little thing known as the Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer-long machine that smashes atoms together to delve into the mysteries of physics. In an average year, CERN uses 1.3 terawatt-hours of electricity to run the LHC and its associated equipment. Technically, this is what’s known as a hell of a lot of electricity, and given the current energy issues in Europe, CERN has agreed to shut down the LHC a bit early this year, shutting down in late November instead of the usual mid-December halt. What’s more, CERN has agreed to reduce usage by 20% next year, which will increase scientific competition for beamtime on the LHC. There’s only so much CERN can do to reduce the LHC’s usage, though — the cryogenic plant to cool the superconducting magnets draws a whopping 27 megawatts, and has to be kept going to prevent the magnets from quenching.
And finally, as if the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t been weird enough, the fact that it has left in its wake survivors whose sense of smell is compromised is alarming. Our daily ritual during the height of the pandemic was to open up a jar of peanut butter and take a whiff, figuring that even the slightest attenuation of the smell would serve as an early warning system for symptom onset. Thankfully, the alarm hasn’t been tripped, but we know more than a few people who now suffer from what appears to be permanent anosmia. It’s no joke — losing one’s sense of smell can be downright dangerous; think “gas leak” or “spoiled food.” So it was with interest that we spied an article about
a neuroprosthetic nose
that might one day let the nasally challenged smell again. The idea is to use an array of chemical sensors to stimulate an array of electrodes implanted near the olfactory bulb. It’s an interesting idea, and the article provides a lot of fascinating details on how the olfactory sense actually works. | 21 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524192",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T01:17:58",
"content": "Smell indeed is a very interesting thing.https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-model-links-smell-molecules-with-metabolic-processes-20221010/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,372,523.165317 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/23/look-inside-this-meditation-headband-and-integrate-it-into-your-own-projects/ | Look Inside This “Meditation Headband” And Integrate It Into Your Own Projects | Donald Papp | [
"Teardown",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"biofeedback",
"brainflow",
"meditation",
"muse",
"teardown"
] | Muse makes a variety of wearable devices aimed at measuring brain and body activity, and [Becky Stern] did
a detailed teardown of the Muse S model
, revealing what goes on inside the device.
The Muse S is a soft, sleep-friendly biofeedback wearable mounted on silver-plated fabric. Not only does [Becky] tear it down, but she provides loads of magnified images and even has it CT scanned. The headband has conductive fabric embedded into it, and the core of the device is stuffed with three separate PCBs that get pretty thoroughly scrutinized.
While the Muse S is sold mainly as a meditation aid and works with a companion app, there is, fortunately, no need to go digging around with a screwdriver and soldering iron to integrate it into other projects.
The Muse S is supported by the Brainflow project
which opens it up to different applications. Brainflow is a library intended to obtain, parse, and analyze EEG, EMG, ECG, and other kinds of data from biosensors.
If you think Muse and Brainflow sound familiar, that might be because of another project we featured that integrated a Muse 2 and Brainflow with Skyrim VR,
creating a magic system whose effectiveness depends on the player’s state of mind
. Good things happen when hardware and software are accessible to users, after all.
You can watch a video tour of the teardown in the video, embedded just under the page break. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524213",
"author": "bemusedHorseman",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T04:29:09",
"content": "Just mind the output voltages, especially if it’s intended for sleeptime use. Don’t want to give anyone beefbrain…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"commen... | 1,760,372,521.086435 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/23/design-your-own-chip-with-tinytapeout/ | Design Your Own Chip With TinyTapeout | Arya Voronova | [
"hardware",
"how-to"
] | [
"ASIC",
"Chip Scale Package",
"custom silicon",
"fab",
"silicon design",
"tinytapeout"
] | When hackers found and developed ways to order PCBs on the cheap, it revolutionized the way we create. Accessible 3D printing brought us entire new areas to create things. [Matt Venn] is one of the people at the forefront of hackers designing our own silicon, and we’ve covered plenty of his research over the years. His latest effort to involve the hacker community,
TinyTapeout,
makes chip design accessible to newcomers – the bar is as low as arranging logic gates on a web browser page.
Just six of the designs submitted, with varying complexity
For this, [Matt] worked with people like [Uri Shaked] of Wokwi fame, [Sylvain “tnt” Munaut], [jix], and a few others. Together, they created all the tooling necessary, and most importantly, a pipeline where your logic gate-based
design in Wokwi
gets compiled into a block ready to be put into silicon, with even simulations and compile-time verification for common mistakes. As a result, the design process is remarkably straightforward, to the point where
a 9-year-old kid
can do it. If you wanted, you could submit your Verilog, too!
The first round of TinyTapeout had
a deadline in the first days of September
and
brought 152 entries together
– just in time for an Efabless shuttle submission. All of these designs were put on a single instance of a chip, that will be fabbed in quantity, tested, soldered onto breakouts, and mailed out to individual participants. In this way, everyone will be getting everyone’s design, but thanks to the on-chip muxing hardware, they’re able to switch between designs using on-breakout DIP switches.
More after the break…
The constraints are simple. You get eight digital inputs, eight digital outputs, and there are 200 gates at your disposal. What could you build with this? For a start, a
BCD to 7-segment decoder,
a
UART transmitter,
or even a
full 4-bit CPU
– or maybe, a Wolf, Sheep, and Cabbage game! After the first round of submissions ended, [Matt] has asked people to compile information about their designs – here’s
a PDF datasheet
with over 30 various designs for you to marvel at, from Hello World ones to CPUs, a variety of circuits with practical or educational purposes.
At the moment, [Matt] is already planning the next TinyTapeout run. If you have a project idea asking to be brought into cold hard logic gates,
sign up for the mailing list
and you won’t miss news about the next TinyTapeout deadline. The
Wokwi template
is already open for your experimenting purposes, all that’s left is for the submission form to go open. If you have any questions,
the FAQ
is quite helpful!
Of course, such projects don’t happen out of nowhere – for a few years, [Matt] has been bringing us hackers teachings on how to get into chip design. We’ve hosted his
Zero to ASIC workshop in 2020,
the
OpenMPW progress story
at Remoticon 2021, and just this year,
a HackChat on open-source ASICs.
TinyTapeout reminds us of the story of
how OSHPark was founded
– a bunch of people pooling together to order their PCBs, and just like back then, we foresee some fun additions to a regular hacker’s toolkit. | 45 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524087",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-10-23T17:11:59",
"content": "“using on-breakout DIP switches”On-board breakout DIP switches?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6524097",
"auth... | 1,760,372,521.035658 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/23/protected-mode-on-a-z80-almost/ | Protected Mode On A Z80! (Almost) | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"8-bit CPU",
"protected mode",
"z80"
] | The microprocessor feature which probably most enables the computing experience we take for granted today is protected mode. A chip with the required hardware can run individual software processes in their own environments, enabling multitasking and isolation between processes. Older CPUs lacked this feature, meaning that all the resources were available to all software. [Andy Hu]
has done the seemingly impossible with a Zilog Z80
, enabling a protected mode on the chip for the first time in over four decades. Has he found an elusive undocumented piece of silicon missed by every other researcher? Not quite, but it is a clever hack.
The Z80 has two address spaces, one for memory and the other for I/O. He’s taken the I/O request line and fed it through a flip-flop and some logic to call a hardware interrupt the first time an I/O call is made or when a RST instruction is executed. Coupled with a small piece of memory for register contents, and he’s made a Z80 with a fully-functional protected mode, for the cost of a few logic chips. It’s explained in the video below the break, and we hope you agree that it’s rather elegant given the resources in hand. It’s too late for the commercial 8-bit machines of the past, but it would be interesting to see what today’s retrocomputer designers make of it. | 27 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524059",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2022-10-23T14:45:54",
"content": "Memory protection is less important than the virtual memory mapping aspect of protected mode execution. Though I guess even that is just a few chips away, you could e.g. stick in an SRAM chip that maps the hi... | 1,760,372,521.210468 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/23/diy-heat-set-insert-press-says-complicated-comfort/ | DIY Heat-Set Insert Press Says Complicated = Comfort | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"diy",
"heat set inserts",
"threaded inserts",
"tools"
] | Heat-set inserts are a great way to embed mechanically-strong, threaded parts into a 3D print. For installation, all that is required is an economical soldering iron; something most of us already have.
The carriage and counterweight use a v-wheel gantry, GT2 belt, and other common hardware.
That’s fine for a handful of occasional inserts, but when a large number need to be inserted reliably and cleanly, something a little more refined is called for. That’s where [virchow]’s
threaded insert press design
comes in. It adds 3D-printed parts to an aluminum extrusion frame to create a press that smoothly lowers a soldering iron directly up and down, with minimal effort by the user.
The holder for the soldering iron is mounted to a small v-wheel gantry that rides along the vertical extrusion. The gantry features a counterweight to take care of resetting the position of the iron. [Virchow] admits that the design could be considered unnecessarily complicated (hence the “UC” in the name) but on the other hand, there’s nothing like doing a hundred or so inserts to make one appreciate every bit of comfort and stability.
Heat-set inserts aren’t difficult to use, but a little technique goes a long way. Spend a few minutes reading Joshua Vasquez’s guide on
the optimal way to use them in 3D-printed parts
to make sure yours not only go in straight but end up looking great as well. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524025",
"author": "nmhois",
"timestamp": "2022-10-23T12:00:04",
"content": "A Juicero moment. A simple arbor press could be recycled when it reaches its end-of-life (unlikely) or is not needed anymore. This just generated quite a bit of plastic waste.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,521.14463 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/22/trying-to-build-the-worlds-fastest-roomba/ | Trying To Build The World’s Fastest Roomba | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"roomba"
] | A lot of people complain that Roombas are unreliable, poor at their job, or just plain annoying. Few people complain they’re not fast enough in a straight line. Regardless, [electrosync] set about building the world’s fastest Roomba
for his own personal satisfaction.
For this challenge, [electrosync] set his own rules. The build must look like a Roomba, use two drive wheels, and one motor per wheel. It also has to maintain its vacuum functionality. After stripping down a used Roomba, he set about carving out space in the chassis for upgraded hardware. Brushed DC 775 motors were selected for the drivetrain, and these run through a 3:1 planetary reduction gearbox. 3D-printed mounts were then used to install the new motors in the existing chassis. New 3D-printed wheels completed the drivetrain. The original Ni-MH cells were replaced with a pair of 3-cell lithium polymer batteries for more power.
Measured with a Bluetooth GPS device, the upgraded Roomba achieved an impressive 36 km/h (22 MPH). With new wheel designs clad in urethane rubber and an improved anti-wheelie device, it hit a mighty 49 km/h (30 MPH). Adding 4-cell batteries pushed things further to 57 km/h (35 MPH), but the Roomba became difficult to control.
The gauntlet has been thrown down. Do you think you can
build a faster Roomba?
Time to get hacking! Video after the break. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523817",
"author": "NotThatDan",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T11:40:34",
"content": "I must have been lucky for once. I am into my second roomba with no issues at all. The first one is still working fine but the NiMh battery gave up after running a daily schedule for five years. When I... | 1,760,372,521.255796 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/22/lego-plays-electronic-drums/ | Lego Plays Electronic Drums | Danie Conradie | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"drum machine",
"lego",
"rapid prototyping"
] | The ability to quickly try out an idea, and then expand and develop it, is what rapid prototyping is all about. Although we tend to think of 3D printing when rapid prototyping is mentioned, [Brick Technology] reminds us of the power of Lego, as he rapidly
builds and improves an electromechanical drum machine
.
Using Lego Technic pieces, he starts with a simple music box-style drum with moveable pins that pluck on spring-loaded levers, which in turn hit piezoelectric discs. The electronics side is simple, with the discs wired to a Roland sound module from an existing electronic drum kit. With the ability to instantly adjust, add and remove pieces, he quickly finds and fixes the problem of getting eleven hammer mechanisms together and working smoothly.
To get around the limited pin space on the drum and increase the length and variation potential of the rhythms, [Brick Technology] moved to a belt design that can accommodate significantly more pins. He also added an electric motor and various gearbox ratios for consistent and adjustable tempo. Together with his
water vortex ball machine
, he makes us think our workshops probably need a few hundred Lego Technic pieces.
To add to the list of excuses to get more Lego, we’ve also seen the plastic blocks get used for everything from
RC submarines
to
reaction wheels
and even
data storage
. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523820",
"author": "Rpol",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T11:57:10",
"content": "Absolutely Brilliant!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523833",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T13:57:... | 1,760,372,521.459763 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/build-this-halloween-themed-tenseggrity-sculpture/ | Build This Halloween-Themed TensEGGrity Sculpture | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"halloween",
"tensegrity"
] | Tensegrity sculptures are fun things, and often sold as office desk toys or scientific novelties. You can build your own too,
and [seabirdhh] has whipped up a fun holiday-themed version.
The first part to build is the egg-hat-stand. This consists of the base of the structure, with the “hat” of the egg character hanging in the center. The other half of the structure is built separately, with the rest of the “egg head” sitting in a cup in the bottom of the upper structure. A series of nylon threads are then tied between the components. These can then be tensioned to give the structure its shape, allowing the egg’s “hat” to hover above its “head”. [seabirdhh] passes the nylon threads through small pieces of rubber that allow the tension to be adjusted just right. Too little and the structure falls down, but too much, and it will bend over time. Tuning it carefully is key.
It’s a fun build, and a cheap way to experiment with tensegrity concepts at home. You can even use these same techniques to
build a quadcopter,
or
apply them in the world of LEGO.
Video after the break. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523766",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T05:28:45",
"content": "Eggcelent! Egglant…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6523788",
"author": "lj",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T08:46:32",
"conten... | 1,760,372,521.369705 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/direction-finding-with-help-from-the-steam-deck/ | Direction-Finding With Help From The Steam Deck | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"df-aggregator",
"direction finding",
"fox hunt",
"ham",
"sdr",
"software-defined radio",
"steam deck"
] | Direction-finding, or fox hunting, is a popular activity in ham radio circles where a group of people armed with radios attempt to locate a broadcasting source. Besides being a hobby for amateurs, it’s also a necessary tool in the belt of regulators who are attempting to track down violators of the air space. There are
a lot of ways to figure out the precise location of a radio transmission
, but this one manages to pull it off using both a boat and a Steam Deck, each armed with a software-defined radio.
This project comes to us from [Aaron] who is well known in the amateur radio circles for his SDR-focused Linux distribution called DragonOS; which has all the tools needed for a quality SDR experience, in this case KrakenSDR and DF Aggregator. He’s loaded everything up on a Steam Deck and left that in a secure location on the shore of a lake, while he carries second device with the same software with him on a boat. With the two devices listening for a specific signal, he’s able to quickly zero in on his friend on the shore who is broadcasting on the 70 cm band thanks to the help of all of these software packages.
While ham radio isn’t always known for being a youthful and exciting activity, the advent of software-defined radio and other digital modes seem to be shaking things up in that world. Certainly speeding around a lake on a boat is fun on its own as well, and a fox hunt like this
can be done with something as small and simple as a Raspberry Pi
too. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523795",
"author": "Folkert",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T09:51:02",
"content": "I am watching the video, but wondering how it works and what exactly I am looking at.What are the constantly moving lines (which for a brief time seem to converge towards the target)?And how doe it work? ... | 1,760,372,521.412258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/neodriver-ornament-brightens-up-christmas/ | Neodriver Ornament Brightens Up Christmas | Lewin Day | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"christmas tree",
"led",
"tree",
"ws2812b"
] | Stores will sell you all kinds of gaudy holiday ornaments, but there’s nothing like the style and class achieved by building your own. [w3arycod3r] did just that,
whipping up the fun and festive Neodriver Ornament.
It’s a battery-powered build, and runs off an rechargeable 18650 cell which provides several days of operation at a low duty cycle. An ATtiny85 is charged with sending out commands to various NeoPixel devices, from rings to rectangular arrays. [w3arycod3r] then designed various PCBs that could carry the hardware and battery in a well-balanced package that would hang nicely when suspended from a ribbon on a Christmas tree.
As is always the fun part with addressable LEDs, [w3arycod3r] whipped up some fun animations to suit. The 5×5 rectangular arrays of NeoPixels are able to deliver scrolling text, while another animation blips out the RNA sequence of everyone’s least favorite coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Getting everything to fit into a ATtiny85’s 8 KB of code space and 512 byte EEPROM was a challenge, but slimming down the Adafruit NeoPixel library and using direct AVR register manipulation in place of regular Arduino functions helped.
Overall, it’s a fun holiday build that looks great on the tree. Alternatively, consider making yourself some
rheoscopic ornaments
this holiday season. And, if you’ve whipped up your own fun holiday build,
throw it on the tipsline! | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523703",
"author": "Orzel",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T23:14:49",
"content": "It’s very hard to find attiny85 those days. Only the sop/soic package is (barely) available.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6523732",
"autho... | 1,760,372,521.614463 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/errf-22-recreator-3d-turns-trash-into-filament/ | ERRF 22: Recreator 3D Turns Trash Into Filament | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"green hacks"
] | [
"3d printer filament",
"ERRF 22",
"filament extruder",
"pet",
"recycling"
] | In
Back to the Future
, Doc Brown returns to 1985 with a version of his DeLorean time machine that has been modified with technology from the future. After telling Marty they need to go on yet another adventure, Doc recharges the DeLorean’s flux capacitor and time circuits by tossing pieces of garbage into the slick Mr. Fusion unit mounted to the rear of the vehicle. The joke being that, in the future, you could simply head over to the local big box store and pick up a kitchen appliance that’s capable of converting waste matter into energy.
Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near powering our homes with banana peels and beer cans.
But if the Recreator 3D is any indication
, the technology required to turn plastic bottles rescued from the trash into viable PET filament for your 3D printer is all but upon us. While there are still some aspects of the process that could stand to be streamlined, such as fusing multiple runs of filament together into one continuous roll, the core concepts all seem to be in place.
The MK5Kit Mini is currently in development with LDO Motors.
Creator [Josh Taylor] made the trip out to the
2022 East Coast RepRap Festival
to not only show off the Recreator 3D, a project he’s been working on now for over a year, but to get people excited about the idea of turning waste plastic into filament. It’s not necessarily a new concept, and in fact [Josh] says earlier efforts such as the PETBOT are what inspired him to create his own open source take on the “pultrusion” concept.
According to [Josh], actually printing with the recycled filament isn’t that different from using commercial PETG, though it’s recommended you lower your speeds. A nozzle temperature of around 260 °C seems to work best, with the bed at 70 °C. Interestingly, the filament produced by the process is actually hollow inside, so the most critical change to make is increasing your extrusion rate to about 130% of normal to compensate for the internal void.
The current revision of the Recreator 3D, known as the MK5Kit, can be assembled using several core components salvaged from a low-cost Ender 3 printer in addition to a number of parts that the user will need to print themselves. For those who’d rather not source the parts, [Josh] says he hopes to get formal kits put together sometime next year, thanks to a partnership with LDO Motors.
But ultimately, [Josh] says the most important thing to him is that the plastic is recycled instead of getting sent to a landfill or incinerator. So whether you build a Recreator 3D or
come up with your own design
, all are welcome to the
PET Pultruders United Facebook group he’s created
to discuss the finer points of turning plastic trash into treasure. | 30 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523667",
"author": "aamott",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T21:01:15",
"content": "I actually really wanted to build one of these but didn’t want to go through the hassle (and cost) of buying a whole Ender 3. It felt overkill to me to run an entire Marlin system when I had all the parts ... | 1,760,372,521.786634 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/hackaday-prize-2022-recycled-plastic-skateboard-decks-demonstrate-small-scale-injection-molding/ | Hackaday Prize 2022: Recycled Plastic Skateboard Decks Demonstrate Small-Scale Injection Molding | Danie Conradie | [
"The Hackaday Prize",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"injection molding",
"Precious Plastic",
"skateboard"
] | Injection molding is usually focused on high-volume production, but that doesn’t always need to be the case. The
Recycled Plastic Skateboard Deck project
centers on the use of injection molding for a relatively low-volume production line using open-source tooling.
RPSD is part of the
Precious Plastics
ecosystem and uses the existing and open-source shredder and extruder to turn locally-sourced plastic waste into melted plastic. The core of the tooling is in the aluminum CNC-machined top, bottom, and edge mold sections bolted to a thick steel support structure that give the skateboard deck its shape. The edge section defines the deck’s perimeter, and 64 cartridge heaters are inserted into it to bring the mold up to temperature. The mold is mounted on a scissor lift mechanism to allow it to be aligned with the extruder, and temperature control electronics are housed in a laser-cut metal enclosure, which is bolted to the base of the mold structure.
To be clear, this is not a cheap way to make a couple of skateboard decks, but rather a way for small shops to do injection molded decks in-house. At ~$7500 for the components of this relatively large mold, excluding the extruder, you’d still have to sell quite a few decks to make it economically viable.
Although
small-scale injection molding
has become a lot more accessible, the cost of machined metal molds will remain high for the foreseeable future. However, if you only need small, flexible parts, you could probably do it for under $50
using 3D printed molds and silicone
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 25 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523637",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T18:35:40",
"content": "But is it 7-ply, cross-grain? lol Make it out of clear wood next time just for shits and giggles.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6523713",
"a... | 1,760,372,522.150409 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/24/plumbing-valves-as-heavy-duty-analog-inputs/ | Plumbing Valves As Heavy Duty Analog Inputs | Navarre Bartz | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Art",
"hardware",
"LED Hacks",
"Microcontrollers",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"escape room",
"inputs",
"led",
"museum exhibit",
"odd inputs",
"photosensor",
"plumbing",
"plumbing valve",
"unusual inputs",
"water valve"
] | Input devices that can handle rough and tumble environments aren’t nearly as varied as their more fragile siblings. [Alastair Aitchison] has devised a brilliant way of
detecting inputs from plumbing valves
that opens up another option. (YouTube) [via
Arduino Blog
]
While [Aitchison] could’ve run the plumbing valves with water inside and detected flow, he decided the more elegant solution would be to use photosensors and an LED to simplify the system. This avoids the added cost of a pump and flow sensors as well as the questionable proposition of mixing electronics and water. By analyzing the change in light intensity as the valve closes or opens, you can take input for a range of values or set a threshold for an on/off condition.
[Aitchison] designed these for an escape room, but we can see them being great for museums, amusement parks, or even for (train) simulators. He says one of the main reasons he picked plumbing valves was for their aesthetics. Industrial switches and arcade buttons have their place, but certainly aren’t the best fit in some situations, especially if you’re going for a period feel. Plus, since the sensor itself doesn’t have any moving parts, these analog inputs will be easy to repair should anything happen to the valve itself.
If you’re looking for more unusual inputs, check out the winners of our
Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals
contest or this
typewriter that runs Linux
. | 36 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524513",
"author": "SteveEh",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T23:17:11",
"content": "Simple, elegant, well explained, and easy to implement",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6524543",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,372,521.99194 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/24/reversing-shorts-demystify-phone-security/ | “Reversing Shorts” Demystify Phone Security | Elliot Williams | [
"Cellphone Hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"cell phone",
"os",
"reverse engineering"
] | Ever wonder what makes a cellphone’s operating system secure, or what that app you just installed is saying about you behind your back? In a
brand new video series
, [Jiska] gives us a peek into different topics in smartphone software reverse engineering.
For instance,
her latest video
, embedded below takes us through some steps to poke at Apple’s RTKit OS, which is the realtime OS that runs inside most of their peripheral devices, including AirPods, but also on their bigger devices too. We don’t know much about RTKit OS, but [Jiska]’s trick in this video is to get a foothold by looking through two different RTKit OS versions and noting which symbols are common — these are probably OS function names. Now you’ve got something to look for.
Each of the videos is short, to the point, and contains nice tips for perhaps the intermediate-to-advanced reverser who is looking to get into phones. Heck, even if you’re not, her demonstrations of the
Frida
dynamic tracing tool are worth your time.
And if you want a longer introduction into the internals of cellphones, we heartily recommend her talk, “
All Wireless Stacks Are Broken
“. | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524490",
"author": "sudos",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T21:19:39",
"content": "“including AirBuds”you meant AirPods, right?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6524495",
"author": "Dj Biohazard",
"timestamp": "2022-1... | 1,760,372,522.186758 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/24/bare-metal-stm32-setting-up-and-using-spi/ | Bare-Metal STM32: Setting Up And Using SPI | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Microcontrollers",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"spi",
"stm32"
] | The Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) interface was initially standardized by Motorola in 1979 for short-distance communication in embedded systems. In its most common four-wire configuration, full-duplex data transfer is possible on the two data (MOSI, MISO) lines with data rates well exceeding 10 Mb/s. This makes SPI suitable for high-bandwidth, full-duplex applications like SD storage cards and large resolution, high-refresh displays.
STM32 devices come with a variable number of SPI peripherals, two in the F042 at 18 Mb/s and five in the F411. Across the STM32 families, the SPI peripheral is relatively similar, with fairly minor differences in the register layout. In this article we’ll look at configuring an SPI peripheral in master mode.
Defining SPI
One interesting and perhaps annoying factoid with
SPI
is that although it can support multiple devices, it does not have an addressing bus, but instead requires that a designated pin is pulled low on the device, usually called slave select (SS) or chip select (CS). With SS high, the slave device puts its other pins into high impedance mode, effectively disconnecting from the SPI lines. The STM32 SPI peripherals have a provision for a dedicated SS pin (NSS) that can streamline this process if only one device is connected. Generally you want to use GPIO pins to toggle these SS pins, with one GPIO pin per device.
For four-wire SPI the master and slave devices are thus connected with the following lines, with the SS line duplicated for each additional slave:
SCLK (serial clock, from master)
MOSI (master out, slave in)
MISO (master in, slave out)
SS (slave select)
SPI timing diagram, showing the different CPHA and CPOL configurations.
Setting up the SPI peripheral is relatively straightforward, requiring the configuration of the clock and parameters such as 8- or 16-bit transfers. Less obvious are the SPI clock polarity (CPOL) and phase (CPHA) parameters. Here the default (Mode 0) is usually CPOL 0 and CPHA 0, which translates to the clock line idling low and new data being pushed onto the data line on the trailing edge of the current clock cycle. CPOL 1 and CPHA 1 result in the opposite behavior. Slaves may support modes other than mode 0, but the datasheet for each slave has to be consulted on a case-by-case basis.
With all of this in mind, we can look at configuring SPI on both the F411 and F042 microcontrollers. Due to the aforementioned similarity between the SPI peripherals across the STM32 families it’s relatively straightforward to adapt the initialization routine. The data transfer routines themselves remain unchanged.
Setting Things Up
Setting up an SPI master begins with configuring the GPIO pins that we’ll be using. This involves setting the appropriate Alternate Function (AF) mode and pin parameters, for example AF5 on the F411 MCU’s pins 4 through 6 on port A. The SPI pins themselves are assigned the following properties:
SCLK: floating, push-pull, high speed.
MOSI: floating, push-pull, high speed.
MISO: pull-up, push-pull, high speed.
SS: pull-up, push-pull, high speed.
Since SPI relies on a push-pull configuration rather than the open-drain of I2C, we have to set all pins to match this, along with the fast GPIO speed option to keep up with the SPI signaling. The decision to leave a pin floating versus activating its pull-up is determined primarily by the function of these pins. In the case of a select pin it is essential to keep it in a high state in order to prevent accidental activation of a device before the system has finished initializing.
Activating the MISO pin’s pull-up is done to keep this line in a known state when no devices are selected and thus none of them are driving the MISO line. Even though the master is not reading the incoming data register, the intermediate voltages can
potentially cause issues
like excessive
power draw
.
With the GPIO pins thus configured, the target SPI peripheral is enabled in the relevant Reset and Clock Control (RCC) enable register. For example, the SPI 1 peripheral is enabled in the
RCC_APB2ENR
register, while SPI 2 and SPI 3 are generally found on the APB1 bus and thus enabled in the corresponding register in RCC. Next up is configuring the SPI peripheral itself.
The first item to configure here is the SPI clock divider (baud rate,
BR
) in the
SPI_CR1
register. This uses the APB frequency (the peripheral bus frequency, or f
PCLK
) as the input for the SPI clock, which can be set to between f
PCLK
/2 and f
PCLK
/256 using three bits of resolution. The divider should be picked to achieve a reasonable clock and thus transfer speed for the application.
While on both the F0 and F4 families the default transfer size is 8-bit, the latter’s peripheral only allows for setting the data frame format to either 8- 16-bit in the
SPI_CR1
DFF
(Data Frame Format) register. With the F0’s SPI peripheral the range of options is far larger when configuring its DS (Data Size) value in the
SPI_CR2
register. This is a 4-bit value that allows for the data size to be configured to anywhere between 4- and 16-bits, with e.g. 8-bit corresponding to b0111.
Unless there are special requirements, the default 8-bit data size, default Mode 0 configuration and default MSB-first setting are good default choices that should work with most SPI devices. This then means that only the clock divisor has to be configured in all cases, after which master mode can be enabled in
SPI_CR1
(
MSTR
). The SS pin can then be enabled and set as output by setting
SSOE
in
SPI_CR2
.
Finally, the SPI peripheral can be enabled by setting
SPE
(SPI Peripheral Enable) in
SPI_CR1
.
Data Transfers
Typical SPI bus: master and three independent slaves. (Credit: Cburnett)
As mentioned earlier, SPI allows for full-duplex transfers. The complication this adds comes from the fully synchronous nature of SPI: for every byte put on the MOSI line by the master, the slave will put a byte on the MISO line, and vice versa. Since the clock line is driven by bytes sent by the master, the result is that in order to receive data from a slave, the master has to put data (e.g. null bytes) on MOSI for each byte on MISO.
A way around this is by changing the SPI bus from a four-wire to a three-wire (half-duplex) configuration using
BIDIMODE
in
SPI_CR1
, which does require cumbersome reconfiguring of the peripheral in between transfers. Generally you would want to just put null bytes on MOSI to save yourself this trouble.
In order to send bytes to a slave we thus follow this sequence after pulling the target’s SS line low:
Wait for
SPI_SR_TXE
(status register: transmit register empty) to become true.
Write data (8-16 bits) into
SPI_DR
. Repeat from (1) if more data has to be written.
Wait for
SPI_SR_TXE
to become true again.
Wait for
SPI_SR_BSY
(status register: bus busy) to become false.
The sequence is ended by pulling SS high again, although noting that some SPI slaves support multiple writes in a single sequence. One gotcha in this sequence is when we write data to
SPI_DR
that is <16 bits: even if we write an 8-bit
uint8_t
variable or similar to this register, it’ll always end up writing 16 bits into the register, with our data plus this padding put onto MOSI and ruining the data transfer. To get around this, we must cast the SPI_DR register to the intended size, e.g. for an 8-bit data array:
*((volatile uint8_t*) &(SPI1->DR)) = data[i];
In order to receive from a slave we either pull SS low, or left it low after a previous transmission sequence and follow this sequence:
Wait for
SPI_SR_BSY
to become false.
Write dummy data (e.g. 0x00) into
SPI_DR
to generate a clock signal.
Wait for
SPI_SR_RXNE
(status register: receive data register not empty) to become true.
Read data from
SPI_DR
into local buffer. Return to (1) to receive additional data.
Wait for
SPI_SR_BSY
to come false.
Here too the sequence is ended by pulling SS high again. Note that writing the dummy data faces the same gotcha as with sending data. Ensure that the
SPI_DR
register is cast appropriately before writing the data. As for why we’re both reading and writing
SPI_DR
is because it is a shared register, connected to the SPI peripheral’s TX and RX FIFOs.
Finally, in order to perform a full duplex transceive operation, we can combine these two sequences, submitting data instead of dummy bytes while simultaneously receiving data from a slave. This is of course an operation that has to be supported by the slave device in question. For many common SPI devices and sensors most operations will likely be performed in a half-duplex manner.
Wrapping Up
There’s still a lot more to SPI as hinted at earlier, though many of the configuration options are rather obscure and rarely used, like LSB-first as well as 16-bit transfers, TI mode and the various clock phase and polarity settings. A more commonly used aspect of SPI peripherals which we will address in an upcoming article is the I2S mode that is found on most STM32 MCUs. This is a connection interface for external audio codecs, often found as secondary mode on SPI peripherals.
SPI itself sees significant use with larger-resolution displays and data storage, but many sensors like Bosch’s BME280 and related MEMS sensors also implement an SPI interface in addition to the I2C one. Depending on the system, putting some of these devices on SPI rather than I2C may make a lot of sense due to routing or other constraints. | 52 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524428",
"author": "X",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T17:19:03",
"content": "STM32 USART devices can also be used as SPI master.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6524437",
"author": "Artenz",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T18:07:02... | 1,760,372,522.088503 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/24/get-clear-insights-into-cloudy-water-with-the-open-colorimeter/ | Get Clear Insights Into Cloudy Water With The Open Colorimeter | Abe Connelly | [
"Science"
] | [
"analytical chemistry",
"colorimeter",
"cuvettes",
"science"
] | A basic scientific tool for chemistry and biology is a colorimeter device used to measure which wavelengths of light a particular sample solution absorbs. Some applications of colorimeters are measuring pH or chlorine levels, measuring pollutants, such as oil or pesticides, and, in some cases, can even be used to measure RNA/DNA concentrations. Even most washing machines today have a specialized colorimeter sensor, of sorts, to measure turbidity (cloudiness) to provide feedback on the cleaning process. To help in building your home scientific lab, [IORodeo] has released an
Open Colorimeter
.
The Open Colorimeter is a self-contained device that accepts
cuvettes
filled with liquids for testing. The basic structure is an LED mounted onto a board that shines through the cuvette filled with a sample that is then measured at the other end by a TSL2591 color sensor. The Open Colorimeter has separate specialized LED boards for a range of wavelengths from 470nm to 630nm and incorporates a PyBadge that serves as the main microcontroller, as well as display and input.
[IORodeo] has done extensive
documentation
on the assembly, usage, and testing of the device. They have also provided
protocols
for the measurement of Ammonia, Nitrate, Nitrite, and Phosphates in addition to providing resources for absorption profiles of many other substances. All files relating to the
3D enclosure
,
firmware source code
,
schematics and Gerbers
are provided under an open source hardware compatible license. For those not wanting to build it themselves, [IORodeo] is offering them
for sale
.
This isn’t the first time we’ve featured colorimeters, with some building a
DIY version
and others using it in a
Tricorder project
. The Open Colorimeter is a nice addition to this list and is ready for hacking and extending! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524440",
"author": "Reluctant Cannibal",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T18:16:00",
"content": "Looks like a very useful bit of kit IMO.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6524456",
"author": "Les Wright",
"timestamp": "2022-10-2... | 1,760,372,522.688202 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/24/dancers-now-help-power-glasgow-nightclub/ | Dancers Now Help Power Glasgow Nightclub | Lewin Day | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"club",
"dance",
"dance club",
"dancing",
"energy storage",
"geothermal",
"Heat pump",
"night club",
"nightclub"
] | Humanity thus far has supplied most of its electricity needs by burning stuff, mostly very old stuff that burns great but is hard to replace. That stuff is getting increasingly expensive, and the pollution is a bother too, so renewable sources of energy are becoming more popular.
While wind or solar power are commonly used at the grid level, one Glasgow nightclub has taken a different tack.
It’s capturing energy from its patrons to help keep the lights on.
Pump Up The Heat
Heat energy from dancers will be captured and stored by the Bodyheat system installed at SWG3.
Credit: SWG3 news page
The facility in question goes by the name SWG3, and hosts a variety of club nights and other artistic events. It features multiple spaces with capacities exceeding 1000 people, having been built in what was once a former galvanizing facility and warehouse complex. When the music is flowing, the punters cutting shapes on the dance floor often generate plenty of heat, and that led to an idea.
The basic concept came about when David Townsend, the founder of TownRock Energy, met Andrew Fleming-Brown, the managing director of SWG3. Fleming-Brown was on the hunt for sustainable energy systems to help power the club, and Townsend was in the geothermal business.
The results of this collaboration was a renewable energy system built to take advantage of the energy released in dance. Known as Bodyheat, it captures the energy emitted by the dancers in the club. Heat pumps take the energy released into the room from the patrons, storing that heat into a cube of rock under the nightclub, via boreholes dug 200 meters deep into the ground.
This is pretty much the same as running a regular refrigeration-cycle air conditioner in the club, but the heat from the dancers is pumped into geothermal storage instead of simply passed out into the wider atmosphere. The benefit of storing this energy is that it can then be used to heat hot water to serve the club, or to warm other rooms that may not have as many gyrating bodies to keep the temperature up. The system essentially captures waste heat, and then later shifts it to somewhere it can be more useful.
The Bodyheat launch event saw a huge crowd bouncing to the tunes, putting out plenty of heat in the process.
Credit: Michael Hunter, TownRock Energy News Page
As for figures, with a full crowd, there should be plenty of energy to harvest. It’s estimated that the average adult puts out around 100 watts at rest, or closer to 250 watts during moderate physical activity like dancing to dull, slow music. But get the crowd pumping with some top-notch high-tempo bangers? You could see up to 500 or 600 watts put out by each person on the floor. With a thousand people in attendance, and a solid DJ set or three? It would be possible to capture tens of kilowatt-hours of heat energy at the very least. Just make sure they drop Sandstorm to really get the rocks hot at the end of the night.
Renewable energy is used to run the heat pumps, keeping the whole system net-zero in terms of carbon emissions. The hope is that in time, the system will enable the club to discontinue its use of municipal gas entirely. This would save on the order of 70 tonnes of CO2 a year.
The system has taken three years to come together, at a cost of over £
600,000
($672,000). That’s around ten times more expensive than it would have been to install conventional air conditioning, according to Fleming-Brown. However, it’s believed that the energy savings should allow the system to pay itself off in around five years or so. Given the enormous costs for energy right now, there’s a better chance than ever that prediction comes true.
There’s already interest to implement the technology in other high-tech European clubs. Townsend reports that the SchwuZ nightclub in Berlin is particularly keen on implementing a similar system of its own.
It’s not the first project to explore capturing energy from dancers in a club.
Previous efforts
have involved using piezoelectric elements to capture mechanical energy and turn it into electricity. However, the Bodyheat concept has the benefit that it directly benefits the club by directly removing heat, replacing the existing need for a regular air conditioning system. It also doesn’t require the installation of a potentially maintenance-heavy mechanically-complex dancefloor.
The concept doesn’t have to be limited to nightclubs, and could find use in other spaces where large numbers of people gather. The technology of heatpumps is proven and well-understood, and thus we may see more geothermal storage solutions like these proliferating in areas where there is value in stored heat. For now, SWG3 will serve as a useful test case as to whether such a system can work in the real world and be economically viable.
Banner photo: “
deep space – cielo nyc
” by 416style. Thumbnail: “
Clubbing 2
” by James Jin | 60 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524339",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T14:08:11",
"content": "There’s a fallacy here where you expect to save 70t of CO2 by not using gas to heat the room. The human efficiency to produce heat is so low compared to gas that you’ll end up consuming (and releasing) ... | 1,760,372,522.994327 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/24/how-the-art-generating-ai-of-stable-diffusion-works/ | How The Image-Generating AI Of Stable Diffusion Works | Donald Papp | [
"Art",
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"ai",
"art",
"art generator",
"machine learning",
"stable diffusion"
] | [Jay Alammar] has put up
an illustrated guide to how Stable Diffusion works
, and the principles in it are perfectly applicable to understanding how similar systems like OpenAI’s Dall-E or Google’s Imagen work under the hood as well. These systems are probably best known for their amazing ability to turn text prompts (e.g. “paradise cosmic beach”) into a matching image. Sometimes. Well, usually, anyway.
‘System’ is an apt term, because Stable Diffusion (and similar systems) are actually made up of many separate components working together to make the magic happen. [Jay]’s illustrated guide really shines here, because it starts at a very high level with only three components (each with their own neural network) and drills down as needed to explain what’s going on at a deeper level, and how it fits into the whole.
Spot any similar shapes and contours between the image and the noise that preceded it? That’s because the image is a result of removing noise from a random visual mess, not building it up from scratch like a human artist would do.
It may surprise some to discover that the image creation part doesn’t work the way a human does. That is to say, it doesn’t begin with a blank canvas and build an image bit by bit from the ground up. It begins with a seed: a bunch of random noise. Noise gets
subtracted
in a series of steps that leave the result looking less like noise and more like an aesthetically pleasing and (ideally) coherent image. Combine that with the ability to guide noise removal in a way that favors conforming to a text prompt, and one has the bones of a text-to-image generator. There’s a lot more to it of course, and [Jay] goes into considerable detail for those who are interested.
If you’re unfamiliar with Stable Diffusion or art-creating AI in general, it’s one of those fields that is changing so fast that it sometimes feels impossible to keep up. Luckily,
our own Matthew Carlson explains all about what it is, and why it matters
.
Stable Diffusion can be run locally.
There is a fantastic open-source web UI
, so there’s no better time to get up to speed and start experimenting! | 40 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524298",
"author": "Dab",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T11:36:14",
"content": "As exciting as new technology is, this presents dangers which need to be addressed. It can be used to produce abusive and even illegal images, as well as those which may prove politically subversive. It reaso... | 1,760,372,522.891634 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/24/diy-bike-wheels-welded-with-rebar/ | DIY Bike Wheels Welded With Rebar | Lewin Day | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bike",
"spoke",
"tricycle",
"trike",
"wheel",
"wheels"
] | [Liebregts] is working on a trike design, and needed a pair of wheels to go up front. Regular bicycle wheels wouldn’t do, as they’re not designed to work with a single-sided support. They also wanted to be able to mount disc brakes. Thus, they set about
building a set of custom wheels to do the job.
The build began with a regular set of 20″ bike wheel rims with all the spokes taken out. A ring of steel rebar welded on the inner perimeter gave the rims more strength. A set of hubs and axles were then fabbed up with a welder and lathe, with provisions for bolting on disc brake components. Lengths of rebar were then welded in as non-adjustable spokes. Next, it was time for a coat of paint. Finally [Liebregts] mounted the tires and brakes, and called the job done.
Obviously, it is possible to buy wheels specifically for trike builds. However, [Liebregts] found it difficult to find exactly what they wanted, particularly where the disc brake option was concerned. The best option was a custom build. The resulting wheels are obviously much heavier than traditional bike wheels, but they’re also likely a fair bit stronger, too. If you need to weigh down a tarpaulin, for example, these wheels might just do the trick.
We’ve seen some other crazy wheels on trikes before, too!
Oh, and
who says wheels need to be a full circle, anyway?
Creativity will never cease to amaze! | 43 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524264",
"author": "Blerik",
"timestamp": "2022-10-24T09:20:49",
"content": "Bike spokes are under tension. Steel is very good under tension. These spokes are under compression / torsion. So I’m not sure about them being ‘much stronger’…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,522.782282 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/new-venue-gives-philly-maker-faire-a-fresh-start/ | New Venue Gives Philly Maker Faire A Fresh Start | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"2022 Philadelphia Maker Faire",
"maker faire"
] | When we last checked in with the Philadelphia Maker Faire in 2019, one couldn’t help but be impressed with what the organizers had pulled off with just a fraction of the budget and resources it took to put on the defunct World Maker Faire in New York. We came away absolutely certain the event was on the verge of explosive growth, and that next year would be even bigger and better.
But of course, that didn’t happen. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that by the time the 2020 Faire should have kicked off, the logistics of holding a gathering much larger than a family dinner had become a serious hurdle. Philadelphia implemented strict rules on indoor and outdoor events to try and contain the spread of the virus, to the point that even when they were relaxed in 2021, it still didn’t make sense to try and put on a Faire under those conditions.
Thankfully things are largely back to normal-ish now, and as such the
Philadelphia Maker Faire
had something of a rebirth this year. Organizers decided to move the event to the
Independence Seaport Museum
, with vendor and exhibitor tables distributed throughout the museum’s three floors. This made the ticket price a great two-for-one value, especially if you had enough time left over to head out to the docks so you could explore the 130-year-old cruiser USS
Olympia
, and the USS
Becuna
, one of the last surviving WWII Balao-class submarines.
As you’d expect, the event was packed with fascinating projects and demonstrations, to the point that trying to list them all here would be impossible. But for those who couldn’t make the trip out to see what the 2022 Philadelphia Maker Faire had to offer, let’s take a look at a handful of the standout exhibits.
Long Live the Zine
There were actually two different exhibits dedicated to the zine — a tiny physical publication that you’d be forgiven for thinking went the way of…well, a great many niche printed publications. But as it turns out, at least in the Philly area, there are still groups out there that are producing their own short run works to document whatever they’re passionate about.
According to the Temple University students that have gone through the
Makers, Hackers, Fixers
course taught by Professor [Juris Milestone], there are a surprising number of zines being produced by local repair groups that either want to document what they’ve fixed or simply get the word out about the larger repair movement. They had a few fascinating examples on display, including a very clever fold-out “teardown” of an Xbox One, and some laser-cut panels which were used in a makeshift printing press to make pamphlets for a repair group.
I spent some time talking to the students and Professor [Milestone] about hackers and the maker movement, and was very impressed with the enlightened attitude the course had towards the community. They recognized that making can take many forms, ranging from a simply hobby to a necessary survival skill, and that the unfortunate Hollywood “hacker” stereotypes had nothing to do with how we use the term.
Documentation from the course explained that hackers are
“those who are circumventing pre-existing barriers to find a new, more efficient way of completing tasks”
and that the term
“encompasses a broad range of individuals, not just those that specialize in computer science.”
The course sounds like a welcome change from the sort of representation the hacker community has had to suffer through, and hopefully represents an evolving mainstream understanding of what we’re really all about.
Upstairs at the DIY Zines table,
[Kara Khan]
was less interested in what the zines were about than how they were made. The artist was conducting hands-on demonstrations of how a single piece of paper can be folded into a small pamphlet for rapid production, and had a collection of zines from the local area on display.
Das Blinkenlights
It’s no secret that hackers are attracted to mulit-colored blinking lights like moths to a flame, so it was no surprise when this table stopped me in my tracks. The wide array of illuminated gadgets, ranging from
electronic fidget toys
to
functional rocket launch controllers
, were the product of [Matthew Malham], and passerby were welcome to push buttons and flip switches to their heart’s content.
Making with Mushrooms
Using 3D printed molds, [Christopher Sweeney] has been able to coax mushroom mycelium and hemp to create
recyclable lighting fixtures he calls MycoLights
.
[Christopher] says the mycelium spends about a day inside the two-part 3D printed mold to pick up the basic shape, and is then removed and given more time to grow so the final density is higher. To stop the growth process, the fixture goes into the oven and is baked for a few hours. The result is a shade that’s strong and is unaffected by the temperatures you’d expect for home lighting applications. If you ever get sick of it, you can toss it in your compost pile.
The Science of Stitch
The only reason I even know what a tufting gun looks like is because
Kristina Panos wrote up a post about the terrifying looking things
earlier in the year.
Later we talked about them on the podcast
, and I seem to recall saying they looked like some cobbled together weapon from a horror film.
Anyway, while Hackaday taught me what these things looked like and what the did, it wasn’t until I walked through the 2022 Philly Maker Faire that I actually saw one being used and examples of what they are capable of
thanks to the folks from [Tuft the World]
.
Still don’t know why they can’t cover up some of those moving parts, but I’ll admit the final result might be worth losing a fingertip for.
On the other end of the sewing spectrum, I also came across this interesting specimen while checking out the table for the
Hive76 makerspace
. Here we see a vintage Singer machine that’s been merged with a CNC platform capable of moving the workpiece while the machine is in operation.
The end result is a Steampunk-style DIY computerized embroidery machine that (probably) won’t take off one of your fingertips. Interestingly enough, I was told that the inspiration behind this machine was an old Hackaday post. I took a look through the archive, and it
seems like this is the likely culprit
.
Back in Business
From what I could see, the 2022 Philadelphia Maker Faire was an incredible success. Everyone I talked to was having a great time, and the general consensus seemed to be that the Independence Seaport Museum made a perfect backdrop for what’s ultimately an educational family event. If I had one regret, it’s that I wasn’t able to get there sooner to properly explore the museum itself.
If you’re within driving distance of Philadelphia, I’d highly recommend making the trip for the 2023 Faire. Who knows, maybe we’ll run into each other. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523674",
"author": "Jesse Garcia",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T21:26:08",
"content": "So bummed I couldn’t make it. Glad to hear it went well. Can’t wait for next year!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523681",
"author": "drwh... | 1,760,372,525.423305 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/hackaday-podcast-190-fun-with-resin-printing-tiny-tanks-lo-fi-orchestra-and-deep-thoughts-with-al-williams/ | Hackaday Podcast 190: Fun With Resin Printing, Tiny Tanks, Lo-Fi Orchestra, And Deep Thoughts With Al Williams | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos rendezvoused in yet another secret, throwaway location to rap about the hottest hacks from the previous week. We start off by gushing about the winners of the Cyberdeck Contest, and go wild over the Wildcard round winners from the Hackaday Prize.
It’s the What’s That Sound? results show, and Kristina was ultimately stumped by the sound of the Kansas City Standard, though she should have at least ventured a guess after shooting down both modem and fax machine noises.
Then it’s on to the hacks, which feature an analog tank-driving simulator from the 1970s, much ado about resin printing, and one cool thing you can do with the serial output from your digital calipers, (assuming you’re not a purist). And of course, stay tuned for the Can’t-Miss Article discussion, because we both picked one of resident philosopher Al Williams’ pieces.
Direct download.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 190 Show Notes:
News:
2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Picking The Best Of The Best
2022 Hackaday Prize: Congratulations, Wildcard Winners!
Lubrication Engineering Hack Chat
What’s that Sound?
Results Show: and the winner is [Anders Nielsen]!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Analog Tank Driving Simulator Patrols A Tiny Physical Landscape
Apollo’s Lunar Module Simulator
Not Acceptable!
Toilet Paper Tube Pulls Dissolved Resin From IPA, Cures It For Disposal
Everything You Wanted To See About Restoring A 1956 Radio
Electroplating Makes 3D-Printed Star Wars Prop Shine
Custom Interface Adds USB And Wi-Fi To Digital Calipers
Sorting Thousands Of Drill Bits
Making An Inexpensive DRO
Lo-Fi Orchestra Learns Tubular Bells
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
3D Printing With A Drone Swarm?
Researching Factorio…For Science
To Turn An ATtiny817 Into A 150MHz Counter, First Throw Out The Spec Sheet
Kristina’s Picks:
Medicine Dosing Spoon Discontinued, Made 3D Printable Instead
3D Printed Sorter Separates Spare Hex Nuts With A Shake
Toteable PC Is Inspired By Macs Of Days Gone By
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Publish Or Perish: Data Storage And Civilization
In Our Own Image: Do We Need Humanoid Robots? | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523659",
"author": "Anders Nielsen",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T20:03:01",
"content": "Yay, I’m gonna love that t-shirt!I have to admit it felt a bit like cheating when all I had to do was to use my Hackaday Prize submissions that were literally already on my desk :DGotta try out tha... | 1,760,372,525.502359 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/this-snappy-8-bit-microcomputer-brings-the-speed-to-retrocomputing/ | This Snappy 8-Bit Microcomputer Brings The Speed To Retrocomputing | Dan Maloney | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8 bit",
"ESP32-Pico-D4",
"eZ80",
"microcomputer",
"microcontroller",
"SBC"
] | When the need for speed overcomes you, thoughts generally don’t turn to 8-bit computers. Sure, an 8-bit machine is fun for retro gameplay and reliving the glory days, and there certainly were some old machines that were notably faster than the others. But raw computing power isn’t really the point of retrocomputing.
Or is it? [Bernardo Kastrup] over at
The Byte Attic
has introduced an interesting machine called
the Agon Light
, an 8-bit SBC that’s also a bit like a microcontroller. The machine has a single PCB that looks about half as big as an Arduino Uno, and sports some of the same connectors and terminals around its periphery. The heart of the Agon Light is an eZ80 8-bit, 18.432 MHz 3-stage pipelined CPU, which is binary compatible with the Z80. It also has an audio-video coprocessor, in the form of an ESP32-Pico-D4, which supports a 640×480 64-color display and two mono audio channels. There’s no word we could find of whether the ESP32’s RF systems are accessible; it would be nice, but perhaps unnecessary since there are both USB ports and a PS/2 keyboard jack. There’s also a pin header for 20 GPIOs as well as I2C, SPI, and UART for serial communication.
The lengthy video below goes into all the details on the Agon Light, including the results of benchmark testing, all of which soundly thrash the usual 8-bit suspects. The project is open source and all the design files are available, or you can get a PCB populated with all the SMD components and just put the through-hole parts on. [Bernardo] is also encouraging people to build and sell their own Agon Lights, which seems pretty cool too. It honestly looks like a lot of fun, and we’re looking forward to seeing what people do with this. | 45 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523595",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T15:49:38",
"content": "Oh, thank goodness. People are building computers fast again.I’m getting oh, so tired of seeing 100-300 ms keyboard-to-screen latencies in modern machines, even worse for cloud apps, and think wistfully at ... | 1,760,372,525.249311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/this-week-in-security-linux-wifi-fortinet-text4shell-and-predictable-guids/ | This Week In Security: Linux WiFi, Fortinet, Text4Shell, And Predictable GUIDs | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"linux",
"Text4shell",
"UUIDs"
] | Up first this week is
a quintet of vulnerabilities
in the Linux kernel’s wireless code. It started with [Soenke Huster] from
TU Darmstadt
, who found a buffer overwrite in mac80211 code. The private disclosure to SUSE kernel engineers led to a security once-over of this wireless framework in the kernel, and some other nasty bugs were found. A couple result in Denial-of-Service (DOS), but CVE-2022-41674, CVE-2022-42719, and CVE-2022-42720 are Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities. The unfortunate bit is that these vulnerabilities are triggered on processing beacon frames — the wireless packets that announce the presence of a wireless network. A machine doesn’t have to be connected or trying to connect to a network, but simply scanning for networks can lead to compromise.
The flaws were announced on the 13th, and
were officially fixed in the mainline kernel on the 15th
. Many distros
shipped updates on the 14th
, so the turnaround was quite quick on this one. The flaws were all memory-management problems, which has prompted a few calls for the newly-merged Rust framework to get some real-world use sooner rather than later.
Fortinet
Much of Fortinet’s lineup, most notable their Fortigate firewalls, has
a pre-auth authentication bypass on the administrative HTTP/S interface
. Or plainly, if you can get to the login page, you can break in without a password. That’s bad, but at this point, you *really* shouldn’t have any administrative interfaces world-accessible on any hardware. Updated firmware is available.
More than just a couple days have passed, so we have some idea of
the root problem and how it was fixed
. It’s a simple one — the Forwarded HTTP headers on an incoming request are unintentionally trusted. So just send a request with
Forwarded:for
and
Forwarded:by
set to 127.0.0.1, and it falls through into code logic intended for internal API calls. Add a trusted SSH key, and pop, you’re in. Whoops.
GitHub Tokens Learn New Tricks
GitHub has been waging a bit of a mini-war on password use for SSH connection to their service. This has some obvious benefits, but one of the downsides is that a token gets permanently installed on the machine you’re developing from, and it has access to your whole GitHub account. That’s a real problem if you do any dev work on shared servers. Thankfully, the folks at GitHub have recognized the error of their ways, and rolled out
more selective access controls for those tokens
. It might be time to go audit your GitHub tokens, revoke the “classic” tokens, and regenerate with strict controls.
Text4Shell
If there’s anything worse than the attempt to make political scandals seem worse by slapping “gate” to the end of them, it’s the new trend of adding “4shell” to Java vulnerabilities. And in that vein, we have text4shell. It’s the quirk that
StringSubstitutor.replace()
and
StringSubstitutor.replaceIn()
can do string lookups on included strings — and that lookup can run arbitrary Java code:
final StringSubstitutor interpolator = StringSubstitutor.createInterpolator();
String out = interpolator.replace("${script:javascript:java.lang.Runtime.getRuntime().exec('touch /tmp/foo')}");
System.out.println(out);
It looked for a while like modern JDK versions were unaffected, but it turns out that a slightly different approach gets us the exact same code execution issue.
Hi Erik, I received some question related to the JDK versions affected by this vulnerability. Can you please update your blog post to make it clear that all JDK versions are vulnerable? Nashorn is effectively not available in modern JDKs but JEXL is
pic.twitter.com/rY2J9VEZrX
— Alvaro Muñoz 🇺🇦 (@pwntester)
October 18, 2022
There are already
tools developed to catch this particular flaw
, though the normal Java issue of libraries compiled-in to the final jarfile will be a problem here, too. Thankfully this one doesn’t look to have quite the same exposure as log4shell.
Non-random GUIDs
UUIDs or GUIDs, whichever you prefer to call them, are a Universally Unique IDentifier, and they get used all over the place. What you might not know is that there is an actual RFC, and it specifies versions with different generation algorithms. When you see an UUID, the first number of the third set specifies which version it is. So,
589bc816-502f-11ed-b8f4-18c04d808bd7
is a version 1 UUID. That’s interesting, because it’s not randomly generated, it’s based on the generating computer’s MAC address and timestamp. Version 4 is the only randomly generated UUID scheme, so all the others are deterministic. And if a password reset link uses a UUID for its secret key?
You might just have a way into the account
.
[Daniel Thatcher], the researcher behind this story has released
guidtool
, a Python script to extract all the details from a V1 UUID string. That’s a lot of information given away by a string you might assume to be random.
Microsoft Insecure Driver List
Signed Windows drivers with known security flaws are either a boon, or a huge problem, depending on whether you’re red- or blue-teaming. The idea is that an unprivileged user can load a signed driver, exploit the known flaw, and get escalation of privilege. Microsoft knows all about this issue, and maintains a list of known-vulnerable drivers, blocking them from loading. If, that is, you have *very* loose definitions of “maintain” and “list”. Apparently
it hasn’t been updated in three years, and the Windows Server 2019 version contains a whopping two drivers
. It looks like after repeated demonstration of problems, Microsoft is once again properly maintaining this list, though there still seems to be user intervention required to install and update it. | 18 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523563",
"author": "Dominik Sierociuk",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T14:14:28",
"content": "GUIDs are meant to be unique, not random. Statisticaly speaking there is no such thing as random number when it’s on digital machine. Actual diameter of 100 M8 bolts will have random distributio... | 1,760,372,524.8833 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/custom-sony-camera-remote-built-with-esp32/ | Custom Sony Camera Remote Built With ESP32 | Lewin Day | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"digital camera",
"ESP32",
"M5stickC",
"sony",
"sony camera"
] | Whether you’re shooting video or photos, having a camera remote can really improve your productivity. No longer do you have to run back to the camera to press its tiny buttons! [Frank Zhao] is a Sony user, so decided to whip up a custom remote using the ESP32 for his Alpha camera,
adding special features along the way.
The build communicates with the camera over WiFi, but can fall back to Infrared if there’s an issue with the radio link. It’s built around the M5StickC, which is a pre-built device featuring an ESP32 and a small display in a handheld form factor. It let him build the remote in half the size of the official Sony device. With limited buttons on board, though, he relies on the IMU to control many advanced features with motion gestures.
The remote enables a bunch of functionality that Sony didn’t bake into its cameras from the factory. There’s a sound-activated shutter release, dual shutter mode, and several timer-based tools including astrophotography modes. There’s also a big knob you can add for focus pulls, and a mode to reset the auto-focus when you’re frustrated that it isn’t working properly. Some of the features work better than others, as sometimes, the camera doesn’t respond to commands quickly enough. Regardless, it’s pretty neat that [Frank] has unlocked so much extra functionality with his custom $20 remote.
We’ve seen
other homebrewed tools
open up new creative possibilities for cameras before, too. If you’ve got your own nifty camera hacks,
let us know on the tipsline! | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523530",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T11:43:05",
"content": "I think it is nice he was able to do this with anything made by $ony.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6523772",
... | 1,760,372,525.577894 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/21/hp-41c-the-forth-edition/ | HP-41C, The Forth Edition | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"forth",
"hp41c"
] | If you have an HP-41 — arguably the best calculator ever made, you might not have noticed that there’s a version of Forth for it. The code was written a while back in assembly and will work on anything that actually emulates the device properly, such as a SwissMicros DM41X. [Calculator Clique]
shows you how it works
in a recent video that you can watch below.
The original code dates back to 1984, but some
recent detective work
by [Angel Margin] has the code running again. If you know about synthetic programming on the 41C and the oddities of its internal architecture, you can’t help but be impressed.
Of course, Forth is meant to be easy to port over, but if you read about some of the architectural challenges, you start to realize this could be one of the more difficult implementations you’ve ever seen. Don’t forget you have what is, by today’s standards, an extremely limited amount of resources.
That being said, calling the HP41C a calculator is almost a crime. It is really a tiny computer hiding inside a calculator case. Then again, the best calculators always are.
We wonder if the code would run on an
emulated 41C?
Were you part of the TI calculator gang?
No problem
. | 45 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523509",
"author": "Olaf",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T08:15:40",
"content": "It is not necessary to tell us about an forth interpreter because we know that there exist a forth interpreter for almost every MCU and every machine in the world. The only problem, nobody use it.Oh and the ... | 1,760,372,525.120692 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/unconventional-longboard-built-from-single-slice-of-tree/ | Unconventional Longboard Built From Single Slice Of Tree | Lewin Day | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"longboard"
] | Typically, skateboards and longboards are made out of many laminated layers of wood. This gives them a pleasing flex that produces a comfortable ride. However, it’s not the only way to do things. [DesignCo] went for an unconventional design,
using a large slice out of a tree instead.
The benefit of using a section of tree trunk for a board is that it has a very attractive look with all the rings visible. To turn it into a board, it was first roughly cut to shape, before being planed down to a uniform thickness. Further shaping was then achieved with the use of a flap wheel on an angle grinder. The wood was finished with several coats of tung oil before being given a final seal with matte lacquer. A solid steel tail was then prepared to match, shaped with an nice curve and with two bolts screwed in. These bolts were then epoxied into the board, joining the two, and trucks installed underneath.
The final build looks stunning, and is ride-able too. It’s likely a little slipperier than a board with grip tape, and it probably wouldn’t handle bumps as well as a traditional design. Long boards are rarely about performance anyway, though, and this board looks like great fun to get around on.
We’ve seen non-traditional longboards before, too
. Video after the break. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523492",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T05:47:04",
"content": "“[DesignCo] went for an unconventional design, using a large slice out of a tree instead.”Poor tree. I feel your pain :-(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,372,525.665825 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/decompiling-software-to-fix-an-old-solar-inverter/ | Decompiling Software To Fix An Old Solar Inverter | Robin Kearey | [
"green hacks",
"Repair Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Software Hacks",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"decompiler",
"disassembler",
"keygen",
"solar inverter"
] | It’s a fact of life that electronic devices become obsolete after a few years. Sometimes this is because technology has moved on, but it can also happen that a perfectly functional device becomes near-useless simply because the original manufacturer no longer supports it. When [Buy It Fix It] found a pair of second-hand Power-One Aurora solar inverters, he ran into an issue for which he needed access to the service menu, which happened to be password-protected. The original manufacturer had ceased to exist, and the current owner of the brand name was unable to help, so [Buy It Fix It] had to resort to
reverse engineering to find the password
.
Thanks to the Wayback Machine over at the Internet Archive, [Buy It Fix It] was able to download the PC software bundle that originally came with the inverters. But in order to access all features, a password was required that could only be obtained by registering the unit with the manufacturer. That wasn’t going to happen, so [Buy It Fix It] fired up dnSpy, a decompiler and debugger for .NET programs. After a bit of searching he found the section that checked the password, and by simply copying that section into a new program he was able to make his own key generator.
With the service password now available, [Buy It Fix It] was able to set the inverter to the correct voltage setting and hook it up to his solar panels. Interestingly, the program code also had references to “PONG”, “Tetris” and “tiramisu” at various places; these turned out to be Easter eggs in the code, containing simple versions of those two games as well as a photo of the Italian dessert.
Inside the software archive was also another program that enabled the programming of low-level functions within the inverter, things that few users would ever need to touch. This program was not written in .NET but in C or something similar, so it required the use of x32dbg to look at the machine code. Again, this program was password-protected, but the master password was simply stored as the unencrypted string “91951” — the last five digits of the manufacturer’s old phone number.
The inverter was not actually working when [Buy It Fix It] first got it, and
his repair video
(also embedded below) is also well worth watching if you’re into power electronics repair. Hacking solar inverters
to enable more features
is often possible, but of course it’s much easier if
the entire design is open source
. | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523495",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T06:05:37",
"content": "wow!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523498",
"author": "Ar",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T06:31:00",
"content": "“Decompilation” sounds like a... | 1,760,372,525.339658 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/a-homebrew-ac-upgrade-for-the-fluke-8840a/ | A Homebrew AC Upgrade For The Fluke 8840A | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"fluke",
"fluke meter",
"repair",
"tools"
] | [William Dudley] picked up a Fluke 8840A bench multimeter at an auction, but was sad to find out that it was reading resistances inaccurately. It was also missing the optional board to enable AC measurements. Desiring to use the otherwise lovely meter,
he set about repairing and upgrading the device.
Thankfully, the 8840A was from a time when Fluke used to openly publish schematics in its manuals. Thus, combined with taking a look at some photos online, it was straightforward for [William] to recreate the original AC “Option 09” board to enable the desired functionality. As is usually the way, his efforts didn’t work first time, but after some bodge wires were installed, all was well. [William] reports the measurements are “reasonable, maybe even sufficient” with no calibration undertaken.
Repairing the resistance issue was easy. It turned out to be corrosion on the selector switches, revealed when high-resistance measurements were accurate, but low-resistance measurements weren’t. A bit of flick-flacker with some contact cleaner sprayed into the switches got things working again nicely.
It’s nice to see old hardware restored to full functionality, particularly when it’s as attractive and well-built
as an old Fluke meter.
Bringing back old tools from the dead?
You know we wanna hear about it! | 11 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523721",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-10-22T00:31:27",
"content": "I have mixed feelings about this.Yes, he got something that was broke and “fixed” it. But a Fluke is held to a high standard (no pun intended? ) and this one falls short. Sor... | 1,760,372,524.82368 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/errf-22-building-a-library-of-filament-colors/ | ERRF 22: Building A Library Of Filament Colors | Tom Nardi | [
"cons",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"3d printer filament",
"database",
"ERRF 22",
"photography",
"Raspberry pi camera"
] | If you’ve ever paged through the color samples at the hardware store trying to match a particular color, you know how hard it can be. Not only are there nearly limitless color variations, but each manufacturer has their own formulas and tints. Often times, the only way to get the exact color you need is to get it custom mixed.
Unfortunately, that’s not really an option when it comes to filament for your 3D printer. Will that roll of orange from Hatchbox actually match the orange from Overture?
That’s where the Filament Librarian comes in
. Created by [Joe Kaufeld], the project aims to catalog and photograph as many 3D printer filaments as possible so you can see exactly what you’re getting.
Now of course, if it was as easy as looking at pictures of filament swatches on your computer, you wouldn’t need this service to begin with. So what’s the trick? A custom automated camera rig, powered by the Raspberry Pi, is used to position, light, and photograph each filament sample in the library. So while [Joe] can’t promise your monitor is showing a perfect representation of each filament’s color, you can at least be sure they will all look correct in relation to each other. So for example, the site can help you figure out if the local Microcenter stocks anything that comes close to matching
Prusament’s Galaxy Silver PLA
.
[Joe] brought a collection of his samples along with his slick camera setup to the
2022 East Coast RepRap Festival
so attendees could see first-hand how he adds a new filament to the database. With an easy-to-use touch-screen interface, it takes just seconds to get the camera ready for the next shot.
Now that he’s got the hardware and the procedure down, [Joe] is asking the community to help out by
providing him with filament samples to process
. It doesn’t take much: all he asks is you snip him off a couple meters of filament, write down what it is and who makes it on a pre-made form, and drop it in the mail. If you’re in the US, you can send it directly to his address in Indiana, and for those on the other side of the globe, he’s got a drop point in the Netherlands you can use.
We love a good passion project here at Hackaday, so here’s hoping that the Filament Librarian receives plenty of new filament samples from all over the planet to feed into that fancy camera setup of his. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523414",
"author": "mathman",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T20:04:52",
"content": "Cool!Now I want an article about color calibration :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523415",
"author": "Joseph C",
"timestamp": "2022-10-... | 1,760,372,525.925173 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/2022-cyberdeck-contest-keezyboost40-is-a-cyberdeck-masquerading-as-a-keyboard/ | 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Keezyboost40 Is A Cyberdeck Masquerading As A Keyboard | Navarre Bartz | [
"contests",
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"cyberdeck",
"lcd",
"ortholinear",
"ortholinear keyboard",
"pi pico",
"raspberry pi 2040",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"rust"
] | There’s something to be said for über-powerful cyberdecks, but there’s also a certain appeal to less powerful decks squeezed into a tiny form factor. [Christian Lo] has designed a cyberdeck that looks like a
simple ortholinear keyboard
but is running a more flexible environment.
There are games and animations
you can play on QMK
, but [Lo] felt that a different framework would give him more flexibility to really stretch the limits of what this Raspberry Pi Pico-powered deck could do. He decided to go with a Rust-based firmware with the keyberon library and says, “it felt like I was in control of the firmware.” While the board is using Rust for now, [Lo] says he’s open to conversations about other firmware options to achieve his goals, like a virtual pet game for the board.
The PCB is described as “bog standard” with the possible exception of placing the Pi in a cutout on the board to keep things as low profile as possible. The trade-off comes in the form of reduced board rigidity and potentially increased strain on the connections to the microcontroller.
Looking for more cool cyberdecks? Check out the
Winners of the 2022 Cyberdeck Contest
or go see all the entries on the
Contest Page
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523410",
"author": "Will",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T19:46:00",
"content": "This is actually a really beautiful design.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523429",
"author": "openS0rceress",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T21:21:... | 1,760,372,525.721604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/2022-hackaday-supercon-final-talks-announced/ | 2022 Hackaday Supercon: Final Talks Announced | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Interest",
"News"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Supercon",
"speakers",
"talks"
] | The third and final round of the 2022 Supercon talks announcements brings us closer to a complete picture of the full spectrum of hacking awesomeness taking the stage in just a few weeks. (And we haven’t even announced the keynote yet!)
Supercon is the Ultimate Hardware Conference and you need to be there! We’ll continue to announce speakers and workshops over the next couple weeks. Supercon
will
sell out so
get your tickets now
before it’s too late. And stay tuned for the next round of talk reveals next week!
Scotty Allen
Storytelling for Hackers
Hackers are amazing at creating our own incredible adventures, and we need to get better at sharing our own stories and hacks with the world. I want to inspire and teach you to make great videos – using the engineering and hacking skills you already have to tell great stories.
Charles Lohr
Assembly in 2022: Yes! We Still Use it and Here’s Why
This talk will help you comfortably do more with less and supercharge your projects by applying basic knowledge of assembly. We go through many of the tools that facilitate a deeper understanding of the assembly language of your choice and show how that understanding dovetails into so many applications.
Andy Geppert
Interactive Core Memory – Core64
Introduction to Interactive Core Memory and how the Core64 project came to be.
Charlyn Gonda
Fun Pics & Quick Clips
Show off projects with style! Easy upgrades for capturing your creations on camera, a look at some excellent examples from my favorite makers, and how to share even when you’re camera shy.
Matt Venn
Tiny Tapeout – lowering the barrier to ASIC design and manufacture
The first open source, manufacturable PDK was released in 2020. Since then, hackers have been making their own ASICs. This talk covers that progress, and also Tiny Tapeout, a new educational project that aims to demystify microchip design and manufacture.
Chris Gammell
The one-engineer dev shop, then and now
Large teams are costly and slow. What if you were able to pare your development of prototypes and products down to the smallest atomic size: one engineer. This talk reviews techniques, tools, and resources for building the smallest dev shop out there.
Adrian Freed
Unusual Circuits with Soviet-Era ICs
Soviet Era ICs were not just copies of designs from the West. Many interesting re-implementations and new designs will be demonstrated including: a wide-range VCO with a quad XOR gate, programmable op-amps, uncompensated power op-amps and transistor arrays in DIP packages with integrated heat-sinks and Thyratron Neon Tube counters. Contemporary new ICs from Latvia will be shown.
Helen Leigh
Soft Electronics
This talk explores the softer side of electronics, from electronic embroidery and e-textiles to soft robotics and flexible PCBs. We will look at exciting new materials and technologies with use cases in engineering, science and art, as well as sharing practical tips on material choice and techniques.
Andrew E Wilson
You’ve got to break a few FPGAs to go to Space!
FPGAs are often used in space, but radiation testing is complex, expensive, and limited. Let’s walk through how fault injection in Xilinx FPGAs is used to understand failure modes and verify mitigation effectiveness. With the use of open-source tools, we can apply triple modular redundancy and identify single point failures.
R (@rqou_)
Behind the scenes of the Paranoids DEFCON badge
A small team within the Paranoids information security team at Yahoo built a badge that was given out at DEFCON. This talk will go in detail into the technical design of the badge as well as cover all of the challenges that were encountered along the way.
John Hays
How to Apply for Grants from ARDC for your non-profit/open source project.
In this presentation you will learn about Amateur Radio Digital Communication Foundation’s Grant making capabilities and requirements. ARDC grants between $5-6 million/year for selected projects.
Aedan Cullen
Opportunities in Lightweight Augmented Reality
Many practical considerations about augmented reality remain open questions: What should be prioritized in wearable AR hardware? What will be necessary to incorporate it in daily life? This talk will present progress made in the development of an advanced AR device, and review the answers it suggests to these questions.
Bradley Gawthrop
Hack Your Ride: The PEV Revolution Needs You!
The world of Personal Electric Vehicles is important, fun, hacker-friendly, and needs your help before the megacorps, lawyers, and governments make it boring and sad. What’s out there, who is it for, what can you do with it, and why you should care.
[If you read this far, you probably
want tickets.
Just sayin’.] | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523408",
"author": "cdilla",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T19:37:09",
"content": "Great to see Scotty Allen on the roster. Inspiring, educational and entertaining. Looking forward to hearing his talk.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,372,525.777076 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/forearm-muscle-contraction-sensor-is-useful-component-for-open-source-prosthetics/ | Forearm Muscle Contraction Sensor Is Useful Component For Open Source Prosthetics | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"prosthetic"
] | Being able to actuate parts of a prosthetic limb can make it much more useful. To help in this goal for partial arm or hand amputees, [TURFPTAx] has developed a sensor
for detecting forearm muscle contractions.
The sensor itself is cost-effective and simple to build.
The build is part of the
Open Prosthetics
project, which aims to offer open designs for various types of prosthetic devices. It apes common commercial designs using a simple electromechanical system.
The build relies on magnets mounted on twelve pistons that move when the muscles contract under the skin. The pistons are sprung to allow them to follow the expansion and contractions of the muscles, and the motion of the magnets is detected by hall effect sensors. The system is bulkier than some other solutions, but has the benefit of clean output and the ability to detect the movement of several distinct muscle groups. The data is all collected by an ESP32 which is then sent wirelessly to a computer for measurement, with [TURFPTAx] using the PyGame library to plot the sensor data.
[TURFPTAx] notes that the output of the sensors would be perfect to input into
a machine learning system.
Video after the break. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523549",
"author": "psuedonymous",
"timestamp": "2022-10-21T12:46:27",
"content": "This seems like it would have all the same issues of sensor positioning (and subsequent displacement) of electromyographic muscle sensing, but exacerbated by the greater mass of the sensors.",
"p... | 1,760,372,525.846754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/retrotechtacular-the-original-weather-channel/ | Retrotechtacular: The Original Weather Channel | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Retrotechtacular",
"Slider"
] | [
"CATV",
"weather channel"
] | The Weather Channel has decided to pull the plug on its automated weather display
, a favorite experience for weather geeks everywhere. However, it wasn’t the original weather nerd TV station. Early cable TV networks had their own low-tech versions of this much longer ago than you might expect. For example, check out the video below which shows one of these weather stations back in 1975.
The audio was from a local FM station and you can enjoy handwritten public service announcements, as well.
Vendors
We always wondered exactly what the hardware for all this looked like. You could guess that some guy wasn’t panning the camera back and forth. Of course, the Internet knows all, so it didn’t take long to uncover several commercial units made for this service. We saw press releases dating back to at least 1964 and it looks like 1967 was when the devices became very mainstream.
Fully automatic!
Note the price tags!
A 1967 blurb for an automated weather channel
A major supplier of this kind of “local origination” equipment was Telemation and [T. Buckingham Thomas] has a good
recollection
of it being in operation and how it led to him being the program director of a mid-sized cable TV company. There were a few different units that were pretty pricey, especially for those days. There were several competitors vying for this market.
Texas Electronics
still makes weather stations, but probably not with automated cameras anymore. Telemation, on the other hand, got sold a few times and somewhat lives on as a part of Thompson.
Note that some of the models had a slide projector and, presumably, a way to scan the slides (probably a rear projection screen). It wasn’t uncommon to see a crawler at the bottom with announcements or advertisements, also.
Tech
You might notice that there are at least two distinct designs for these machines. In one, a camera pans back and forth. The other panned a mirror — presumably, easier since there was no power or signal rotating. However, that also means, we assume, that either the dials were mirrored or the camera scan took the mirroring into account.
The units got smaller and smaller until they finally disappeared completely.
The units got smaller…
.. and smaller…
…and smaller
Nostalgia
We can’t honestly say we miss these old weather channels, but they do remind us of simpler times. Imagine what would have to design today to do the same function. No corporate overlord would allow you to put places in for handwritten advertisements. Of course, you don’t have to. Today, you could grab the weather data off the Internet, format it using any number of rendering techniques, and pump out video all day with zero mechanical footprint.
Better? Maybe, but it doesn’t stop us from feeling nostalgic. We also marvel at how ingenious and simple you can be when you don’t have a lot of options. Also, we are a bit surprised someone isn’t streaming from one of these old beasts or a replica today. Where is the MAME simulator for the WeatherScan?
If you just want your own wacky weather display,
go for it
. If you really like the analog vibe of the WeatherScan,
you can do that too
. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523308",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T14:54:42",
"content": "Cell phones killed the need for a lot of things from a watch to weather information. And if Teletext had taken off data would be coming through that.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,372,526.074913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/render-yourself-invisible-to-ai-with-this-adversarial-sweater-of-doom/ | Render Yourself Invisible To AI With This Adversarial Sweater Of Doom | Dan Maloney | [
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"adversarial",
"classifier",
"cnn",
"CoCo",
"neural network",
"object detection",
"ugly sweater",
"YOLO"
] | Ugly sweater season is rapidly approaching, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere. We’ve always been a bit baffled by the tradition of paying top dollar for a loud, obnoxious sweater that gets worn to exactly one social event a year. We don’t judge, of course, but that’s not to say we wouldn’t look a little more favorably on someone’s fashion choice if it were more like
this AI-defeating adversarial ugly sweater
.
The idea behind this research from the University of Maryland is not, of course, to inform fashion trends, nor is it to create a practical invisibility cloak. It’s really to probe machine learning systems for vulnerabilities by making small changes to the input while watching for changes in the output. In this case, the ML system was a YOLO-based vision system which has little trouble finding humans in an arbitrary image. The adversarial pattern was generated by using a large set of training images, some of which contain the objects of interest — in this case, humans. Each time a human is detected, a random pattern is rendered over the image, and the data is reassessed to see how much the pattern lowers the object’s score. The adversarial pattern eventually improves to the point where it mostly prevents humans from being recognized. Much more detail is available in
the research paper (PDF)
if you want to dig into the guts of this.
The pattern, which looks a little like a bad impressionist painting of people buying pumpkins at a market and bears some resemblance to
one we’ve seen before in similar work
, is said to work better from different viewing angles. It also makes a spiffy pullover, especially if you’d rather blend in at that Christmas party. | 57 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523257",
"author": "shod",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T11:45:16",
"content": "“vulnerabilities” eh, and they are ultimately trying to find them so they can be “fixed’ no doubt.I have my own views, both on the subject of using such technologies as well as on developing and improving th... | 1,760,372,526.189617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/catch-the-stick-game-is-a-tidy-build/ | Catch The Stick Game Is A Tidy Build | Lewin Day | [
"Games"
] | [
"reaction",
"reaction game",
"reaction tester",
"reaction training"
] | There are many different ways to test one’s reaction times; a simple way is to simply drop a ruler and see how far it falls before you can catch it. Take that same concept to a greater level, and you get this impressive
“Catch The Stick” game
.
The creation of one [Romain Labbe], the build has a wooden frame that holds up several sticks roughly seven feet off the ground. When the game is triggered, a beeper counts down, and then sticks start dropping. Each stick is held in place with a small solenoid-controlled latch, and the game simply energizes the solenoids in turn to drop the sticks randomly. On easier modes, the sticks are released gently, one at a time. On higher difficulty levels, they’re released in a near-continuous stream that would tax even a team of several players.
It’s not a complicated build, but it is very nicely executed. It certainly looks to be good fun to play with friends. Alternatively, you could try out
this more distributed-style build
. Video after the break.
DIY standalone “Catch The Stick” game
[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!] | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523270",
"author": "ONV",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T12:04:59",
"content": "I see a potential pub game to rival darts and pool :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523322",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
... | 1,760,372,526.236106 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/permeability-tuned-oscillators-made-stable-with-a-glue-stick/ | Permeability Tuned Oscillators Made Stable With A Glue Stick | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"indcutor",
"permeability tuning",
"tuned circuit"
] | For over a century now, radio amateurs have made tuned circuits using a coil of wire and a variable capacitor. In recent decades the supply of variable capacitors has dwindled, as SDR technology has supplanted the traditional tuning capacitor. No more tuned circuits for the radio amateurs? Not quite,
as [Bill Meara N2CQR] shows us in the video below the break
by making variable inductors using permeability tuning. This is hardly high-tech, the major component is as simple as a glue stick.
A permeability tuned inductor has a core that is moved in and out of its center by means of a screw. A glue stick has a glue core on a lead screw from a knob at its end, so an old glue stick with the glue replaced by a ferrite ring makes a reasonable permeability tuned former. The coil is wound on its outside, and when assembled into an oscillator it gives a useful tuning range. This is hardly a new idea as permeability tuning could be found in car radios and TV tuners among other applications back in the day, but it’s still a good trick to bear in mind.
We’ve featured
plenty of Bill’s videos
before here at Hackaday, most recently tracking down an unusual early TV. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523197",
"author": "Bruce Ferrell",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T06:30:30",
"content": "if transformers were tuned this way in am radios",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6523324",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As... | 1,760,372,526.602583 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/rubber-stamping-your-way-to-custom-pcbs/ | Rubber Stamping Your Way To Custom PCBs | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"pcb",
"pcbs",
"rubber stamp"
] | Many of us now outsource PCB production to board houses overseas, which offer high-quality boards with increasingly impressive turnaround times. You might still brew up your own PCB, though, and a reader found this
great old hack from [William Hare]
that might be worth a look.
Forget toner transfer or marker pens — this build is all about speed. [William] decided to use a rubber stamp to quickly transfer ink to a copper board that can then be etched to produce a PCB. It’s simple and straightforward enough. We’ve used the same technique for silkscreen and pad art, but never as an etch resist.
The trick is to make several rubber stamps with different circuit elements, though. The genius part is that you can then assemble a PCB by simply stamping down the various circuit components you need. The boards will still need to be drilled if you’re working with through-hole parts, but tipster [Shri] notes that the technique is super useful for producing single-sided surface mount boards.
We’ve seen some other unique methods to producing PCBs at home,
such as using a 3D printer to help out.
If you’ve got your own innovative homebrew PCB hacks, be sure to
drop us a line
!
Thanks [Shri Hari Ram] for the tip! | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523160",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T02:17:38",
"content": "I’d say that’s a hack!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523169",
"author": "ekaggrat",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T0... | 1,760,372,526.37722 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/a-3d-printer-with-quadruple-the-output/ | A 3D Printer With Quadruple The Output | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"four",
"four at once",
"hotends",
"multiple",
"prints",
"z-axis"
] | While the polygraph is colloquially associated with pseudoscientific lie detector tests, the actual invention of the first polygraph was designed to mechanically duplicate the pen strokes of someone writing. Famously, a polygraph was used by former US President Thomas Jefferson in his “modern office”, a replica of which still sits in the Smithsonian museum. Few of us have a need for a pen-based polygraph anymore, but inspiration from the centuries-old invention can still be gleaned from the machine,
like in this 3D printer which can output four identical prints at once
.
The printer is a Core XY design with four separate print heads, which are all locked together. The printer behaves as if there is a single print head which keeps it simpler than it otherwise could be. Some extra consideration needs to be paid to the print bed to ensure it’s level and flat, and it also includes a unique Z-axis designed to prevent Z-banding from poor quality leadscrews. It has a fairly wide print area, but a noticeable restriction is that it’s essentially quartered, so while it can produce many parts at once, it can’t produce a single part that uses the entire area of the print bed.
Every printed part used to make this printer was designed by [Rick] in OpenSCAD. He also built a custom electronics board with the printer drivers, and all other associated circuitry in KiCad. For anyone who prints large volumes of parts, this might be just the trick to increase output without having to manage more printers. If you already have more printers and need an easier way to manage them all, take a look at
this dedicated Raspberry Pi set up to do just that
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523131",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T23:26:21",
"content": "https://youtu.be/3TJgZqErqBAis 20 (or 18 (or 16)) heads.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523143",
"author": "Doctor Duck",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,372,526.284319 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/uv-monitoring-budgie-keeps-an-eye-on-exposure-levels/ | UV Monitoring Budgie Keeps An Eye On Exposure Levels | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"internet of things",
"uv index",
"uv rays",
"weather"
] | UV rays are great at helping us generate vitamin D, but they can also be harmful, causing sunburn and even melanoma. To help kids keep track of the UV index in his local area,
[Jude Pullen] created the UV Budgie.
The build is based around an Arduino Nano 33 IoT board, which queries the Met Office’s API to determine the UV level in the area. The relevant data is then displayed on a small e-ink display, with cute little sun characters telling you about the prevailing conditions. It also announces the current risk level with recorded voice samples, advising on whether precautions should be taken, such as using sunscreen or sheltering inside for the worst days. Plus, there’s a bird that flaps its wings to announce an update, actuated by a small servo in the base.
It’s a fun build that should help [Jude] and his family remain sun safe in the summer. [Jude] notes the build could also be reprogrammed to share other warnings, too. APIs to query local
air quality
or
radiation levels
are just some of the ideas that come to mind. Video after the break. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523157",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T01:58:38",
"content": "If I can fit the budgie into my budget…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523551",
"author": "Jude Pullen",
"times... | 1,760,372,526.538591 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/hackaday-prize-2022-a-cheap-and-effective-mouth-joystick-mouse/ | Hackaday Prize 2022: A Cheap And Effective Mouth Joystick Mouse | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"accessibility",
"mouth joystick"
] | Some people have issues using regular computer mice, and need alternative input devices that suit their needs. [Olman Orozco] designed
an affordable mouth-joystick intended to work as a mouse
to suit that very use case.
A simple frame allows the controller to be held near the mouth for use.
The build is based on a simple USB gamepad. A mouse emulator program is used to turn the thumbstick movements into mouse movements, and button presses into mouse clicks.
The trick is that the thumbstick is turned into a mouth-activated joystick, making the device perfect for those with limited-to-no movement in their arms. This is achieved with a pen body used to extend the joystick so it can be readily actuated with the mouth. A custom puff-switch is also integrated into the mouth-joystick, built out of a balloon, bottle caps, and a micro switch. This enables the user to click on things without the need for another button.
Overall, it’s a great hack that turns cheap, everyday components into a useful piece of accessibility hardware. As a bonus, it can be built using only simple tools. [Olman] notes there’s no need for a 3D printer or other advanced parts or tools to build the device.
Game controllers are often important devices when it comes to accessibility hacking,
as we’ve seen before
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWGbCbH9KBU
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523278",
"author": "xzion",
"timestamp": "2022-10-20T12:47:25",
"content": "Tech ist supposed to make Life more livable, for those with certain Handycaps and us all – Not for huge corpos with megalomania.Amazong Work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,372,526.649483 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/if-only-the-kids-knew-about-pipes/ | If Only The Kids Knew About Pipes | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"card game",
"pipes",
"unix"
] | Being a parent is hard work. You need to prepare your child to operate in the world. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and how to make good choices are just the beginning. They also ought to know regular expressions and Unix pipes. [Jackdoe] can help with that last one, thanks to their
Unix pipe card game
.
As an example, the task “print the most common line from a file” would require the answer:
cat 03.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -1
You can vary the rules to declare whoever has the smallest pipe or the largest pipe that accomplishes the task as the winner. We’d add a house rule that whoever has the fastest pipe ought to get something. We don’t, however, think this card game will make the Vegas tables, unfortunately.
You can print your own card deck and even the box. Or you can buy a nice set, if you don’t want to spend the time. You should probably know about cat, grep, tail, head, wc, sort, and uniq along with their options.
If you want some other esoteric kids’ learning activities, they also have “Programming Time” which teaches algorithms and Python, and “4917” to teach the basics of machine code.
If you want help with the other key skill — regular expressions — check out regexp
golf
or
crosswords
. | 50 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522789",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T00:18:39",
"content": "You don’t usually need cat. Just redirect the input.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6522790",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,372,526.84438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/an-oscilloscope-trigger-for-vintage-video-processors/ | An Oscilloscope Trigger For Vintage Video Processors | Chris Wilkinson | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"lm1881",
"ntsc",
"oscilloscope",
"retrocomputer",
"texas instruments",
"TMS9918",
"TMS9918AA"
] | Working on retro computers is rarely straightforward, as [ukmaker] recently found out while designing a new display interface. Their oscilloscope was having trouble triggering on the video signal produced by older video circuitry, so they created the
Video Trigger for Retrocomputers
.
The Texas Instruments TMS9918 video display controller was used across a range of 1980s game consoles and home computers, from the well-known ColecoVision to Texas Instruments’ own TI-99/4. Substantial retro computing heritage notwithstanding, the video output from this chip was (for reasons unknown) not quite compatible with the Hantek DSO1502P oscilloscope. And without a better understanding of the video signal, it was difficult to use the chip with newer TFT displays, being designed for CRT televisions with more forgiving NTSC tolerances.
Maybe a different scope would have solved the problem, but [ukmaker] had a feeling that the ‘scope needed an external trigger signal. The Video Trigger project uses a LM1881 sync separator to tease out the horizontal and vertical sync signals from the vintage video chip, with the output piped into an ATmega 328P. Along with a smattering of discrete components, the ATmega aids the user in selecting which line to frame a trigger on, and the slope of the horizontal sync signal to align to. A tiny OLED display makes configuration easy.
If this has piqued your interest, [ukmaker] also has a great write-up over on
GitHub
with all the gory details. Maybe it will help you in your next vintage computing caper. Having the right tool can make all the difference, like this
homebrew logic meter for hobby electronics troubleshooting
. Or if you want to know more about the mystical properties of analog NTSC video,
we’ve covered that, too
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522739",
"author": "Bogdan Ryszkiewicz",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T21:44:22",
"content": "Reasons uknown… .. typically the same reasons the digital/LCT/TFT monitors have problems locking on the signal from retro machines. It deviates wildly from the norms, is not (properly) interlac... | 1,760,372,527.210197 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/whip-up-some-homemade-artisanal-flux/ | Whip Up Some Homemade Artisanal Flux | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"flux",
"rosin",
"soldering"
] | You don’t think much about the power company until you flip the lights on and they don’t come on. The same can be said of soldering flux. You don’t think much about it, usually, until you try soldering without it. Flux has a cleaning action on metal surfaces that allows for a proper solder joint. The problem is, do you have any idea what’s in the flux you are using? We don’t either. [Catsndogs] has a r
ecipe to make your own flux
and then you’ll know.
At the heart of rosin flux is basically tree sap. If you live near pine trees, you can source it naturally. If not, you can find it at music instrument stores. Stringed instruments use rosin, so it is readily available. If you do source it yourself, [Catsndogs] reports that it doesn’t matter if it is old or clean. You do want to pick out as much tree bark and dead ants as you can, though. You essentially dissolve it in alcohol (at least 80% isopropyl or ethanol). Then filter it through filter paper or a coffee filter.
You can adjust the viscosity by allowing the alcohol to evaporate to make the mixture thicker or by adding more alcohol to make it thinner. Thicker flux is good for tacking down SMD parts. As you might expect, this isn’t “no clean” flux. Also, the flux is very flammable, so be careful.
This isn’t the first time we’ve
heard of this recipe
. Or even the
second time
. But it is a good reminder that you can make your own free of whatever wacky chemicals are in the commercial preparations. | 32 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522660",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T19:02:55",
"content": "This is cool from a do it from scratch DIY perspective. My experience doing something similar, for restoring 1890’s technology that used lead solder to connect steel components, is that the resulti... | 1,760,372,526.7282 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/3d-printering-managing-multiple-printing-profiles/ | 3D Printering: Managing Multiple Printing Profiles | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"PrusaSlicer",
"superslicer"
] | I know people who have 3D printers that are little more than appliances. They buy it, they print with it, and they don’t change much of anything. That doesn’t describe me and, I’m guessing, it doesn’t describe you either. This does lead to a problem, though, when it comes to slicers. You have to keep changing profiles and modifying them. It can be hard to keep things straight. For example, if you have profiles for different nozzles, you get to make a choice: keep one profile and edit the parts that change, or keep multiple profiles and any common changes have to be propagated to the other profiles.
Part of the reason I want to manage multiple profiles has to do with this mystery object…
I’ve long wanted to create a system that lets me have baseline profiles and then just use specific profiles that change a few items in the baseline. Turns out, I didn’t need to do it. Prusa Slicer and its fork, SuperSlicer, have the capability already. Both of these, of course, are based on Slic3r, but the scripting languages are different and what I’m doing does require G-code scripting. The problem is, this capability is not documented very well and the GUI doesn’t really support it directly, which requires a little sidestepping. I’ll show you how I have things set up and where the limitations are. If you want to try your hand at it, I highly suggest you backup your configuration directory or switch to a new one.
Speaking of which, both programs take a
--datadir
command line argument that lets you put the configuration files where you want. If you are like me and use the slicer from different computers, this is a great way to put the files in a shared drive or use something like Syncthing to keep a few copies synced across the network.
Bundle It
Presets or profiles are usually stored in
.ini
files that have a very simple format. The name of each preset is in square brackets, along with an identifier of what kind of preset it is. For example, you might have:
[print:myprinter]
layer_height = 0.3
This is not great, though, because one preset lives in one file. You could, of course, keep track of a myriad of
ini
files and generate them on the fly. That was my first thought. However, the slicers allow you to export and import configuration bundles that populate a bunch of profiles at once.
On the face of it, that might not seem like much of a big deal since you could just zip a bunch of
ini
files into an archive. But there are two things that work in our favor. First, you can hide certain entries in a bundle. Second, you can have one entry inherit items from another preset in the same bundle.
What that means is you can export your configuration as a bundle and then rearrange everything so that you have all your common settings in one place and then inherit most of those setting from specific items. For example, you might have a base PLA filament type. Then a PLA type for “Brand X” which overrides only a few items. Finally, you would have a specific “Red Brand X PLA” that only has to set the color and — if you have multiple extruders — maybe the pigment factor that controls how much filament gets purged between colors.
For example:
[filament:PLA Brand X Red]
inherits = *PLA_Brand_X*]
filament_colour = #FF0000
filament_wipe_advanced_pigment = 0.7
Hidden Entries
Notice the asterisks around the PLA_Brand_X identifier? That tells the slicer not to show this entry to the user. In fact, on import, the slicer only uses these to fill out the ini file for a specific item. This allows you to not have a bunch of meaningless entries just to hold your defaults.
The downside, though, is that once you import, there is no common connection anymore between the preset and the “base class.” If you make a change, it only changes the current preset. You can work around that, though, in a few ways.
So when I mentioned exporting your existing configuration as a bundle, you’d create new entries for things like “print:*default*” to house all the common things. Note you don’t want a space after the colon, but don’t ask me why I know that.
Common Scripts
A hotend on a quick-change mounting plate
There’s one other problem. One reason I’m interested in this is that I have
a system that allows me to rapidly swap hotends
. Sometimes I use a switching hot end, and sometimes I use a more conventional hotend like a Dragon. The problem is that the hot ends have different extrusion factors, thermistor calibrations, and nozzle sizes. Some of these are easy to take care of with the configuration bundles. What is less easy, though is having a single unified startup and shutdown script or sending custom code to set the thermistor calibration, for example.
A mixing hot end, for example, needs a much more complex startup than a normal E3DV6. However, both of them need bed adjustments and temperature warm-ups. I currently have six flavors of extruders and I don’t want to make parallel changes in six different scripts.
The answer is to use scripting. Unfortunately, the scripting language provided by the slicer is pretty limited, so you can’t set variables to use later, for example. But you can read “placeholders” (system variables) to learn things like the first layer height or the desired temperature. You’ve probably seen this used in startup gcode before to prevent you from having to have different start-up scripts for different materials or nozzle sizes.
However, you can also learn the name of the printer preset and search it for a regular expression. I’ve taken advantage of that by naming each profile whatever I want but having
!1!
or
!2!
or some other number appear in the name. In that way, I can easily write code that modifies parameters based on which profile is using it. For example:
{if printer_preset=~/.*~!3!.*/ }
M305 P0 B4981
M301 E0 P22.7 I2.4 D53.8
{endif}
A ceramic core hotend mounted
Obviously, there are similar bits of code for each hotend ID. The names of the printers look like: NF-!3! or E3D-!0!. You may prefer different characters and schemes. You could, of course, just search for the exact name if you prefer and skip the numeric encoding. However, this scheme allows me to have multiple profiles for the same hotend and still pick up the common parameters regardless of the exact name. That is, NF-!3! and NF-HF!3! both get the same start and end code.
One issue with the scripts, too, is they are all on one line with
\n
encoded to show the line wraps. The way I work around this is that I keep a version-controlled file with each startup script. When I need to make a change, I put it in any preset that I happen to have and save it either as a temporary name or sometimes I just save it since I’m about to write over it anyway (which you’ll hear about, below). Then I open the corresponding
.ini
file and copy the line to put in the bundle. There are many other ways you could do it.
As an extra feature, each script starts with a version number and a date so I can easily see that my changes have been made and I can easily go back using
git
without getting too confused.
The GUI Disconnection
The last problem is that of the GUI. As I mentioned before, importing the bundle destroys the relationship between presets. I’ve found a few simple rules that help manage the madness. I manage versions of the bundle and related files with
git
, but that’s no panacea since the individual files change.
Never change the imported profiles and save them. You can, of course, but it will confuse you.
If you do change an imported profile, save it with a similar new name (I add -exp for experimental to the name).
When you decide you want to make a change to one of the standard presets or add one permanently, use the slicer to show you the differences between the preset and one you think will make a good base class.
Edit the bundle to reflect the changes you want to keep. Some changes aren’t worth keeping and remember to set the “inherits” key to the base class.
Reimport the bundle. Remove any extra presets you created in step 2.
If you make any mistakes, the import will warn you. One common problem is that the GUI likes to capitalize things like the names of infill patterns. However, in the file, everything is lowercase.
Once you do the import, you should be fine. One thing to watch for is that the
[physical_printer]
tag has all the presets you want set, so you don’t have to edit the physical printer to reassociate it with new profiles.
If you really want to do tool changing, check out [Joshua’s]
Jubilee
. If you aren’t using a compatible slicer, you can learn more about
PrusaSlicer
and
Super Slicer
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522659",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T19:00:21",
"content": "Now this is where using Fossil, instead of Git, would really shine. Not only the version control, you also get Wiki and tickets + much more in a single executable.What i have done is put firmware sources and ... | 1,760,372,526.91065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/3d-printing-with-a-drone-swarm/ | 3D Printing With A Drone Swarm? | Dave Rowntree | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"drone hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"delta bot",
"drone",
"effector",
"wasps"
] | Even in technical disciplines such as engineering, there is much we can still learn from nature. After all, the endless experimentation and trials of life give rise to some of the most elegant solutions to problems. With that in mind, a large team of researchers took inspiration from the humble (if rather annoying) wasp, specifically its nest-building skills. The idea was to explore 3D printing of structures without the constraints of a framed machine, by
mounting an extruder onto a drone.
As you might expect, one of the most obvious issues with this attempt is the tendency of the drone’s to drift around slightly. The solution the team came up with was to mount the effector onto a delta bot carrier hanging from the bottom of the drone, allowing it to compensate for its measured movement and cancel out the majority of the positional error.
The printing method relies upon the use of two kinds of drone. The first done operates as a scanner, measuring the print surface and any printing already completed. The second drone then approaches and lays down a single layer, before they swap places and repeat until the structure is complete.
Multiple drones can print simultaneously, by flying in formation. Prints were demonstrated using a custom cement-like material, as well as what appeared to be expanding foam, which was impressive feat to say the least.
The goal is to enable the printing of large, complex shaped structures, on any surface, using a swarm of drones, each depositing whatever material is required. It’s a bit like a swarm of wasps building a nest, into whatever little nook they come across, but on the wing.
We’ve been promised
3D printed buildings for some time now
, and while we’re not sure this research is going to bring us any closer to living in an extruded house,
we’re suckers for a good drone swarm here at Hackaday
.
Thanks to [Zane] for the tip! | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522566",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T16:13:10",
"content": "Having a wasp to build your house is probably going to happen sooner than this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6522581",
"author": "dapostusa"... | 1,760,372,526.966263 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/mining-and-refining-cobalt-the-unfortunately-necessary-metal/ | Mining And Refining: Cobalt, The Unfortunately Necessary Metal | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"anode",
"artisanal",
"battery",
"cobalt",
"conflict",
"ev",
"lithium",
"Mining and Refining"
] | The story of humankind is largely a tale of conflict, often brought about by the uneven distribution of resources. For as long as we’ve been down out of the trees, and probably considerably before that too, our ancestors have been struggling to get what they need to survive, as often as not at the expense of another, more fortunate tribe. Food, water, land, it doesn’t matter; if They have it and We don’t, chances are good that there’s going to be a fight.
Few resources are as unevenly distributed across our planet as cobalt is. The metal makes up only a fraction of a percent of the Earth’s crust, and commercially significant concentrations are few and far between, enough so that those who have some often end up at odds with those who need it. And need it we do; what started in antiquity as mainly a rich blue pigment for glass and ceramics has become essential for important industrial alloys, high-power magnets, and the anodes of lithium batteries, among other uses.
Getting access to our limited supply of cobalt and refining it into a useful metal isn’t a trivial process, and unfortunately its outsized importance to technological society forces it into a geopolitical role that has done a lot to add to human misery. Luckily, market forces and new technology are making once-marginal sources viable, which just may help us get the cobalt we need without all the conflict.
A Side of Cobalt
The chemical properties of cobalt play a large role in its uneven distribution. Like aluminum, it’s essentially impossible to find any elemental cobalt in nature, and for much the same reason — it reacts readily with oxygen, forming oxides that are fairly inert. It also tends to form minerals that are closely associated with other metals, like copper and nickel. In fact, almost all cobalt produced today — 98% — is a byproduct of mining and refining those two important industrial metals.
Cobaltite, one of the many ores of cobalt. Source:
James St. John
, CC BY 2.0
Cobalt also easily forms minerals that incorporate sulfur and, unfortunately, arsenic. There are over 30 different ores that bear cobalt in commercially significant concentrations, making it hard to pinpoint one main ore. However, the geology that makes these diverse ores readily available is fairly limited, and knowing what sorts of rock formations cobalt ores are likely to be found in helps explain why viable deposits are scattered around the globe.
Cobalt ores tend to occur in two broad geological settings: sedimentary and volcanogenic. Sedimentary deposits, which account for more than 50% of cobalt mining today, are sandstones and shales that formed beneath ancient oceans and lakes, where organic sediments accumulated and eventually mineralized, mainly with metal sulfides. Two large sedimentary deposits are the European
Kupferschiefer
, or “copper shale”, and the Central African Copperbelt. Both of these deposits contain vast amounts of copper sulfides along with a significant amount of associated cobalt minerals.
Volcanogenic ore deposits, on the other hand, come from hydrothermal processes, where copper and cobalt sulfide minerals precipitate from fluids passing through hydrothermal vents. These mineral deposits originally form on the sea floor, but tectonic activity and other geological processes eventually expose these minerals or put them close enough to the surface to make for relatively easy access. Volcanogenic cobalt deposits are very rare indeed, with only a handful scattered across the globe, and are the only formations where cobalt is mined as a primary product, rather than as a byproduct of copper or nickel mining.
Old Sources, New Methods
The vast majority of cobalt currently produced is a byproduct of copper production, and since the ores for the two metals are so closely associated in their sedimentary deposits, it’s not possible to selectively mine one or the other. So the process of extracting cobalt from its ores is essentially the same as mining and refining copper, which
we’ve already covered
in this series. Briefly, crushed sulfide ore from vast open-pit mines is heaped up in pits with impervious linings to catch a rich mineral soup that’s leached from the rock by a constant rain of sulfuric acid. Copper is pulled out of the solution by electrolysis, leaving behind a spent electrolyte that is relatively rich in cobalt and other metals.
A series of chemical precipitation steps and a secondary leaching step selectively remove the other metals from the electrolyte, gradually enriching the cobalt in the solution until it can finally be precipitated out by adding lime to create cobalt (II) hydroxide. Despite cobalt’s association with the color blue, the precipitate is a lovely shade of pink; the famous “Cobalt Blue” pigment only results when cobalt (II) oxide is mixed with aluminum oxide.
The Bou-Azzer cobalt mine in Morocco. Source:
Groupe Managem
For the few commercially viable volcanogenic cobalt sources, such as the Bou-Azzer mine in Morocco and the new
Idaho Cobalt Operations
(ICO) project, the recovery process is quite a bit different, mainly because the cobalt concentration in the rocks is usually significantly lower. The plan for the ICO project, which will be the only cobalt mine in the United States and the first to open in decades, shows just what’s involved in recovering cobalt as a primary product from these deposits.
The ICO project is located
outside of the city of Salmon, Idaho
, in the middle of the Salmon-Challis National Forest. The site is located in a 1.6-billion-year-old geological formation known as the
Idaho Cobalt Belt
, which was first developed in the 1940s as the need for a domestic source of cobalt became obvious after World War II. An open-pit mine operated there until the early 1980s, when cheaper foreign sources of cobalt made it hard for the mine to stay viable.
An open-pit mine in the middle of a pristine forest would be a hard sell these days, of course, so the mine’s new owners, Australia’s Jervois Mining, will be investing in deep-shaft mining to access the ore, which is primarily
cobaltite
, which is a compound of cobalt, arsenic, and sulfur (CoAsS). The veins they’ve identified are up to 1% cobalt, which is pretty rich for a volcanogenic deposit, and occurs alongside some decently rich chalcopyrite copper ore, as well as a good amount of gold.
The ICO project is just getting started, with work beginning on the mine workings and on the concentrator plant that will process the ore on site. When the project is in full swing, ore will be transported up from the mine face to the surface, to be stockpiled before being fed into a jaw crusher plant. The crushed ore will then be sent to a ball mill to be reduced to a powder and made into a slurry with the addition of water. A surfactant called
potassium amyl xanthate
(PAX) will then be added before the slurry is sent to a series of froth flotation tanks. Here, air will be injected into the slurry, which thanks to the PAX will form large bubbles. The metal sulfides will float to the top and be skimmed off, while the heavier rock bits will fall to the bottom of the tank. After thickening with vacuum filtration, the concentrate will be dried, bagged, and shipped off-site for further refining using the electrowinning methods described above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_90qrleC-M
Cobalt at Any Price
The ICO project is expected to produce about 45 million pounds (20,400 tonnes) of cobalt and 175 million pounds (80,000 tonnes) of copper before being closed up for site remediation by around 2030. In a global market that produces about 116,000 tonnes every year, the Idaho project might seem like small potatoes, but the fact that new sources of cobalt are being developed is good news, primarily because it stands to offset some problematic cobalt sources.
In 2021, about 60% of the world’s supply of cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which sits atop a big chunk of the Central African Copperbelt and is no stranger to
conflict over cobalt
. The majority of that is mined in traditional mines and refined as described above, but a huge portion comes from what’s euphemistically known as “artisanal miners.” These are generally desperately poor people who locate high-grade cobalt deposits outside traditional mines and gather ore manually. The work is incredibly dangerous, both in terms of the usual hazards found in any mine, and compounded by the lack of personal protective equipment, the presence of toxic materials, and the threat of violence from other miners. Children are used as labor, and the miners sometimes earn only pennies a day.
Despite the challenges, the artisanal miners are incredibly productive — in 2021, they produced more than twice as much cobalt as Russia did. Bringing previously unviable deposits like those in the Idaho Cobalt Belt into production might offset some of this demand, which is of course a double-edged sword since cobalt is the only source of income for many artisanal miners. The whole thing may be academic, though, since global cobalt demand is predicted to rise to almost a quarter-million tonnes annually by 2025, which suggests the struggle for cobalt will do nothing but continue to escalate. | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522529",
"author": "Collie147",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T14:54:36",
"content": "Does that copper mine look like a star was set or is it just me?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6522531",
"author": "Collie147",
... | 1,760,372,527.148812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/playdate-handheld-turned-typewriter/ | Playdate Handheld Turned Typewriter | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games"
] | [
"3d printed",
"console",
"dock",
"gaming",
"keyboard",
"Playdate",
"text editor",
"typewriter",
"word processor"
] | The Playdate is an interesting gaming system. It’s a handheld, has a black and white screen, and superficially reminds us a little bit of the original Game Boy, right down to the button layout. But the fact that it has a second controller that pops out of the side, that this controller is a crank, and that the whole system was made by the same people that made
Untitled Goose Game
, makes us quite intrigued. Apparently it has made an impact on others, too,
because this project turns the gaming system into a typewriter
.
The Playdate doesn’t have native support for USB accessories unless it’s plugged into this custom 3D printed dock. Inside of the dock is a Teensy 4.1 which handles some translation between the keyboard and the console. Once the dock is taken care of the text editor needs to be side-loaded to the device as well. The word processor has the ability to move the cursor around, insert and delete text, and the project’s creator, [t0mg], plans to add more features in future versions like support for multiple files, changing the font, and a few other things as well.
For anyone interested in recreating this project, all of the printable files, the text editor, and the schematics are all available in the GitHub repo. It’s an impressive project for a less well-known console that we haven’t seen many other hacks for, unless you count this one-off Arduboy project
which took some major inspiration from the Playdate’s crank controller
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522444",
"author": "chango",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T11:58:04",
"content": "Akshually, Panic published Untitled Goose Game. House House was the developer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6522498",
"author": "RunnerPack",
... | 1,760,372,527.066984 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/crusty-leaking-cells-kill-your-tech-just-whats-going-on/ | Crusty Leaking Cells Kill Your Tech. Just What’s Going On? | Jenny List | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"alkaline cell",
"battery",
"dry cell",
"primary cell",
"zinc-carbon cell"
] | Seasoned Hackaday readers may have noticed over the years, that some of us who toil under the sign of the Jolly Wrencher have a penchant for older tech. After all, what’s not to like in a dirt cheap piece of consumer electronics from decades past that’s just begging for a bit of hardware hacking? For me at the moment this is manifesting itself in a selection of 8mm movie cameras, as I pursue a project that will eventually deliver a decent quality digital film cartridge.
When A Cell Is From West Germany, You Know It’s Old
“Made in West Germany”
The trouble with scouring junk shops for a technology superseded four decades ago is that the cameras I find have in most cases been sitting in a drawer since the early 1980s. They were a valuable item back in the day so of course they were hung on to, then they were forgotten about until one day the grown-ups who were once the kids featured in the home movies are clearing the house, and they start their journey to my bench.
The problem is that very few owners of 8mm cameras had the good sense to remove their batteries before putting them away, so I inevitably end up with a battery compartment full of crusty 1980s Duracells and rusted contacts. This has left me curious, just what has happened here and how can I fix it?
What’s The Leaky Stuff?
Construction of a zinc-manganese “alkaline” cell. Tympanus,
Public domain
.
Non-rechargeable cells come in a variety of chemistries, but the commercial ones we’re most familiar with are zinc-carbon “dry cells”, and “Alkaline” zinc-manganese dioxide cells. The zinc-carbon variety are becoming less common here in 2022 and have an acidic zinc chloride or ammonium chloride electrolyte, while the alkaline cells have a higher capacity and a basic potassium hydroxide electrolyte. They both have different failure modes that result in the leaky cells, so it’s worth taking a look at each one.
The failure mode of a zinc-carbon cell is a chemical one, the acidic electrolyte reacts with the zinc can anode, and eventually eats through it. The leaking electrolyte then attacks the surrounding circuitry and battery clips. It’s hardly a concentrated acid, but it’s enough to do plenty of damage over the years.
Meanwhile an alkaline cell has a build-up of hydrogen as it degrades. It incorporates a vent which allows the hydrogen to escape, however the hydrogen pressure can instead force the electrolyte out through this vent. The electrolyte will then corrode the battery terminals and any other electronics it touches. A feature of alkaline cell leakage is a white crust, this is potassium carbonate formed from the reaction between the potassium hydroxide electrolyte and carbon dioxide in the air.
The Global Parts Bin To The Rescue
Fresh and new battery clips for AA holders
How much damage has been done is usually a function of how long the leaking batteries have been in the device. Sometimes one is lucky and the battery contacts are salvageable, otherwise they are too far gone and a replacement has to be found. A past me tried all sorts of home-made solutions using stiff copper wire and other materials, but today thanks to the miracle of international commerce it’s usually possible to find a contact the same as or very similar to the old one. A quick AliExpress search on terms such as “
AA battery spring
” will return numerous options, and it’s simply a case then of paging through to find the one you need on the terms you like.
So those of you who like retro tech will find something familiar in the last few paragraphs, but there’s a lesson to be found in dealing with ancient batteries. Here in 2022 we’re more likely to have lithium polymer cells in our consumer devices and so the need to keep a pile of Duracells at hand is reduced. But the thought of today’s equivalent of a Super 8 camera lying forgotten in a drawer for decades with a cheap li-po pouch cell inside it is far more frightening than something with some crusty manganese cells. Have we just found the root cause of house fires in the 2040s? | 83 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523051",
"author": "andrzej229",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T17:23:42",
"content": "I’m often collecting old electronics like CRTs, cameras, VCRs, computers and stuff because they contain valuable metals. I’m most interested in gold and silver but lead (solder), aluminium and steel ma... | 1,760,372,527.386798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/generating-stereo-fm-signals-thanks-to-python/ | Generating Stereo FM Signals, Thanks To Python | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"arbitrary waveform generator",
"difference",
"fm",
"multiplex",
"pilot tone",
"radio",
"stereo",
"sum"
] | A casual understanding of how AM radio works is pretty easy to come by, and standard FM is only a little more complicated. Things can go off the tracks a bit with stereo FM, though — figuring out how they squeeze two separate audio tracks onto one radio signal is a bit of a head-scratcher. In that case, wrapping your head around the concept might be helped by
mocking up a stereo FM signal with an arbitrary waveform generator and a little bit of Python
.
Not that [Sebastian] of Baltic Lab was unfamiliar with multiplex FM theory, mind you. As he explains it, his goal was to generate a valid stereo FM signal with a different pure tone on each channel, 700 Hz on the left and 2,200 Hz on the right. Luckily, [Sebastian] has a nice AWG, the Siglent SDG1032X, which has an Ethernet connection that can be used to control it remotely along with PyVISA, a Python package for controlling instruments using the Virtual Instrument Software Architecture protocol.
The meat of this project, and what really helps drive home the concept of putting multiple audio signals onto an FM signal, lies in the Python code that generates the component parts. [Sebastian] does a great job explaining how he programatically generates the sum and difference signals along with the 19 kHz pilot tone, and puts them all together into one waveform. The output of the program is used to generate a series of values that are sent to the arbitrary waveform generator, which outputs the desired FM signal. Looking at the output on a spectrum analyzer, the two audio tones are clearly visible, as are the attenuated pilot tone and some other spikes a little further up.
Just add an antenna to the setup and you’d have the world’s dullest FM radio station — but at least it’d be in stereo. Or if you want to check out the origin story for FM radio,
we’ve got something for that too
. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523038",
"author": "Rog77",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T16:31:13",
"content": "https://www.instructables.com/Arbitrary-Wave-Generator-With-the-Raspberry-Pi-Pic/How does this compare as a “poor man’s” version – using only a pico?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,372,527.256234 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/2022-hackaday-prize-congratulations-wildcard-winners/ | 2022 Hackaday Prize: Congratulations, Wildcard Winners! | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"wildcard"
] | The Wildcard Round is the wildest round, and the 2022 Hackaday Prize had a slew of great entries. We’ve winnowed the wildcards down to a large handful, and we’re happy to announce the finalists. Every winner receives a $500 award, and is automatically entered for the final round of the Hackaday Prize. The grand prize winners will be announced during Supercon on Nov. 5th, and we’ll be streaming so you can root for your favorites whether you’re with us in Pasadena or not.
So without further ado, the finalists.
Wild Oceans and Watching the Air
Two of our wildcard finalists turned their efforts to the seas.
Otter Force One
is essentially an underwater, AI-powered vacuum collector for purple sea urchins. What? Well, the invasive sea urchins destroy the kelp forests, upsetting the ocean ecosystem. While divers can harvest the sea urchins to help keep them at bay, it’s probably a better job for a robot. Prototype one is stationary, but a new version aims to be mobile, with thrusters that drive it around the ocean floor.
Ocean Sensing for Everyone: The OpenCTD
is an invitation to do oceanography, citizen-science style. It’s a low cost CTD: a device that measures salinity, temperature, and water depth. It’s a DIY piece of gear that would enable schools, individuals, or anyone on a budget to get started learning about their local ocean.
Even if you don’t live by the sea, you probably still breathe air. And if you’re concerned about your local air quality,
Mindful Droid
and
The Interactive Air Quality Map
will help you quantify that. The former is a cute pixel-art adorned bot that is both portable and informative – displaying sensor readings for all to see, and maybe discuss. The Map is more of a stay-at-home device, but it reports its data to other Maps, and together help map out a city’s current air quality situation.
Welcome the Wildness
Then come the uncharacterizable projects – that’s why you have a wildcard round after all. Leading the pack is the
Bloft Mk2 3D Printer
, a hangprinter with a pellet-eating nozzle that allows it to use recycled plastic and extrude on a large enough scale to make furniture.
Automatic Construction
uses inflatable formers and a unique soap-suds foamed concrete that may actually help sequester CO2, offsetting some of concrete’s emissions.
Autonomous Research Laboratories
is a closed-loop science automation demo project, which basically consists of a spectrophotometer and some LEDs, but it aims to demonstrate how you
could
automate simple experiments. Similarly wild, the
DC-DC Solar EV Charger project
mounts a solar panel and purpose-built MPPT charging setup to the roof of an electric car. We have no idea if it’s going to net power, but at least it’s out there collecting data.
Another promising project is
Tica-Lab – Electrified mosquito net
. The essential innovation is an affordable conductive mosquito net that can be charged up via solar panel during the day to electrocute mosquitoes at night, without the use of pesticides. They’re still working on the manufacturing side, but this project looks to be really going places.
And finally,
JoyToJoy
is a sweet but simple project to add video-gaming joystick functionality to wheelchair-drive joystick controllers. It basically consists of a bunch of configurable joystick heads that all embed an IMU that detects their position. Add some buttons, and design the 3D print to fit the needs of the user, and you’ve got a wheelchair compatible pointing device. It’s an out-of-the-box solution that’s as clever as it is respectful of its users. And that’s a wildcard win in our book.
The Final Days
As our 50 finalists put the final polish on their projects before the freeze deadline this weekend, and our judges break out their fine-toothed combs to look them over, we can
take a look back at all of the 327 (!) projects that got entered
. We’re looking forward to the finals on Nov. 5th.
Thanks again to Supplyframe and Digikey for being loyal supporters of the Hackaday Prize!
Save-the-World Wildcard Finalists
Otter Force One
Bloft Mk2
Ocean Sensing for Everyone
Joytojoy
DC-DC Solar EV Charger
The Interactive Air Quality Map
Automatic Construction: Inflatable Building
Autonomous Research Laboratories
Mindful Droid – Take Action against Air Pollution
Tica-Lab – Electrified mosquito net
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6523035",
"author": "Andrew Thaler (@DrAndrewThaler)",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T16:10:51",
"content": "What a wonderful surprise! Congratulations to all the finalists!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6523207",
"author": "Tal... | 1,760,372,527.441945 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/researching-factorio-for-science/ | ResearchingFactorio…For Science | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games"
] | [
"api",
"artificial intelligence",
"factorio",
"real-world",
"research",
"study",
"video game"
] | Science has affirmatively answered a lot of questions that, looking back, could be seen as bizarre to have asked in the first place. Questions like “can this moldy cheese cure disease” or “can this rock perform math if we give it some electricity.” Among the more recent of this list is the question of whether or not the video game
Factorio
, in which the player constructs an elaborate factory, can be used as the basis for other academic work.
As [Kenneth Reid] discusses in this talk, it most certainly can
.
If you haven’t played the game, it’s a sort of real-time strategy (RTS) game where the player gathers materials to construct a factory while defending it from enemies. On the surface it might seem similar to
Age of Empires
or
Starcraft
, but its complexity is taken to extremes not found in other RTS games. The complexity hides nuance, and [Kenneth] points out that it’s an excellent simulator to study real-world problems such as vehicle routing problems, decision making, artificial intelligence, bin packing problems, and production planning, among a whole slew of other interesting areas of potential research.
[Kenneth] and his partners on this project also developed some software tools with interacting with a
Factorio
game without having to actually play it directly. The game includes an API which the team used to develop tools so that other researchers can use it as a basis for simulations and studies.
There was a research paper published as well
for more in-depth reading on the topic. We shouldn’t be too surprised that a game can be used in incredibly productive ways like this, either. Here’s another example of
a toy being used to train engineers
working in industrial automation. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522951",
"author": "Iván Stepaniuk",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T11:28:12",
"content": "Cracktorio!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6522955",
"author": "jo",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T11:43:19",
"content":... | 1,760,372,527.497625 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/19/hydraulic-press-channel-puts-nuts-to-the-test/ | Hydraulic Press ChannelPuts Nuts To The Test | Al Williams | [
"hardware"
] | [
"Bolts",
"nuts",
"threads"
] | Have you ever wondered how many threads a nut needs to be secure?
[Hydraulic Press Channel] decided to find out
, using some large hardware and a hydraulic press. The method was simple. He took a standard nut and cut the center out of it to have nuts with fewer threads than the full nut. Then it was on to the hydraulic press.
As you might expect, a single-thread nut gave way pretty quickly at about 10,000 kg. Adding threads, of course, helps. No real surprise, but it is nice to see actual characterization with real numbers. It is also interesting to watch metal hardware bend like cardboard at these enormous pressures.
In the end, he removed threads from the bolts to get a better test and got some surprising results. Examining the failure modes is also interesting.
Honestly, we aren’t sure how valid some of the results were, but it was interesting watching the thread stripping and the catastrophic failures of the samples in the press. It seems like to do this right, you need to try a variety of assemblies and maybe even use different materials to see if all the data fit with the change in the number of threads. We expect the
shape of the threads
also makes a difference.
Still, an interesting video. We always enjoy seeing data generated to test theories and assumptions. We think of bolts and things as pretty simple, but there’s a surprising amount of technology that goes into
their design and construction
. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522908",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T08:57:37",
"content": "The single threads on the bolt take less force because the process of removing the other threads on the lathe leaves sharp transition points at the end and beginning of the thread, which crack easily. Instea... | 1,760,372,527.572851 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/front-door-keys-hidden-in-plain-sight/ | Front Door Keys Hidden In Plain Sight | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"D1 Mini",
"ESP8266",
"IoT",
"key",
"rfid",
"ring",
"security",
"Wemos"
] | If there’s one thing about managing a bunch of keys, whether they’re for RSA, SSH, or a car, it’s that large amounts of them can be a hassle. In fact, anything that makes life even a little bit simpler is a concept we often see projects built on to of, and keys are no different. This project, for example, eliminates the need to consciously carry a house key around
by hiding it in a piece of jewelry
.
This project sprang from [Maxime]’s previous project, which allowed the front door to be unlocked with a smartphone or tablet. This isn’t much better than carrying a key, since the valuable piece of electronics must be toted along in place of one. Instead, this build eschews the smartphone for a ring which can be worn and used to unlock the door with the wave of a hand. The ring contains an RFID which is read by an antenna that’s monitored by a Wemos D1 Mini. When it sees the ring, a set of servos unlocks the door.
The entire device is mounted on the front of the door about where a peephole would normally be, with the mechanical actuators on the inside. It seems just as secure (if not more so) than carrying around a metal key, and we also appreciate the aesthetic of circuit boards shown off in this way, rather than hidden inside an enclosure. It’s an interesting build that reminds us of some other
unique ways of unlocking a door
. | 27 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522858",
"author": "AggregatVier",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T05:33:11",
"content": "Vandal steals “artwork” and you arrive back home with no way to get inside without B&E tools.Couldn’t the sensor be on the inside of the door behind a thin layer of wood (along with all the nobody-ne... | 1,760,372,527.868749 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/analog-tank-driving-simulator-patrols-a-tiny-physical-landscape/ | Analog Tank Driving Simulator Patrols A Tiny Physical Landscape | Danie Conradie | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"driving sim",
"FPV",
"main battle tank",
"training"
] | How do you build a practical tank-driving simulator in the 1970s, when 3D computer-generated graphics are still just a fantasy of the future? If you’re a European tanker school, the solution is to use a
large CNC machine to drive a camera around a miniature terrain model
(German,
translated
). In the video after the break, [Tom Scott] takes it for a test drive.
The original computer was replaced with a Raspberry Pi
Developed in France, the simulator provided a safer and more cost-effective way for teaching new trainees the basics of driving Centurion, Leopard 2, or Panzer 68 tanks. The trainee sits in a realistic “cockpit” mounted on a hydraulically-operated motion platform, with a TV screen in front of his face, which is connected to a camera mounted on a large gantry-style CNC platform.
The camera’s lens is mounted just above a pivoting metal foot which slides across the 12 m-long terrain model and sends its angle to the hydraulic system. It will even alter the tank’s handling based on its current position on the model to simulate different surfaces like dirt, snow, or asphalt.
The last of these systems remained in use until 2004 at the military training center in Thun, Switzerland, before being saved by the Swiss Military Museum from being scrapped. The original 70s computer, electronics, and hydraulics finally gave out, so the museum undertook a complete refurbishment of the system to return it to working order for museum visitors. It was kept as original as possible, but parts for the original computer could not be found, so it was replaced with a Raspberry Pi and custom interface board.
Over three decades, these simulators probably trained a few thousand tank drivers, and even with limited technology did an excellent job of preparing trainees for the real thing. Besides providing training for operators, drivers and pilots, simulators are also just plain fun. We’ve seen some impressive home built simulator including a
A-10 Warthog
, an
F-15 sim
built from an actual wreckage, and even a
starship’s bridge
. | 30 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522821",
"author": "Scotty",
"timestamp": "2022-10-19T02:31:59",
"content": "Back in the 80s I worked for singer link flight simulation. Some of the flight simulators used model board and camera to operate. A couple of interesting items, one the original used bright lights to illum... | 1,760,372,527.790997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/kodak-film-factory-revealed/ | Kodak Film Factory Revealed | Dave Walker | [
"chemistry hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"35mm film",
"camera",
"coating",
"factory",
"film",
"kodak"
] | Anybody born before the mid 1990s will likely remember film cameras being used to document their early years. Although the convenience of digital cameras took over and were then themselves largely usurped by mobile phones, there is still a surprising variety of photographic film being produced. Despite the long pedigree, how many of us really know what goes into making what is a surprisingly complex and exacting product? [Destin] from
SmarterEveryDay
has been to Rochester, NY to find out for himself and you can see the
second in a series of three hour-long videos
shedding light on what is normally the strictly lights-out operation of film-coating.
Kodak’s first attempt at a digital camera in 1975. The form-factor still left something to be desired…
Kodak have been around in one form or another since 1888, and have been producing photographic film since 1889. Around the turn of the Millennium, it looked as though digital photography (which Kodak invented but failed to significantly capitalize on) would kill off film for good, and in 2012 Kodak even went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which gave it time to reorganize the business.
They dramatically downsized their film production to meet what they considered to be the future demand, but in a twist of fortunes, sales have surged in the last five years after a long decline. So much so, in fact, that Kodak have gradually grown from running a single shift five days per week a few years ago, to a 24/7 operation now. They recently hired 300 Film Technicians and are still recruiting for more, to meet the double-digit annual growth in demand.
[Destin] goes to great lengths to explain the process, including making a 3D model of the film factory, to better visualize the facility, and lots of helpful animations. The sheer number of steps is mind-boggling, especially when you consider the precision required at every step and the fact that the factory runs continuously… in the dark, and is around a mile-long from start to finish. It’s astonishing to think that this process (albeit at much lower volumes, and with many fewer layers) was originally developed before the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight.
We recently covered getting a
vintage film scanner to work with Windows 11
, and a little while back we showed you the incredible technology used to
develop, scan and transmit film images from space
in the 1960s.
Thanks to [zit] for the tip. | 51 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522390",
"author": "Joseph Eoff",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T09:40:13",
"content": "Missed an opportunity for a really lame joke:“Kodak film factory exposed.”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6522398",
"author": "Dave Wa... | 1,760,372,528.044528 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/custom-interface-adds-usb-and-wi-fi-to-digital-calipers/ | Custom Interface Adds USB And Wi-Fi To Digital Calipers | Robin Kearey | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"caliper",
"digital caliper",
"diy usb interface",
"ESP32",
"micro-USB"
] | Although old-school machinists typically prefer the mechanical vernier scale on their trusty calipers, many users nowadays buy calipers with a digital readout. These models often come with additional features like differential measurements, or a “hold” function for those situations where you have to maneuver the instrument somewhere deep inside a machine. Another useful feature is a data link that lets you log your measurements on a computer directly instead of manually entering all the values.
The VINCA-branded caliper that [Liba2k] bought has such a data link feature, which requires a USB adapter that’s sold separately. There is a micro-USB connector on the tool itself, but instead of implementing a USB interface, this is used to carry a proprietary serial protocol — a design decision that ought to be classified as a felony if you ask us. Rather than buying the official USB adapter, [Liba2k] decoded the protocol and built
his own interface called VINCA Reader that can connect through either USB or Wi-Fi
.
The serial format turned out to be a simple serial bus that clocks out 24 bits at a time. In order to adapt its 1.2 V signal level to the 3.3 V used by an ESP32, [Liba2k] designed a simple level shifter circuit using a handful of discrete components. The ESP can communicate with the computer through its Wi-Fi interface, for which [Liba2k] wrote a spreadsheet-like application; alternatively, an ordinary USB cable can be connected to emulate a keyboard for use with any other software.
With its added Wi-Fi feature, the VINCA Reader is actually more complete than the official USB adapter, and will probably be cheaper as well. The serial interface appears to be common to all caliper manufacturers, although many went for
a more sensible connector than micro-USB
. An automated readout system is particularly handy if you have to make
thousands of similar measurements
. | 26 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522306",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T05:22:30",
"content": "One of the “nicest” features of difital calipers is that they are always out of batteries when you need them. Mechanical calipers just dont have that exciting feature…",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,372,527.939647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/hackaday-prize-2022-a-not-so-smart-spot-welder/ | Hackaday Prize 2022: A Not-So-Smart Spot Welder | Navarre Bartz | [
"Battery Hacks",
"contests",
"how-to",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"battery tab",
"capacitor bank",
"capacitors",
"diy spot welder",
"spot welder",
"welder"
] | DIY spot welders often use high-powered components that can be a bit frightening, given the potential for dangerous malfunctions. [Wojciech “Adalbert” J.] designed his
capacitive discharge spot welder
to be safe, easy to build, and forego the microcontroller.
Many projects work great with
just a single Li-ion cell
, but when you need more power, you’ve got to start connecting more cells together into a battery. [Wojciech]’s spot welder is designed to be just powerful enough to weld nickel tabs onto a cell without any overkill. The capacitor bank uses nineteen
Nichicon UBY 7500uF/35V capacitors, all
wired in parallel using solder wick saturated with solder. They sit atop on a perfboard with metallicized holes to carry the high current.
[Wojciech] has detailed every step of building the welder, including changes to the off-the-shelf relay board and adding a potentiometer to the step-up converter board. The level of detail makes this seem like a good starting place if you’re hoping to hop into the world of DIY spot welders. Safe is always a relative term when dealing with high powered devices, so be careful if you do attempt this build!
DIY spot welders have graced these digital pages many times, including
this one built with safety in mind
, and this
other one that was decidedly not
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522312",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T05:48:40",
"content": "Now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything listed in millifarads.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6522622",
"author": "echode... | 1,760,372,528.336251 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/hunt-down-nfc-signals-with-this-nfc-multi-tool/ | Hunt Down NFC Signals With This NFC Multi Tool | Abe Connelly | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"contactless",
"hardware",
"NFC",
"open source hardware",
"Open Source Hardware Certification",
"reverse engineering",
"wireless"
] | NFC hacking can be a daunting task with many specialized tools, a proliferation of protocols, and a multitude of different devices. [ElectronicCats] has done a lot of work to try to make this investigation accessible by creating an open-source, hardware-certified NFC tool called the
HunterCatNFC
that can read and emulate a multitude of NFC devices.
The HunterCatNFC device is meant to be portable and self contained, with LED indicator lights that can give information about the various modes, and feedback about what data is being received. At its core, the HunterCatNFC has an NXP PN7150 NFC controller chip to handle the NFC communication. The main processing controller is a Microchip SAMD21 which also provides USB functionality, and the whole device is powered by a 3.7V 150mAh Li-ion battery.
The HunterCatNFC has three main modes, ’emulation’, ‘read/write’ and ‘peer-to-peer’. Emulation mode allows the HunterCatNFC to mimic the functionality of a passive NFC device, only responding when an NFC reader issues a request. The read/write mode allows it to emulate an NFC reader or writer, with the ability to communicate with nearby passive NFC devices. The peer-to-peer mode gives the device the ability to have two way communication, for instance, between two HunterCatNFC devices.
We’ve covered
NFC hacking before
, including the
Flipper Zero
. The HunterCatNFC is a fine addition to the NFC hackers arsenal of tools with some very nice
documentation
to learn from. For those not wanting to send out their own boards to be printed and assembled, [ElectronicCats] has them
for sale
.
Video after the break! | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522323",
"author": "rewolff",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T06:03:14",
"content": "It can be done cheaper/easier than that. A led has a capacitance. Tune the PCB antenna for resonance around the NFC frequency. Mount the led and… Done!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replie... | 1,760,372,528.103805 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/barillas-open-source-tool-for-perfect-pasta/ | Barilla’s Open Source Tool For Perfect Pasta | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"boiling",
"cooking",
"pasta",
"thermometer"
] | Cooking pasta is perhaps one of the easiest things you can do in the kitchen, second only to watching a pot of water boil. But as pasta maker
Barilla points out on their website,
you can reduce your meal’s CO₂ emissions by up to 80% if you simply let the pasta sit in the hot water rather than actively boil it the whole time — a technique known as passive cooking.
The trick is getting the timing right, so in a fairly surprising move, Barilla has released the design for an open source device that will help you master this energy-saving technique. Granted it’s not a terribly complex piece of hardware, consisting of little more than an Arduino Nano 33 BLE, an NTC probe, and a handful of passive components wrapped up in a 3D-printed case. But the documentation is great, and we’ve got to give Barilla credit for going way outside of their comfort zone with this one.
Magnets in the 3D printed case let it stick to the lid of your pot, and when it detects the water is boiling, the gadget alerts your phone (at least for this version of the device, an Android or iOS application is required) that it’s time to put in the pasta. A few minutes later it will tell you when you can turn off the burner, after which it’s just a matter of waiting for the notification that your passively-cooked pasta is ready to get pulled out.
Like the
prop making video Sony put out after the release of
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
, we recognize that on some level this is an advertisement for Barilla pasta. But if developing useful open source gadgets that can be built by the public is what a company wants to spend their advertising dollars on, you won’t catch us complaining. Hell, we might even spring for a box of Barilla next time we’re in the store.
Thanks to [fgma] for the tip. | 79 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522133",
"author": "Cogidubnus Rex",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T20:28:41",
"content": "Reminds me of convincing my wife when boiling eggs, once the water’s boiling it doesn’t matter if it’s a vigorous boil or just simmering – the water’s at the same temperature; the only difference i... | 1,760,372,528.236927 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/shoot-an-email-to-get-a-shot/ | Shoot An Email To Get A Shot | Abe Connelly | [
"home hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"barbot",
"drink",
"drink mixing robot",
"drinkbot",
"peristalic pump",
"Raspberry Pi 3 B+"
] | [_Pegor] wanted to create a shot pouring machine for their friends birthday. Unfortunately, the build wasn’t done in time, but at least the
JagerMachine
is finished now so that others can use it.
The JagerMachine has a
peristaltic pump
that moves liquid from a reservoir hidden in the back of the machine to the glass in front. The machine has a 3.5 inch DSI touch screen display for user input and a WS2812B LED ring for creating a small light show when the drinks are served. A 3.3 V to 5 V level shifter is used to power the LED ring and a motor driver module is used to drive the peristaltic pump motor. It looks like there’s a “shot glass detection” feature that uses a 3D printed mini platform with a notch for a magnet so that when a glass is placed on top of it, the hall sensor can detect the presence of the nearby magnet.
Part of the charm of this project is the software stack on the Raspberry Pi that allows for novel interaction, including being able to serve drinks from the receipt of emails. Using the Raspberry Pi as the controlling device allows for this rich set of interfacing options, including easily allowing the ability to drive the LEDs, detect the presence of the shot glass, along with establishing network connectivity. The setup procedures are all documented in the repository for anyone wanting to see how this type of functionality might transfer to their own project.
Drink mixing robots are, of course, a thing. ranging from
small and cute
to
full shelf
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522217",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T23:41:27",
"content": "After three shots it should call you an Uber.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6522244",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2022-10-18T02:... | 1,760,372,528.28052 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/in-our-own-image-do-we-need-humanoid-robots/ | In Our Own Image: Do We Need Humanoid Robots? | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"humanoid",
"Rant",
"robot"
] | Science fiction is full of things you don’t want to think too hard about. Why do starships with transporters have brigs with forcefields? Why not just beam a prisoner into an enclosed space? Why do Cylons fly ships with human controls? Why not have a plug in their… well, you get the idea. For that matter, why do Cylons (and Kaylons, and Gort) even look human at all? Why aren’t some Cylons just ships?
Of course, the real reason is so we can identify with them and actors can play them with some cosplay gear and makeup. But real-life robots that are practical rarely look like humans at all.
No one is going to confuse a robot factory arm or a Roomba with a person, yet they are perfectly suited for their purpose. Yet we are fascinated with human-looking robots and continue to build them, like Nadia from IHMC Robotics in the video below.
It is something of hubris to think that the human form is ideal for everything. Look at nature. While some animals look like us, others are totally different because they fit different ecological niches. If you are going to make a smart machine, why not make it fly, jump, swim, or even stay in one place, if that’s what it needs to do? Robotic fast food fry chefs, for example,
tend to ride on a ceiling-mounted rail
, and why shouldn’t they? As much as we like to envision androids, an army of metallic workers asking us if we want fries with that would probably be a little unnerving.
No trouble picking out which is the robot. CC-BY-SA-4.0 by [Nicholas-halodi]
There have been calls lately to not arm robots. We had to chuckle at that because robots are already armed. What is a cruise missile or an autonomous drone with a weapon but an armed robot? Self-driving cars are weapons all by themselves. A bullet isn’t any more dangerous than getting hit by a 3,000 kg vehicle. Yet it seems that robots that look like people carrying weapons make people more uneasy than non-anthropomorphic autonomous weapons.
One use case might be in the field of human interaction. Perhaps you really do want your robot nurse or translator (C3PO) to look sort of human. A robot made to fill in for a person sometimes might need to appear somewhat human, but generally speaking, that’s not an efficient approach. (Did Star Wars get it exactly right?) What use cases can you think of for human-looking robots that aren’t pretending to be people?
Let’s face it. Robots like
Sophia
,
ASIMO
, or
RoboNaut/FEDOR
make good news stories.
Flippy ROAR
might not be as sexy, but it is a lot more practical and you are more likely to encounter one in real life.
Not that humanoid robots don’t seem cool. Want to build one? There’s
an open-source one out there
, at least half of one, anyway. If you want the whole thing, check out
Poppy
. | 105 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522069",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T17:13:56",
"content": "This is the difference between a tool and a servant. There is a huge amount of venture capital being poured into voice assistants and humanoid robots because the wealthy of this world would like to have t... | 1,760,372,528.503407 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/lubrication-engineering-hack-chat/ | Lubrication Engineering Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, October 19 at noon Pacific for the
Lubrication Engineering Hack Chat
with Rafe Britton!
You know the old joke: if it moves when it shouldn’t, fix it with duct tape, and if it doesn’t move but it should, fix it with WD-40. For a lot of us, that’s about as far as our expertise on lubricants — and adhesives — goes. That’s a shame, because with hundreds of years of petrochemical engineering expertise behind us, not to mention millennia more of ad hoc experience with natural substances, just reaching for that trusty blue and yellow can for a spritz is perhaps a wasted opportunity. Sure, it’ll work — maybe — but is it really the right tool for the job?
Modern lubricants are extremely complex and highly engineered materials, often built atom by atom to perform a specific job under specific, often extremely challenging, conditions. Oils and greases are much more than just the slippery stuff that keeps our mechanical systems running, and while you might not need to know all the details of how they’re made to put them to use, a little inside information could go a long way in making sure your mechanism lasts.
We’ve invited Rafe Britton on the Hack Chat to talk about all aspects of lubrication engineering. With degrees in engineering and physics, Rafe runs
Lubrication Expert
and the
Lubrication Explained
channel on YouTube to help his clients figure out what they don’t know about lubrication, and how to put that knowledge to use in the real world. Be sure to bring your questions and concerns about lubrication, as well as your lubrication success stories and failures — especially the failures!
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, October 19 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522061",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T16:41:46",
"content": "Abusing WD40…it’s a slippery slope",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6522097",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T18:34:54",
... | 1,760,372,528.568249 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/2022-hackaday-prize-sensible-flow-helps-you-keep-track-of-your-water-usage/ | 2022 Hackaday Prize: Sensible Flow Helps You Keep Track Of Your Water Usage | Robin Kearey | [
"green hacks",
"home hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"bluetooth low energy",
"flow meter",
"water measurement"
] | Safe, clean drinking water is a scarce resource that shouldn’t be wasted. But it’s not always easy to see how much you’re using when you turn on the tap: is it one liter a minute? Is it ten? How much do you actually use when washing your hands or brushing your teeth? If you’d like to get some hard data on your water usage, have a look at
[Josh EJ]’s Sensible Flow project
. It contains designs for a set of sensors that measure your water consumption and a convenient little display that shows the total amount consumed.
The most obvious way of measuring water consumption is to install an off-the-shelf flow meter onto your pipe, which is something that Sensible Flow supports. But probably the most interesting part of the project is a design for a non-invasive flow sensor that you can simply attach to any type of tap. This sensor contains a nine-axis inertial measurement unit (IMU) that detects how far you’ve twisted, turned or tilted the handle, and uses that information to estimate the amount of water flow. You will need to perform an initial calibration step using a timer and measuring cup, but you won’t have to rip open your plumbing just to keep track of your water usage.
Both types of sensors are powered by a coin cell battery that is estimated to work for about one year, thanks to a power-efficient Arduino Pro Mini and a BlueTooth Low Energy (BLE) module to communicate with the base station. The base station plugs into a wall socket and shows the total water consumption on a small one-inch OLED display. STL files for the enclosures are available on the project page, along with detailed circuit diagrams that show how all the parts are connected.
We’ve seen several water flow measurement systems for home use, such as
this neat ESP8266-based shower water monitor
. If you prefer just a simple visual reminder to turn off the tap, have a look at
this LED gadget
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522045",
"author": "X",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T15:51:28",
"content": "Why not use the water meter that your town has provided? Maybe a camera and some ocr and just read what it says? No plumbing necessary.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,528.943647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/teardown-cooler-max-liquid-cooling-system/ | Teardown: Cooler Max Liquid Cooling System | Tom Nardi | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"gaming pc",
"refrigeration",
"water cooling"
] | Every week, the Hackaday tip line is bombarded with offers from manufacturers who want to send us their latest and greatest device to review. The vast majority of these are ignored, simply because they don’t make sense for the sort of content we run here. For example, there’s a company out there that seems Hell-bent on sending us a folding electronic guitar for some reason.
At first, that’s what happened when
CoolingStyle recently reached out to us about their Cooler Max
. The email claimed it was the “World’s First AC Cooler System For Gaming Desktop”, which featured a “powerful compressor which can bring great cooling performance”, and was capable of automatically bringing your computer’s temperature down to as low as 10℃ (50°F). The single promotional shot in the email showed a rather chunky box hooked up to a gaming rig with a pair of flexible hoses, but no technical information was provided. We passed the email around the (virtual) water cooler a bit, and the consensus was that the fancy box probably contained little more than a pair of Peltier cooling modules and some RGB LEDs.
The story very nearly ended there, but there was something about the email that I couldn’t shake. If it was just using Peltier modules, then why was the box so large? What about that “powerful compressor” they mentioned? Could they be playing some cute word games, and were actually talking about a centrifugal fan? Maybe…
It bothered me enough that after a few days I got back to CoolingStyle and said we’d accept a unit to look at. I figured no matter what ended up being inside the box, it would make for an interesting story. Plus it would give me an excuse to put together another entry for my Teardowns column, a once regular feature which sadly has been neglected since I took on the title of Managing Editor.
There was only one problem…I’m no PC gamer. Once in a while I’ll boot up
Kerbal Space Program
, but even then, my rockets are getting rendered on integrated video. I don’t even know anyone with a gaming computer powerful enough to bolt an air conditioner to the side of the thing. But I’ve got plenty of experience pulling weird stuff apart to figure out how it works, so let’s start with that.
Promising Pedigree
While I waited for my Cooler Max to make its way across the ocean, I decided to look a bit into the company itself.
Browsing their website
, you’ll find an impressive array of diminutive water chillers used for things like cooling industrial lasers or high-performance servers. As explained on the website, the key to CoolingStyle’s product line is their palm-sized compressor, which lets them squeeze an entire refrigeration system into a box that can fit into a standard server rack.
Pulling the manual for one of their chillers, we can see that the control panel used is identical to the one shown in the promotional images for the Cooler Max. At this point, I was actually getting pretty excited — this thing was looking more and more like the real deal.
In fact, one of the chillers offered on the CoolingStyle, the
Q Series Micro Water Chiller
, appeared to be very similar to the overall layout of the Cooler Max. Could it be that this company took one of their high-end industrial cooling devices, retooled it for the gamer crowd with some RGB LEDs?
An Imposing Machine
I have to admit, as soon as I got the Cooler Max out of the box, I was impressed. The thing is as large as a mid-sized desktop PC, and is built like a tank. There are a few fit and finish issues here and there with the case, but nothing that can’t be forgiven considering it’s a pre-release prototype.
In terms of construction, it’s actually very similar to a desktop PC case, with sheet metal side panels that slide off once you remove the rear thumbscrews. The front and back panels are also sheet metal, while the top and bottom appear to be injection molded plastic. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s some kind of jellybean PC case that’s been customized, as there’s even a support panel on one side that looks like it could have been intended to hold a motherboard.
Electronics
Towards the front of the Cooler Max is a Mean Well LRS-350 power supply providing 24 V to the compressor and most of the electronics, and around the other side we can see a common adjustable regulator board that’s been set to 5 V and is connected to the dual 120 mm RGB fans in the top of the unit. As the main control board for the compressor has a functional 5 V rail already, the addition of the separate regulator seems to be a bit of a bodge; as if the onboard regulator wasn’t up the task of handling the large light-up fans. In any event, I’d be surprised if this wasn’t changed for the production units — even just dropping down to a fixed 5 V regulator would be cheaper.
Note the small adjustment screw on the blue regulator board for setting the output voltage.
The compressor control board has quite a bit going on, and judging by all the unused connectors, has considerable untapped potential. There’s clearly a serial port right at the top of the board, which could be a subject of future experimentation. Overall the construction looks quite nice here, and I appreciate the little details like the insulated spade connectors. The relays could be a point of potential failure down the line, and though they aren’t socketed, swapping them out wouldn’t be terribly difficult.
On the inside of the front panel, we have a second PCB. This is the one that appears to be featured in most of CoolingStyle’s products, so as you might expect, it again features a number of unused connections considering this relatively simple application.
While the two main ICs have regrettably had their labels removed, the pair are obviously a microcontroller and a dedicated LCD controller. Note the clearly marked SWDIO/SWCLK pins on the bottom header: that’s a Single Wire Debug (SWD) interface, and a decent hint that our mystery MCU is in fact an STM32. Like the previously mentioned serial port, this interface is ripe for future experimentation. Matthew [wrongbaud] Alt has
put together some excellent write-ups
on the kind of information that can be gleaned from SWD, for those not familiar with ARM’s answer to JTAG.
The conformal coating on the board is a nice touch given the potential for moisture, and the screw terminal connection for the thermocouple was a welcome surprise. Small details, but they speak to the overall build quality.
Water Cooling System
I won’t spend much time on this since, as far as I can tell, this part of the Cooler Max looks like it’s completely off-the-shelf. While I obviously don’t have one to compare against, I’d be surprised if this is the kind of thing you’d find in any of their professional chillers; and is likely one of the cost-cutting measures they’ve utilized to create this more consumer-targeted device.
There are no identifying marks on the water cooling components, but very similar units can quickly be found online. There may have been some custom modifications done, for example adding the port for the thermocouple, but certainly the pump, fittings, and reservoir are all standard components that you’d find inside any water-cooled gaming PC. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.
Refrigeration Cycle
So at this point, it should be clear that the Cooler Max really is a tiny (relatively speaking) refrigeration unit. Just like an air conditioner, it’s got a compressor and a sizable condenser paired with large fans to keep it cool. But the difference is that, instead of blowing cold air, this device is designed to pump cold water.
So rather than an evaporator coil with another set of fans blowing across it, the Cooler Max uses a heat exchanger to cool the water that’s being pumped through the internal reservoir. Unfortunately the nature of the soldered copper connections on these sort of refrigeration units makes it impossible to take them fully apart without releasing the refrigerant, so we can’t get a very good look at any of these components in isolation.
But with the water reservoir removed, and the power supply moved to the side, we can get a fairly good overview of all the core components. The silver radiator in the rear is the condenser, the black cylinder mounted to the bottom of the case is CoolingStyle’s miniature compressor, and the foam-wrapped box at the center of the image is the heat exchanger. The thicker insulated tubes are for water, and if you look at the top of the image near where the AC power comes into the unit, you can see the bulge of the flow sensor which it used to determine how much water is actually being pumped through the system.
Impressively Repairable
Before wrapping things up, I think it’s worth noting that the Cooler Max is perhaps one of the most serviceable devices we’ve seen during this teardown series. Replacements for so many of the components, from all of the water cooling gear to the fans and power supply, can be picked up on your online retailer of choice without jumping through any hoops.
R134a service port
The design and construction of the unit is such that, as you’ve see here, it can be taken almost entirely apart with nothing more exotic than a screwdriver. All the electrical connections are socketed or screw-down, and there was’t a dab of glue anywhere to be seen inside the thing.
Incredibly, they even included a service port for adding refrigerant, which is something you
generally have to hack in yourself
. The compressor uses R134a, which at least here in the United States, you can simply pick up from the auto parts store.
Of course, being a prototype, some of these features could be due to its one-off nature. The final units might strip out the service port and replace half the internals with proprietary bits and bobs. Maybe. But we can dream.
OK, But Does It Work?
As I said at the start, I’m no PC gamer. Nor is this a website about PC gaming. So I’m not qualified to pass judgment on the Cooler Max in that context. That will likely upset some people, perhaps not least of which the fine folks at CoolingStyle.
Highly scientific kitchen counter testing.
For the record however, I did hook it up to a basic water block to do some simple tests — it definitely gets cold in short order, and when I dunked the block into a bucket of hot water the Cooler Max revved up like mad and brought it down to below room temperature in a minute or two.
I can also tell you that the Cooler Max appears to be very well made, and designed so that you can open it up to fix it, and potentially modify it, without danger of destroying it in the process. That’s a trait we don’t see often enough, so respect to CoolingStyle where its due.
Considering there’s nothing else quite like it on the market, it’s hard to judge the introductory
Kickstarter price of $699
. It’s a lot of money. But the closest thing you can really compare it with on a technical level would be a small travel air conditioner, and shopping around, they cost just about as much. Of course, at the end of the day, if you’ve got a gaming computer powerful enough that you’re even contemplating something this elaborate for your cooling needs, that number probably isn’t going to break your budget. | 57 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522028",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T14:23:07",
"content": "I wonder if it would work for water-cooled CNC spindles?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6522151",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,528.67609 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/classic-dos-games-on-an-arduino/ | Classic DOS Games On An Arduino? | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"86Duino",
"msdos"
] | It has been a while since we’ve seen a 86Duino, but [TheRasteri] reminded us about it, with his video
showing how to use one to run classic MS-DOS games
. To be fair, the computer isn’t really an Arduino, it’s essentially a tiny 486 PC on an Arduino-style PCB.
If it were just running DOS games on a tiny PC, that wouldn’t be very newsworthy. However, the board by itself has no video card and, as [TheRasteri] points out, sound card compatibility is also a problem. A carrier board, however, has a tiny VGA card on it, and thanks to some work from another user, it is possible to
add an ISA bus
to the board if you want to plug in a legacy sound card.
The ISA hack was done neatly, but it is a bit of wiring. Instead of using a normal ISA backplane, it is possible to use a PC/104 backplane, if you have cards that will fit that bus — electrically, they are the same. The board was able to run
DOOM
and
Quake
at nearly 30 frames per second. Not bad. He did have problems getting a mouse to work, though.
Got a bit nostalgic watching him use QBasic to directly write to registers on an ISA card. If you want an old DOS machine and don’t want to tie up a lot of space, this could be the ticket. Especially if you need it to run some old piece of hardware that won’t work with modern computers. We have to wonder if anyone would make a USB to ISA adapter out of something like this. The drivers would seem to be the hard part.
We saw the
86Duino
nearly 10 years ago when there were a few other x86 single-board computers around. Apparently, lots of people
want to run vintage games
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6522000",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T11:59:05",
"content": "great choice of connector there. just great.I wonder were he found a bread board with the shifted pin header…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "652... | 1,760,372,528.841986 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/poly-keyboard-has-screens-in-every-key/ | Poly Keyboard Has Screens In Every Key | Navarre Bartz | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"dynamic key labels",
"dynamic keyboard",
"dynamic keys",
"keyboard",
"keyboard screen",
"oled",
"poly keyboard",
"polyglot",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | Aspiring polyglots can be stymied by differing keyboard layouts and character sets when switching between languages. [Thomas Pollak]’s
Poly Keyboard
circumvents this problem by putting a screen in every key of the keyboard.
In his extensive build logs, [Pollak] details the different challenges he’s faced while bringing this amazing keyboard to life. For example, the OLED screens need
glyph rendering
to handle the legends on the keys. Since the goal is true universal language support, he used the Adafruit-GFX Library as a beginning and was able to extend support to Japanese, Korean, and Arabic so far in his
custom fork of QMK
.
The attention to detail on this build is really impressive. Beside the dedication to full glyph support, [Pollak] has measured the
amount of extra force
the flex cables from the OLEDs add to the actuation of the keyswitches. For the Gateron yellow switch he tested, the difference was about 62.2 g versus the initial 49.7 g.
In case you’re thinking you’ve seen other screen keyboard projects, [Pollak] includes a
roundup of similar projects
in his logs as well. This isn’t the first keyboard we’ve seen here at Hackaday with an OLED on top of a keyswitch, although
[Voidstar Lab]’s MiRage
only has three screen keys that were
removed in a later iteration
. If you’d like a more conventional fixed display in your keyboard, check out
[Peng Zhihui]’s modular board
with an e-ink display and haptic feedback knob.
Just one more time because it’s so much fun ;) Now plus Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, French and Spanish
#PolyKeyborad
#MechanicalKeyboard
#OLED
pic.twitter.com/AC791tzEfp
— thpoll (@thpoll2)
October 4, 2022 | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6521986",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T10:15:14",
"content": "Don’t forget the original.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Maximus_keyboardMost reviews I’ve read have said it’s not a very good keyboard, especially for gaming. Terrible key action / feel.",
... | 1,760,372,528.894 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/16/petamentor2-is-latest-to-turn-bottles-into-filament/ | PETamentor2 Is Latest To Turn Bottles Into Filament | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"pet",
"recycle"
] | [Ondřej Šraitr] has several videos, including the one you can watch below, about his
PETamentor2
— a machine for turning PET bottles into printable filament. You can grab the files on
Thingiverse
, and there aren’t many parts you have to buy.
The device looks good, and from the videos, it appears to work well. A blade slices the bottle into a strip that feeds what is essentially a hot end that pushes out the filament. The blade is adjustable to set the amount of plastic fed at any given time which is important because you need enough to create a solid piece of filament but not any more than that.
Surprisingly, the bill of materials doesn’t include any sort of microcontroller. There is a PWM speed control module to drive the 7 RPM motor and a temperature controller. Of course, you need a power supply, a heater block and a heater. The nozzle is, oddly enough, a standard 0.4 mm nozzle. You drill it out to 1.5 mm and die swell takes care of getting to the final 1.75 mm size.
It takes about 45 minutes to eat up what looks like a 1-liter bottle. The filament produced looks good in the video. We aren’t sure, but we think that was a roll of solder used as a ballast weight on top of the bottle keeping it moving in a downward direction. Bottles imply wetness, of course, so after producing the filament, it needs to be dried.
This is the second version of the machine and we were a bit surprised that we never saw a video of the filament in use. But it looks like it would work and it isn’t like we
haven’t seen this technique used before
. In fact,
we’ve seen it several times
. We can’t remember any that looked as stylish as the PETamentor2, though, and we are interested to hear about anyone’s results with the resulting filament. | 24 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6521946",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T06:53:28",
"content": "*belches* It is just so perfect and well working, but me liver would advice to switch to non-alcoholic beer for making this work. Sadly there is a recovery system in my country (and a few other EU countri... | 1,760,372,529.055952 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/16/fourteen-legged-cell-carries-natures-tiny-computer/ | Fourteen-Legged Cell Carries Nature’s Tiny Computer | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"biology",
"state machines"
] | Computers are, after all, frighteningly complex state machines. Quite of bit of the software we write can be modeled as a state machine, too. A great technological achievement by humans? Turns out,
state machines exist in some of nature’s tiniest natural computers
, according to biologists studying
Euplotes eurystomus
, a kind of water-dwelling eukaryote. This single-cell organism uses fourteen protolegs known as cirri that move in a particular gait, in response to certain stimuli.
As you might expect, a single-celled organism doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a brain, so scientists wondered what could control the way the beast walks using the cirri. The answer was fibers made of bundles of microtubles that acted as a mechanical state machine.
While we are used to state machines using bi-stable electronic elements, older machines often used cams and microswitches along with a timing motor. For example, a phone answering machine might have a three-minute motor. One cam would depress a micro switch to run the outgoing message for 15 seconds. Then another cam would depress a microswitch to start recording, and a final switch and cam would keep the motor running until the very end. To start the process, a ringing phone would goose the motor so that that last cam engaged. Simple and no computer needed. The “brain fibers” of the
Euplotes
seem to work in a similar way. They enforce which states can be reached from what other states and react to outside stimuli, as well.
Is any of this practical? Maybe not, although we often see technology mimic biological systems. But we can’t help but wonder if future microscopic-scale machines might not need this same sort of mechanical state machine for many purposes, including locomotion.
You can apparently make
single-cell organisms your servants
, more or less. We’ve covered
state machines
many times if you need a refresher. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6521921",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T03:39:17",
"content": "Boston Dynamics could use it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6521943",
"author": "Xeon",
"timestamp": "2022-10-17T06:37:22",
"content":... | 1,760,372,529.102195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/16/hackaday-links-october-16-2022/ | Hackaday Links: October 16, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | Be careful where your take your iPhone 14 or Apple Watch, because
under the right circumstances
, you might end up swatting yourself. At least that’s what seems to have happened to some owners when their device’s crash detection feature interpreted a roller coaster ride as a car crash, and dialed emergency services. Crash detection is apparently set up to make the call automatically when accelerometers detect the high g-forces that normally occur in a crash, but can also occur on a coaster ride — at least the good one. In at least one case, an ersatz call to 911 was accompanied by
the screams of fellow coaster riders
, as the service apparently opens the device’s microphone when a crash is detected.
Hilarity ensued, of course, as long as you weren’t someone with a legit emergency who experienced a delayed response because of this. We’d have sworn that having a system auto-dial 911 was strictly illegal for just this reason, but apparently not. We guess there are two lessons here: one, that Apple engineers really should have thought this through, and maybe need to get out into the real world once in a while; and two, that people will gladly fork over their hard-earned dollars for the privilege of going on a fun ride that’s indistinguishable from a car crash. Our own Lewin Day
took a close look at the situation earlier this week
if you’d like to read more on the subject.
The reports of the death of film photography appear to have been somewhat exaggerated, with old-line photography company Kodak announcing that they
can’t hire enough people to keep up with film demand
. Kodak is reporting record consumer demand for its products, particularly for 35-mm film, with consumers eager to exercise their old SLRs. Perhaps it’s a hipster fad, but if it is, it’s a good one for the Rochester, NY company, which moved from one shift five days a week a few years ago to three shifts around the clock. And they’re hiring more people for all their film operations, which is good news for the area. Things weren’t fantastic in Rochester when this particular Hackaday writer lived there in the early 90s, so it’s nice to see a resurgence. Might be time to dust off the old gear and support the one-time hometown again.
The solar system is filled with strange and wondrous sights, especially through a telescope. But pretty much every planet you can see with even a moderately powerful telescope gets a little boring after a while. So what’s the amateur astronomer who’s sick of staring at rocks and gasbags to do? Why, point that telescope at the Sun, of course, and in the process take
some beautiful images of our star
. David “Deddy” Dayag is a self-taught astronomer who has been bucking the conventional wisdom that solar photography is out of reach of the amateur. His time-lapse images are breathtaking, and show the fine structure of the convective cells on the Sun’s surface, in addition to sunspots, flares, and filaments. It’s remarkable stuff, all the more so for being made with fairly modest equipment.
And finally, great news for people who like to pay an optional extra tax to the State of California, where
digital license plates are now legal for all vehicles
. We’ve covered
the E-ink license plates
before, when the project was still in its pilot phase, and what seemed like a solution in search of a problem then still looks the same to us now that all Californians can participate. Renting the plates for $20 a month seems a steep price to pay for the novelty of being able to show custom, DMV-approved slogans and messages along with your car’s registration number. And we wonder what law enforcement thinks about losing the retro-reflective background that makes old-fashioned license plates so easy to read at night. We suppose that’s all academic at this point, and at least we can now look forward to a flood of large-format E-ink displays hitting the secondary market. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6521865",
"author": "Jeff Faust",
"timestamp": "2022-10-16T23:23:14",
"content": "Remember that there were once 42,000 employees at Kodak Park alone, to say nothing of Kodak office, the Elmgrove plant, Hawkeye, smaller facilities all over town, and numerous operations out of state. ... | 1,760,372,529.000482 |
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