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https://hackaday.com/2022/09/15/billet-machining-a-special-xbox/ | Billet Machining A Special Xbox | Jenny List | [
"cnc hacks",
"Xbox Hacks"
] | [
"case modding",
"xbox",
"xbox series x"
] | The world of console modding has delivered us some amazing projects over the years, usually rendering an original into a completely different form factor. [Modified] has done a special bit of console modding on an Xbox Series X, with the unusual result of keeping exactly the same form factor. What makes it special? His Series X has been given a new case, almost identical to the original, but instead of molded plastic
it’s machined entirely from a single billet of aluminium stock
.
From one perspective it’s a slightly crazy endeavor — pushing the limits of his mill to remove 90% of the stock. But from another it’s an interesting tale of how to approach such a project, of the challenges in reaching further into a workpiece than the tooling is designed for, and also of the cooling for the Xbox itself. Sure he could have made it from aluminium plate and screwed it together, but in doing so he’d have denied us the chance to follow a machining adventure.
The result is an Xbox that’s nominally the same as when it left the factory, but which looks
so
much cooler. Oddly the aluminum doesn’t act as a heatsink because the console is air-cooled, but particularly on the bottom there are more holes than were found in the original. On the front is an engraving of Master Chief from
Halo 2
‘s cover art which really puts the finishing touch on the build — though we wonder whether it might benefit from a little resin to make it stand out a bit.
Hungry for more Series X case mods? They don’t come bigger than
this one
! | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512991",
"author": "come2",
"timestamp": "2022-09-15T12:35:40",
"content": "Too cheaply made for being a luxury, but too expensive to be affordable to make…Except for this feat, I don’t know why he used an aluminium billet instead of steel plates, and why he didn’t do another pass ... | 1,760,372,563.492733 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/15/reimagined-ramen-comes-in-edible-package/ | Reimagined Ramen Comes In Edible Package | Navarre Bartz | [
"cooking hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"food container",
"food prep",
"noodles",
"packaging waste",
"ramen",
"sustainability"
] | Hackers and college students alike reach for ramen when they want to fuel up on a budget, but, if you’re concerned about packaging waste, the plastic film and foil packets start to weigh on your conscience. [Holly Grounds] was sick of this compromise and
came up with a way to have your packaging and eat it too
.
[Holly] first experimented with different bioplastics until she developed a recipe for “an edible, tasteless starch-based bioplastic, that dissolves in contact with boiling water.” With that accomplished, she next integrated flavoring into the bioplastic wrapper so that there’s no foil packet. She found that herbs and spices worked, but larger solids like shrimp couldn’t be incorporated into the film.
For the finishing touch, she fashioned the noodles into a disk so they fit better in a bowl for cooking. To cook the noodles, you remove a puck from the wax paper sleeve holding multiple servings, add boiling water, stir, and enjoy. [Holly] says that her ramen packets are quicker to prepare than existing packets since there are fewer steps and the shape is optimized for cooking. That’s a win-win for the planet and convenience.
If you want to see another pasta packaging marvel, we’ve previously covered
Flat Pack Pasta
. Have your own project to reduce packaging waste? Submit it to the
Save the World Wildcard round of the Hackaday Prize
which closes on October 16th! | 31 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512948",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-09-15T08:27:49",
"content": "If they are biodegradable and safe to consume by humans, how do they protect from mould and humidity? The entire point of plastic is that it is nearly a “forever chemical”. I’m sure starch-based will not ... | 1,760,372,563.305611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/making-a-tape-echo-the-traditional-way/ | Making A Tape Echo The Traditional Way | Dave Walker | [
"classic hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"echo",
"effect",
"guitar",
"guitar effect",
"music",
"reel-to-reel",
"tape",
"tape echo"
] | [Juan Nicola] has taken inspiration from the musician hackers of old and re-purposed a reel-to-reel tape recorder into a
tape-echo for his guitar
with a built-in valve amplifier (video in Spanish).
The principle is to record the sound of the guitar onto a piece of moving magnetic tape, then to read it back again a short time later. This signal is mixed with the live input and re-recorded back onto the tape further back. The effect is heard as an echo, and this approach was very popular before digital effects became readily available.
[Juan] installed a new read-head onto his Grundig TK40 and managed to find a suitable mechanical arrangement to keep it all in place. He has since updated the project by moving to a tape loop, allowing an infinite play-time by re-using the same piece of tape over and over.
Turning tape machines into echo effects is not a new idea, and we’ve
shown
a
few
of
them
over the
years
, but every one is slightly different!
Both versions are shown after the break. YouTube closed-caption auto-translate might come in handy here for non-Spanish speakers. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512919",
"author": "Nikolai",
"timestamp": "2022-09-15T05:21:30",
"content": "Someone can try to use a floppy drive to record just audio. May work well for samples loops.The head stays static for one sample and move to change to another sample.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,372,563.390912 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/robot-will-draw-for-food/ | Robot: Will Draw For Food | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"conductive ink",
"robot"
] | Biological systems often figure out the best ways to get what they need to survive. Now
a robot
created by researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Imperial College London, and the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign can make the same claim. The robot operates in front of a plate that has electrical terminals on one end and various obstacles between those terminals and the robot.
The robot can pick up and rearrange some of the items on the plate and then draws paths to the terminals using conductive ink. The effect is the robot gets to “eat” if it solves the connection puzzle.
Admittedly, by itself, this isn’t especially important. Obviously, the machine already has power and it doesn’t really help it to get more power. However, there are many tasks where a robot art might have a task to perform that defies predefinition. This is an example of how software can assess the situation and then create and execute a plan to get the desired result.
Especially impressive was the robot’s ability to move a ramp to bridge a barrier and then draw over the ramp. This isn’t going to revolutionize a pick and place setup, but we could see applications in, say, routing PCBs which is a not dissimilar problem.
Need your own robot arm to play with? We’ve covered
a few
.
Conductive ink not included
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512961",
"author": "come2",
"timestamp": "2022-09-15T09:28:50",
"content": "Well, it’s fun, it’s brand-new research, but I can’t see the real point of this. Robots that need energetical autonomy have other better ways to do that already referenced in the linked paper. It “works” in... | 1,760,372,563.345416 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/esp32-adds-bluetooth-to-an-ipod-nano/ | ESP32 Adds Bluetooth To An IPod Nano | Jonathan Bennett | [
"ipod hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"ipod",
"soldering"
] | The iPod Nano was one of Apple’s masterworks, but it’s really tied down by its dependence on wired headphones. At least, that’s what [Tucker Osman] must have thought, as he spent an unreasonable amount of time
designing a Bluetooth mod for the 3rd gen Nano
. And it’s a thing of beauty — temperamental, brutally difficult to build, and fragile in use, but still beautiful. And while some purists try to keep their signal analog, [Tucker]’s coup d’etat is to intercept the iPod’s audio signal before the DAC chip, keeping the entire signal path digital to the Bluetooth speaker. Oh, and he also managed to make the volume and track skip buttons work, back across the wireless void.
Now we know you’re itching to use the beautiful instructions and source code at the link above, and try to replicate this hack. And if you *really* want to, go for it. But know that the soldering required is a nightmare, the case needs modification to fit the extra board, and the resulting device has a battery life measured in minutes instead of hours. But since when has that stopped us? And if more iPod hacking is your thing,
check out [Tucker]’s other project! | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512906",
"author": "Chris E",
"timestamp": "2022-09-15T02:44:04",
"content": "Would love to see this mod on a 5th or 6th gen classic. If you swap the OG hard drive for a SD card there should be plenty of room.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,563.61399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/mokeylaser-a-diy-laser-engraver-that-you-can-easily-build/ | Mokeylaser: A DIY Laser Engraver That You Can Easily Build | Dave Rowntree | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"aluminium extrusion",
"CNC shield",
"diode laser",
"grbl",
"GT2 Belt",
"laser engraver",
"NEMA17",
"sainsmart"
] | [Mark aka Mokey] borrowed his friend’s open-frame laser engraver for a while, and found it somewhat lacking in features and a bit too pricey for what it was. Naturally,
he thought he could do better
(video, embedded below.) After a spot of modelling in Fusion 360, and some online shopping at the usual places, he had all the parts needed to construct an X-Y bot, and we reckon it looks like a pretty good starting point. [Mark] had a Sainsmart FL55 5.5W laser module kicking around, so that was dropped into the build, together with the usual Arduino plus CNC shield combo running GRBL.
[Mark] has provided the full F360 source (see the
mokeylaser GitHub
) and a comprehensive bill-of-materials, weighing in at about $400, and based upon the usual 2040 aluminium extrusions. This makes MokeyLaser a reasonable starting point for further development. Future plans include upgrading the controller to something a bit more modern (and 32-bits) as well as a more powerful laser (we do hope he’s got some proper laser glasses!) and adding air assist. In our experience, air assist will definitely improve matters, clearing out the smoke from the beam path and increasing the penetration of the laser significantly. We think there is no need for more optical power (and greater risk) for this application. [Mark] says in the video that he’s working on an additional build video, so maybe come by later and check that out?
Obviously, MokeyLaser is by no means the only such beast we’ve featured,
here’s the engravinator
for starters. For even more minimalism, we covered a build with
some smart optics doing all the work
. But what if you don’t happen to have a 5W laser module “lying around” then perhaps try
a more natural heat source instead
? | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512863",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T22:31:11",
"content": "Sharks with lasers,Now Monkeys with lasers!B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6512882",
"author": "Eric Weathe... | 1,760,372,564.082962 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/2022-cyberdeck-contest-rpg-character-tracker/ | 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: RPG Character Tracker | Tom Nardi | [
"contests",
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"2022 Cyberdeck Contest",
"board games",
"erector set",
"M5Stack"
] | While it would be a mistake to think there are any firm rules for what constitutes a cyberdeck, we can at least identify some common traits that would seem to give us a baseline description. For example, most deck builds we’ve seen have been fully-functional Linux computers, more often than not powered by some Raspberry Pi variant. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room in the community for less computational powerful decks, or builds that are so bespoke that they can only perform a few selected tasks.
As a perfect example, take a look at the
RPG Character Tracker from [Melissa Matos]
. You won’t find a Raspberry Pi here, nor a full operating system. Instead, we’ve got a M5Stack Core2 and an I2C CardKB Mini Keyboard wrapped up in a foldable frame made from Erector Set pieces. Add in a little LED lighting for that cyberpunk feel, and the stage is set.
So what does this diminutive build do? Well, apparently nothing right now. [Melissa] just got the hardware together and has only recently started aligning all the 1s and 0s to do her bidding. But what it’s
supposed
to do is clear enough: it’s intended to be an electronic companion to complex RPG tabletop games to help with things such as character creation. Sounds like it will also have a “roll dice” mode that will save you the trouble of having to crawl under the table when one of your D20s goes rogue.
While such a device could be useful for many different games, it should come as no surprise to hear that [Melissa] is currently targeting the cyberpunk
Shadowrun.
Although we were particularly taken with the
online tool that let you generate 3D printed organizers for all your tabletop gaming needs
, we’d definitely rather have digital companions like this which would make those plastic baggies full of parts obsolete. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512826",
"author": "smellsofbikes",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T19:51:15",
"content": "This is a neat build with a nice aesthetic.One thing we did in college was set up a Multi-User Dungeon for D&D, where players could explore the scenario/dungeon with a mix of text and spoken word, a... | 1,760,372,563.443209 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/future-brings-cpu-modules-and-the-future-is-now/ | Future Brings CPU Modules, And The Future Is Now | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware",
"laptops hacks",
"Raspberry Pi",
"Slider"
] | [
"cm4",
"compute module 4",
"eoma68",
"intel compute card",
"MNT",
"mnt reform",
"modular",
"modular computer",
"modular electronics",
"modular hardware",
"pc/104",
"Raspberry Pi Compute Module"
] | Modularity is a fun topic for us. There’s something satisfying about seeing a complex system split into parts and these parts made replaceable. We often want some parts of our devices swapped, after all – for repair or upgrade purposes, and often, it’s just fun to scour eBay for laptop parts, equipping your Thinkpad with the combination of parts that fits you best. Having always been fascinated by modularity, I believe that hackers deserve to know what’s been happening on the CPU module front over the past decade.
This “swap your Thinkpad keyboard”
video
thumbnail captures a modularity-enabled sentiment many can relate to.
We’ve gotten used to swapping components in desktop PCs, given their unparalleled modularity, and it’s big news when someone tries to split a yet-monolithic concept like a phone or a laptop into modules. Sometimes, the CPU itself is put into a module. From the grandiose idea of Project Ara, to Intel’s Compute Card, to Framework laptop’s standardized motherboards, companies have been trying to capitalize on what CPU module standardization can bring them.
There’s some hobbyist-driven and hobbyist-friendly modular standards, too – the kind you can already use to wrangle a powerful layout-demanding CPU and RAM combo and place it on your simple self-designed board. I’d like to tell you about a few notable modular CPU concepts – their ideas, complexities, constraints and stories. As you work on that one ambitious project of yours – you know, the one, – it’s likely you will benefit a lot from such a standard. Or, perhaps, you’ll find it necessary to design the next standard for others to use – after all, we all know there’s never too few standards!
How Is Modularity Still Alive?
We like repairability and upgradeability. Sadly, many consumer-facing gadget-producing companies don’t tend to appreciate these as much as we do – you will see previously omnipresent aspects of modularity, like swappable CPUs or even RAM on laptops, becoming less prevalent with time. Simply put, having us buy new devices is more profitable than letting us upgrade and repair our old devices. Still, there are reasons why modularity lives on – in some important ways, it’s simpler to design modular products. For instance, you don’t have to layout your own board with high-speed CPU and RAM interconnects, able to instead focus on the part that must fit your IO of choice – greatly simplifying design.
An apt demonstration of modular computing upsides being commercially viable,
the PC/104 standard
has been a staple of industrial computing, in large part because it’s easy to get a replacement motherboard if your old one fails. After all, industrial customers are willing to pay a premium for some degree of modularity, since it means they can get equipment fixed quickly, without losing large amounts of money as their production line is stuck idle. And, when your equipment could use an upgrade due to system requirements rising the way they always do, there’s hardly ever a shortage of PC/104 boards with increased processing power.
Customers don’t have as much of a sway to make modularity in consumer products everpresent. It makes sense from where we stand nowadays, but it’s sad, and doesn’t have to be this way. It also doesn’t help when we have companies like Google and Intel starting attractive modular projects with their own purposes in mind, then screwing a myriad of important aspects up, and ultimately shelving everything. On one hand, bungling products in such a way is a known M.O. of large companies – on the other hand, it’s frustrating to get our hopes up, then have them be represented by a low-effort flop. If you’re not aware of how bad it can get, here’s an example.
The Corporate Way To Get It Wrong
Intel is a giant company manufacturing CPUs, chipsets and all sorts of things that a hobbyist can only dream to one day tinker with. They have both an inordinate amount of resources and a customer base to develop modular solutions, and they’ve been trying to get their own modular, somewhat hobbyist-accessible embedded ideas off the ground, every few years a new one. These ideas have so far been failing, in large part, due to Intel’s own fickle decisions – as many of us
somberly familiar with Intel’s Edison and Galileo product lines
can attest.
That slot on the left is where you would’ve had inserted your Intel Compute Card – if you had one.
For instance, in 2017, Intel has unveiled the Compute Card concept – a card with CPU, RAM and storage that you could’ve put in your pocket and plugged into anything. Two years later,
they’ve shelved the concept.
In particular,
a politely scathing blog post from NexDock,
a company who was trying to develop a Compute Card dock at the time, sheds some light at how rude Intel’s behaviour was. It’s borderline amusing to read about “overly complicated encryption and authentication requirements of Intel Compute Cards”, and nowhere near surprising to read about insufficient support from Intel.
Even though Intel touted NexDock’s efforts as an achievement, it wasn’t enough to warrant proper collaboration and transparency, and NexDock’s ended up spending tons of money and time on something Intel never took seriously. Intel’s latest effort developing CPU+RAM modules is called
Intel Compute Element.
This one is expressly not for you: it’s for building custom NUCs and other systems with requirements-tailored hardware, reflected by
the modules’ price tag.
It looks nice in a “what if” way, but by now, we’ve learned to not expect much.
With Enough Resources, We Can Get There Ourselves
Intel presented their Compute Card concept in 2017. In 2016, a surprisingly similar but open-source and hobbyist-friendly project was taking shape.
The EOMA68 project
invited us to contribute to a future where CPU cards existed – where you could have the CPU, RAM and storage on a small low-power card able to plug into a laptop-shaped housing, game console, a small NUC-like desktop box, or even usable standalone with a HDMI monitor and a powered USB hub. If you’re going somewhere, you can physically take your system out of your desktop enclosure and plug it into a laptop housing, and plug it back when you’ve returned. A lot of the same goals and same form-factor as an Intel’s Compute Card, but none of the corporate backing, it was an daring goal to set, even if you were to get an A20 CPU instead of an x86 system.
Designed by an ambitious engineer set on getting things done, the aim of the EOMA68 project was to never compromise on compatibility while keeping the cards accessible for small-scale design and production – ensuring that after the first compute cards became outdated, building backwards-compatible ones would remain realistic. In a witty move, PCMCIA connectors and housings were used for IO connections – cheap and still widely available. Care was taken to design a pinout which could be compatible with a few different CPU generations going forwards, aiming for upgradability without losing features – and the crowdfunding drive reached its goal as if effortlessly, showing that people believe in what this project stands for.
Getting a batch of EOMA68 cards built proved to be a struggle, however. Manufacturing was an uphill battle, with troubles like connectors going out of stock one after another and replacements causing low yield issues. Time is a cruel mistress and had only stacked extra problems on top of every delay, and the project’s last update has been reassuring but not yet fruitful. However, it’s a journey that one of us ought to have embarked on – even unreleased, this small project achieved things that Intel couldn’t. In addition to that, the author has kept
a rich research database,
and the development process has been
discussed openly on a mailing list
– invaluable resources for anyone looking into modular computing.
CM4 Form-Factor No Longer Just Theirs
You’re no doubt familiar with Raspberry Pi Compute Modules, but perhaps, not with all the pin-compatible alternatives. When
the Pi 4 came out,
one of the questions was – how would the next Compute Module look, given the newly added PCIe interface? Most expected a new generation of a SODIMM-mountable module, and
what we got
was far from that. Once laments about low-pitch alignment-pin-less connectors died down, the promise of PCIe was too much to pass on, and hackers have come out with a wide array of carrier boards and Compute Module-based hacks. There’s almost too many to cover,
but we sure try!
Of course, there’s nothing exclusive about a pinout+connector+footprint combination of such a SoM (System-On-Module), and the aforementioned myriad of carrier boards is tempting for any designer wise enough to avoid creating a whole new ecosystem. As a result, you have multiple boards with different –
Pine64 SOQuartz
,
Banana Pi BPI-CM4
and
Radxa CM3,
to name a few. Each has some benefits over the CM4 – my personal favourites are the eDP-compatible DisplayPort on the SOQuartz and the SATA ports on the CM3, but there’s more to it. Hobbyists are also getting on the CM4-compatible board train with projects like
the ULX4M FPGA boards,
and there’s
a RISC-V CM4-compatible
from Antmicro in the works, even.
These modules are not exactly like a computer card that you could swap between your tablet and your desk PC on a daily basis, but it does provide unexpected and pleasant upgradability if you happen to have a device expecting a CM4 baseboard. In times of CM4 module shortages, this is a godsend, too. What’s more, players like
TuringPi
and MNT Reform have created adapters for their own ecosystems.
Reform The Laptop, CPU Module Ecosystem Comes Free
If you’ve followed projects like
Novena,
you’ll know that NXP’s i.MX series processors are one of the most openness-friendly ARM CPUs available. Six years after the Novena,
the MNT Reform laptop
wisely
picked an i.MX8 CPU.
However, they didn’t want to develop a complex multi-layer baseboard, and went for a DDR-formfactor
i.MX8M-hosting SoM
from Boundary Devices – making the Reform’s mainboard all that cheaper and simpler to design. The unique part about the Boundary Devices’ SoM – it’s the most open i.MX8M module out there, fit for a laptop that strives to be as open as possible.
To reiterate, there’s nothing exclusive about a pinout + connector + footprint combination – and a DDR formfactor module is just a PCB with a set of gold-plated pads at its edge. You can see where this is going, right? MNT Reform’s team developed some custom SoMs and adapters, compatible with the i.MX8 module’s surface-level connectivity. To date, there’s
an adapter for the Pi CM4,
consequently compatible with three more aforementioned CPU boards,
a NXP LS1028A board
with half as many CPU cores but twice as much RAM, and even
a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA-hosting board
with talks about a software-synthesized RISC-V CPU
ala Precursor.
What’s more – MNT has recently
announced development of the Pocket Reform,
a 7″ laptop-shaped companion device. Not to miss such a wonderful opportunity, the MNT Pocket Reform uses this exact module form-factor as its bigger sibling. Now, the MNT lineup became an ecosystem with swappable CPU cards – we didn’t quite expect this to happen, but it’s a pleasant surprise of the kind that we don’t get every day. If you’re working on a yet-unrivaled cyberdeck, you too should consider putting a DDR socket on a PCB and benefitting from everything the MNT ecosystem has to offer.
More To Come, Already Plenty
With each project daring to create a standard – or better yet adhere to an existing one – modular computing becomes more and more of a reality in hacker projects. The CM4 and MNT CPU module standards in particular are both accessible and hacker-friendly. If you wanted to develop a custom highly featureful wearable, or a laptop motherboard swap
for that old Thinkpad you grew up with,
there’s no better time to start than nowadays. Just like I2C devices have slowly been
coalescing on JST-SH connectors,
perhaps soon, we’ll be building powerful and sleek computers into whatever we want, at a whim, and our parts drawers will get a new drawer named “CPU modules”.
Headline image: “
Back-side of an Intel Celeron LGA775 CPU
” by Uwe Hermann | 36 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512791",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T17:06:39",
"content": "Chiplets as a form of modularity.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6512807",
"author": "Alexander Wikström",
"timestamp": "2022-09-... | 1,760,372,563.692582 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/big-noise-from-a-555-and-a-little-embroidery/ | Big Noise From A 555 And A Little Embroidery | Lee Wilkins | [
"Art",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"555 timer",
"e-textiles",
"etextile",
"stitch"
] | [Sam Topley] specializes in making textile based, electronic instruments and sculptures using embroidery, and
this little hoop packs some serious sound
(
Nitter
).
The circuit is a riff on a classic 555 timer circuit, which produces a signal that is modulated by applying pressure conductive textile in different ways. The signal is then piped through a system built in a visual coding interface called
MaxMSP
, which allows [Sam] to get specific on how to control it. The program shifts the pitch and applies filtering, producing a dynamic dial-up tone-like sound as the user interacts.
To top it off, [Sam] uses
vintage resistors
and
tropical fish capacitors
from the 60s that compliment the visual design and match the embroidery floss, they’re both beautiful and functional! This isn’t the only circuit of this kind [Sam] has made, she also produces tons of
e-textile radios
using similar techniques. We love how this project spans a ton of areas, analog circuitry, vintage tech, and soft circuits!
While we don’t see too many projects involving them come our way, e-textiles are certainly a fascinating topic. Our coverage of
2018’s “eTextile Spring Break” in New York
is a must-read if you’re interested in exploring this technology, and the relatively recent news that
MIT has developed a washable LED fabric
has us hoping we’ll see more projects like this in the near future. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512790",
"author": "Danjovic",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T17:04:20",
"content": "Alive and ticking after 50 years! Happy anniversary 555!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6512870",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As R... | 1,760,372,563.239666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/new-parkinsons-test-smells-success/ | New Parkinson’s Test Smells Success | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Medical Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"medical test",
"medicine",
"parkinson's",
"Parkinson's disease",
"research",
"test"
] | Parkinson’s disease affects millions of people all over the world. The degenerative condition causes characteristic tremors, trouble walking, and often comes with complications including dementia, depression, and anxiety.
One of the major challenges around Parkinson’s disease involves diagnosis. There’s no single, commonly-available test that can confirm or rule out the disease. It’s can cause particular frustration as the disease is most treatable in its early stages.
That may soon change, however. One woman identified that she seemingly had the ability to “smell” the disease in those affected, and is now working with scientists
to develop a test for the condition.
Follow Your Nose
The human sense of smell, by and large, isn’t particularly impressive. It helps us enjoy the scent of fresh bread baking in an oven, or the aroma of freshly cut grass. However, as a tool for inspecting and learning about the world around us, it really comes up short.
Some of us, though, are more capable in the olfactory department than others. Joy Milne from Perth, Scotland, is one such person. She happened to detected a change in her partner’s characteristic smell, one day, and twelve years later, they were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
The idea that someone could “smell” a difference with people with Parkinson’s disease is an easy one to test. When Milne eventually put the idea together that the different smell she noticed was perhaps related to her husbands condition, she quickly drew the interest of scientists. With the aid of her partner, a former doctor, she teamed up with researchers Dr. Tilo Kunath and Professor Perdita Barran to investigate further.
Anatomy of a hair follicle
. (Public domain, NIH)
The suspicion was that the change in smell may have been due to a chemical difference in sebum, the oily substance the sebaceous glands excrete to the skin. A test was put together wherein Milne was to smell T-shirts worn by various people. Some of the participants had Parkinson’s disease, and some did not. Milne was able to correctly identify the shirts worn by those with the disease. She also detected the characteristic smell on a T-shirt belonging to someone from the group without Parkinson’s. Just eight months later, that individual was also diagnosed with the disease. It served as a resounding indication that there may be a detectable chemical signature of Parkinson’s disease.
After years of research, a group of researchers led by Barran have developed a simple test for the disease. A sample is taken by swabbing a cotton bud on the back of the neck. The sample is then analyzed for molecules linked to Parkinson’s disease. It serves as a straightforward clinical tool to help identify patients that may suffer from the condition.
The test works by identifying certain heavy-weight lipid molecules that are only found in people with Parkinson’s disease using mass spectrometry techniques. Currently in early stages of development, the test has been trialled in laboratory settings with success. It has the additional benefit that the swab technique is non-invasive.
Future Work
The next stage is to develop the sebum analysis technique into a simple standardized test that can be run in typical clinical settings, in hospitals and doctor’s clinics around the world. Having the test widely available could be key to early identification of the disease. Milne has demonstrated the ability to smell the change in sebum before clinical symptoms were evident; the test could thus theoretically do the same. Currently, diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease in the UK can take months or years, thanks to the work involved and the backlog of patients in the system. A simple swab test could change that, getting patients to the right specialist help sooner rather than later.
Milne is continuing her work, teaming up with scientists to see if she can identify other diseases by smell. Prime candidates include tuberculosis and cancer. The latter of the two has been found to be
detectable by dogs in some cases
, so Milne’s own highly-capable nose may be able to achieve the same feat. She occasionally smells the characteristic Parkinson’s signature when out in public, too. However, she has been advised by medical ethics professionals that she cannot advise people of her findings. Milne notes that most general practitioners would discount a patient that came in for tests on the testimony of a woman that smelled that they had a disease, anyway.
The overall development of the swab test shows how effective science can be in testing extraordinary claims. When Milne claimed to have the ability to “smell” Parkinson’s disease, scientists were quickly able to devise a test that confirmed that was the case. From there, they were able to figure out what was happening at a low level, and turn it to real medical benefit. That’s the benefit of the scientific method at work! | 39 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512740",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T14:21:23",
"content": "Considering the state of American medicine, if someone said they smelled something odd with me, I would be inclined to believe them. Crap, I was just there, should investigated getting sniffed",
"p... | 1,760,372,563.577263 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/ai-midjourney-images-stairway-to-heaven/ | AI Midjourney Imagines “Stairway To Heaven” | Dave Rowntree | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"art",
"artifical intelligence",
"curated",
"Led Zeppelin",
"music lyrics"
] | This modern era of GPU-accelerated AI applications have their benefits. Pulling useful information out of mountains of raw data, alerting users to driving hazards, or just keeping an eye on bee populations are all helpful. Lately there has been a rise in attempts at producing (or should that be curating?) works of art out of carefully sculpted inputs.
One such
AI art project is midjourney
, which can be played with via a Discord integration bot. That bot takes some textual input, then “dreams” with it, producing sometime uncanny, often downright disturbing images.
You can have a tinker with it for free, for a short while, but there is monthly cost if you want to use it ‘for real’ whatever that means. YouTuber [Daara] has been feeding the lyrics from
Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” into it
, producing a video tour of the resulting outputs for your perusal.
Just for the sake of — you know —
science
, we fed some Hackaday author bio details into midjourney to see what popped. Can you guess which authors match the images?
Each image tile represents one HaD author, but who’s who?
/imagine circuit board hammer drill
Engineering nerds like us probably aren’t the best judges of whether or not this counts as art, but for making interesting images out of a rough concept it’s certainly entertaining at least. What happens with mundane inputs, like “circuit board hammer drill”?
Led Zeppelin have been around a while, with some interesting tributes, such as this
C64 demoscene hack
that streams a song straight off the humble floppy and doesn’t sound half bad. And if this whole AI image stuff is familiar, we did cover another application,
stable diffusion
just the other week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCKdPhepB1s
Thanks to [Andy Pugh] for the tip! | 36 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512710",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T11:41:31",
"content": "I would like to see the output from HaD article titles.E.G. THE CALICO WEARABLE RIDES THE RAILS",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,372,564.017348 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/14/the-calico-wearable-rides-the-rails/ | The Calico Wearable Rides The Rails | Navarre Bartz | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"health",
"wearable",
"wearable robot",
"Wearables",
"workout"
] | If you’re feeling underwhelmed by yet another smartwatch announcement, then
researchers at the University of Maryland may have just the wearable for you
. Instead of just tracking your movement from one spot, Calico winds around you like a cartoon sidekick.
Using a “
railway system
,”(PDF) the Calico can travel around a garment to get better telemetry than if it were shackled to a wrist. By moving around the body, the robot can track exercise, teach dance moves, or take up-close heart measurements. Tracks can be magnetically linked across garments, and Calico can use different movement patterns to communicate information to the user.
This two-wheeled robot that rides the rails is built around a custom PCB with a
MDBT42Q
microcontroller for a brain which lets it communicate with a smartphone over Bluetooth Low Energy. Location is monitored by small magnets embedded in the silicone and plastic
living hinge
track, and it can use location as a way to provide “ambient visual feedback.”
The researchers even designed a friendly cover for the robot with googly eyes so that the device feels more personable. We think animated wearables could really take off since everyone loves cute animal companions, assuming they don’t fall into the
uncanny valley
.
If you love unusual wearables as much as we do, be sure to check out
Wearable Sensors on Your Skin
and the
Wearable Cone of Silence
. | 12 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512688",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T09:49:37",
"content": "This is bizarre, I don’t see any immediate practical applications but I think it could make someone’s cosplay outfit pretty great.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,564.214355 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/neon-lamps-not-just-for-pilot-lights/ | Neon Lamps — Not Just For Pilot Lights | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"breakdown",
"discharge",
"flip-flop",
"lamp",
"multivibrator",
"neon",
"pilot light",
"plasma",
"thyratron"
] | It’s easy to see why LEDs largely won out over neon bulbs for pilot light applications. But for all the practical utility of LEDs, they’re found largely lacking in at least one regard over their older indicator cousins: charm. Where LEDs are cold and flat, the gentle orange glow of a neon lamp brings a lot to the aesthetics party, especially in retro builds.
But looks aren’t the only thing these tiny glow lamps have going for them, and [David Lovett] shows off
some of the surprising alternate uses for neon lamps
in his new video. He starts with an exploration of the venerable NE-2 bulb, which has been around forever, detailing some of its interesting electrical properties, like the difference between the voltage needed to start the neon discharge and the voltage needed to maintain it. He also shows off some cool neon lamp tricks, like using them for all sorts of multi-vibrator circuits without anything but a few resistors and capacitors added in. The real fun begins when he breaks out the MTX90 tube, which is essentially a cold cathode thyratron. The addition of a simple control grid makes for some interesting circuits, like single-tube multi-vibrators.
The upshot of all these experiments is pretty clear to anyone who’s been following [David]’s channel, which is chock full of non-conventional uses for vacuum tubes. His efforts to
build a “hollow state” computer
would be greatly aided by neon lamp circuits such as these — not to mention how cool they’d make everything look. | 30 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512626",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T05:10:30",
"content": "It’s a fun video but I think he should have explained how the circuits worked a bit more thoroughly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6512628",
... | 1,760,372,564.554632 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/c23-programming-for-everyone/ | C23 Programming For Everyone | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"c++",
"C23"
] | Here’s a history quiz: What architecture did the first C++ compiler target? Of course, it is a trick question. The original C++ — known then as C with classes — compiler wrote out standard C code that you then compiled for whatever your target was. This has a lot of advantages since C compilers are everywhere. Now we are seeing a similar approach to bring C23 to the world with
Cake
. Cake can translate C23 or other versions to C99 which you can then compile with normal compilers.
While the old C++ compiler, cfront, needed special steps to compile (since it was built using C++), you can build cake for Windows or Linux easily. However, it can also be built with emscripten and you can try it yourself
in your web browser
.
Curious about what’s new in C23? Well, some old stuff was removed and even more was deprecated. But the really interesting things are the additions which include decimal floating point types, integers with specified bit size, standard attributes, and many changes involving constants and initialization. You can find a summary over on
cppreference.com
. Of course, many of these things have been around in C++ or in common extensions for compilers for a long time, but this brings a lot of common practice together in standard C.
The only other thing to watch out for is that some features are really in the library. Compiling your code isn’t going to help with differences in libraries, although many of the changes are just bringing in functions that most libraries provide any way for things like POSIX compliance.
If you don’t want to dig around for an interesting example, the drop-down box at the top of the browser “playground” lets you pick among many examples. Just press the “Compile To” button and then you can compile the output to see the program execute.
The new standard does bring some complexity, but
still nothing like C++
. Why use C? Lots of reasons, not the least of which is that it is
energy efficient
. | 29 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512600",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T03:20:00",
"content": "I miss K&R C.. It was so easy to memorize, clean and tidy. *sigh* 😔",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6512645",
"author": "X",
"times... | 1,760,372,564.45429 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/how-the-bbc-still-sends-audio-to-transmitter-sites/ | How The BBC (Still) Sends Audio To Transmitter Sites | Jenny List | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"bbc",
"digital audio",
"NICAM"
] | Running a radio station is, on the face of it, a straightforward technical challenge. Build a studio, hook it up to a transmitter, and you’re good to go. But what happens when your station is not a single Rebel Radio-style hilltop installation, but a national chain of transmitter sites fed from a variety of city-based studios? This is the problem facing the BBC with their national UK FM transmitter chain, and since the 1980s it has been fed by a series of NICAM digital data streams. We mentioned back in 2016 how the ageing equipment had been replaced with a modern FPGA-based implementation without any listeners noticing, and now thanks to [Matt Millman],
we have a chance to see a teardown of the original 1980s units
. The tech is relatively easy to understand from a 2020s perspective, but it still contains a few surprises.
In each studio or transmitter site would have been a 19″ rack containing one of these units — a card frame with a collection of encoder or decoder cards. These are all custom-made by the BBC’s engineering department to a very high standard, and use period parts such as the familiar Z80 microprocessor and some Philips digital audio chips, which followers of high-end consumer audio may recognize. As you’d expect for a mission critical device, many of the functions are duplicated for redundancy, with their outputs compared to give warning of failures.
The surprise comes in the NICAM encoder and decoder — it’s a custom LSI chip made exclusively for the BBC. This indicates the budget available to the national broadcaster, and given that these units have in some cases been working for over 35 years, we’re guessing that the license payers got their money’s worth.
You can read about
the original switch-over in 2016
, and
a little more about NICAM
, too. | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512565",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T00:49:28",
"content": "NICAM never really came to the U.S. It was mostly a European thing with some uptake in the Asia-Pacific region as well:1.3.1 Nations and regions using NICAM public broadcastshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NI... | 1,760,372,564.331732 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/resin-cleanup-a-sticky-situation/ | Resin Cleanup: A Sticky Situation | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"resin",
"wood glue"
] | We’ll admit it. We like the results of resin 3D printing, but we don’t always care for the mess. We aren’t alone, and a common issue is to have drips of resin on your LCD screen — a potential disaster. You ought to have a screen protector, but yeah… you should back up hard drives, too. [Jessy] has the same problem and he has heard that you can easily clean cured resin from the screen using
wood glue
. Does it work? Check out the results of three glues in the video below.
We winced to see glue going on the screens. [Jessy] cured some resin on the screens deliberately for a test. He used Elmer’s wood glue, Gorilla wood glue, and Titebond II wood glue. While there is a bit of a price difference between the options, they are all fairly inexpensive.
After letting the glue cure for 24 hours, it should peel up and take the resin up with it. Getting under the corner to start peeling was challenging and the whole thing left a huge mess. In retrospect, [Jessy] mentioned it might be a good idea to put a tab under the glue while wet to provide a handle.
It probably doesn’t matter, though. Only the Gorilla glue grabbed any resin at all and even that wasn’t very effective. [Jessy] suggests using alcohol and a plastic scraper if you have this problem. We suggest a screen protector.
There are two upsides, though. First, the casting of some brands of wood glue made some interesting pieces that might have use in some other context. Second, the video comments have other ideas that might be worth trying including hot sponges and cheap material for screen protection.
Usually, we are more worried about getting
resin to stick
not unstick. If you are still on the fence about the mess versus rewards of resin printing, check out
our overview
. | 10 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512572",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2022-09-14T01:08:40",
"content": "I’m told sooner or later you’re going need a replacement LCD screen for your resin SLA printer, so make sure the printer manufacturer you choose makes them readily available. Case in-point, here is the repl... | 1,760,372,564.166825 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/inexpensive-reading-glasses-become-stereoscope/ | Inexpensive Reading Glasses Become Stereoscope | Jenny List | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"glasses",
"lenses",
"stereoscope"
] | It’s an unfortunate consequence of growing older, that no longer are you able to read the print on a SOT-23 package or solder a QFN without magnification. Your eyes inexorably start to fail, and to have any hope of continuing a set of reading glasses is required. We have this in common with [Niklas Roy], who noticed while shopping for cheap reading glasses that their lenses were of surprisingly good quality. The result of this observation was
a stereoscope made from card and a few euros worth of eyewear
.
In the tradition of [Niklas]’ work it has a high level of attention to detail, which manifests itself here in
a parametric web-based template generator
to produce a result tailored to your glasses. It’s a fairly straightforward trapezoid shape, with a compound lens made from two sets of glasses drilled and held back-to-back with zip ties.
It served as a project for a group of children, and of course because stereo cameras are a relative rarity he also investigated taking his own pictures by moving a smartphone for left and right eye perspectives. It seems the youngsters had a lot of fun.
These lenses hadn’t come up on our radar until now, but like many goodies in a dollar store they’re certainly something to take a look at. Maybe not as a stereoscope for everyone though,
some of us can’t see what the fuss is about
. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512539",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T22:16:00",
"content": "A few images for your perusal here…https://imgur.com/gallery/rrWei…. sorry Jen, not extra wide supersurround.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,372,564.382871 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/groundwater-management-of-a-much-neglected-lifeline/ | Groundwater: Management Of A Much Neglected Lifeline | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science"
] | [
"aquifer",
"groundwater",
"rain"
] | It seems obvious that if you dig or drill into the soil, at some point you will hit
groundwater
. Drill deep enough and you will reach an aquifer containing enormous amounts of fresh water. After this you can just pump water out of these wells and you will have fresh water aplenty. Or so was the thinking among many for the longest time. As enormous the fresh water reserves in the form of groundwater are – with most liquid fresh water being groundwater – we can literally empty them faster than that they’ll refill.
As the
Dust Bowl
disaster painfully showed in the 1930s and drought along with surface subsidence issues as in e.g.
California’s Central Valley
shows today is that we cannot simply use the soil and groundwater and expect no consequences. While the 19th century saw many fresh settlers to the West’s arid and semi-arid regions like California believe in the ‘
Rain follows the plow
‘ mysticism, the 20th century and these first few decades of the 21st century taught us that tilling the soil and drawing groundwater for irrigation does not change an arid climate into a lush one.
Perhaps ironically, even with increasing droughts, most human settlements use stormwater drainage and combined sewage systems to carry rainwater away, rather than letting the groundwater recharge naturally. Fortunately, more and more regions these days are seeing the necessity of managing groundwater.
Waste Not, Want Not
Drought monitor statistics for Germany on September 10th, 2022, showing the drought effects on multiple levels in the ground. (Credit:
UFZ
Drought Monitor)
How much one values rainwater and snow melt-off depends largely on how much one has of it. For someone like myself who grew up on a farm in the western regions of the Netherlands – amidst soggy clay and ditches that led straight to pumping stations – capturing rainwater wasn’t a concern, while finding ways to prevent flooding was more essential.
This equation changes completely when the rainwater your area receives is perhaps only barely enough to sustain that year’s crop, with irrigation from a nearby river, or from deep wells, being required to keep crops in the fields from dying. For many cultures over the centuries, the use of
dryland farming
has been essential to deal with an arid climate. What this means is to minimize evaporation by limited tilling of the soil, increasing spacing between crop rows to minimize competition for limited soil moisture, and growing crops or cultivars that are adapted to an arid climate.
Which is not to say that it’s not possible to grow just about any crop or the like in even a desert environment. For thousands of years now, humans have used irrigation to grow crops in places that otherwise would be completely off-limits. The same is also true for humans themselves, as we too require fresh water on a daily basis, requiring us to draw from the same rivers or groundwater as our crops.
Here the lesson is that the less fresh water is available, the more important it is to capture every last drop of rainwater, and to use it as sparingly as possible. Another essential consideration here is that even if drainage systems don’t immediately whisk the water away, soil structure is essential for allowing rainwater to soak into it. After a prolonged drought, the pores that normally exist between soil particles and that allow for moisture to reside between them will have mostly vanished.
The effect is that this super-dry, ultra-compacted soil will not easily absorb rainwater, which is perhaps ironically what enables
flash floods
. What one can do here is to give the soil more time to absorb the moisture, through the use of ponds,
swales
and similar structures in the landscape that prevent run-off and maximize the soak time of the soil. Not only will this increase the amount of moisture in the top level of the soil column, but more crucially assist in
groundwater recharging
.
That Sinking Feeling
Schematic of an aquifer showing confined zones, groundwater travel times, a spring and a well.
In addition to capturing rainwater and run-off from snowmelt for irrigation, drinking water and recharging groundwater levels, it’s increasingly common to inject treated water back into
aquifers
, rather than releasing it into rivers and other surface waters. A major benefit of this is that it helps to counteract the subsidence of the soil, which is a common issue when water is extracted faster from an aquifer than it replenishes itself.
Mexico City is an example of a
sinking city
that is suffering the consequences of overdrafting from the aquifer which it was built upon. As a result the city is sinking at a rate of more than than 15 centimeters per year, while water shortages keep increasing the pressure to draw ever more water from the aquifer. Possibly worse is overdrafting from an aquifer for a coastal region, as this can result in
saltwater intrusion
, where the salt water flows in and contaminates the fresh. The worse this becomes, the more likely that the aquifer may have to be abandoned completely, or require intensive treatments like desalination.
All of which should make it clear that aquifers, as well as groundwater in general, is a precious resource that should be treated carefully, so that it can be a sustainable resource. This leads us to another major risk factor, namely that of pollution.
Keeping It Clean
Groundwater contamination from a pit latrine. (Credit: CAWST)
Even though the soil matrix will act as a kind of filter, this tends to be only good enough to filter out larger particles. Pathogens, heavy metals and various chemicals may be contained in run-off water. In many regions the use of
septic drain fields
,
cesspits
and latrines is quite common, all of which risk introducing pathogens into the groundwater that may end up in the water retrieved from poorly sited wells.
Such types of
groundwater pollution
have led to the spread of disease and similar in the past, and continue to be a heated subject of debate. The practice of fracking for natural gas involves the injection of chemicals into the rock that often ends up in groundwater and has led to lawsuits and medical studies. Ultimately there is the dawning realization that groundwater is something we all end up sharing, not unlike the water in a public swimming pool.
To prevent pollution from rainwater run-off ending up in groundwater, the concept of
bioswales
has been introduced fairly recently. This iterates on the basic concept of swales by adding a filtering function, which would allow it to retain heavy metals, silt and debris. By picking specific plants to grow in these bioswales, this growth can act as a natural filter, while also allowing for debris to settle. Heavy metals would be mostly retained in the sediment that settles in these bioswales, allowing for periodical removal and replacement of this sediment for disposal.
In a study of an existing bioswale that has been in place in southern California for a few years,
Evans et al. (2018)
analyzed the rate at which zinc, lead, cobalt and manganese were retained in the bioswale’s soil. They found that a significant amount of these metals were sequestered.
A Shared Resource
Ultimately fresh water is a precious resource that, if managed carefully, can bring prosperity and health to not just crops and people, but also the environment in general. By using ponds, swales and other retention structures people in semi-arid and arid regions can optimize the small amounts of rainfall, while not burdening aquifers and nearby bodies of water too much, especially if combined with dryland farming.
By injecting stormwater run-off into aquifers, and letting it soak into the soil rather than carrying it away into drainage systems, the impact of droughts can be made significantly less severe, while preventing permanent damage from letting aquifers dry out. Finally, by preventing groundwater pollution, we can ensure that the water that we pump out of wells is not laced with heavy metals, pathogens and similar unpleasantness.
As long as we learn to accept that rain and plentiful groundwater aren’t things we can necessarily count on, and may require effort from our side to maintain or make optimal use of, things should work out fine. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512454",
"author": "Klaws",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T17:05:25",
"content": "TL;DR version: Venice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6512497",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T19:35:48",
"content":... | 1,760,372,564.272737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/heavy-engineering-hack-chat/ | Heavy Engineering Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, September 14 at noon Pacific for the
Heavy Engineering Hack Chat
with
Andy Oliver
!
Here at Hackaday, we focus mainly on engineering at the small end of the spectrum. Millimeter waves, nearly microscopic SMD components, nanoscale machines like MEMS accelerometers, and silicon chips with features that measure in the nanometer range. We’ve all become pretty good at wrapping our heads around problems at the wee end of the spectrum.
And while all that tiny stuff is great, there’s a whole, big world out there to explore, with big engineering to solve big problems. Think of things like dam spillways, lift bridges, and canal locks — big stuff that still has to move, and has to do it safely and efficiently. Those are problems that demand an entirely different way of thinking, and skills that not a lot of us have.
Andy Oliver works in the world of big, movable structures, designing control systems for them. He’ll drop by the Hack Chat to discuss the engineering that not only makes these structures work but also keeps them safe and reliable. If you’ve ever wondered how big things work, you won’t want to miss this one.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, September 14 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512465",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T17:47:16",
"content": "I recently saw a Pelton water wheel in person and was surprised to find that they balanced it by pouring lead behind the buckets. Also all the nuts were different sizes and it wasn’t finished evenly. Didn... | 1,760,372,564.49411 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/floppy-disk-sings-im-big-in-japan/ | Floppy Disk Sings: I’m Big In Japan | Al Williams | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Rants"
] | [
"e-signature",
"encrypted email",
"fax",
"floppy disk",
"japan",
"Rant"
] | The other day, a medical office needed my insurance card. I asked them where to e-mail it and they acted like I had offered them human flesh as an appetizer. “We don’t have e-mail! You have to bring it to us in person!” They finally admitted that they could take a fax and I then had to go figure out how to get a free one page fax sent over the Internet. Keep in mind, that I live in the fourth largest city in the United States — firmly in the top 100 largest cities in the world. I’m not out in the wilderness dealing with a country doctor.
I understand HIPAA and other legal and regulatory concerns probably inhibit them from taking e-mail, but other doctors and health care providers have apparently figured it out. But it turns out that the more regulations are involved in something, the more behind-the-times it is likely to be.
Case in Point
Photo by [S Migaj] via Pexels
I was recently reading that in Japan, government mandates means that people have to submit official documents on paper or using
floppy disks or CDROMs
. But nothing else. You can’t just upload your papers on the Internet. They are trying to change that, but in this day when most computers don’t have floppy drives and many no longer have optical drives, it seems strange you would insist on those formats.
But it isn’t just Japan. The article points out that South Korea just stopped using ActiveX controls on official websites. In China, if you hold on to a company’s “
chops
” — think of a
rubber stamp
that is an official signature — you can control the company even if you’ve been fired.
But, surely, not in the U.S., right? You might be surprised. Do you wonder why the IRS is behind on tax form processing? Sure, COVID-19 is the official reason. But the Washington Post recently did a look at how the agency
handles tax forms
. Stacks and stacks of paper are everywhere — even in the cafeteria. There’s no optical character recognition. A human being enters in all the data by hand. No kidding.
Why, Oh Why?
So why are we in this state of affairs? Governments move slowly, of course. I’m sure no one want to pay for the IRS or the Japanese government to upgrade their systems. Yet, you can imagine the cost savings if you had more electronic documents and OCR instead of outdated manual systems with antiquated equipment.
You might argue that people don’t know what’s possible, but I doubt that’s true today. We live in a world where even ordinary people use their smartphones to deposit checks and scan documents. You can’t tell me that no one in these organizations has even moderate computer literacy.
Then there’s fear coupled with misunderstanding. I used to have major companies call me to place orders for things and when you told them they could order with a credit card they would act about as shocked as the medical office staff. They were not going to put their super special credit card on the bad old Internet, no way! So they would read the number to a stranger on an insecure phone line and then what would I do? Type it into the order system on the Internet.
Why is this better than digital? (via Pixabay)
I joined a company a few years ago that was just about to roll out an electronic signature system. They were very proud of it and had a meeting to explain how wonderful it was. I couldn’t see how people were being authenticated, though, so I asked an inconvenient question. The premise was that if Alice got an e-mail for her signature, there would be a link in it and clicking it would sign the document. I asked what happens if I get into Alice’s e-mail. They assured me that wasn’t a problem.
I wasn’t satisfied. I said, “How does that work?” They couldn’t explain it to me. So I said, “So can you send an e-mail to sign something to the CIO? I want her to forward it to me and if I can’t sign it then I’ll go figure out why and I’ll leave you alone. ” Ten minutes later, I had signed the CIO’s name to something and the system was back at the drawing board.
It Can Be Better
But the point is this: people think that electronic documents are somehow insecure or bad. But they don’t have to be. There are many ways that you can authenticate people — digital certificates, a PIN code, and probably 143 more ways that I can’t think of. But just proving you have a link in an e-mail isn’t sufficient. That’s why banks often ask you questions about things they can find out about you like which car did you own or which address have you had in the past. Sure, someone highly motivated can figure that out, but it stops all but the most dedicated adversary.
I think our community might be a step ahead of most people in this area. We tend to trust digital documents. The days of giant catalogs and databook arriving in the mail are over, for better or worse. You are reading this on some sort of screen and not in a glossy four-color magazine. Most of us know how to send encrypted e-mails.
But we are the minority by a long shot. Try exchanging an encrypted e-mail with practically anyone. Find three non-technical people at your work who have a digital certificate. Try authorizing someone to get into a safety deposit box or close a real estate deal with no physical papers. Today, you probably can’t do any of those things.
I have a feeling some countries are better at this than others. How’s where you live? | 67 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512380",
"author": "Rog Fanther",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T14:09:33",
"content": "So so. Around here, one of the problems with certificates is that they expire. Surely some people will insist that is necessary, but there could be a way to just renew one online, instead of having to... | 1,760,372,564.925909 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/let-slip-the-chips-of-war/ | Let Slip The Chips Of War | Dave Rowntree | [
"News",
"Parts"
] | [
"components",
"Covid-19",
"passives",
"Russia-Ukraine",
"semiconductors",
"shortages"
] | We’re going to go out on a limb and predict that future history books will note that the decision to invade a sovereign nation straight after a worldwide pandemic wasn’t exactly the best timing. Turns out the global electronics shortage the pandemic helped to catalyze isn’t just affecting those of us with peaceful intentions, as the Russian war machine is having a few supply issues with the parts needed to build modern weapons and their associated control equipment.
As you might expect, many of these parts are electronic in nature, and in some cases they come from the same suppliers folks like us use daily. This
article from
POLITICO
includes an embedded spreadsheet, broken down by urgency
, complete with part numbers, manufacturers, and even the price Moscow expects to pay!
Chips from US-based firms such as Texas Instruments are particularly hard for the Kremlin to source.
So what parts are we talking about anyway? The cheapest chip on the top priority list is the Marvell ‘Alaska’ 88E1322 which is a dual Gigabit Ethernet PHY costing a mere $7.10 USD according to Moscow. The most expensive is the 10M04DCF256I7G, which is an Altera (now Intel) Max-10 series FPGA, at $1,101 USD (or 66,815 Rubles, for those keeping score).
But it’s not just chips that are troubling them, mil-spec D-sub connectors by Airborn are unobtainable, as are all classes of basic passive parts, resistors, diodes, discrete transistors. Capacitors are especially problematic (aren’t they always). A whole slew of Analog Devices chips, as well as many from Maxim, Micrel and others. Even tiny logic chips from Nexperia.
Of course, part of this is by design. Tightened sanctions prevent Russia from purchasing many of these parts directly, which is intended to make continued aggression as economically unpleasant as possible. But as the
POLITICO
article points out, it’s difficult to prevent some intermediaries from ‘helping out’ without the West knowing. After all, once a part hits the general market, it is next to impossible to guarantee where it will eventually get soldered down.
Thanks to [Kim Tae] for the tip! | 71 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512334",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T11:10:54",
"content": "“Never get involved in a land war in Asia”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6512336",
"author": "justsayin",
"timestamp": "2022-09-1... | 1,760,372,564.773161 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/the-philly-maker-faire-is-back-and-wants-your-hacks/ | The Philly Maker Faire Is Back And Wants Your Hacks | Tom Nardi | [
"cons"
] | [
"maker faire",
"mini maker faire",
"Philadelphia Maker Faire"
] | After two years of waiting out the COVID-19 pandemic, the
Philadelphia Maker Faire is officially back for 2022
. The one-day event will take place on Saturday, the 15th of October, from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm at the Independence Seaport Museum.
We don’t have a schedule or full list of what will be on display this far out, but
given what we saw during our 2019 visit
, we’re confident you’ll get your tickets worth. While we keenly felt the loss of the flagship Maker Faires in California and New York, we can take some solace in the fact that their absence has given these smaller Faires a chance to move in and grow in ways that might not have been possible before.
For those looking to take an active role in what’s often been called the “Greatest Show & Tell on Earth”, organizers will be
accepting proposals until September 15th
for individuals, groups, and companies that want to share their creations with attendees. Participation is free, so long as you aren’t trying to sell anything, and offers a fantastic way to show off those pandemic projects. That said, proposals aren’t limited to just hardware projects — artwork, live performances, and workshops will also be considered. Basically, if it’s something the STEAM crowd would be interested in checking out, consider it fair game.
If you can spare some time after seeing everything that will be on display at the Maker Faire, the
Independence Seaport Museum
itself sounds like a pretty fascinating place to check out. Beyond the exhibits and collection of maritime artifacts, the Seaport also offers the chance to take tours aboard a pair of unique vessels: the USS
Olympia
saw service in the Spanish–American and First World Wars, and USS
Becuna
is one of only eight surviving WWII Balao-class submarines currently available for public viewing.
Planning on attending the 2022 Philadelphia Maker Faire? Maybe even presenting? Let us know in the comments. Who knows, you might just run into a Hackaday writer in the wild and score yourself some coveted Wrencher stickers. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512079",
"author": "Hilary B. Bisenieks",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T16:35:22",
"content": "the seaport museum is great, and their working boat shop is especially great",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6512113",
"author": "ame... | 1,760,372,564.814344 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/robotic-surgeons-are-showing-hints-of-one-day-outperforming-humans/ | Robotic Surgeons Are Showing Hints Of One Day Outperforming Humans | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Medical Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"robot",
"robotic surgery",
"surgeon",
"surgery"
] | When it comes to fields that are considered the most complex of human endeavours, the most typically cited are those of rocket science and brain surgery. Indeed, to become a surgeon is to qualify in a complex, ever-changing, and high-performance field, with a pay scale and respect to match.
The tools of surgery have changed over time, with robotic assistants becoming commonplace in recent decades. Now the latest robots are starting to outperform human surgeons in some ways. Let’s look at how that’s been achieved, and what it means for the future of medicine.
Robots With The Moves
Robotic surgery has been in development since the 1980s, when basic robots were used to help out with simple surgical tasks. Robots offer plenty of advantages that make them ideal for surgical purposes. They can hold tools with excellent positional accuracy, don’t suffer from fatigue, and their manipulators can work on much smaller scales then human hands. This is of particular benefit when doing keyhole surgeries, where tiny robotic implements can be inserted into a patient along with a camera. This allows surgeons to operate while making minimally-sized incisions in a patient, improving recovery outcomes and reducing the likelihood of any infections.
Moving pegs on a board is a typical way human surgeons practice with robotic surgical manipulators. However, one recent study has shown that the robot can achieve the task faster under autonomous control than with a human making the moves. Credit:
Research paper
, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering
Traditionally, robotic surgical apparatuses, like the well-known
Da Vinci robot
, are used under direct control from human surgeons. They have the benefits of filtering out tiny tremors common in human movement, and also offer control of surgical instruments with more range of motion than is possible with the human hands alone. Fundamentally, though, the robot is under full remote control, with a human directing the exact movements of the tools that operate on the patient.
However, recent research has explored adding autonomous control to robotic surgery systems.
One study
explored using a surgical robot to achieve a simple task, where triangular pegs were transferred from one side of a pegboard to another. The pegboard is a common training tool used by human surgeons, which teaches fine motor control, precision, and speed. The study explored three variations on the peg movement task, a one-handed method, a two-handed method, and a method involving transferring pegs from one hand to the other before placing them back on the board.
A human surgeon controlling the Da Vinci robot system was able to achieve the one-handed task faster than the fully automated system created by the research team. However, the two-handed tasks were more quickly achieved under fully autonomous control system.
Of course, moving pegs around a board is simple compared to surgery on humans. Tracking rigid objects of known size and shape is relatively simple given today’s machine vision systems. Still, it shows that the processing power and control systems are now available to best a human at such a task, and that it’s a fruitful area for experimentation and research.
If you’re familiar with the DaVinci robot surgery system, it may be from the classic grape surgery video that went viral online.
However, other teams are going beyond simple standardized training tasks.
A research group from John Hopkins University
trialled autonomous robot surgery on live pigs. This involved rejoining severed intestines, in what is called an intestinal anastomosis procedure. It’s an incredibly challenging process, requiring surgeons to carefully suture two sections of intestine back together without damaging the incredibly soft tissue.
Early tests involved performing the surgery outside the body, with the robotic system able to achieve the procedure with the assistance of human doctors. Further upgrades enabled the surgery to be achieved via keyhole methods inside the pig’s body. The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, was able to complete two-thirds of the required stitches by itself, with the remaining completed with guidance from the the human surgical team. It’s an impressive feat for a robot to achieve, and it suggests that future developments could allow robots to work alone in future decades.
Right now, it’s our superior eyes and brains that are keeping human surgeons ahead of the game. The fact is that many surgeries are already achieved with robotic instruments. Once the robots get superior vision systems and intelligence, it may be that they outcompete human surgeons entirely. As always, time will tell. | 31 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512051",
"author": "12AU76L6GC",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T14:55:42",
"content": "I’m alive today because of the daVinci robot and brilliant surgeons at the world’s highest rated surgical center. It’s way, way beyond the grape example for minimally invasive surgery. They have cutte... | 1,760,372,565.105815 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/finally-we-can-watch-the-deere-cracking-def-con-talk/ | Finally We Can Watch The Deere Cracking Def Con Talk | Jenny List | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"DEF CON",
"dmca",
"john deere",
"right to repair"
] | A few weeks ago, some tantalizing social media posts emerged from a Def Con talk, in which [Sick Codes] broke into the screen control unit for a John Deere tractor live on stage, and proceeded to play a special Deere-themed
DOOM
level upon it. At the time there was nothing more to go on, but
we’re pleased to find out that the whole talk has been put online
.
The talk starts with an introduction to the topic, to the basics of the control units within the machine and to the various different ages of Deere screen unit. We find that the earlier machines, which are still at work on farms worldwide, rely on outdated Windows CE versions, though the very latest screens run a Linux variant.
It’s one of these last screens to which he turns his attention, and we’re treated to an in-depth look at some of its secrets. After a lot of dead ends and learning exercises the final result is distilled into a pogo pin adapter for the hardware part, and a simple enough
cron
job to bypass one of Deere’s defenses by keeping the filesystem writable so a file can be updated. There’s a bit more detail about the special
DOOM
level too, as a special bonus.
You can see
our original mention of this talk
, or
read some of our past Deere coverage
.
Thanks [Taylor Finley] for the tip! | 12 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512028",
"author": "Your comment is awaiting moderation",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T12:34:21",
"content": "Down with the Deere !! Very much looking forwards to playing Doom on my 1974 International Harvester.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,565.203445 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/what-every-pcb-designer-needs-to-know-about-track-impedance-with-eric-bogatin/ | What Every PCB Designer Needs To Know About Track Impedance With Eric Bogatin | Dave Rowntree | [
"hardware"
] | [
"characteristic impedance",
"Eric Bogatin",
"Monte Carlo",
"pcb",
"tdr",
"transmission lines"
] | PCB design starts off being a relatively easy affair — you create a rectangular outline, assign some component footprints, run some traces, and dump out some Gerber files to send to the fab. Then as you get more experienced and begin trying harder circuits, dipping into switching power supplies, high speed digital and low noise analog, things get progressively more difficult; and we haven’t even talked about RF or microwave design yet, where things can get just plain weird from the uninitiated viewpoint. [Robert Feranec] is no stranger to such matters, and he’s teamed up with one of leading experts (and one of this scribe’s personal electronics heroes) in signal integrity matters, [Prof. Eric Bogatin] for a
deep dive into the how and why of controlled impedance design
.
RG58 cable construction. These usually are found in 50 Ω and less commonly these days 75Ω variants
One interesting part of the discussion is why is 50 Ω so prevalent? The answer is firstly historical. Back in the 1930s, coaxial cables needed for radio applications, were designed to minimize transmission loss, using reasonable dimensions and polyethylene insulation, the impedance came out at 50 Ω. Secondarily, when designing PCB traces for a reasonable cost fab, there is a trade-off between power consumption and noise immunity.
As a rule of thumb, lowering the impedance increases noise immunity at the cost of more power consumption, and higher impedance goes the other way. You need to balance this with the resulting trace widths, separation and overall routing density you can tolerate.
Another fun story was when Intel were designing a high speed bus for graphical interfaces, and created a simulation of a typical bus structure and parameterized the physical constants, such as the trace line widths, dielectric thickness, via sizes and so on, that were viable with low-cost PCB fab houses. Then, using a Monte Carlo simulation to run 400,000 simulations, they located the sweet spot. Since the via design compatible with the cheap fab design rules resulted often in a via characteristic impedance that came out quite low, it was recommended to reduce the trace impedance from 100 Ω to 85 Ω differential, rather than try tweak the via geometry to bring it up to match the trace. Fun stuff!
We admit, the video is from the start of the year and
very
long, but for such important basic concepts in high speed digital design, we think it’s well worth your time. We certainly picked up a couple of useful titbits!
Now we’ve got the PCB construction nailed, why circle back and go
check those cables
? | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512004",
"author": "fghrtfhrtf",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T08:52:44",
"content": "tell me why path si small, not fat if it is possible?many times i see small path when is possible change it to bigest , bigest path less impedance",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,372,565.155286 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/11/3d-printing-for-textile-work/ | 3D Printing For Textile Work | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"fabric",
"textiles"
] | While it isn’t for everyone, some of the best creators we know are experts at working with textiles. While the art is ancient, it isn’t easy and requires clever tools. [Lauren] collected a few 3D prints that can help you with
knitting, crochet, and even a knitting loom
.
Some of the designs are pretty basic like the yarn bowl, or pretty easy to figure out like the simple machine for re-spooling wool. We were frankly surprised that you can 3D print a crochet hook, although the post does mention that breaking them is a real problem.
We were really impressed though, with the
sock knitting machine
. There are actually a few of these out there, and you can see a similar one in the video below. Of course, like a RepRap printer, it needs “vitamins” in the form of metal rods, fasteners, and the like. There’s also a portable knitting loom which looked interesting.
We aren’t adept enough with fabric arts to know if these tools are serious contenders compared to commercial products, but we have to admit the sock knitting machine looks like it could be. We recently saw a
sophisticated loom
, although that might be a bit more than most people need. We have looked at open-source
knitting machines
, too. Of course, if you’d rather not create with textiles, you can
always 3D print on them
, instead. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512019",
"author": "dave",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T11:25:45",
"content": "When touring NZ south island many many museums would have not just the one but a collection of different types of hand cranked sock making machine.Beautifully complicated well built metal pieces of engineeri... | 1,760,372,565.242917 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/11/if-the-blade-sees-its-shadow-its-another-64th-of-accuracy/ | If The Blade Sees Its Shadow, It’s Another 64th Of Accuracy | Matthew Carlson | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"LED hack",
"miter saw",
"shadow line"
] | If you’ve bought a miter saw in the past few years, you might have noticed the LED “laser” that came with it. The goal was to show where on the piece the saw was going to cut. But over a year or two, you might have found the laser to have drifted or skewed into a crooked line. [Fisher] decided that his after-market laser wasn’t entirely accurate enough and
added a shadow line instead
. (Video, embedded below the break.)
The blade has a thickness (known as kerf), and with a laser to one side, you can only accurately cut on one side of the line. A shadow line works differently. By shining a line at the top of the blade, you get a mark where the blade will cut precisely. You can also see your marks as the laser doesn’t shine over them. Previously, [Fisher] had tried to use LED strips, but after a comment suggested it, he found a sewing light on a gooseneck. It worked great as a small compact light fitting the blade housing. After some quick modifications, hot glue, and duct tape, the light was installed, and the wires were routed while still allowing the saw its full range of motion.
The result is impressive, with a clear shadow on even darker hardwoods. Just the few test cuts he made seemed entirely accurate. Of course, you can always go deeper down
the hole of accuracy and measurement
. But overall, [Fisher] has a great little mod that speeds up his workflow more accurately. | 43 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511955",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T02:06:44",
"content": "What’s a 64th in Olympic-sized swimming pools?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6511956",
"author": "Rog Fanther",
"timestamp": "2022... | 1,760,372,565.397939 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/11/hackaday-links-september-11-2022/ | Hackaday Links: September 11, 2022 | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"arduino",
"coronal mass ejection",
"cyborg insects",
"moxie",
"solar orbiter",
"solar power",
"wonderwall"
] | Good news out of Mars from the little lunchbox that could — in the seven times that MOXIE has run since it arrived in February 2021,
it has reached its target production of six grams of oxygen per hour
, which is in line with the output of a modest tree here on Earth. The research team which includes MOXIE engineers report that although
the solid oxide electrolysis machine
has shown it can produce oxygen at almost any time or day of the Martian scale, they have not shown what MOXIE can do at dawn or dusk, when the temperature changes are substantial, but they say they have ‘an ace up (their) sleeve’ that will let them do that. We can’t wait to see what they mean.
In other, somewhat funnier space news — early last Sunday morning, the ESA’s Solar Orbiter was cruising by Venus as part of a gravity-assist maneuver to get the Orbiter closer to the Sun. Two days before the Orbiter was to reach its closest point to the spacious star,
it spat a coronal mass ejection in the general direction of both Venus and the Orbiter
(dibs on
that
band name), as if to say ‘boo’. Fortunately, the spacecraft is designed to withstand such slights, but the same cannot be said for Venus — these events have their way with Venus’ atmosphere, depleting it of gasses.
Is this not the most Hackaday-esque thing you’ve ever heard of?
A solar-powered, Arduino-driven cockroach
. Not a robot, an actual cockroach with a backpack. Why? Cyborg insects for urban search and rescue missions, obviously. We’d make some quip like ‘all it needs is a Nixie tube’, but in all seriousness, that would just weigh them down needlessly.
So anyway, here’s (an ‘Arduino guitar device’ playing)
Wonderwall
. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511948",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T00:18:38",
"content": "Won’t somebody please think of the childre- I mean plane- I mean cockroaches :(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6511961",
"author": "Truth",
"tim... | 1,760,372,565.445873 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/13/with-a-little-heat-printed-parts-handle-vacuum-duty/ | With A Little Heat, Printed Parts Handle Vacuum Duty | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts",
"Science"
] | [
"3D printed parts",
"post-processing",
"vacuum",
"vacuum degassing"
] | We don’t have to tell the average Hackaday reader that desktop 3D printing has been transformative for our community, but what might not be as obvious is the impact the technology has had on the scientific community. As explained in
Thermal Post-Processing of 3D Printed Polypropylene Parts for
Vacuum Systems
by [Pierce Mayville], [Aliaksei Petsiuk], and [Joshua Pearce]
, the use of printed plastic parts, especially when based on open source designs, can lead to huge cost reductions in the production of scientific hardware.
More specifically, the authors wanted to examine the use of 3D printing components to be used in a vacuum. Parts produced with filament-based printers tend to be porous, and as such, are not suitable for fittings or adapters which need to be pumped down to below one atmosphere. The paper goes on to explain that there are coatings that can be used to seal the printed parts, but that they can outgas at negative pressures.
The solution proposed by the team is exceptionally simple: after printing their desired parts in polypropylene on a Lulzbot Taz 6, they simply hit them with a standard consumer heat gun. With the temperature set at ~400 °C, it took a little under a minute for the surface of take on a glossy appearance — the result reminds us of an
ABS print smoothed with acetone vapor
.
As the part is heated, the surface texture visibly changes. The smoothed parts performed far better in vacuum testing.
In addition to the heat treatment, the team also experimented with increasing degrees of infill overlap in the slicer settings. The end result is that parts printed with a high overlap and then heat treated were able to reliably handle pressures as low as 0.4 mTorr. While the paper admits that manually cooking your printed parts with a heat gun isn’t exactly the ideal solution for producing vacuum-capable components, it’s certainly a promising start and deserves further study. | 40 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512357",
"author": "shinsukke",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T12:56:24",
"content": "How good is OpenSCAD?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6512366",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T13:31:53",
... | 1,760,372,565.324183 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/testing-an-inexpensive-cnc-spindle/ | Testing An Inexpensive CNC Spindle | Bryan Cockfield | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"AliExpress",
"cnc",
"cost",
"price",
"spindle",
"testing",
"tool holder",
"vibration"
] | The old saying “you get what you pay for” is a cautionary cliché, but is directly contrary to several other common sayings. In the case of [Spikee]’s planned CNC machine build, he took the more adventurous idiom of “no risk, no reward” to heart when
he purchased these spindles for the machine from AliExpress
. While the delivered product seemed fine, there were some problems that needed investigations.
Upon delivery of the spindle, everything seemed to work correctly out-of-the-box. Even the variable frequency drive, which was programmed at the factory, was working properly. But at around 8000 rpm the machine would begin shaking. The suspected part causing the vibration was the tool holder, so after checking the machine’s runout and also using a specialized vibration sensor this was confirmed to be the case.
Luckily [Spikee] was able to get a refund on the tool holders since they were out of spec, but still has a quite capable spindle on his hands for an excellent price. Without some skills in troubleshooting he might have returned the entire machine unnecessarily. If you are looking for some other ideas in setting up an inexpensive CNC machine, you might also like to look at
BLDC motors from a remote control vehicle
. | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512280",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T06:24:17",
"content": "Congrats for going through the missing quality check himself, learning things on the way, adjusting / correcting (and getting refund) some parts, which results in a good quality tool for a fraction of the cos... | 1,760,372,565.521358 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/equalize-your-listening-with-hifiscan/ | Equalize Your Listening With HiFiScan | Jenny List | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"equalisation",
"frequency response"
] | Audiophiles will go to such extents to optimize the quality of their audio chain that they sometimes defy parody. But even though the law of diminishing returns eventually becomes a factor there is something in maintaining a good set of equipment. But what if your audio gear is a little flawed, can you fix it electronically? Enter
HiFiScan
, a piece of Python software to analyse audio performance by emitting a range of frequencies and measuring the result with a microphone.
This is hardly a new technique, and it’s one which PA engineers have used for a long time to tune out feedback resonances, but an easy tool bringing it to the domestic arena is well worth a look. HiFiScan is a measuring tool so it won’t magically correct any imperfections in your system, however it can export data in a format suitable for digital effects packages.
Naturally its utility is dependent on the quality of the hardware it’s used with, but the decent quality USB microphone used in the examples seems to give good enough results. We see it used in a variety of situations, of which perhaps the most surprising is a set of headphones that have completely different characteristics via Bluetooth as when wired.
If audio engineering interests you, remember we have an ongoing series:
Know Audio
. | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512255",
"author": "Or does it loop back around more like a record?",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T03:44:12",
"content": "When your audio setup is that good that you defy parody, does that mean the audio quality is even better?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,565.587235 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/blue-origin-loses-rocket-gains-abort-system-test/ | Blue Origin Loses Rocket, Gains Abort System Test | Tom Nardi | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"Blue Origin",
"commercial space",
"New Shepard",
"suborbital"
] | Even if you’re just making a brief hop over the Kármán line to gain a few minutes of weightlessness, getting to space is hard. Just in case any of their engineers were getting complacent, Blue Origin just got a big reminder of that fact this afternoon with the
destruction of their New Shepard 3 (NS3) rocket during a suborbital research flight
.
But while the rocket itself was lost, the New Shepard’s automated abort systems were able to push the capsule
H
. G. Wells
away from the fireball, saving the dozens of scientific experiments which had been loaded onto the un-crewed vehicle. While there’s been no public word yet on the condition of these experiments, it’s reasonable to assume that at least some portion of them can be re-flown in the future — a fact that will likely come as a great relief to the researchers who designed them. It will be interesting to see who picks up the tab for the do-over flight;
while launch insurance is a must-have for billion dollar satellites
, it seems unlikely these small suborbital experiments would have been covered under a similar policy.
A spurt of flame can be seen in the otherwise invisible exhaust moments before engine failure.
We’re also still in the dark about what caused the in-flight breakup of NS3, other than the fact that the engine was clearly sputtering in the seconds before it blew apart. This could be a sign that the engine’s nominal fuel-to-oxidizer ratio was faltering, or perhaps even indicative of foreign debris becoming dislodged and burning in the combustion chamber. But really, without official word from Blue Origin, it’s impossible to say what happened.
This is especially true when you consider that we’re talking about a vehicle that’s pushing the envelope to begin with. Remember, the New Shepard is a reusable booster, and NS3 is specifically a veteran of eight flights — with all but one of them taking the booster above the 100 kilometer altitude, which is generally accepted to be the boundary of space.
For those worried that celebrities and assorted millionaires will no longer have access to space, fear not.
Blue Origin’s crewed flights
have flown exclusively on the newer NS4 and its associated capsule
First Step
. This does however mean that Blue Origin no longer has a spare booster on which to fly commercial payloads, potentially putting into jeopardy any semblance of scientific value the program may have had. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512249",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-09-13T02:29:04",
"content": "8 previous flights, so, it’s the old New Shepard.B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6512265",
"author": "Als",
"... | 1,760,372,565.6379 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/the-hunt-for-a-rare-version-of-ibms-os-2/ | The Hunt For A Rare Version Of IBM’s OS/2 | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ibm",
"os/2",
"slovenia"
] | Slovenian OS/2 Warp 4 was a popular OS choice in that European country back in the day, but
could the Slovenian Computer Museum lay their hands on a copy
? In that question lies a bit of detective work and some luck.
There’s an old gag, about how this is finally the year of the Linux desktop. But oddly back in the ’90s it
almost
seemed possible, because alongside Microsoft Windows there were a host of other players that just
might
have become challengers. Foremost among them was IBM’s OS/2, a desktop PC operating system that could very much give Windows a run for its money. It could even run 16-bit Windows applications thanks to the code-sharing deal between the two companies dating back to the DOS days. Big Blue were so anxious to take their OS into new markets that they localized it into languages which Microsoft hadn’t touched, of which Slovenian was one.
But a couple of decades later, could a copy of this rare operating system version be found? While it may still lurk on a dusty shelf in an IT office somewhere it’s proved elusive, and online sources have dried up. The quest for it makes interesting reading for anyone with an interest in that period of retrocomputing, and finally ended up at the Slovenian company which had performed the localisation. This resulted in a copy of the OS, but not of the media, box, or paperwork. It yielded the fascinating discovery that IBM had localized the Windows 3.1-derived components as well as their own code, something that Microsoft had never done.
So do you have a boxed Slovenian OS/2 Warp 4 on a dusty shelf? Someone at the
Slovenian Computer History Museum
might like to see it. Meanwhile it’s a surprise to find that OS/2
is still supported
. | 40 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512149",
"author": "Bryan Baker (@XBrav)",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T20:18:18",
"content": "It’s weird where you can find copies of this stuff. I got a copy of OS/2 Warp fully boxed from a gas compression station in Canada (It was used to run Factorylink at one point, along with a D... | 1,760,372,566.676463 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/arduino-nano-powers-reverse-polish-notation-calculator/ | Arduino Nano Powers Reverse Polish Notation Calculator | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"arduino",
"calculators",
"retro calculator"
] | There’s something about Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) and the calculators that use it. It calls to mind a time when a calculator was a serious tool, and not just a throwaway toy. Created in the legacy of such calculators by HP and Texas Instruments,
[Simon Boak] shows off his SB116, sporting an Arduino Nano under the hood
. It’s a fully custom design, with a hand-built metal case, a custom PCB for the keyboard, and
a tiny OLED display
for maximum retro green goodness.
The impetus for this build was to replace a particular calculator, a well-used TI Programmer, that’s useful for working with 6502 assembly. The SB116 supports binary, octal, decimal, and hex; and boasts some downright useful functions — AND, NOT, OR, XOR, and bitshifts.
The source code is available
, but you’re on your own for the case and keyboard. And for maximized retro faux-nostalgia, [Simon] designed a box that would have looked right at home on an 80s store shelf.
Stick around for
more retro-modern takes on calculators
, or
tales of repairing a genuine vintage model
. | 51 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512128",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T18:45:25",
"content": "Yay! The world needs more RPN!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6512135",
"author": "rclark",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,566.765632 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/12/git-intro-for-hardware-hackers/ | Git Intro For Hardware Hackers | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"how-to",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"Git",
"vcs",
"version control"
] | Git is a wonderful tool that can multiply your project’s impact, or make your project easier to manage by an order of magnitude. Some of us hackers don’t yet know how to use command-line Git, but a relatable example of why a certain tool would be useful might be a good start. Today, I’d like to give you a Git crash course – showing you why and how to put a KiCad PCB into a Git repository, later to be shared with the world.
KiCad works wonderfully with Git. The schematic and PCB files of KiCad are human-readable, especially when compared to other PCB file formats. KiCad creates different files for different purposes, each of them with a well-defined role, and you can make sense of every file in your project folder. What’s more, you can even modify KiCad files in a text editor! This is exactly the kind of use case that Git fits like a glove.
Not Just For Software Developers
What’s Git about, then? Fundamentally,
Git
is a tool that helps you keep track of code changes in a project, and share these changes with each other. Intended for Linux kernel development as its first target, this is what it’s been designed for, but it’s flexibility extends far beyond software projects. We hardware hackers can make use of it in a variety of ways – we can store PCB and other design software files, blog articles, project documentation, personal notes, configuration files and whatever else that even vaguely fits the Git modus operandi.
Naturally, it’s important that these files are stored in a safe and failproof manner.
The first benefit you will get from using Git is a backup of your project. In fact, if you upload your git changes somewhere, you get two extra copies of your project – one stored in your local
.git
folder, and one uploaded to a place like GitHub or GitLab. In fact, a project stored in Git with an online mirror conforms to
the 3-2-1 backup principle
automatically. What’s more – you get historical backups within arm’s reach. Have you redesigned your PCB long ago, and now urgently need to refer to an earlier version? As long as you’ve been keeping your changes in Git, they’re a single command away.
Many people also store configuration files in Git – you might’ve heard of this practice being referred to as
dotfiles.
Doing that helps you keep track of all configuration changes you make. If you’ve ever debugged a complex piece of software (say, a webserver) by recombining parameters in its configuration file, you’ll know how painful it can be when you forget a change that used to work – and losing a meticulously tailored configuration file is pain on a whole different level. With a few Git commands under your belt, you avoid a world of pain you might’ve never known you could avoid.
Often, we hackers need each other’s help – and for such cases, Git’s collaboration capabilities are second to none. Say, you find yourself working on a PCB project with a fellow hacker across the globe. With Git, you only need one command to upload your latest changes, and your colleague needs one command to download them. If you both have made changes in a way that they conflict (say, edited the same footprint in a different way), Git has a rich toolkit for changeset conflict resolution, freeing up precious time you both could instead spend arguing about high-level design problem.
Hacker, Meet Git – Git, Meet Hacker
For a start – you have a PCB project, and you’ve
installed a Git shell
on your OS of choice. I also assume you know your terminal’s basics – moving from directory to directory and opening files, we won’t need much more. Git needs a few small variables configured before you can start – let’s get that sorted out, and use that as an opportunity to test that
git
functions in your console of choice, too.
For tracking your changes, Git wants to know your name and email – these don’t have to be real. If you push your changes to GitHub/GitLab/etc, both the name and the email are going to be accessible to anyone who can download the repository contents from where you uploaded them, which is to say, usually anyone. I use my nickname and my old public-facing email address for that, for collaboration and “contact me about this project” purposes – you can do the same, or just use the John Doe defaults if you’ll never upload. Here are the commands you should run,
taken from here
:
git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com
Being
--global
, these changes only need to be done once on each machine you use for Git work. In addition to these two, it helps to let Git know which text editor you prefer for making quick changes – those will be called for every so often. On Linux, you might find that your default editor for git commit is already set to Vi – if you don’t know what
:wq!
stands for, feel free to run run
git config --global core.editor nano
for a more friendly option. On Windows, you’ll want to
do things a bit differently.
Now, you’re all set to start. In your terminal, move to the folder where your PCB project is stored. Type
git init
and press Enter. That’s it – your project folder is now a Git repository!
Adding Your Changes
From here, Git doesn’t yet keep track of your project files. Run
git status
, and see a bunch of files marked as “untracked”.
git status
helpfully tells you what to do to start tracking them – in fact, this command does a fair bit of handholding for Git newcomers, as you can see from the output. Let’s add the files we care about – that is, everything but the
.kicad_prl
file and the
-backups/
directory!
$ git add jolly_wrencher.svg
$ git add jolly_wrencher.kicad_mod
$ git add jolly_wrencher_pcb.kicad_pro
$ git add jolly_wrencher_pcb.kicad_pcb
$ git add jolly_wrencher_pcb.kicad_sch
$ git status
These files have been added to the list that Git is watching, but they’re not yet worked into the project’s Git history in a way that matters. For that, we need to make a commit, which registers a group of file changes. Starting a repository like this, you’ll usually do an “initial” commit – for that, you can run
git commit -m "Initial commit"
, where the
-m
parameter is a human-readable message describing what the changes mean. You can also do
git commit
and write the message in a separate editor – see what’s more comfortable for you. Since the files weren’t previously committed, they will be stored in their entirety.
A Bit Of Commit-ment
A commit is a “unit of work” of sorts, a way to group changes logically. You can navigate between commits in your project’s history as different stages of your project’s development, separate some commit-contained tweaks into a different branch so that you can have multiple different versions of your project coexisting seamlessly, transfer commits between repositories, export and email them, and so much more.
It makes sense to hold logically distinct changes in different commits. Say, you improve silkscreen on your PCB, and you also add a license file. First, you add your
.kicad_pcb
file and commit it with “silkscreen: added pinouts” message; then, you add your
LICENSE.txt
file and commit it as “added license”. This helps you overview your project’s history, track mistakes down, and a myriad of other things.
If you run
git log
, you will see the list of commits. Using their hash, you can move between commits when you need an older version of your project. For that, do
git checkout HASHCHARS
, where “HASHCHARS” is at least seven first characters (can be more!) of your commit hash. To get back to your project’s latest state, do
git checkout HEAD
.
Don’t Need To Track Everything
git status
still shows us the
.kicad_prl
and the backup directory that we don’t need to track – these two don’t contain meaningful changes. For ignoring these two kinds of files, create a
.gitignore
file (name starting with a dot) in your project’s main directory, and put these two entries in it:
*.kicad_prl
*-backups/
As you can see, you can do some very simple pattern matching there, but you could also put the actual project file names – I didn’t want to type them out, and the more generic version will be handy if you want to copy-paste.
git status
will already cease showing these files, and as you add and commit the
.gitignore
file, these two entries will stay. Want a KiCad-specific gitignore file that covers most cases you’ll encounter?
GitHub offers one
.
Tracking binary files in Git makes your project folder grow in a way you might not expect
Git doesn’t understand binary files – it’s designed for human-readable text files that change in a meaningful way. KiCad PCB files fit that criteria – a whole lot of other files do not. Thing is, each version of a binary file will indefinitely remain as a copy inside your
.git
folder, staying long after you’ll have updated the binary file with a new version. You don’t want to store a
.zip
that changes frequently in your project’s git repository, and you don’t want to store gerber files there, either. It just takes up extra space and time.
Extra Features At No Cost
The versioning capabilities of git come handy in PCB development, and there’s plenty of niceties that make it even more comfortable to use. For instance, if you want to move between project versions quicker, you can attach tags to commits. Did you develop a v2 of your PCB, but still need to refer to v1 files for customer support reasons? Do
git tag v2
to tag the current commit as “v2”, and do
git tag commit v1 HASHCHARS
pointing to a commit where your PCB was still at v1. Now, you can do
git checkout v1
and
git checkout v2
to jump between versions as needed.
Let’s say, hypothetically, you’ve committed a
README.md
file – a good practice (feel free to use
my PCB README template!
). Let’s also say, for the sake of the argument, that you’ve just added some images into your project directory and linked them into the README. Say, you’ve also edited the README to add some completely unrelated changes that belong in a separate commit – perhaps, you’ve changed a connector on the PCB and reflected that in README. How do you separate logically different changes that you’ve just made to the same file? Use
git add --patch README.md
to interactively pick and choose which parts of the file get added.
Committed something and want to tweak the last commit’s message? Use
git commit --amend
. Need to add/remove/tweak files in the last commit? Add your changes and
commit --amend
. Did some changes to a file and want to get rid of them instead of adding? Use
git checkout path/to/file
– you’ll lose these changes as the file will revert to its currently tracked version. Oh, you can also use
--patch
with
git checkout
for partial reverting of changes.
Git has helpful subcommands aplenty. If you want to see current changes to your project files in console, use
git diff
. Did you add some of the changes already and they won’t show up? Use
git diff --cached
. Both of these commands accept filenames for more targeted overview. There’s a lot of complexity Git is capable of, being a tool viable for the largest distributed software development efforts. You actually don’t need to use any of the fancy features if you don’t want to, either.
Next Step: Upload
As you can see, I haven’t covered uploading to an online repository or working with others; these are topics with quite a few important caveats. I’d also like to cover GitLab as well as GitHub, so that you’re not locked into a single ecosystem. I haven’t covered branches, either – a typical PCB project doesn’t need that, but we might talk about that in a future installment. Still, you can learn that as you go. You’re now equipped to use Git for simple projects! | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6512100",
"author": "morgan",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T17:16:47",
"content": "Jesse Vincent of Keyboardio gave a great talk at KiCon and presented some tools for visual diffs on KiCAD projects.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZCyk3rmmGQ",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,372,565.84835 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/11/engraving-a-puzzle-box-heres-a-collection-of-single-line-cryptex-fonts/ | Engraving A Puzzle Box? Here’s A Collection Of Single-Line Cryptex Fonts | Donald Papp | [
"Art",
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cryptex",
"engraving",
"fonts",
"hershey",
"text",
"vector art"
] | Here’s a neat resource from [MSRaynsford] that is worth bookmarking for anyone who gets creative with laser engravers, CNC routers, or drawing robots:
SVGFonts
are single-line symbol fonts that [MSRaynsford] created for his laser-cut and engraved cryptex puzzle boxes. They provide an easy way to engrave text as symbols.
Single-line fonts for engraving that include a runic-looking alphabet, a Greek-inspired set, and two symbol sets based on Flag Semaphore.
CNC engraving of letters and symbols is one of those things that seems simple, but is actually more complex than it may appear. It is often desirable to use a tool to engrave symbols with a single line, in much the same way a person would write them if using a pen. But fonts and art for letters and numbers aren’t normally a single line. Thankfully there is a solution in the form of Hershey text, an extension for which is
included in Inkscape
. It turns out that
Hershey Fonts have their origin back in the 1960s
, when the changing landscape of electronics and industry opened new opportunities and demanded new solutions.
That’s why, when [MSRaynsford] needed fonts in different styles and symbols for creating his puzzle boxes, he had to design them himself and they had to be single-line vector art, just like Hershey Text. The small collection includes English letters designed to resemble a runic alphabet, a Greek-inspired series, and two coded alphabets based on
flag semaphore
.
Grab ’em on
GitHub
, because you never know when you’ll need to
make a quick cryptex
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511916",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2022-09-11T21:38:42",
"content": "When I first tried out my cnc machine to engrave some labels it nearly did my head in.Why is it so hard?Having some more fonts that work is a great help.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,372,565.894697 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/11/hackaday-prize-2022-using-infrared-thermometers-to-measure-crops-water-stress/ | Hackaday Prize 2022: Using Infrared Thermometers To Measure Crops’ Water Stress | Robin Kearey | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"agriculture",
"crop water stress index",
"infrared thermometer",
"moisture sensor"
] | If you live anywhere on the Northern Hemisphere, you’re likely to have experienced one of the many heatwaves that occurred this summer. Extreme heat is dangerous for humans and animals, but plants, including important crops, also suffer. High temperatures lead to increased transpiration and evaporation, and if the water lost in this way is not replenished quickly enough, plants will stop growing and eventually wither and die.
In order to keep track of the amount of water available to crops, [Florian Ellsäßer]
built the Crop Water Stress Sensor
: a device that checks whether plants have enough moisture available to stay healthy. It does this by measuring the temperature of the leaves to calculate evaporation levels. If the leaves are cooler than their surroundings, this means that water is evaporating from them and the plant apparently has enough water available. If the leaves’ temperature is closer to the ambient temperature, then the plant may be running low on water.
[Florian]’s system performs this measurement using an infrared array, which is basically a low-resolution thermal camera that remotely measures the temperature of everything in its field of view. This IR array is pointed at a field, where it will see both leaves and the ground between them. The difference in temperature between these two can then be used to calculate the Crop Water Stress Index (CWSI), a standardized measure of how well-hydrated plants are. The result is shown on a display and also indicated using a convenient red-yellow-green status LED that shows if the crops in question need watering.
The system can be solar powered for completely remote operation, while its data can be read out through a WiFi interface. [Florian] is planning to update the design with a LoRa interface for greater range: the eventual goal is to build a large network of these sensors throughout agricultural areas and use the combined data to raise awareness of water shortages in certain areas. In order to make the sensors easy to build by anyone interested, all design files are available on the project page.
Keeping crops moisturized is one of the key tasks of agriculture, and we’ve seen several projects that aim to optimize and automate it, from a simple-but-effective
ESP8266-based moisture sensor
to
complete hydroponics systems
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511862",
"author": "Michael Brooks | Website Developer/Blogger",
"timestamp": "2022-09-11T18:07:30",
"content": "As climate change rages on, and the stress of crops worsens, this seems like a great idea. Congratulations Florian on creating an awesome project.",
"parent_id": nul... | 1,760,372,566.003166 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/11/a-crowned-pulley-keeps-robots-treads-on-track/ | A Crowned Pulley Keeps Robot’s Treads On Track | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"antweight",
"belt",
"combat robot",
"crowned pulley",
"tank tread",
"tapered wheel",
"tracked robot"
] | [Angus] at Maker’s Muse recently created
a new and tiny antweight combat robot
(video, embedded below) and it has some wonderfully clever design elements we’d like to highlight. In particular: how to keep a tracked robot’s wheel belt where it belongs, and prevent it from slipping or becoming dislodged. In a way, this problem was elegantly solved during the era of the steam engine and industrial revolution. The solution? A
crowned pulley
.
Silicone bracelet and crowned pulley result in a self-centering belt with a minimum of parts.
A crowned pulley is a way of automatically keeping a flat belt centered by having a slight hump in the center of the pulley, which tapers off on either side. Back when steam engines ran everything, spinning axles along the ceiling transferred their power to machinery on the shop floor via flat belts on pulleys. Crowned pulleys kept those flat belts centered without any need for rims or similar additions.
The reason this worked so well for [Angus]’s robot is partly its simplicity, and partly the fact that it works fantastically with the silicone wrist bracelets he uses as treads. These bracelets are like thick rubber bands, and make excellent wheel substitutes. They have great grip, are cheap and plentiful, and work beautifully with crowned pulleys as the hubs. It’s a great solution for a tiny robot, and you can how it self-centers in the image here.
Antweight robots are limited to 150 grams
which means every bit counts, and that constraint leads to some pretty inventive design choices. For example, [Angus]’s new robot also has a clever lifter mechanism that uses a
4-bar linkage
designed to lever opponents up using only a single motor for power. Watch [Angus] explain and demonstrate everything in his usual concise and clear manner in the video, embedded below. | 20 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511814",
"author": "Sawdust",
"timestamp": "2022-09-11T15:30:05",
"content": "Just like bandsaw tires.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6512121",
"author": "fonz",
"timestamp": "2022-09-12T18:27:06",
"c... | 1,760,372,566.069949 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/11/full-transparency-stronger-fdm-prints/ | Full Transparency: Stronger FDM Prints | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing"
] | We always look forward to [Stefan’s] CNC Kitchen videos. They are usually useful, but always carefully thought out and backed with experimental data. His latest is about creating
transparent
and strong FDM prints. You normally don’t associate the FDM process with clear prints even with clear filament. The problem is the filament doesn’t lay down in a particular structure, so light scatters producing a sort of white color. However, [Stefan] found a post on Printables called “
How to Print Glass
” which changes the structure of the part and, of course, [Stefan] wanted to see if the process also led to stronger parts.
The process is slow and the basic idea is to use no top and bottom layers. The entire part is essentially infill. You also need to set the infill to go in the same direction for each layer. As [Stefan] mentions, there have been other efforts to make transparent parts, especially in vase mode. Of course, you can also get transparent parts using resin printing, although it isn’t always as easy as you might think.
[Stefan] got good results using PCTG, but because it isn’t as common as PETG, he used that more common material in his tests. The tests were systematic and show the impact different slicer parameters have on the finished product.
The interesting byproduct of the testing is that the same slicer parameters that help the parts be transparent also lead to very strong parts. If you are interested in either clear parts or strong parts, give the video a watch.
As [Stefan] pointed out, the
technique itself isn’t new
. You can also get filament specifically made to create
transparent parts
. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511780",
"author": "Robert Stefanowicz",
"timestamp": "2022-09-11T12:12:28",
"content": "https://www.printables.com/de/model/15310-how-to-print-glass/comments/333184#His parameters are note optimal :You have to : Optimize parameters – higher temp – more extrusion – lower speed – on... | 1,760,372,566.114397 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/11/renewable-hydrogen-sucked-from-thinish-air/ | Renewable Hydrogen Sucked From Thinish Air | Dave Rowntree | [
"green hacks",
"News"
] | [
"air",
"electrolysis",
"hydrogen",
"renewable energy"
] | Stored hydrogen is often touted as the ultimate green energy solution, provided the hydrogen is produced from genuinely green power sources. But there are technical problems to be overcome before your average house will be heated with pumped or tank-stored hydrogen. One problem is that the locations that have lots of scope for renewable energy, don’t always have access to plenty of pure water, and for electrolysis you do need both. A team from Melbourne University have come up with a interesting way to
produce hydrogen by electrolysis directly from the air
.
Redder areas have more water risk and renewable potential
By utilising a novel electrolysis cell with a hygroscopic electrolyte, the so-called direct air electrolysis (DAE) can operate with humidity as low as 4% relative, so perfectly fine even in the most arid areas, after all there may not be clouds but the air still holds a bit of water. This is particularly relevant to regions of the world, such as deserts, where there is simultaneously a high degree of water risk, and plenty of solar potential. Direct electrolysis of saline extracted at coastal areas is one option, but dealing with the liberated chlorine is a big problem.
The new prototype is very simple in construction, with a sponge of melamine or a sintered glass foam soaked in a compatible electrolyte. Potassium Hydroxide (alkaline) was tried as was Potassium Acetate (base) and Sulphuric Acid, but the latter degraded the host material in a short time. Who would have imagined? Anyway, with electrolysis cell design, a key problem is ensuring the separate gasses stay separate, and in this case, are also separate from the air. This was neatly ensured by arranging the electrolyte
sponge fully covered both electrodes, so as the hygroscopic material extracted water from the air, the micro-channels in the structure filled up with liquid, with it touching both ends of the cell, forming the circuit and allowing the electrolysis to proceed.
Hydrogen, being very light, would rise upward through holes in the cathode, to be collected and stored. Oxygen simply passed back into the air, after passing though the liquid reservoir at the base. Super simple, and from reading the paper, quite effective too.
You can kind of imagine a future built around this now, where you’re driving your hydrogen fuel cell powered dune buggy around the Sahara one weekend, and you stop at a solar-powered hydrogen fuel station for a top up and a pasty. Ok, possibly not that last bit.
The promised hydrogen economy may be inching closer. We covered using
aluminium nanoparticles to rip hydrogen out of water
. But once you have the gas, you need to store and handle it.
Toyota might have a plan for that
. Then perhaps handling gas directly at all isn’t a great idea, and maybe the
future is paste
?
Thanks to [MmmDee] for the tip! | 26 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511771",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2022-09-11T11:07:34",
"content": "Large facilities using this method could help to reduce air humidity in high moist areas. Great for tropical countries.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,566.227177 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/10/flexible-radiation-monitoring-system-speaks-lora-and-wifi/ | Flexible Radiation Monitoring System Speaks LoRa And WiFi | Robin Kearey | [
"green hacks",
"Science",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"geiger counter",
"LoRa",
"moteino",
"radiation monitoring",
"wifi"
] | Radioactivity has always been a fascinating phenomenon for anyone interested in physics, and as a result we’ve featured many radioactivity-related projects on these pages over the years. More recently however, fears of nuclear disaster have prompted many hackers to look into environmental radiation monitoring. [Malte] was one of those looking to upgrade the radiation monitor on his weather station, but found the options for wireless geiger counters a bit limited.
So he decided to build himself his own
Wifi and LoRa compatible environmental radiation monitor
. Like most such projects it’s based on the ubiquitous Soviet-made SBM-20 GM tube, although the design also supports the Chinese J305βγ model. In either case, the tube’s operating voltage is generated by a discrete-transistor based oscillator which boosts the board’s 5 V supply to around 400 V with the help of an inductor and a voltage multiplier.
Data can be visualized in graphs, together with other data from the weather station like temperature and humidity
The tube’s output signal is converted into clean digital pulses to be counted by either an ESP32 or a Moteino R6, depending on the choice of wireless protocol. The ESP can make its data available through a web interface using its WiFi interface, while the Moteino can communicate through LoRa and sends out its data using MQTT. The resulting data is a counts-per-minute value which can be converted into an equivalent dose in Sievert using a simple conversion formula.
All design files are available on [Malte]’s website, including a PCB layout that neatly fits inside standard waterproof enclosures. Getting more radiation monitors out in the field can only be a good thing, as we found out when
we tried to detect a radiation accident using community-sourced data
back in 2019. Don’t like WiFi or LoRa? There’s plenty of
other ways
to
connect your GM tubes to the internet
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511746",
"author": "yh56rthr45t",
"timestamp": "2022-09-11T08:02:50",
"content": "please 2 deviceand connect to readio@ctive at home",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6511779",
"author": "JLMCB",
"timestamp": "2022-09-11T... | 1,760,372,566.433849 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/10/understanding-wavelets/ | Understanding Wavelets | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"mathematics",
"wavelet"
] | Mathematical transforms can be a great help in understanding signals. Imaging trying to look at a complex waveform and figuring out the frequency components without the Fourier transform. [Artem Kirsanov] calls the
wavelet transform
a “mathematical microscope” and his video gives you a great introduction to the topic. You can see the video below.
The video starts with a discussion about how the time domain and frequency domain have a dual relationship — not big news if you’ve dealt with Fourier transforms and — in fact — that’s the next topic in the video. However, there are limitations to the transformation — you lose time domain information in the process.
Obviously, the wavelet transform can address these limitations. The transform is similar to applying Fourier, but instead of decomposing to a series of infinite sine waves, wavelet transformation decomposes signals into finite functions that meet certain conditions.
You do need a little math to follow the video, but probably not as much as you might think. The explanations are clear and there are few assumptions about your prior knowledge. If you’ve encountered windows in Fourier analysis, the ideas are somewhat similar.
If you want to experiment with some DSP concepts in a
spreadsheet
, you can do that. If you don’t intuitively grasp the Fourier transform, try watching [3blue1brown’s]
enlightening video
on the topic. | 17 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511668",
"author": "George",
"timestamp": "2022-09-11T02:43:47",
"content": "Very clear description of the subject. I’m not sure where I would use the subject material, but now at least I have a chance.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,566.380366 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/10/london-bridge-has-fallen-by-radio/ | London Bridge Has Fallen — By Radio | Jenny List | [
"News",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"alert",
"cold war",
"current events",
"sdr"
] | One of the global news stories this week has been the passing of the British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. Since she had recently celebrated 70 years on the throne, the changing of a monarch is not something that the majority of those alive in 2022 will have seen. But it’s well known that there are a whole suite of “London Bridge has fallen” protocols in place for that eventuality which the various arms of the British government would have put in motion immediately upon news from Balmoral Castle. When it became obvious that the Queen’s health was declining, [Hackerfantastic]
took to the airwaves to spot any radio signature of these plans
. [Update 2022-09-11] See the comments below and
a fresh Tweet to clarify
, it appears these were not the signals they were at first suspected to be.
What he found in a waterfall view of the 4 MHz military band was an unusual transmission, a set of strong QPSK packets that started around 13:40pm on the 8th of September, and continued on for 12 hours before disappearing. The interesting thing about these transmissions is not that they were a special system for announcing the death of a monarch, but that they present a rare chance to see one of the country’s Cold War era military alert systems in action.
It’s likely that overseas embassies and naval ships would have been the intended recipients and the contents would have been official orders to enact those protocols, though we’d be curious to know whether 2022-era Internet and broadcast media had tipped them off beforehand that something was about to happen. It serves as a reminder: next time world news stories happen in your part of the world, look at the airwaves! | 25 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511610",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T23:06:35",
"content": "Cool story, but incorrect.https://twitter.com/hackerfantastic/status/1568650178076311557",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6511620",
"author": "Tim M... | 1,760,372,566.492965 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/10/the-open-source-rotary-cell-phone-two-years-later/ | The Open Source Rotary Cell Phone, Two Years Later | Tom Nardi | [
"Cellphone Hacks"
] | [
"open source cellphone",
"rotary cell phone",
"rotary phone"
] | We know the pandemic has screwed with a lot of people’s sense of time, but we doubled checked, and it has indeed been more than two years since the Internet first laid eyes upon the incredible rotary cell phone put together by [Justine Haupt]. We’re happy to report that not only has she continued to develop and improve the phone since the last time it made the rounds, but that the
kits for this open source marvel are currently available for preorder
.
A lot has happened since this phone last graced the pages of Hackaday. For one thing, it’s now officially known as the Rotary Un-Smartphone. [Justine] has also spun up a small company for the express purposes of putting these kits into production, which clearly speaks to just how much attention the project picked up in mainstream circles.
The new rotary mechanism is based on modern components.
In terms of hardware, while the phone might look more or less the same externally, [Justine] says that there’s not a single unchanged component from the previous version. The 3D printed case has given way to a beautiful injection molded enclosure offered in several retro colors, and the rather incongruous rubber ducky antenna has been replaced with an articulated aerial that serves as a kickstand.
Speaking of reception, the original 3G cellular modem has been upgraded to a LTE-compatible model from uBlox, so it should still get a signal for a decade or so before your carrier kicks it off the network. When ordering the kit you can choose between a global version using the TOBY-R200 modem, or a North American variant with the TOBY-R202.
Even the user interface has been spruced up — while the previous model featured a simple LED indicator on the front to show when you were in a call, the new version features an OLED display that will show you the currently dialed number as well as status information such as battery life and signal strength. Some may be disappointed to hear that the authentic Western Electric model 10A rotary dial has been deleted in favor of a custom designed mechanism that uses all modern components, but we can certainly understand why the change had to be made from a production standpoint.
To make assembly as easy as possible, the final kit will require no soldering.
Perhaps the only thing that
hasn’t
changed is the commitment to making the device open source and hacker-friendly. The Rotary Un-Smartphone is still Arduino compatible, and as [Justine] demonstrates in the video below, you can even tap into the AT commands going between the microcontroller and cellular modem if you want to play around with some of the hardware’s more advanced capabilities. While the links to the source code admittedly point to a coming soon page at the time of this writing, we’re confident that [Justine] will deliver the goods. The kind of folks that take the time to
write a rant about the benefits of open source
can generally be trusted to do the right thing.
The original project was a
masterclass in building hardware on your own terms
, and we’re delighted to see that [Justine] has forged ahead with this new revision so that others might be able to realize the dream of
owning a cell phone that doesn’t treat you like a product
. | 58 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511572",
"author": "Jii",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T20:38:59",
"content": "That thing is gorgeous.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6511740",
"author": "Curtis B",
"timestamp": "2022-09-11T07:05:57",
"co... | 1,760,372,566.600048 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/10/2022-cyberdeck-contest-the-folding-mini-deck/ | 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: The Folding Mini-Deck | Jenny List | [
"contests",
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"2022 Cyberdeck Contest",
"cyberdeck",
"smallest cyberdeck",
"tiny computer",
"tiny cyberdeck"
] | The trend for cyberdecks has brought us many takes on the home-made portable computers, but it’s fair to say that some of them can be rather unwieldy. This is not an accusation you can point at [Smeef] with
the Mini-Deck
though, because its Raspberry Pi Zero, Adafruit miniature display, and tiny keyboard make the whole unit able to fit in the palm of a hand. We’re not sure we’ve seen one so compact!
The most obvious feature is the keyboard, it’s a DreamGear MiniKey miniature USB keyboard. It doesn’t have all the useful buttons a PC board has, so there’s also a separate set of buttons to cover those. Then there’s an analog stick connected to an Arduino Pro Micro that takes the functionality of a mouse, and an Adafruit Mini PiTFT 1.3″ Display. While a fully-functional display for the Pi, we do wonder if this tiny screen might actually be a bit
too
tiny to be practical. Power for the unit comes via an 18650 battery, which also functions as a pin for a folding mechanism.
The result is something that looks, feels, and
works
like a cyberdeck, but all in miniature. It might be a stretch to write a Hackaday piece on a machine like it, but we’re guessing that merely having built something like this is cool enough in itself. Certainly it’s considerably smaller than
previous contenders for the smallest build
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511521",
"author": "tyj67j",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T18:19:53",
"content": "This device falls apart in your hands, scattering into pieces. It certainly does not fit in the hand. It just falls apart.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,372,566.802944 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/10/who-is-responsible-for-your-safety/ | Who Is Responsible For Your Safety? | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"newsletter",
"responsibility",
"safety",
"youtube"
] | We recently posted a video where some
ingenious metal-shop hackers made a simple jig to create zig-zag oil grooves on the inside of a cylinder
, and the comment section went wild. What ensued was a flood of complaints that the video displayed unsafe shop practices, from lack of safety glasses to wearing flip-flops while operating a lathe.
Where the comments went off the rails were people asking Hackaday to remove our discussion of the video, because the commenters thought that we were somehow implicitly encouraging open-toed footwear in the presence of machine tools. We certainly weren’t! We wanted you all to see the clever machining hack, and be inspired to build your own. We figure that you’ve got the safety angle covered.
Now don’t get me wrong – there were safety choices made in the video that I would not personally make. But it also wasn’t my shop and I wasn’t operating the machines. And you know who is ultimately responsible for the safety in my basement shop? Me! And guess who is responsible for safety in
your
shop.
But of course, none of us know everything about every possible hazard. (Heck,
I wrote just that a few weeks ago
!) So while we’re sympathetic with the “that’s not safe!” crew, we’re not going to censor inspiring hacks just because something done along the way wasn’t done in the way we would do it. Instead, it’s our job, in the comment section as in Real Life™, to help each other out and share our good safety tips when we can.
You’ll see some crazy stuff in videos, and
none
of it is to be repeated without thinking. And if you do see something dodgy, by all means point it out, and mention how you would do it better. Turn the negative example around for good, rather than calling for its removal. Use the opportunity to help, rather than hide.
But also remember that when the chips are flying toward your personal eyeballs, it’s up to you to have glasses on. We all do potentially hazardous things all the time, and it’s best to be thinking about the risks and their mitigation. So stay safe out there. Keep on learning and keep on hacking!
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
! | 182 | 46 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511422",
"author": "Adam",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T14:05:04",
"content": "Here, here!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6511424",
"author": "Hobo Lobo",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T14:09:20",
"content": "I... | 1,760,372,567.297653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/10/the-big-list-of-naughty-strings-helps-find-those-user-input-problems/ | The Big List Of Naughty StringsHelps Find Those User Input Problems | Donald Papp | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"big list of naughty strings",
"QA",
"sanitizing",
"strings",
"testing",
"user input",
"xss"
] | Any software that accepts user input must take some effort to sanitize incoming data, lest unexpected and unwelcome things happen. Here to make that easier is
the
Big List of Naughty Strings
, an evolving list of edge cases, unusual characters, script-injection fragments, and all-around nonstandard stuff aimed at QA testers, developers, and the curious. It’s a big list that has grown over the years, and every piece of it is still (technically) just a string.
These strings have a high probability of surfacing any problems with handling user input. They won’t necessarily
break
anything, but they may cause unexpected things to happen and help point out any issues that need fixing. After all, many attacks hinge on being able to send unexpected inputs that don’t get properly sanitized.
Finding bad inputs is not always entirely straightforward, but at least the
Big List of Naughty Strings
is available in a variety of formats to make it easy to use. [Max Woolf] has been maintaining the list for years, but if you haven’t heard of it yet and think it might come in useful, now’s the time to give it a look. Now you can help ensure your system can handle things like
someone registering a company
named
; DROP TABLE “COMPANIES”;– LTD
. | 14 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511405",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T11:47:00",
"content": "Little Bobby Tables!https://xkcd.com/327/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6511578",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T2... | 1,760,372,566.932297 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/10/diff-tool-knows-what-you-mean/ | Diff Tool Knows What You Mean | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"diff",
"software",
"source code"
] | We will admit to not being particularly artistic, but we do remember an art teacher telling us that sometimes it is better to draw what isn’t there instead of what’s there — a concept known as negative space. [Wilfred] makes a similar point when explaining his “fantastic diff” tool called, appropriately,
difftastic
. He points out that when comparing two programs, the goal isn’t so much to determine what changed, but rather what stayed the same. The more you can identify as the same, the less you have to show as a change.
The tool compares source code in a smart way, assisted by
tree-sitter
which has many different languages already parsed, at least well enough for this purpose. According to [Wilfred’s] post the tool supports 44 different languages ranging from bash and YAML, Verilog to VHDL, and C++ to Rust, among others.
Of course, the tool by itself is worth taking note of. But the real gems in the write-up are things like tree-sitter and a lucid description of the algorithm (borrowed from
autochrome
) for working out the minimal set of changes.
The code is still under development and the output is not always as clear as he would like. Still, a pretty good tool and a great write-up on the development challenges.
Although Verilog and VHDL are a start, we really want diff for
schematics
. Oh, and
PCB layouts
, don’t forget those,e either. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511377",
"author": "None",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T09:31:19",
"content": "Interesting topic. The logical approach is nice, though the visual presentation (and color choice) of WinDiff seems a lot easier on the eyes. The dark background and colorful text is straining to the eyes. ... | 1,760,372,566.88285 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/the-filamentmeter-for-when-you-absolutely-want-to-count-every-meter-used/ | The Filamentmeter: For When You Absolutely Want To Count Every Meter Used | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"diy",
"FDM",
"filament sensor",
"paid model"
] | [ArduinoNmore] took an interesting approach to designing a counter intended to
accurately display how many meters of filament a 3D printer has used
. The Filamentmeter looks a little bit like a 3D printed handheld tally counter (or lap counter) but instead of a button to advance each digit, the readout represents how many meters of filament have gone through the extruder.
Driving the digit rotation from the extruder motor itself means that even retractions are accounted for.
At first glance it may look like there is a motor hidden inside, or that the device is somehow sensing the filament directly. But it’s actually the movement of the extruder motor that drives the device. A small spur gear attached to the printer’s extruder drives a series of gears that advance the digits. This means that retractions — small reverses of the extruder motor during printing — are properly accounted for in the total, which is a nice touch.
[ArduinoNmore] designed this for the Ender 3, and the Filamentmeter relies on a specific extruder design and orientation to work properly. Of course, since it’s 3D printed, modifying the design for your own purposes should be pretty straightforward.
Curious? The design is being sold for a few bucks, and there is
a free test piece
one can print and use to confirm whether the design will work before mashing the buy button.
Non-free printable 3D models can be a world of buyer beware
, but test pieces and solid documentation are good ways to give buyers confidence in your work.
The insides of the unit are really quite intricate, with a clockwork-type elegance to them. You can see it all in the short video, embedded below. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511341",
"author": "Daid",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T05:58:06",
"content": "Does not account for material slip and deformation.Just buy a scale and weight your filament.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6511359",
"autho... | 1,760,372,566.990369 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/this-week-in-security-one-click-upnp-mainframes-and-exploring-the-fog/ | This Week In Security: One-click, UPnP, Mainframes, And Exploring The Fog | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"This Week in Security",
"tor"
] | A couple weeks ago we talked about in-app browsers, and the potential privacy issues when opening content in them. This week Microsoft reveals the other side of that security coin — JavaScript on a visited website
may be able to interact with the JS embedded in the app browser
. The vulnerability chain starts with a link handler published to Android, where any
https://m.tiktok[.]com/redirect
links automatically open in the TikTok app. The problem here is that this does trigger a redirect, and app-internal deeplinks aren’t filtered out. One of these internal schemes has the effect of loading an arbitrary page in the app webview, and while there is a filter that should prevent loading untrusted hosts, it can be bypassed with a pair of arguments included in the URI call.
Once an arbitrary page is loaded, the biggest problem shows up. The JavaScript that runs in the app browser exposes 70+ methods to JS running on the page. If this is untrusted code, it gives away the figurative keys to the kingdom, as an auth token can be accessed for the current user. Account modification, private video access, and video upload are all accessible. Thankfully the problem was fixed back in March, less than a month after private disclosure. Still, a one-click account hijack is nothing to sneeze at. Thankfully this one didn’t escape from the lab before it was fixed.
UPnP Strikes Again
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) may have been the most dangerous feature to be included in routers with the possible exception of open-by-default WiFi.
QNAP has issued yet another advisory of ransomware targeting their devices
, and once again UPnP is the culprit. Photo Station is the vulnerable app, and it has to be exposed to the internet to get pwned. And what does UPnP do? Exposes apps to the internet without user interaction. And QNAP, in their efforts to make their NAS products more usable, included UPnP support, maybe by default on some models. If you have a QNAP device (or even if you don’t), make sure UPnP is disabled on your router, turn off all port forwarding unless you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re doing, and use Wireguard for remote access.
Retro Hacking — The IBM AS/400
Viola Levan, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
If you have a craving for some throwback hacking, then
[pz] from Silent Signal has you covered
. While you don’t see IBM AS/400 front-ends in stores as often as you used to, these venerable machines still run the back-end of plenty of businesses. The IBM AS/400 was the solution to IBM’s problem in the early 80s, of too many similar product lines. It replaced the System/36 and System/38 products, and was based on an effort to port System/36 software to system/38 hardware. The new solution used Technology Independent Machine Interface (TIMI) as an intermediary layer that compiled programs targeted. The actual OS did a run-time translation to the machine code of the physical processor, which is how IBM has managed to keep such old software running for so long. It’s similar to what Sun was trying to do with Java, though with very different modern-day results.
The researchers at Silent Signal see an untapped wealth of research in the IBM AS/400, now officially called IBM i. Lots of code running on these systems was written in the late 80s and 90s, with much of it getting Y2k fixes — and likely untouched since then. The state of computer security research was quite different then, so there are likely to be issues to find. To this end, they’ve set up a dedicated IBM i lab, and have some findings to share. In a penetration test against a live customer, they were given access to an emulated TN5250 terminal, and a limited-privilege account. TN5250 turned out to be the foot in the door, as the IBM-specific terminal protocol supports extended keys like Attn, which works as a system interrupt key. The menu that’s triggered has a nifty feature, opening a shell as the logged-in user. A subtle misconfiguration allows running commands as other users with additional privileges. This exact penetration test didn’t use vulnerabilities in IBM code, just system misconfiguration — but as the pool of system administrators that really understand this legacy tech shrinks, this is likely to become a common issue.
The 8,729 day old CVE
Speaking of legacy code-bases… It’s always a bit startling to see how old some of the code is in our modern machines. Curl had its 4.0 release in 1998, and before that it was called urlget. There’s code written back then that’s still around in the project,
and it turns out at least one vulnerability
Sort of.
Cookies are little bits of data that web pages can store on you machine, and thanks to an well-intended-but-terrible law, something that bugs you for every new website you visit. The history of cookies is a bit convoluted, as it was always an ad-hoc solution without a formal design or specification. As a result, we see some odd behavior even today, like the fact that a subdomain can set a cookie for the parent domain, and that other subdomains will see that cookie. So
http://www.hackaday.com
can set a cookie with
domain=hackaday.com
. Then if you visit
someothersubdomain.hackaday.com
, that cookie gets sent with the request.
Web servers have been around just as long, but have been forced to ratchet down their security posture. One of those security enhancements is to reject any HTTP requests that contain control codes, like 0x07, the ASCII bell. Cookies have no inherent ban on these values. Put those together, and you get a denial of service vulnerability. A subdomain can set a cookie containing a control code, assigned to the target domain, and that cookie gets sent in any future requests. And those requests get dropped because of the trapped cookie. The cookie-handling code was added in late 1998, and this trick has worked ever since. Except, browsers added the control-code check in 2016. It must be a quantum effect, resulting in a bug that is nearly 24 years old, and merely 6 years old, both at the same time. Either way, 7.85.0 fixes the problem.
Rusty Tor
The Tor project has a
shiny
rusty new release —
Arti, a Tor implementation in Rust
. This started as a pet project by [Nick Mathewson], but within a few months he had a code-base that could actually connect to the Tor network, and soon after was actually sending properly anonymized traffic. And a week ago today, version 1.0.0 was released, marking the project ready for prime time.
There are a few things missing, like the censorship avoidance capability — the plugins that disguise Tor traffic as something else. On the other hand, Arti is being used as an opportunity to make some changes and updates to Tor, like the introduction of a proper API. It looks like the eventual plan is to deprecate the C implementation, but there’s quite a bit of work left on Arti before it reaches complete feature parity.
EFF Enters the Fog
The EFF is taking aim at Fog Data Science, a company that purchases “anonymized” location data from mobile app vendors, and then sells a service to law enforcement that allows searching for individuals among that data. Researchers at the EFF pulled off a brilliant bit of detective work,
reverse engineering the Fog Reveal search engine, while never actually having access to the interface
. The trick is to visit the Fog Reveal web app, and grabbing all the JavaScript libraries that load on site visit. The app requires an account to use, but all the code that runs in the browser is available without that login. EFF took on the non trivial task of reverse engineering the data expected by the front-end, but in the end it gave them a detailed look.
The results are impressive, and worrying. A subscriber can select an area, give a date and time, and get a list of devices that were in that area at the time. The data is anonymized — but you can then select a data stream and follow the user home. Not so anonymous when you can trivially find a home address. On one hand I’m sure this comes in very handy when trying to round up a list of suspects for a crime, but it seems precariously close to what one might consider an unreasonable search or seizure of data. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511111",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T14:47:37",
"content": "Gaaah, who lets code run on the client side, especially for real tracking data. So stupid. Every input should be treated as possibly malformed or malicious, but if you are letting your code run on the cli... | 1,760,372,567.456063 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/apples-satellite-emergency-texts-how-do-they-work/ | Apple’s Satellite Emergency Texts, How Do They Work? | Jenny List | [
"Cellphone Hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"emergency text",
"globalstar",
"iphone"
] | There is always some hype surrounding an Apple product announcement, and while maybe it’s not in the same league as those for the original iPod or iPhone,
their iPhone 14 model will include emergency texting by satellite
has generated quite a bit of coverage. It’s easy to find a lot about the system from the software end in terms of its interface and even Apple’s use of compression, but what about the radio side? Whose satellite constellation are they using, and how does it work?
As has been widely reported, their communication partner for the service is
Globalstar
, a provider of satellite data services that like their competitor Iridium have their origins in the 1990s when satellite phones were briefly seen as the Next Big Thing. They have a 24-satellite constellation, and they sell a range of off-the-grid voice, data, paging, tracking, and IoT connectivity services. The Apple emergency texting looks a lot like Globalstar’s
Spot
texting service. It’s only available in North America for now, we’re guessing because the satellites aren’t smart relays but straightforward transponders, and the network lacks sufficient ground station coverage outside that region.
With all the talk about low-earth-orbit connectivity surrounding services such as SpaceX’s Starlink it’s a bit unexpected to find ourselves back with a satellite constellation using 1990s technology. But we can see that as well as a major win for Globalstar as their service begins to look outdated by comparison to Starlink, it’s a perfect match for Apple in not requiring a complex ground station for low-bandwidth text messages. We expect that there will be some form of exclusivity in the deal, so it will be interesting to see how the larger Android vendors respond.
It’s worth noting,
we’ve looked at satellite IoT services before
.
Wilderness image: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
Public Domain
. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511078",
"author": "Neverm|nd",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T12:28:15",
"content": "Jenny, I still don’t get it. There must be… Something on the hardware side, no ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6511112",
"author": "Jus... | 1,760,372,569.143955 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/upcycling-flat-scraps-with-open-source-tools/ | Upcycling Flat Scraps With Open Source Tools | Al Williams | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"scrap",
"upcycle"
] | If you have any sort of device that cuts like a CNC mill or a laser cutter, you probably generate a lot of strange-looking scrap material. Most of us hate to throw anything away, but how do you plan to use all these odd shapes? [Caddzeus] has an answer. Using a camera and some software he
digitizes the shapes
accurately into a form usable in his CAD package of choice.
The process involves setting up some targets with known dimensions that will appear in the photograph. This allows the picture to be taken without being overly concerned about the distance to the camera or the angle.
Using GIMP, he adjusts the images to remove the perspective. He then brings the image into Inkscape where he can accurately scale and trace the shape.
There are detailed instructions — including videos — but if you know how to use these tools, you can probably figure it out for yourself. This technique would be useful, too, if you wanted to get an outline of something you intend to mill or cut into your CAD program as a reference. We like to do this with a laser cutter so you can burn the outline of something you are engraving or cutting on a piece of paper before you start and easily align the workpiece to the laser.
Of course, a small part could surrender its image to a conventional scanner and you can use a similar technique to adjust the scale. If you start using Inkscape a lot, you’ll want
more plugins
. You never know what you might build from some
scrap odds and ends
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511082",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T12:39:51",
"content": "You get more accurate results if you make the pictures perpendicular in the first place, so you don’t have to remove the pespective at all.You can also mount a camera on you CNC router. Then you can just ... | 1,760,372,569.540941 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/your-car-gets-hot-when-left-in-the-sun-hot-enough-to-cook/ | Your Car Gets Hot When Left In The Sun. Hot Enough To Cook? | Jenny List | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"bread",
"solar cooker",
"solar oven"
] | In hot weather, those of us who drive are familiar with the sensation of getting into the car and having it feel like an oven inside. A car is a essentially sealed metal box with large windows, thus on a sunny summer day it has more in common with a greenhouse, and in a heatwave this can become unbearable. But does it get hot enough for cooking? [Julian Lozos] aimed to find out,
by cooking Icelandic
rúgbrauð
using only a 2016 Honda and the California sunshine
.
Rúgbrauð is a traditional Icelandic rye bread that’s traditionally cooked by geothermal energy buried in the ground for around a day in proximity to a hot spring. A car dashboard gets pretty hot in a California heatwave, so it’s not unreasonable to expect that it might replicate this environment. He parked the Honda on a street in the sun, placed a pot full of dough on the dashboard, and waited.
The maximum temperature measured was 86.5 C (187 F), but unfortunately the sun didn’t stay high enough to maintain that temperature for the required time. After two days in the car the crust was cooked but the interior was still gooey, so the experiment can’t be said to have been successful. He does make the point though that a less traditional and much thinner loaf using a wide and flat tray might have delivered a better result.
We’re intrigued by this experiment, almost enough to try something like it ourselves were the summer not beginning to wane in these more northerly climes. Have any of you tried cooking in a hot car, or would we need
a solar oven
? Give us your views in the comments. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511009",
"author": "David Reid",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T05:17:43",
"content": "We used to wrap steaks in tinfoil, place them in the engine bay while driving across New Mexico on vacation.When we arrived… the dinner was ready.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies"... | 1,760,372,569.016734 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/tracking-weather-balloons-with-sdr/ | Tracking Weather Balloons With SDR | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"radiosonde",
"RTL-SDR",
"sdr"
] | The advent of cheap software-defined radio hardware means that what would have once been an exotic expensive undertaking can now be relatively cheap. [David] notes that using some pretty simple gear, he could
track down weather balloons
.
The U.S. National Weather Service sends up a large number of radiosondes attached to balloons twice a day. Their job is to measure conditions at high altitudes up to about 30km. Once the balloon gets too high, the pressure inside bursts the balloon, and a small parachute slows the instrument package’s descent back to Earth. [David] wanted to track these down and return them to the NWS for reuse.
There are several interesting items to note in the post, including a link to a site that
tracks ballons all over the world
. The radiosondes that [David] wanted to find transmit on 403.4 MHz and they were relatively easy to hear. If you want to join in on the fun, you only need a few simple pieces of gear. One important thing, though, is perhaps the best hack of all: an orange safety vest. As [David] says, “If you’re wearing an orange vest, everyone assumes that whatever you are doing is legit.”
It doesn’t sound like [David] has actually recovered any radiosondes yet. But he found one, but it was, unfortunately, on the other side of a fence with no trespassing signs. We guess an orange vest doesn’t solve all problems.
Of course, some people see
the radiosonde hardware as a gift from the heavens
but we think it is classier to return them. We’ve actually looked at
these devices
several times and we always find them fascinating. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510977",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T02:06:32",
"content": "This is myth. The hobby electronic magazines had VHF receiver projects, not great, but they were there. Once again, about 1966, a guy in England received weather satellite pictures. In 1971, Paul... | 1,760,372,569.080137 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/troubleshooting-barcodes-a-lesson-in-critical-thinking/ | Troubleshooting Barcodes: A Lesson In Critical Thinking | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"barcodes",
"troublesshooting"
] | We’ve all been there. Something that is known to work doesn’t work out in the field. But back at home base, it works fine. How do you fix it? Of course, there’s no one right answer to that question, but [Benji York] had a particularly
satisfying round of troubleshooting some errant barcodes
and even came up with a very creative solution.
Here’s the setup: a customer couldn’t read some barcodes sent from [Benji’s] company. Yet when the bad barcodes returned, they were fine. They looked fine, too. In a Twitter post, [Benji] challenges you to see if you can tell what’s wrong.
We’ll confess. We couldn’t. [Benji] started decoding the barcodes by hand and noticed that one bar was just a little thinner than it should be. You can see in the picture, there is a thin white line cutting through the borders. That’s a problem with the printer and it manages to thin out one of the vertical lines in the barcode. Apparently, [Benji’s] scanner is more tolerant of this than the customer scanner.
The solution was also interesting. Instead of replacing or repairing the printer, it works fine to simply rotate the label 90 degrees. Sure, the thin line is still there, but it is a minor glitch in all the bars that any scanner will handle. [Benji] suggests always printing barcodes “against the grain” although, of course, that will depend a lot on the kind of technology your printer uses.
What we thought was interesting, though, is what this tells you about critical thinking when faced with a problem. Now that you know what the problem is, that thin vertical line in the border stands out like a sore thumb. But if you are like us, you were so fixated on the barcode that we totally missed it. Like the old saying about the forest and the trees.
A great reminder to look at all parts of something that aren’t working, not just the part that is failing. Honestly, we would have probably just repaired the printer but we do applaud the creative workaround. We spend a lot of time
thinking about troubleshooting
. If you want to dive deeper into
barcodes
, we can help you with that, too. | 26 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510944",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T00:01:52",
"content": "Before I read past the second paragraph I’m guessing that line through the barcode on the right where the printer didn’t thermally transfer might have something to do with it.Not my first rodeo, though.",... | 1,760,372,569.603983 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/adsl-router-as-effects-pedal/ | ADSL Router As Effects Pedal | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"adsl",
"alsa",
"digital",
"effects",
"guitar",
"linux",
"modem",
"pedal",
"router",
"signal processing",
"sound",
"usb"
] | Moore’s law might not be as immutable as we once though thought it was, as chip makers struggle to fit more and more transistors on a given area of silicon. But over the past few decades it’s been surprisingly consistent, with a lot of knock-on effects. As computers get faster, everything else related to them gets faster as well, and the junk drawer tends to fill quickly with various computer peripherals and parts that might be working fine, but just can’t keep up the pace. [Bonsembiante] had an old ADSL router that was well obsolete as a result of these changing times,
but instead of tossing it, he turned it into a guitar effects pedal
.
The principle behind this build is that the router is essentially a Linux machine, complete with ALSA support. Of course this means flashing a custom firmware which is not the most straightforward task, but once the sound support was added to the device, it was able to interface with a USB sound card. An additional C++ program was created which handles the actual audio received from the guitar and sound card. For this demo, [Bonsembiante] programmed a ring buffer and feeds it back into the output to achieve an echo effect, but presumably any effect or a number of effects could be programmed.
For anyone looking for the source code for the signal processing that the router is now performing, it is listed on
a separate GitHub page
. If you don’t have this specific model of router laying around in your parts bin, though, there are
much more readily-available Linux machines
that can get this job done instead. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510900",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T20:59:43",
"content": "It´s not a “custom firmware” it´s a stock OpenWRT, no black magic reverse engineering or voodoo involved, just grab the image from OpenWRT website and follow the instructions.The real work was writing the eff... | 1,760,372,569.288484 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/hackaday-prize-2022-otter-force-one-protects-kelp-forests-by-sucking-up-sea-urchins/ | Hackaday Prize 2022: Otter Force One Protects Kelp Forests By Sucking Up Sea Urchins | Robin Kearey | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"autonomous underwater vehicle",
"environmental cleanup",
"sea urchins"
] | When thinking about forests being endangered by human activity, most people would immediately think of the rainforest. Below the ocean surface, there’s another type of forest is in danger: the kelp forests off the coast of northern California. Warming sea water has triggered an explosion in the population of purple sea urchins (
Strongylocentrotus purpuratus
) which devour kelp at an alarming rate. It’s estimated that 90% of kelp forests have been lost to the urchins along a 350 km stretch of coastline.
The fix is as simple as getting rid of the urchins, but collecting the millions of spiny creatures manually isn’t realistic. Luckily, [RobotGrrl] designed just the tool for this task:
Otter Force One, an autonomous underwater robot
that can gather the aquatic interlopers and put them in a bag for removal. The device is still under development, but progress so far has been promising. The basic idea is to identify an urchin using machine vision, then dislodge it with a water jet, and finally to use a suction pump to pull it inside the machine and store it in a bag.
A prototype made from 3D printed components is currently being used to test the idea. Its motors are driven by an ESP32 with a motor controller, with the system powered by a set of beefy lithium batteries. Tests with plastic urchin models confirm that the suction mechanism works, though the water jet and machine vision systems still need to be tested. But even without these in place the Otter Force One can still be used by human divers to improve their urchin-gathering efficiency.
We’ll definitely keep an eye on this project, and hopefully see it evolve into a fully-automated urchin hunter. Underwater pest-control robots are not completely new: we already saw a
laser-powered delouser for use on salmon farms
. There are also
robotic starfish
and
octopuses
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510918",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T22:10:59",
"content": "I like the idea but I think it would be more effective to merely kill the urchins and move on. If you can hit them with a strong enough wave of water then they will die. This would be best accomplished w... | 1,760,372,569.494093 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/the-tak-ecosystem-military-coordination-goes-open-source/ | The TAK Ecosystem: Military Coordination Goes Open Source | Danie Conradie | [
"Android Hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3D mapping",
"android",
"communication",
"military"
] | In recent years you’ve probably seen a couple of photos of tablets and smartphones strapped to the armor of soldiers, especially US Special Forces. The primary app loaded on most of those devices is ATAK or Android Tactical Assault Kit. It allows the soldier to view and share geospatial information, like friendly and enemy positions, danger areas, casualties, etc. As a way of working with geospatial information, its civilian applications became apparent, such as firefighting and law-enforcement, so
CivTAK/ATAK-Ci
v was created and
open sourced in 2020
. Since ATAK-Civ was intended for those not carrying military-issued weapons, the acronym magically become the Android
Team Awareness
Kit. This caught the attention of the open source community, so today we’ll dive into the growing TAK ecosystem, its quirks, and potential use cases.
Tracking firefighting aircraft in 3D space using ADS-B (Credit:
The TAK Syndicate
)
The TAK ecosystem includes ATAK for Android, iTAK for iOS, WinTAK for Windows, and a growing number of servers, plugins, and tools to extend functionality. At the heart of TAK lies the
Cursor on Target
(CoT) protocol, an XML or Protobuf-based message format used to share information between clients and servers. This can include a “target’s” location, area, and route information, sensor data, text messages, or medevac information, to name a few. Clients, like ATAK, can process this information as required, and also generate CoT data to share with other clients. A TAK client can also be a sensor node, or a simple
node-Red flow
. This means the TAK can be a really powerful tool for monitoring, tracking, or controlling the things around you.
Standalone tools: Checking line-of-sight and camera coverage
ATAK is a powerful mapping tool on its own. It can display and plot information on a 3D map, calculate a heading to a target, set up a geofence, and serve as a messaging app between team members. Besides using it for outdoor navigation, I’ve used two other built-in mapping features extensively. Viewshed allows you to plan wireless node locations, and check line-of-sight their line-of-sight coverage. The “sensor” (camera) markers are handy for planning coverage of CCTV installations. However, ATAK starts to truly shine when you add plugins to extend features, and link clients in a network to share information.
Networking
To allow networking between clients, you either need to set up a multicast network or a central server that all the clients connect to. A popular option for multicast communication is to set up
a free ZeroTier VPN
, or any other VPN. For client-server topologies, there are several open source TAK servers available that can be installed on a Raspberry Pi or any other machine, including the official
TAK server
that was recently open sourced on GitHub.
FreeTakServer
can be extended with its built-in API and optional Node-RED server, and includes an easy-to-use “zero-touch” installer.
Taky
, is another lightweight Python-based server. All these servers also include data package servers, for distributing larger info packs to clients.
Plugins
If an internet connection is not available where you are going, there are several off-grid networking plugins available.
HAMMER
acts as an audio modem to send CoTs using cheap Baofeng radios.
Atak-forwarder
works with LoRa-based
Meshtastic
radios, or you can use
APRS-TAK
with ham radios.
Plugins can also pull data from other sources, like ADSB data from an RTL-SDR, or the
video feed and location information from a drone
. Many of the currently available plugins are not open source and are only available through the
TAK.gov
website after agreeing to terms and conditions from the US federal government. Fortunately, this means there is a lot of space for open source alternatives to grow.
For further exploration, the team behind the FreeTAK server maintains an
extensive list
of TAK-related tools, plugins, info sources, and hardware.
Tips to get started
At the time of writing, ATAK is significantly more mature than iTAK and WinTAK, so it’s the best option if you want to start exploring. iTAK is actually a bit easier to start using immediately, but it’s missing a lot of features and can’t load plugins.
Opening ATAK on Android for the first time will quickly become apparent that it is not exactly intuitive to use. I won’t bore you with a complete tutorial but will share a couple of tips I’ve found helpful. Firstly, RTFM. The usage of many of the features and tools is not self-evident, so the included PDF manual (Settings > Support > ATAK Documents) might come in handy. There is also a long list of settings to customize, which are a lot easier to navigate with the search function in the top bar of the Settings menu.
No maps are included in ATAK by default, so download and import
[Joshua Fuller]’s ATAK-Maps package
. This gives ATAK an extensive list of map sources to work with, including Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps. ATAK can also cache maps and imagery for offline use. ATAK only has low-resolution elevation data included by default, but you can
download and import
more detailed elevation data from the USGS website.
To connect with others interested in TAK you can also check out the
TAK Community Discord server
.
Have you played around with anything in the TAK ecosystem? Share your experience and ideas in the comments below. | 38 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510851",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T17:38:30",
"content": "I wonder if the US left any backdoors for themselves. I can see a strategic advantage to having people install their software.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,569.227405 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/scroll-through-esphome-with-ipod-style-click-wheel/ | Scroll Through ESPHome With IPod-style Click Wheel | Tom Nardi | [
"ipod hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"click wheel",
"ESP32",
"esphome",
"home automation",
"ipod",
"remote control"
] | While you’d be hard pressed to find a Hackaday writer that feels any nostalgia for the DRM nonsense the iPod helped to introduce, we’ve got to admit that we miss that click wheel. Spinning your way through long lists was a breeze, and the tactile response made it easy to stop exactly where you wanted. These days, we’re stuck fumbling our way through touch screen interfaces that make simple tasks like seeking to a particular spot in a song or video all but impossible to do with any kind of accuracy.
If you too yearn to once again feel that subtle thumping under your thumb, then
check out this project from [landonr]
. Technically the handheld gadget is intended to be used as a wireless remote for a home automation system powered by ESPHome, but that’s only one possible application for this particular combination of off-the-shelf components.
If you must, there’s a version with buttons.
Building your own version of the handheld device is a simple as mounting a LILYGO ESP32 T-Display TTGO, an ANO Rotary Navigation Encoder from Adafruit, and a battery pack to a scrap of perfboard. We’d probably look into 3D printing a case to make it a bit less…pokey, but that’s up to you. The result actually bears quite a resemblance to Apple’s iconic media player, but without that pesky walled garden to hold you back.
As mentioned previously, [landonr] wrote the firmware with the intention of controlling a home automation system. So there’s a lot of stuff in there about turning on lights and such. But there are also functions for media playback that look very promising. Whatever software you end up running on it, one thing is for sure: running through the menus is going to feel like a dream.
We’ve covered several other home automation remotes over the years. This
handsome wooden model kept things simple
with just a few physical buttons, while this
somewhat more whimsical approach repurposed Nintendo’s Zapper light gun
.
Thanks to [Tushar] for the tip. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510952",
"author": "Navarre",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T00:46:26",
"content": "The real question is, can this fit in an iPod enclosure?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6510980",
"author": "tomt",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09... | 1,760,372,569.333097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/dont-be-salty-how-to-make-desalination-work-in-tomorrows-world/ | Don’t Be Salty: How To Make Desalination Work In Tomorrow’s World | Maya Posch | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"desalination"
] | Although water is often scarce for human consumption and agriculture, this planet is three-quarters covered by the stuff. The problem is getting the salt out, and this is normally done by the Earth’s water cycle, which produces rain and similar phenomena that replenish the amount of fresh water. Roughly 3% of the water on Earth is fresh water, of which a fraction is potable water.
Over the past decades, the use of
desalination
has increased year over year, particularly in nations like Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but parched United States states such as California are increasingly looking into desalination technologies. The obvious obstacles that desalination faces – regardless of the exact technology used – involve the energy required to run these systems, and the final cost of the produced potable water relative to importing it from elsewhere.
Other issues that crop up with desalination include the environmental impact, especially from the brine waste and conceivably marine life sucked into the intake pipes. As the need for desalination increases, what are the available options to reduce the power needs and environmental impact?
Heating, Filtering, And Waste
Water salinity diagram. (Credit: Peter Summerlin)
A common type of desalination is distillation, which is essentially what also happens in nature through evaporation of surface waters. As water is heated, it evaporates, with the salts and other dissolved solid matter being left behind. When this process is done using intense heat, and in stages, it is called multi-stage flash distillation (
MSF
), which is one of the three most common distillation types, together with multi-effect distillation (
MED
) which uses stages with heated steam that couple into the next stage, effectively reusing the heat. However, by far the most common type of distillation (~69% share) is reverse-osmosis (
RO
), which uses a pressure differential across a membrane that allows the water molecules to pass, but not salts and many other dissolved solids.
Important to keep in mind is that the output from none of these large-scale desalination processes is a neat separation into water and whatever else is left. Instead there is a fresh water output (~40% for RO), with a concentrate flow that is essentially briny water, allowing with whatever contaminants were in the intake saline or brackish water. This concentrate flow is what is returned to the sea or other body of water from which the intake water was drawn.
In addition to the much higher saline content of this concentrate flow, approximately twice that of seawater, it also has a much higher temperature than the intake water for thermal desalination plants. While an increased temperature of the discharged brine has clear negative effects on the local marine life, the plume of briny water has been reported to persist up to 5 km from the discharge site at some locations. This would render the area unsuitable for a number of species that do not deal well with briny water.
Number and capacity of operational desalination facilities by (a) technology and (b) feedwater type.
(Ihsanullah et al., 2021)
Much of this is highlighted in an August 2021 review by
Ihsanullah et al.
detailing the known environmental impact of today’s desalination facilities, as well as strategies to make desalination more environmentally friendly. This review also covers the additives that are commonly added to the intake water, and which may end up in the environment include:
antiscalants.
biofouling control additives (e.g. chlorine and sodium hypochlorite).
anti-foaming additives.
cleaning chemicals, e.g. for membrane cleaning.
In addition, the waste stream may include various other contaminants, such as copper and nickel as a result of corrosion of heat exchangers and other components of the desalination plant. By the nature of the desalination process, heavy metal concentrations will also be increased. To lessen the environmental impact from this waste stream, the reject streams from desalination plants are increasingly treated before being released back into the environment.
The Energy Benefit Of Membranes
Ihsanullah et al. (2021)
Until the 1980s, the use of thermal desalination was commonplace, which was when RO became commercially available. A massive benefit with RO is its much lower energy requirements per cubic meter of produced fresh water (
Elsaid et al., 2020
), with MSF (operating at 120°C) requiring the most energy, especially thermally. MED uses significantly less power due to its reusing of heat in its successive stages. As can be seen in the table reproduced here from Ihsanullah et al. (2021), for RO the lack of thermal energy requirements make it significantly more efficient by default, only requiring electrical energy to create the pressure gradient across the membrane.
By requiring electricity rather than electricity and thermal power, essentially any constant source of electrical power can be used, making RO very versatile and suitable for both smaller and larger installations. Considering the rapid decrease in the marketshare of thermal desalination installations, it is likely that RO and similar membrane-based technologies will continue to dominate the market for the foreseeable future.
Capacitive Ionization (CDI) and electrodialysis/electrodialysis reversal (ED and EDR respectively) are some of a number of newer technologies that are seeing some use, though mostly for more brackish water. Along with nanofiltration (NF) and similar filtration technologies, these are held back by material issues as well as higher power usage (especially with CDI and ED/EDR). Other listed technologies are Electro-Deionization, membrane distillation and forward osmosis (FO), according to
WNA
.
An attractive energy source for powering desalination plants – whether thermal or membrane-based – is a nuclear reactor. These can provide both electrical power and heat, with e.g. Japan’s JAEA demonstrating an MSF desalination plant powered by a high-temperature reactor called the GTHTR300. As MSF can deal more easily with e.g. heavily polluted water better than RO absent pre-treatment of the intake water, the waste heat from nuclear reactors (including today’s existing light-water reactors) may make MSF and MED much more competitive with RO, while preventing the pollution from today’s mostly natural gas-powered MSF and MED desalination plants.
This has been demonstrated over the past decades in e.g. Kazakhstan (BN-350 fast reactor) and Japan, where ten desalination plants have been powered by pressurized water reactors (PWRs), employing mostly MED and RO. In South Korea some of its PWRs also run MED desalination plants that mostly generate water for its own cooling systems. In Egypt and Pakistan, their new nuclear power plants are also used to run MED and RO facilities.
Recycling The Waste
Although it’s generally been the case that the waste stream from desalination plants has been discharged back into the environment, there are good reasons to instead use as much as possible from this concentrated briny water. Especially in the case where seawater is used as the intake water, the concentrate at the output of the desalination process will contain significant amounts of magnesium, gold, uranium, bromine, potassium, cesium, rubidium and lithium, at least some of which may be economically recoverable.
Recently we looked at recovering
uranium from seawater
, which is challenging due to there being only a few parts per million of uranium dissolved, with the same being the case for the other metals and minerals that may be of interest. Although the oceans contain more uranium and such than can be reasonably mined from the Earth’s crust, fact of the matter is that there’s even more water in which it is diluted.
Since desalination plants massively reduce the amount of water, it logically follows that the resulting ‘waste’ will have much higher concentrations of uranium, lithium and so on, that may make it attractive to filter them out of this concentrated flow. The result of this may be that we can use much if not most of this concentrate, which would reduce the amount of briny, possibly contaminated water that ends up in the environment.
Hope Springs Eternal
If we are to use cheaper, environmentally friendly sources of power for our desalination plants, and use as many resources as possible from the ‘waste’ produced by these plants, we may actually end up saving money and environmental damage from mining elsewhere. Perhaps it is this perspective that is most helpful in any discussion about desalination.
As noted earlier, it is common for nuclear power plants to be involved in desalination. When this process can be performed using MED technology using what amounts to essentially waste heat, and the briny waste is dealt with properly, then it may just provide millions of people with plenty of potable water. One essential part of a desalination part that is hard to underestimate is that it does require access to a sea, ocean or other significant source of brackish or saline water.
When a city is placed in the middle of a desert, then said potable water will always have to be provided by pipeline or similar. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish. | 60 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510788",
"author": "dave",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T14:11:55",
"content": "“As the need for desalination increases, what are the available options to reduce the power needs and environmental impact?”Cutting back on the need for water in places where there is no water ?have we not y... | 1,760,372,569.446262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/ask-hackaday-stripping-wires-with-lasers/ | Ask Hackaday: Stripping Wires With Lasers | Al Williams | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Laser Hacks",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"laser",
"wire stripping"
] | Most of us strip the insulation off wires using some form of metal blade or blades. You can get many tools that do that, but you can also get by with skillfully using a pair of cutters, a razor blade or — in a pinch — a steak knife. However, modern assembly lines have another option: laser stripping. Now that many people have reasonable laser cutters, we wonder if anyone is using laser strippers either from the surplus market or of the do-it-yourself variety?
We are always surprised that
thermal strippers
are so uncommon since they are decidedly low-tech. Two hot blades and a spring make up the heart of them. Sure, they are usually expensive new, but you can usually pick them up used for a song. The technology for lasers doesn’t seem very difficult, although using the blue lasers most people use in cutters may not be optimal for the purpose. This
commercial product
, for example, uses infrared, but if you have a CO
2
laser, that might be a possibility.
The technique has found use in
large-scale production
for a while. Of course, if you don’t care about potential mechanical damage, you can get automated stripping equipment with a big motor for a few hundred bucks.
We did find an
old video about using a CO
2
laser
to strip ribbon cable, but nothing lately. Of course, zapping insulation creates fumes, but so does lasering everything, so we don’t think that’s what’s stopping people from this approach. | 22 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510727",
"author": "Diego Betto",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T11:07:48",
"content": "Nice! If you add a mirror on the side you can also cut the bottom side bouncing the laser (with a particular care of where the laser goes around :) )",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repl... | 1,760,372,569.944261 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/08/machining-zig-zag-figure-8-oil-grooves/ | Custom Lathe Tool Cuts Complex Oil Grooves | Anne Ogborn | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"lathe",
"machining",
"manual machining"
] | Oil grooves are used to lubricate the inside of a bearing, and can come in many forms — from a single hole that takes a few drops of oil, to helical patterns that distribute it over the entire internal surface. The ideal arrangement is a looping figure eight pattern similar to an oscilloscope Lissajous figure, but cutting these is a nightmare. That is, unless you’ve got the proper tool.
We figure [Machine Mechanic] must need to cut a lot of them, as they
spent quite a bit of time perfecting this custom lathe attachment
to automate the process. Through an assortment of clever linkages and a rod-turned-crank that was welded together in-situ, the device converts the rotational motion of the lathe into a reciprocating action that moves the cutting tool in and out of the bearing. Incidentally the business end of this gadget started life out as a bolt, before it was turned down and had a piece of tool steel brazed onto the end.
With a little adjustment, it seems like this device could also be used to carve decorative patterns on the outside of the workpiece. But even if this is the only trick it can pull off, we’re still impressed. This is a clever hack for a very specialized machine shop operation that most would assume you’d need a four-axis CNC to pull off.
Lathes seem at first like rather single purpose machines, we’re always pleased to discover strange and wonderful things being done with them, like this
seemingly impossible-to-turn piece
, and this
combo wire EDM and lathe
.
Thanks to [Zane] for the tip. | 41 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510733",
"author": "Fred",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T11:24:04",
"content": "Great ingenuity! Sure it’s quite hazardous but I’m sure they understood that. Also, I like that they didn’t weld directly onto the chuck, despite what Mr happy’s comment above says.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,570.024183 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/interfacing-broken-ps4-controllers-with-a-replacement-pcb/ | Interfacing Broken PS4 Controllers With A Replacement PCB | Lewin Day | [
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"controller",
"playstation",
"ps4 controller",
"rp2040"
] | [Becky] had some PS4 controllers that were sadly no longer functional. However, most of the buttons and joysticks still appeared to be okay. Thus, she set about
designing a replacement PCB to breathe new life into these formerly bricked gamepads.
In the case of the PS4 controller, most of the buttons are of a membrane type, that talk to the main board inside via a series of contacts on a flex cable. Thus, [Becky] designed her PCB to interface with that to read most of the buttons. A breadboard and an LED came in handy to figure out which pads corresponded to which buttons on the controller. Replacement joysticks were sourced off Amazon to solder directly on to the replacement PCB.
[Becky] also took advantage of Fusion 360’s design tools to 3D print a simulcra of the final design. This helped get the fit just right inside the gamepad’s shell.
The replacement PCB itself acts as a breakout so that the gamepad’s controls can be wired up to a microcontroller. In this case, the controller was repurposed to work with an RP2040 microcontroller
running a looping audio project
. The various buttons and controls fire off samples to allow simple performances.
Those eager to replace the guts of their own controllers can make their own,
as [Becky] has shared the design files online
. If you just want to interface a PS4 controller in a less invasive way, though,
consider this alternative technique
. Video after the break. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510734",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T11:27:38",
"content": "Great hack :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6510902",
"author": "Bill",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T21:10:04",
"content": "Brilliant idea �... | 1,760,372,569.885246 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/motorcycle-builder-makes-downhill-mountain-bike/ | Motorcycle Builder Makes Downhill Mountain Bike | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bicycle",
"bike",
"downhill",
"drivetrain",
"frame",
"millyard",
"mountain",
"sealed"
] | [Allen Millyard] is a premier British motorcycle builder. In these circles he is widely regarded and his custom motorcycles are nearly world-famous. But when his son took up downhill mountain biking, he decided to put his skills building a different type of vehicle.
This is the Millyard MR001
, one of the most unique mountain bikes ever built thanks to some design choices that solve many problems otherwise inherent in bicycles.
Perhaps the most immediately striking design of this bike is the aluminum space frame, a lightweight but extremely strong frame necessary for the high speeds and stresses of
downhill mountain biking
. Upon closer inspection, however, the sealed drivetrain warrants further inspection. Unlike most mountain bikes with gears, this one eliminates the typical derailleur which hangs below the rear gears. The gears are instead above the pedals in front of the rear tire, are completely sealed eliminating the maintenance requirements of a typical bike, and are designed in such a way that they can be shifted without the bike moving.
Despite the bike being built in 2007, it still includes plenty of features that still aren’t widely adopted in mountain biking. It’s also nearly completely silent thanks to the custom drivetrain, and [Allen] reports that it still sneaks up on other mountain bikers as a result. This is essentially
the opposite problem of another bike we’ve seen around
. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511312",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T03:09:21",
"content": "You’re welcome for the tip XD",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6511314",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-09-10T03:12:17",
"content": "... | 1,760,372,570.166124 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/the-internet-without-the-computer-1990s-style/ | The Internet Without The Computer: 1990s Style | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"3com",
"Audrey",
"Internet Appliance",
"retrocomputing"
] | We think of the Internet extending to small devices as a modern trend, but it actually is a good example of how everything makes a circle. Today, we want the network to connect to our thermostat and our toaster. But somewhere between the year 1990 and the year 2010, there was a push to make the Internet accessible to the majority of people who didn’t own a computer. The prototypical device, in our mind, was Microsoft’s ill-fated WebTV, but a recent video from [This Does Not Compute] reminded us of another entry in that race: The
Audrey
from 3COM. Check out the video, below.
Many devices, like the WebTV, wanted to take over your TV set to save on a display. That doesn’t sound bad today, but you have to remember, the typical TV set in those days was not the high-resolution digital monster you have today, so the experience of surfing the Web on one was suboptimal. The Audrey actually had a cute little screen and a compact keyboard.
The 7.5 inch color LCD was state-of-the-art. There were even USB ports, although the keyboard was IR wireless. Don’t forget this needed to be near a phone line because Audrey had to use its 56K modem that was onboard. A “channel knob” let you download selected web pages without having to understand the complexities of the new-fangled Internet.
The box could do e-mail including handwriting on the stylus-driven touch screen and voice attachments. Honestly, for its day, the Audrey was pretty advanced and ran the sophisticated operating system QNX. The browser isn’t very useful these days, though, because the built-in browser no longer supports modern web protocols.
Everything goes in a circle. One of Audrey’s key selling points was as a personal communication hub. We are seeing attempts to storm that market again. Other appliances slaughtered Audrey in the marketplace. However, the whole category was doomed, of course.
We had forgotten the Audrey, but thanks to [This Does Not Compute] we got a pleasant reminder. We love the old retrocomputers. As mentioned, we had to think of the
WebTV
(later MSN TV). We do, however, miss our
Chumby
. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511267",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T23:31:21",
"content": "Watching the development of technology is like watching the cambrian explosion in a single lifetime.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6511275",
... | 1,760,372,570.325395 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/bootstrapping-the-old-fashioned-way/ | Bootstrapping The Old Fashioned Way | Jonathan Bennett | [
"computer hacks",
"News",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"altair",
"assembly",
"imsai 8080"
] | The PDP-11, the Altair 8800, and the IMSAI 8080 were some of the heroes of the computer revolution, and they have something in common — front panel switches, and a lot of them. You probably have a fuzzy idea about those switches, maybe from reading Levy’s Hackers, where the painful process of toggling in programs is briefly described. But how exactly does it work? Well thanks to [Dave Plummer] of Dave’s Garage,
now we have a handy tutorial
. The exact computer in question is a reproduction of the IMSAI 8080, the computer made famous by a young Matthew Broderick in Wargames. [Dave]
managed to score the reproduction
and a viewer saved him the time of assembly.
The example program is a Larson Scanner, AKA making an strip of lights push a pulse of light across the strip. [Dave] starts with the Assembly code, a scant 11 lines, and runs it through an assembler available online. That gives us machine code, but there’s no hex keypad for input, so we need those in 8-bit binary bytes. To actually program the machine, you set the address switches to your start-of-program location, and the data switches to your first byte. The “deposit” switch sets that byte, while the “deposit next” switch increments the address and then stores the value. It means you don’t have to key in an address for each instruction, just the data. Get to the end of the program, confirm the address is set to the start, and flick run. Hope you toggled everything in correctly. If so, you’re rewarded with a friendly scanner so reminiscent of 80s TV shows. Stick around after the break to see the demonstration! | 62 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511205",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T20:14:30",
"content": "When I was a kid, I had too hand assemble 6502 code.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6511214",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,570.529703 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/ultra-thin-rubber-parts-made-with-a-3d-printed-plug/ | Ultra-Thin Rubber Parts Made With A 3D Printed Plug | Tom Nardi | [
"Parts"
] | [
"3D printed mold",
"ultrasonic cleaning",
"water soluble"
] | We generally think of 3D printed components as being hard bits of plastic, because for the most part, that’s what we’ve got loaded up in our desktop machines. But outside of the normal PLA, PETG, and ABS, you can also print with various flexible filaments such as TPU. This can be handy for producing custom seals, or rugged enclosures.
But what if you want to make very thin rubberized parts? In that case, the 0.4 mm nozzle on most desktop machines will be your limiting factor. But not so with the method
[Daniel Bauen] demonstrates in his latest
Engineerable
video
. The trick here is that the printer isn’t producing the final product — it’s making a water-soluble plug that has been slightly undersized for the application at hand.
Once the plug has been printed, [Daniel] sprays it with several coats of Plasti Dip. This builds up a rubberized coating on the printed part, and once it’s reached the desired thickness, the whole thing gets tossed into an ultrasonic cleaner to break up the filament. What you’re left with is a silicone-like part that has the same shape as your original print, but is far thinner than anything you could have extruded normally.
So what is [Daniel] looking to accomplish with this technique? We’ll admit the shape of the object is rather suggestive, but in that case, the dimensions just leave us with more questions than answers. Perhaps we’ll learn more in the next video, which we’re told will see the plugs get dipped into latex.
If subtractive manufacturing is more your speed, you can always
freeze a sheet of rubber and use a CNC
to cut custom parts out of it. | 21 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511186",
"author": "als",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T19:14:22",
"content": "emergency condom. sorry, couldn’t resist",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6511188",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"ti... | 1,760,372,570.223461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/frank-drakes-legacy-or-are-we-all-alone-in-the-universe/ | Frank Drake’s Legacy, Or: Are We All Alone In The Universe? | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"News",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"exoplanets",
"Frank Drake",
"obituary",
"SETI",
"seti@home"
] | When
Frank Drake
began his astronomy career in the late 1950s, this was an incredibly exciting time for the field. Humanity was beginning to unlock the secrets of the Universe using ever more powerful radio frequency and optical telescopes, including the tantalizing prospect of space-based telescopes. Amidst the ramping up Space Race between the US and USSR, there was an ever-growing excitement about humankind’s future among the stars.
As concrete plans for landings and colonies on the Moon, Venus and Mars were proposed and put into action, it also brought to the forefront many existing and new questions about humanity’s place in the Universe. During Frank Drake’s 92 years on planet Earth – until his passing on September 2nd of this year – he was one of the driving forces behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (
SETI
), along with other legends like Carl Sagan.
Although to the average person the acronym SETI is most likely to bring to mind popcorn movies about little grey – or green – men, Drake’s Project Ozma, as well as the SETI Institution and the ongoing Breakthrough Listen project are just some of the attempts made by Drake and his colleagues over the decades to answer that one question that may affect the very course of humankind’s future: are we alone in the Universe?
Intelligent Life As A Fluke
In a Universe that contains billions upon billions of stars and planets, what is the chance that life will form on any of these planets? Of this life, what percentage will possess a level of intelligence that enables complex societies in which scientific inquiry and technological development can be sustained? Out of these societies, how many will acquire the means to reach out beyond the limits of their planet?
Although the speculation about extraterrestrial life has been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, it hasn’t been until the development of more advanced means of observation that humanity has gained the ability to put these speculations to the test. As commonplace as we consider lifeforms – whether intelligent or not – to exist within the Earth’s biosphere, we know at this point in time that of all planets and moons in our Solar System, only the Earth is capable of supporting life, never mind an advanced society.
In the 1930s, rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky mentioned his doubts about alien intelligent life in an unpublished work, with physicist Enrico Fermi becoming associated in the 1950s with a formal definition of these doubts, commonly referred to as
Fermi’s Paradox
. Essentially this paradox entails the conflict between the likelihood of a significant number of alien civilizations, and the clear absence of these civilizations.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence thus seeks to resolve this paradox. Are we wrong about the likelihood of intelligent life forming, or are there other factors that we may be missing? In 1961 Drake would formalize these factors in what is called the
Drake Equation
, which is:
N = R
*
· f
p
· n
e
· f
l
· f
i
· f
c
· L
Here N is the number of civilizations within our galaxy with whom communication may be possible.
R
*
is the average rate of star formation.
f
p
is the fraction of stars with planets.
n
e
is the fraction of these planets that can support life.
f
1
is the fraction of planets that actually develop life at some point.
f
i
is is the fraction of planets with life that develop intelligent life (civilizations).
f
c
is the fraction of these civilizations with technology that allows them to be detected through e.g. radio transmissions.
L
is the length of time during which these detectable signals will be emitted.
Unsurprisingly, the values one can assign these factors will range wildly, making
N
to be of questionable use, but it is a useful aid in showing the many underlying questions to be answered before the larger question of whether Earth life in general and human civilization in particular is a cosmic fluke, somewhat rare or actually commonplace.
In Carl Sagan’s
Cosmos
PBS television series – as well as the book with the same title – these same questions are also asked and considered from many angles. In science fiction works such as
Star Trek
,
Babylon 5
, etc. the uncomfortable questions are avoided as these feature a Galaxy brimming with thousands upon thousands of civilizations. Based on the available scientific evidence one might ask the question of whether we are perhaps afraid of being all alone in the Galaxy.
What if we do travel out there in faster-than-light spaceships, but find a Galaxy utterly devoid of life and habitable planets?
The Wow! Signal
The Wow! signal represented as “6EQUJ5” with Jerry R. Ehman’s handwritten comment.
Would we recognize another civilization if we came across it? This is one of the questions posed in Carl Sagan’s
Cosmos,
as he describes a hypothetical scenario in which a probe like the Voyager 1 & 2 approaches Earth, and its operators try to determine whether Earth has an active biosphere, and maybe a civilization. Based on the atmospheric levels of organic molecules like methane and photosynthesis indications the former seems likely, while the Earth’s surface shows signs of structures, but would they be signs of an intelligence?
A significant amount of attention with SETI has been directed towards radio frequency (RF) communication, as RF signals can travel significant distances through space, and are at least for human civilization a common communication method that also liberally gets broadcast into space. If Earth has been lit up like a proverbial RF beacon for about a hundred years, surely this would be the case for other inhabited planets too.
This assumption was one of the reasons why in 1977 a narrowband RF signal received by the Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope got a surge of attention, as it seemed to be the surest sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. This so-called ‘
Wow! signal
‘ came from the direction of the
Sagittarius
constellation and lasted beyond the 72 second observation window by Big Ear. Unfortunately no modulation was detected in the 1420 MHz signal, and so far the signal has not been repeated, making it likely that it was an astronomical phenomenon.
On the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, the National Geographic Channel sponsored a promotion for one of its shows by transmitting a digital stream encoding thousands of Twitter messages to the presumed origin of the 1977 signal via the Arecibo Observatory’s radio telescope dish. To this day we have either received no response, missed the response, or our message ended up in someone’s spam folder.
A Matter Of Time
What is perhaps one of the most humbling aspects of astronomy is the sheer, mind-boggling scale of the Cosmos. Not just in terms of space and distances, but also in terms of time. Much of the electromagnetic radiation that is now being captured by the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope was sent out by their sources millions to billions of years ago. Our own
Milky Way
Galaxy is approximately 87,000 light years in diameter, with an estimated 100 – 400 billion stars. The light from the furthest stars in the Milky Way relative to Earth’s position originate from a time when humanity was still living as hunter-gatherers on a wild Earth.
Map of the Milky Way Galaxy with the constellations that cross the galactic plane in each direction and the known most prominent components annotated including main arms, spurs, bar, nucleus/bulge, and notable nebulae. (Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi)
This notion is perhaps the most difficult one that Frank Drake and his colleagues had to contest with when it comes to SETI projects. It feels that all we can do is keep listening, even if the likelihood is vanishingly small that there is anything to receive. This did however not prevent the
SETI@home
project from attracting over a million users who dedicated part of their computer resources to running a distributed super computer that processed data from the Arecibo and
Green Bank
radio telescopes.
Even though the SETI@home project is currently dormant after no conclusive findings, the
Berkeley SETI Research Center
behind the project still has other ongoing projects, of which the most notable one is the
Breakthrough Listen
project. With $100 million in funding, the project began in 2016 and is expected to run for 10 years, providing the most comprehensive search to date using both radio and visible light telescopes.
Differentiating Intelligence
The plaque attached to Pioneer 10.
The most vexing aspect of SETI projects is that although there are plenty of signals coming in that bear a closer look, who is to say what signal ‘definitely’ comes from an advanced civilization, and which ones are from natural phenomena? The Cosmos is after all a rather noisy place in the electromagnetic spectrum, which significantly increases the burden of proof.
Over the past decades, humankind has sent out messages directed at potential alien civilizations. These have ranged from RF transmissions to physical items, such as the
Pioneer plaque
attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft that was designed by Drake and Sagan. A few years later the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft would be launched, each with a
Voyager Golden Record
attached to it.
At this point in time, Pioneer 10 and 11, as well as Voyager 1 and 2 have left the reach of Earth’s star system and are travelling through interstellar space. Even though only Voyager 1 and 2 are still actively gathering sensor data and communicating with Earth, the messages these spacecraft carry should last long enough for another civilization to find them and perhaps manage to decode them.
Barring faster-than-light travel or another means of transport which humanity has not yet conceived of, such an event would take place many thousands to millions of years into the future of Earth. Even the radio and television broadcasts we have sent out for decades now will take thousands of years to reach the more distant parts of the Milky Way, and possibly vice versa, making SETI one of the longest endurance games imaginable.
Lightspeed, Mr. Drake
Regardless of what humankind’s future will look like, Frank Drake’s legacy along with that of Carl Sagan and other great minds of the recent past, should endure for many more decades and centuries to come. Perhaps the most impactful aspect of their teachings is that how they taught us to take the time now and then to find ourselves outside at night. To find a spot without any artificial light and to look up, so that we can take in the enormity and beauty of the Milky Way and the countless stars which we can perceive even with the naked eye.
By allowing us to see even just a bit more of this one small Galaxy and to allow our minds to wander on the question what – and who – we may find among all those stars, humanity is better prepared to deal with the challenges and possible discoveries than before, regardless of what the final Drake Equation ends up looking like. May you find peace among the stars, Mr. Drake. | 85 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511155",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T17:52:46",
"content": "It’s funny because we tend to think of the galaxy as huge, but… it’s really not. That’s part of the problem with the Fermi paradox and the biggest problem with science fiction shows: out where the Earth is, t... | 1,760,372,570.664353 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/hackaday-podcast-184-what-is-art-bulk-tape-eraser-go-brr-and-the-death-of-email/ | Hackaday Podcast 184: What Is Art, Bulk Tape Eraser Go Brr, And The Death Of Email | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos had a lot of fun discussing the best of the previous week’s hacks in spite of Elliot’s microphone connectivity troubles. News-wise, we busted out the wine and cheese to briefly debate whether a Colorado man should have won an art competition by entering an image created by AI. Afterward, we went around a bit about floppies, which are being outlawed in Japan.
Then it’s on to the What’s That Sound Results Show, but since Elliot can’t find a 14-sided die, he pulled on the Internet for our random number needs. Congratulations to our big winner [D Rex], who will receive one our coveted Hackaday Podcast t-shirts (Ed. note: Heck,
I
don’t even have one! That’s how special these babies are).
Afterlife for dead floppies.
Make shoes out of this.
Kristina’s Cyberdeck Thoughts
Is the food-safety-of-3D-printing debate over once and for all? It is as far as Elliot’s concerned. You know what else is over? The era of distributed, independent email servers. Bah! We’re not kidding about that last one — and we discuss a lie-detecting app that may or may not prove our innocence.
Finally, we talk active foot cooling, heat barriers for hot shops, and big, strong magnets. What are they for? Fixing floppies, fool!
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 184 Show Notes:
News:
Man Boasts About Winning Art Competition Using AI-Created Image
Japan Decides It’s Time to Stop Using Floppy Disks, Report Says
What’s that Sound?
Congratulations to [D Rex] for correctly guessing that Kristina was advancing an old-school film camera!
Marc Bolan
? That you?
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Food Safe 3D Printing: A Study
Truthsayer Uses Facial Recognition To See If You’re Telling The Truth
“The Era Of Distributed, Independent Email Servers Is Over”
Hackaday Prize 2022: A Cooler For Your Footwear
Why You’ve Never Heard About Nintendo’s U-Force
Fixing A Hot Shop, With Science
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
A Simple Web Configured BLE To GPIO Bridge
Organise Your Hacks With TreeSheets: An Open Source Hierarchical Spreadsheet
Touch Tone MIDI Phone And Vocoder Covers Daft Punk
Kristina’s Picks:
Machine Learning App Remembers Names So You Don’t Have To
Magnetic Maniac Manages Mangled Memory
2022 Cyberdeck Contest: The Black Beast Will Help You Survive A Robot Apocalypse
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Stable Diffusion And Why It Matters
LAION-5B: A NEW ERA OF OPEN LARGE-SCALE MULTI-MODAL DATASETS
Backup Camera, Digital Dash, Road Assist… In 1969? | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511142",
"author": "Fred Love",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T17:05:13",
"content": "Art is, Something that tells a story, or evokes an emotion, or both. This does not happen to the same degree in all observers. The better the piece of art, the more people it will effect . Poorer art ... | 1,760,372,570.375703 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/09/ztachip-accelerates-tensorflow-and-image-workloads/ | Ztachip Accelerates Tensorflow And Image Workloads | Dave Rowntree | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"computer hacks"
] | [
"accelerator",
"ai",
"RISC-V",
"scala",
"spinalhdl",
"tensorflow",
"verilog",
"vexrisc-v",
"vhdl"
] | [Vuong Nguyen] clearly knows his way around artificial intelligence accelerator hardware, creating
ztachip: an open source implementation of an accelerator platform for AI and traditional image processing workloads
. Ztachip (pronounced “zeta-chip”) contains an array of custom processors, and is not tied to one particular architecture. Ztachip implements a new tensor programming paradigm that [Vuong] has created, which
can
accelerate TensorFlow tasks, but is not limited to that. In fact it can process TensorFlow in parallel with non-AI tasks, as the video below shows.
A RISC-V core, based on the VexRiscV design, is used as the host processor handling the distribution of the application. VexRiscV itself is quite interesting. Written in SpinalHDL (a Scala variant), it’s super configurable, producing a Verilog core, ready to drop into the design.
A Digilent Arty-A7, Arducam and a VGA PMOD is all you need
From a hardware design perspective the RISC-V core hooks up to an AXI crossbar, with all the AXI-lite busses muxed as is usual for the
AMBA AXI ecosystem
. The Ztachip core as well as a DDR3 controller are also connected, together with a camera interface and VGA video.
Other than providing an FPGA-specific DDR3 controller and AXI crossbar IP, the rest of the design is generic RTL. This is good news. The demo below deploys onto an Artix-7 based
Digilent (Arty-A7)
with a VGA PMOD module, but little else needed. Pre-build Xilinx IP is provided, but targeting a different FPGA shouldn’t be a huge task for the experienced FPGA ninja.
Ztachip top level architecture
The magic happens in the Ztachip core, which is mostly an array of Pcores. Each Pcore has both vector and scalar processing capability, making it super flexible. The Tensor Engine (internally this is the ‘dataplane processor’) is in charge here, sending instructions from the RISC-V core into the Pcore array together with image data, as well as streaming video data out. That camera is only a 0.3 MP Arducam, and the video is VGA resolution, but give it a bigger FPGA and those limits could be raised.
This domain-specific approach uses a highly modified C-like language (with a custom compiler) to describe the application that is to be distributed across the accelerator array. We couldn’t find any documentation on this, but there are a few example algorithms.
The demo video shows a real-time mix of four algorithms running in parallel; one object classification (Google’s Tensorflow
mobilenet-ssd
, a pre-trained AI model)
canny edge detection
, a
Harris corner detection
, and Optical flow which gives it a predator-like motion vision.
[Vuong] reckons, efficiency wise it is 5.5x more computationally efficient than a Jetson Nano and 37x more than Google’s TPU edge. These are bold claims, to say the least, but who are we to argue with a clearly incredibly talented engineer?
We cover many AI-related topics, like this
AI assisted tap-typing gadget
, for starters. And not wanting to forget about the original AI hardware,
the good old-fashioned neuron
, we got that covered as well! | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6511119",
"author": "Dave Rowntree",
"timestamp": "2022-09-09T15:39:38",
"content": "Advert? Are you sure? It’s very much an open source hardware and software project by one man, trying to get it up and out into the world. I don’t see any big corporation behind this.Did you *look* a... | 1,760,372,570.429052 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/improve-cd-sound-by-shaving/ | Improve CD Sound By Shaving? | Al Williams | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"audiophile",
"cdrom",
"Compact Disc"
] | We always enjoy the odd things that people do to try to get better audio reproduction. Exotic cables, special amplifiers, and higher resolution digitization come to mind. Most of this is dubious, at best, but [Techmoan] brings up something we must have missed back in the day: shaving CDs with a gadget that was marketed as the “CD Sound Improver.” The theory is that bad CD reproduction comes from light scatter of the laser. The solution, according to the maker of this vintage equipment, is to cut a 36-degree bevel to act as a
light trap
. You can see the gadget in the video below.
The device claims it reduced vibration, improved audio, and even helped DVDs playback better video. As you might imagine, this has little hope of actually working. The box is essentially a motor-driven turntable, a razor blade, and a port for a vacuum cleaner to suck up the mess. You were told to color the edge with a marker, too.
On the one hand, this seems ridiculous. Of course, it also seems crazy that a marker on a CD would defeat some forms of copy protection, but it
did
. Apparently, quite a few people plunked down around $500 to trim the plastic off of their CDs. There were plenty of positive reviews, too. But as you might expect, there’s no actual benefit to doing this operation. Nevertheless, [Techmoan] did sacrifice a [Dave Brubeck] CD in the name of science. We don’t think you’ll be surprised at the results.
There’s always debate about how much difference
small changes in equipment make to your audio
. Unfortunately, most of the easy things probably don’t make a difference you can hear, and to make that kind of difference is
much more difficult
. | 89 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510630",
"author": "David Lang",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T02:34:27",
"content": "coloring the edge with a marker was actually a legitimate thing to defeat some of the stupid copy protection stuff.But being digital, improving the accuracy of reading from the CD will only matter for ... | 1,760,372,570.788449 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/the-mos-7600-video-game-chip-gives-up-its-secrets/ | The MOS 7600 Video Game Chip Gives Up Its Secrets | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"cpu",
"ken shirriff",
"MOS 7600",
"tv game",
"video game"
] | A good chip decapping and reverse engineering is always going to capture our interest, and when it comes from [Ken Shirriff] we know it’s going to be a particularly good one. This time
he’s directed his attention to the MOS 7600 all-in-one video game chip
(
Nitter
), a mostly forgotten device from the 6502 chipmaker which we featured a few weeks ago
when it was the subject of a blogger’s curiosity
. The question then was whether it contained a microprocessor or not and even whether it was another 6502 variant, and the answer revealed in the decapping answers that but will disappoint the 6502 camp.
On the chip is a mixture of analog and digital circuitry, with some elements of a more traditional game chip alongside a ROM, a PLA, and a serial CPU core. The PLA stores pixel data while the ROM stores the CPU code, and the CPU serves to perform calculations necessary to the games themselves. He hasn’t fully reverse-engineered either, but the two areas of the chip are mask-programmed to produce the different games with which the chip could be found.
So the answer to the original question is that there is a CPU on board, but it’s not a 6502 and the operation is a hybrid between dedicated game chip and CPU-controlled chip. What we find interesting is that this serial CPU core might have as we mused in the previous piece made the heart of a usable 1970s microcontroller, was this a missed opportunity on the part of MOS? We’ll never know, but at least another piece of early video game history has been uncovered. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510598",
"author": "Matt Cramer",
"timestamp": "2022-09-08T01:01:26",
"content": "A nine bit CPU? Did someone write that spec as a joke to literally one-up eight bit systems?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6510604",
... | 1,760,372,570.960311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/ethersweep-an-easy-to-deploy-ethernet-connected-stepper-controller/ | Ethersweep: An Easy-To-Deploy Ethernet Connected Stepper Controller | Dave Rowntree | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"atmega328",
"freecad",
"KiCAD",
"network",
"python",
"stepper motor",
"udp",
"wiznet"
] | [Neumi] over on Hackaday.IO wanted a simple-to-use way to drive stepper motors, which could be quickly deployed in a wide variety of applications yet to be determined. The solution is named
Ethersweep
, and is a small PCB stack that sits on the rear of the common NEMA17-format stepper motor. The only physical connectivity, beside the motor, are ethernet and a power supply via the user friendly XT30 connector. The system can be closed loop, with both an end-stop input as well as an on-board
AMS AS5600 magnetic rotary encoder
(which senses the rotating magnetic field on the rear side of the motor assembly – clever!) giving the necessary feedback. Leveraging the
Trinamic TMC2208 stepper motor driver
gives Ethersweep silky smooth and quiet motor control, which could be very important for some applications. A rear-facing OLED display shows some useful debug information as well as the all important IP address that was assigned to the unit.
Control is performed with the ubiquitous ATMega328 microcontroller, with the Arduino software stack deployed,
making uploading firmware a breeze. To that end, a USB port is also provided, hooked up to the uC with the cheap CP2102 USB bridge chip as per most Arduino-like designs. The thing that makes this build a little unusual is the ethernet port. The hardware side of things is taken care of with the
Wiznet W5500
ethernet chip, which implements the MAC and PHY in a single device, needing only a few passives and a magjack to operate. The chip also handles the whole TCP/IP stack internally, so only needs an external SPI interface to talk to the host device.
Talking about firmware for a moment, to ease deployment, the network configuration is handled by DHCP, although some control over MAC address assignment is promised for the future. All control is via UDP over ethernet, and again the basic functionality is there, but some niceties such as motor synchronisation and state querying are again subject to further releases. Hardware design is implemented in KiCAD and FreeCAD, with Arduino covering the firmware and host control side in python. You can read all about it on the
Ethersweep project GitHub
, what is there not to like?
If you thought you’d seen this stepper-mounted driver setup before, you’d be correct, here’s a Hackaday Prize 2017 Entry for a
CANBUS controlled driver
. We also saw this on
Dummy: the obscenely well made robot arm
by [Zhihui Jun], which if you missed it, then do circle back and take a look, you won’t regret it! | 35 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510535",
"author": "Steven",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T20:50:42",
"content": "This would be pretty great combined with Linux-based 3D printer firmware like Klipper. I’m picturing a Pi, an Ethernet hub, and a few of these modules replacing the control board, so all you’re left with i... | 1,760,372,570.865262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/how-to-be-a-stinkin-chess-cheat-sockfish/ | How To Be A Stinkin’ Chess Cheat — Sockfish | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Games",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"cheats",
"chess",
"Raspberry Pi Zero"
] | [James Stanley] enjoys chess, isn’t terribly good at it, and has some dubious scruples. At least,
that’s the setup for building Sockfish
, a shoe-to-Pi interface to let you cheat at chess. We’re pretty sure only the first point is true, but the build is impressive all the same. It’s a pair of 3D printed shoe inserts, with two pressure-sensitive inputs on each insert, coupled with a vibration motor in each. Tap out your opponent’s moves during the game, and the Stockfish software will buzz instructions back to you. Just follow the instructions, and you too can be a chess master.
In practice things went a bit awry, as poking in encoded move data with one’s feet isn’t the easiest task, and discerning the subtle tickles on the toes is error-prone at best. [James] arranged a match against an unsuspecting friend (in the name of science), and managed to fat-finger (fat-toe?) the inputs on both games, leading to Sockfish instructing him to make illegal moves.
This seemed like too much cheating, even for [James], so he played the rest of each game on his own abilities, winning one of the two. Once the deed was done, our anti-hero gladly doffed his shoes to show off his gadgetry. After some debate, they concluded the device might “bring the game into disrepute” if used for greater evil. Naturally [James] is already working on an improved version.
Thanks to [Abe Tusk] for the tip! | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510562",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T22:03:17",
"content": "Celebrating 50 years after the Spasky-Fisher duel!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6510579",
"author": "Hirudinea",
... | 1,760,372,570.924099 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/linux-fu-eavesdropping-on-serial/ | Linux Fu: Eavesdropping On Serial | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"linux",
"rs232",
"serial port"
] | In the old days, if you wanted to snoop on a piece of serial gear, you probably had a serial monitor or, perhaps, an attachment for your scope or logic analyzer. Today, you can get cheap logic analyzers that can do the job, but what if you want a software-only solution? Recently, I needed to do a little debugging on a USB serial port and, of course, there isn’t really anywhere to easily tie in a monitor or a logic analyzer. So I started looking for an alternate solution.
If you recall, in a previous Linux Fu we talked about
pseudoterminals
which look like serial ports but actually talk to a piece of software. That might make you think: why not put a piece of monitor software between the serial port and a pty? Why not, indeed? That’s such a good idea that it has already been done. When it works, it works well. The only issue is, of course, that it doesn’t always work.
The software in question is
interceptty
. You may have to build it from source, but there aren’t any oddball dependencies. Just:
git clone https://github.com/geoffmeyers/interceptty.git
cd interceptty
./configure
make
sudo make install # or however you like to install things like checkinstall, etc.
Back End, Front End
The software uses the concept of a backend device and a frontend device. The back device is, usually, your normal serial port. The frontend device is something that interceptty creates. So the idea is that you connect the program to the backend, it creates the front end, and then you connect some other program to the front end. The program will log all the traffic between the program connected to the front end and the port on the back end.
You can also use file descriptors, unix sockets, or TCP sockets as a front or back device. The backend can also be a running program. There is also a provision for connecting between two actual ports. You can find all the options on the program’s man page.
The output is a bit awkward, but it is easy to parse by other programs including an example Perl program included with it. A character shows you the direction of the data then you see a character in both hex and ASCII.
An Example
It is probably easier to see an example. I have a small controller on
/dev/ttyACM0
. Here’s a sample command line.
sudo interceptty /dev/ttyACM0 /dev/ttyCAP
This creates the
/dev/ttyCAP
fake port. Once the program connects you can see the data it sends to the left and the responses (including the echo) to the right.
< 0x3a (:)
> 0x3a (:)
< 0x78 (x)
> 0x78 (x)
< 0x38 (8)
> 0x38 (8)
< 0x79 (y)
> 0x79 (y)
< 0x38 (8)
> 0x38 (8)
< 0x69 (i)
> 0x69 (i)
< 0x31 (1)
> 0x31 (1)
< 0x30 (0)
> 0x30 (0)
< 0x21 (!)
> 0x21 (!)
< 0x0d ([CR])
> 0x06 ([ACK])
> 0x0d ([CR])
> 0x0a ([LF])
Problematic Software
Unfortunately, not all software likes to work with ptys. In particular, the main program I wanted to use takes advantage of the
Sigrok
serial port library. It is a known issue that this library makes calls that don’t work well with ptys. However, if you use just about any normal terminal program like picocom or
tio
, it works fine. Other serial libraries seem to be able to handle it, also. I thought about trying
slsnif
, but it works the same way, so I doubt it would be any better in that regard.
One other note about the Sigrok library. Recent changes in the kernel have removed an ioctl that the library uses so if you are using software that uses libserialport, you won’t be able to find any ports. Until they fix it, you’ll have to build the library yourself and patch the configure.ac file:
git clone git://sigrok.org/libserialport
cd libserialport
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
Be sure you get rid of old versions of the library or, at least, make sure your program is using your custom library.
Other Options
You can, if you like, try converting
a serial port to a network socket
and then you have lots of monitoring options. Of course, this has similar problems insomuch as not everything understands the fake serial port you create. I can report, though, that
Tio
seems well-behaved enough to work with these pty fake port.
It would be nice if all serial software understood that they might be called on to talk to a pty or a named pipe. On the other hand, you may have access to the source code for naughty programs, so if you really had to, you could fix them. | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510472",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T17:18:11",
"content": "In the first “get” listed, intercepttty is spelled 2 different ways.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6510473",
... | 1,760,372,571.018963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/the-pocket265-is-a-pocket-sized-6502-single-board-computer/ | The Pocket265 Is A Pocket-Sized 6502 Single-Board Computer | Robin Kearey | [
"computer hacks",
"handhelds hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"diy handheld",
"single board computer"
] | Single-board computers have been around ever since microprocessors became affordable in the 1970s and never went away. Today we have Raspberry Pis and LattePandas, while back in the ’70s and ’80s there were the Ferguson Big Board, the KIM-1 and a whole array of Intel SDK boards. Although functionally similar to their modern counterparts with a CPU, RAM, ROM and some basic peripherals, the old boards were huge compared to today’s tiny platforms and typically required a rather beefy power supply to operate.
It doesn’t have to be that way though, as [Aleksander] shows with
the Pocket265: a handheld 6502 single-board computer somewhat reminiscent of the famous KIM-1
. Like that classic machine, it’s got a hexadecimal keypad to enter programs using machine code and a row of LED displays to show the programs’ output. Unlike the KIM, the Pocket265 is small enough to hold in one hand and uses bubble LED displays, which make it look more like a programmable calculator from the 1970s. It comes with a lithium battery that makes it truly portable, as well as a sleek 3D printed case to make it more comfortable to hold than a bare circuit board.
The single ROM chip contains a monitor program that runs the basic user interface. It also makes programming a bit less tedious by implementing a number of system calls to handle things like user input and display output. A serial EEPROM enables local data storage, while a UART with a USB interface enables data transfer to other computers. If you’re interested in building and programming such a machine yourself, [Aleksander] helpfully provides code examples as well as full hardware documentation on his GitHub page.
The 6502 remains a firm favorite among hardware hackers: some projects we recently featured with this CPU include
one beautifully made machine
,
this easy-to-build single-board computer
and
this huge breadboard-based contraption
. Looking for something smaller? Try
this tidy little board
or
this 6502 coupled to an FPGA
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510428",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T15:46:40",
"content": "In 1980, someone I knew had a terminal the size of a calculator. I think LED display. He used it to configure Intersil 6100 boards he was manufacturing to sell to a record plant to modernize their... | 1,760,372,571.065508 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/agrivoltaics-is-a-land-usage-hack-for-maximum-productivity/ | Agrivoltaics Is A Land Usage Hack For Maximum Productivity | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"agriculture",
"agrivoltaic",
"agrivoltaics",
"farming",
"growing",
"photovoltaic",
"photovoltaics",
"plants"
] | Land tends to be a valuable thing. Outside of some weird projects in Dubai, by and large, they aren’t making any more of it. That means as we try to feed and power the ever-growing population of humanity, we need to think carefully about how we use the land we have.
The field of agrivoltaics concerns itself with the dual-use of land for both food production and power generation. It’s all about getting the most out of the the available land and available sunlight we have.
Two Things At Once
The world has limited land that is suitable for food production. Prime agricultural land is prized for its ability to grow crops at high yields. This often comes down to factors like favorable soils, readily-available water supplies, and plenty of sunlight.
As it turns out, though, agricultural land is
perfect for installing solar panels, too
. Solar installations want as much sun as possible, and they don’t like getting too hot. The cooler, moist conditions of farming lands make them more attractive than deserts for solar panels, as the lower temperatures help the panels remain in their most efficient operating range.
Vineyards can potentially add solar power as a revenue stream, while simultaneously reaping the benefits of less water loss due to the shade provided. Credit:
SunAgri, press release
Thus, for land with plenty of sun and mild conditions, it makes sense to try and use it for both food production and power generation. The field of agrivoltaics concerns itself with finding optimum methods to achieve this.
The most important consideration is one of shade. If the solar panels are installed without due care, there will be insufficient sunlight to grow any meaningful produce. At that point, you’re just doing photovoltaics, and you’ve thrown the agriculture out the window. Typically, the trick is to raise the panels at a significant height off the ground to allow workers and machinery to access the crops below. This does add significant cost, which is the trade-off for such combined installations.
When it comes to agrivoltaics, plant choice is key. Those that grow well in shady conditions are ideal, while those that require full sun are a poor choice. Tomatoes, lettuce, and simple grasses can do well in an agrivoltaic setup, as they can grow successfully with a low amount of sunlight. Broadacre crops like wheat, on the other hand, deliver very poor yields under such conditions, and are not a suitable choice.
The
BayWa r.e. project
in Europe has found success with a variety of agrivoltaic systems across the Netherlands and Germany. These consist of various berries and vegetables grown underneath raised photovoltaic panels. This actually brought a surprise benefit on hotter days. The shade from the panels on these days actually helped cool the plants, reducing evaporation and heat stress. The panel installation also appeared to help keep the growing area warmer overnight, reducing the need for plastic covers to protect delicate berries from the cold.
Vineyards can also benefit from such installations. Installing panels above vines in France helped reduce water demand, as the plants were protected from the worst of the sun during heatwaves.
During one experiment run by Sun’Agri
, the grapes produced by solar-shaded vines also had improved aromatic properties, making them more desirable for use in winemaking.
Meanwhile,
a Chinese project
has found a way to mitigate the shading problem for more flexibility. Grooved glass panels are installed interspersed with solar panels at a height of several meters above the ground. The glass panels act to scatter sunlight evenly across the crops below, mitigating the shading effect of the solar panels. In testing, crop yields were equal or better than under normal conditions, and adding LED lighting to the system enabled the production of an even higher quality crop.
More basic systems can work too. Some elect to simply install solar panels on agricultural land, slightly raised up to allow sheep or other animals to graze underneath. As long as there’s enough sun to keep the grass growing, it’s a straightforward way to combine food production and power generation on the same tract of land. In one Greek trial
of this methodology
, the sheep provide the useful benefit of vegetation control. No mowing is required to avoid excessive grass growth and fire risks. Instead, the grazing keeps the grass in check.
As the world turns to solar power for more of its energy needs, there will necessarily be a hunt on for more land to install panels on. Armed with agrivoltaic techniques, humanity will be best placed to get the most possible out of the limited agricultural land we have to rely on. Expect to see more farms turning to agrivoltaics in future, both for the added revenue stream from solar power, and to help provide the clean energy our societies so desperately need . | 53 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510380",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T14:24:48",
"content": "Just don’t plant pole beans!B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6510386",
"author": "Greg",
"timestamp": "2022-09... | 1,760,372,571.313852 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/the-era-of-distributed-independent-email-servers-is-over/ | “The Era Of Distributed, Independent Email Servers Is Over” | Jenny List | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"email",
"email server",
"net neutrality"
] | Imagine the Internet had begun its life as a proprietary network from a major software vendor rather than evolved as a distributed network shared by researchers. It’s a future that almost came to pass for consumers in the 1990s when walled gardens such as AOL or the original incarnation of MSN were all the rage, but thankfully the world took the Internet course.
Though there are many continuing threats to Internet freedom we can still mostly use the network our way, but with sadness we note that one piece of Internet freedom may have drawn to a close. [Carlos Fenollosa] has written a lament
about how the outlook for anyone running their own mail server now looks bleak
.
At its heart is spam, or indeed the heavy-handed measures taken by large email providers to combat it. Spotting and canning spam is computationally expensive, so the easiest way to stop a spammer is to recognize their activity and block it at the network level. Thus a large email provider will instantly block large IP ranges when it detects they hold a spammer, with the collateral damage of also blocking any legitimate email servers in the same range such that their mail just doesn’t get through. Since spam is such a widespread problem, as [Carlos] points out it’s less of a case of
if
your server has this problem, but
when
. This functions essentially as something of a racket, in which large email providers have the power to ensure that any email not generated from amongst themselves is unlikely to reach any of the millions of addresses under their care, and the only recourse an operator of a small email domain has is to use the services of one of them.
He has something of a manifesto as to how this problem can be addressed, and we think that it’s important enough that you should take a look. Maintaining email as something beyond the control of large providers is too important not to.
Thanks [Thomas Steen Rasmussen] for the tip.
Header image: RRZE,
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 138 | 37 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510310",
"author": "Avamander",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T11:19:28",
"content": "The article’s author has a very narrow view of the email ecosystem and his experience really isn’t sufficient for such generalisations.Email is older than the internet, some problems stem from that, but... | 1,760,372,571.684253 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/07/organise-your-hacks-with-treesheets-an-open-source-hierarchical-spreadsheet/ | Organise Your Hacks With TreeSheets: An Open Source Hierarchical Spreadsheet | Dave Rowntree | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"hierarchical",
"mindmap",
"productivity",
"spreadsheet"
] | Some people may have heard of Dutch programmer [Wouter Van Oortmerssen] since he’s the creator of the Amiga-E programming language, as well as being involved with several game engines. Heard of
SimCity
? How about
Borderlands 2
or
Far Cry
? Having had clearly a long and illustrious career as a programmer for a variety of clients — including a long stint at Google, working on Web Assembly — many people will be familiar with at least some of his work. But you may not have heard of his
TreeSheets productivity tool
. Which would be a shame, as you’ve been missing out on something pretty darn useful.
TreeSheets is described as a hierarchical spreadsheet, which is intended as a replacement for several distinct tools; think spreadsheets, mindmaps and text editors and similar. In [Wouter]’s words:
It’s like a spreadsheet, immediately familiar, but much more suitable for complex data because it’s hierarchical.
It’s like a mind mapper, but more organized and compact.
It’s like an outliner, but in more than one dimension.
It’s like a text editor, but with structure.
Having been in development for about a decade, TreeSheets might look a bit dated here and there, but the design is clear and distraction-free, which is exactly what you need when you’re trying to focus on the task in hand. Why not give it a try and see if it works for you? After the break,
you can see a video tutorial by YouTube user [DrilixProject]
.
No strangers to productivity hacks, here’s
Pomodachi, a cute pomodoro timer crossed with a Tamagotchi
. Sometimes productivity isn’t solved with software tools, but more to do with
your attitude to projects
. Finally sometimes the route to greater productivity is a little closer to home,
like inside your head
.
Thanks to [Paper] for the tip! | 42 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510271",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T08:12:23",
"content": "Pomodomo ? Like it´s for the domus ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6510307",
"author": "Dave Rowntree",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T10:5... | 1,760,372,571.482345 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/retrotechtacular-oh-boy-were-radio-engineers/ | Retrotechtacular: Oh Boy! We’re Radio Engineers! | Al Williams | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"radio",
"retrotechtactular",
"toys"
] | It is a shame that there are fewer and fewer “nerd stores” around. Fry’s is gone. Radio Shack is gone. But the best ones were always the places that had junk. Silicon valley was great for these places, but they were everywhere. Often, they made their money selling parts to the repair trade, but they had a section for people like us. There’s still one of these stores in the Houston, Texas area. One of the two original Electronic Parts Outlets, or EPO. Walking through there is like a museum of old gear and parts and I am not ashamed to confess I sometimes drive the hour from my house just to wander its aisles, needing to buy absolutely nothing. It was on one of those trips that I spied something I hadn’t noticed before. A Remco Caravelle transmitter/receiver.
The box was clearly old and the styling of the radio was decidedly retro. You can tell it wasn’t catering to the modern market because it mentions: “play ham radio operator” which would surely mystify most of today’s kids. The unit was an AM receiver and a transmitter, complete with a morse code key and microphone.
You can see a contemporary commercial for a similar unit from Remco, in the video below
.
The toy appeared in 1962 and while you “built it yourself,” it wasn’t something you had to solder. Somehow, I missed this as a kid, although I did have something similar from General Electric (the Y7060 CB base station). You have to wonder how many ham radio operators and broadcasters a toy like this launched? We’ve read that [Rush Limbaugh] got interested in broadcasting because of this kit. As the kid in the commercial says, “Oh Boy! We’re Radio Engineers!”
Radio is even more important today than it was back then. But like all successful tech, it has become invisible to the ordinary person. Not so, back when making a phone call across the
Atlantic was a marvel
. Not to mention the
1940s car phone
. | 44 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510240",
"author": "hinspect",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T05:36:00",
"content": "Who is going to mention Heathkit? My first shortwave receiver with 3 or 4 vacuum tubes!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6510243",
"author"... | 1,760,372,571.401834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/teslas-dojo-is-an-interesting-cpu-design/ | Tesla’s Dojo Is An Interesting CPU Design | Matthew Carlson | [
"computer hacks",
"Machine Learning"
] | [
"chipsandcheese",
"CPU ISA",
"machine learning",
"super computing",
"tesla"
] | What do you get when you cross a modern super-scalar out-of-order CPU core with more traditional microcontroller aspects such as no virtual memory, no memory cache, and no DDR or PCIe controllers? You get the Tesla Dojo, which
Chips and Cheese recently did a deep dive on.
It starts with a comparison to the IBM Cell processors. The Cell of the mid-2000s featured something called the SPE (Synergistic Processing Elements). They were smaller cores focused on vector processing or other specialized types of workloads. They didn’t access the main memory and had to be given tasks by the fully featured CPU. Dojo has 1.25MB of SRAM that it can use as working memory with five ports, but it has no cache or virtual memory. It uses DMA to get the information it needs via a mesh system. The front end pulls RISC-V-like (heavily MIPS-inspired) instructions into a small instruction cache and decodes eight instructions per cycle.
Interestingly, the front end aggressively prunes instructions such as jumps or conditionals. However, eliminated instructions aren’t tracked through the pipeline. Instructions are not tracked through retirement, so during exceptions and debugging, and it’s unclear what the faulting instruction was as instructions are retired out of order.
Despite the wide front end, there are just two ALUs and two AGUs. This makes sense as the focus of integer execution is primarily focused on control flow and logic. The actual computing horsepower is the vector and matrix execution pipelines. With 512-bit vectors and 8x8x4 matrices, each dojo core comes close to a full BF16 TFLOP. The result is something that looks more like a microprocessor but is wide like a modern desktop CPU.
All these decisions might seem strange until you step back and look at what Tesla is trying to accomplish. They’re going for the smallest possible core to fit as many cores on the die as possible. Without a cache, you don’t need any snoop filters or tags in memory to maintain coherency. On TSMC’s 7nm process, the Dojo core and SRAM fit in 1.1 square millimeters. Over 71.1% of the die is spent on cores and SRAM (compared to 56% of the AMD Zeppelin). A single Dojo D1 die has 354 Dojo cores. As you can imagine, a Dojo die must communicate with an interface processor, which connects to the host computer via PCIe. However, Dojo deployments often have 25 dies, making this a very scalable supercomputer.
If you’re curious about peeling back the layers of more compute cores,
look into Alder Lake
. | 29 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510222",
"author": "NS",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T02:42:55",
"content": "Dojo* arigato mister roboto",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6510385",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T14:29:36",
... | 1,760,372,571.804188 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/a-simple-web-configured-ble-to-gpio-bridge/ | A Simple Web Configured BLE To GPIO Bridge | Dave Rowntree | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"ble",
"bluetooth",
"nRF51",
"sensor"
] | [Daniel Dakhno] kept ending up in a situation where the ability to read the status of, or control a few digital IO pins with minimal effort, would be terribly useful. Not wanting to keep compiling code, for such simple needs, they instead used a nRF51-based module as a physical interface and produced a general purpose firmware that could be configured with a simple web interface. The
NRF51-IO-module
was born, whose job is to pair with whatever device you have in front of you, provided it supports BLE, and give direct access to those IO pins.
Rather than acting as a rather slow logic analyser, the firmware is intended for mostly static configurations. The
web application
sends a configuration packet over to the nRF51 board, which then programs it into FLASH and restarts, reading the updated configuration and applying it to the IO pins. These outputs then persist as long as there is power. The read-side of the equation can also be performed via the web page, but we didn’t have a chance to verify that. The code implements the
Bluetooth automation IO service
as well as the
binary sensor service
so if you have access to applications that talk these services, then you should be able to fire it up and go with it, although we’ve not personally tested this due to lack of an nRF51 board. We noticed that the
Home Assistant automation platform supports the BT binary sensor
, which might be a big help for some people with a need for some wireless control and sensing.
If you need a practical example of a use for remote sensing, here’s a
physical mailbox status monitor
, using the nRF51. Whilst we’re thinking of Bluetooth and sensors, here’s a
custom firmware for some super cheap environment sensors
that frees them from vendor lock-in.
Header image: Ubahnverleih,
CC0
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510239",
"author": "dongwaffle",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T05:17:05",
"content": "Oh man there is SO MUCH MORE IN STORE for Bluetooth and Home Assistant. Check the release notes for the upcoming September release which should ship in the next day or two:https://rc.home-assistant.io... | 1,760,372,571.73224 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/touch-tone-midi-phone-and-vocoder-covers-daft-punk/ | Touch Tone MIDI Phone And Vocoder Covers Daft Punk | Donald Papp | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"daft punk",
"diy",
"dtmf",
"midi",
"music",
"phone",
"touch tone",
"vocoder"
] | [poprhythm]’s
Touch Tone MIDI Phone
is a fantastic conversion of an old touch tone phone into a MIDI instrument complete with intact microphone, but this project isn’t just about showing off the result. [poprhythm] details everything about how he interfaced to the keypad, how he used that with an Arduino to create a working MIDI interface, and exactly how he decided — musically speaking — what each button should do. The LEDs on the phone are even repurposed to blink happily depending on what is going on, which is a nice touch.
Of course, it doesn’t end there. [poprhythm] also makes use of the microphone in the phone’s handset. Since the phone is now a MIDI instrument with both a microphone and note inputs, it’s possible to use them together as the inputs to vocoder software, which he demonstrates by
covering
Around the World
by
Daft Punk
(video).
We love how [poprhythm] explains how he interfaced to everything because hardware work is all about such details, and finding the right resources.
Here’s the GitHub repository
for the Arduino code and a few links to other resources.
We have seen MIDI phone projects before, and each one is always unique in its own way:
here’s a different approach to converting a keypad phone to MIDI
, and
this rotary pulse-dial phone
went in a completely different direction with the phone itself completely unmodified, using only external interfacing.
You can admire [poprhythm]’s Touch Tone MIDI Phone in action in the short videos embedded below, with each one showing off a different aspect of the build. It’s great work! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510294",
"author": "Kevin",
"timestamp": "2022-09-07T10:13:50",
"content": "Brilliant! I love seeing what can be done with old telephones and music.Great job :)Kevin",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6510488",
"author": "[EG... | 1,760,372,571.857644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/hackaday-prize-2022-diy-landslide-warning-system/ | Hackaday Prize 2022: DIY Landslide Warning System | Lewin Day | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"distributed sensor network",
"landslide",
"sensors",
"solar"
] | Landslides can be highly dangerous to both people and property. As with most natural disasters, early warning can make all the difference.
[Airpocket] has built a cheap, affordable system that hopes to offer just that.
The system relies on a network of sensors built with Sony Spresense controllers, built into solar garden light enclosures which provide a watertight enclosure and a sustainable power supply. The controllers are paired with accelerometers to detect movement, and communicate over a WiSUN connection back to a Raspberry Pi 4B base station. When a deployed sensor station detects movement, it sends a message back to the base station, which sounds the alarm that a landslide may be imminent.
Early testing shows the concept works in theory. In practice, some improvements to reduce power draw and increase communication reliability are required. However, it’s a solid proof of concept for a simple landslide warning system.
Early warning is always key when it comes to things like landslides, tsunamis, and earthquakes. In fact, the US Geological Survey has done its own work
on predicting earthquakes and providing early warning, too
. Video after the break.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510174",
"author": "ArcReactorKC",
"timestamp": "2022-09-06T20:40:36",
"content": "The solar garden light enclosure and use of the solar panel are genius. I may be doing something with those in the near future now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,571.903816 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/05/todays-the-day-you-finally-learn-quaternions/ | Today’s The Day You Finally Learn Quaternions | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"gimbal lock",
"orbital mechanics",
"quaternion"
] | If you’ve ever dealt with orbital mechanics or sophisticated computer graphics, you’ve probably run across the math term quaternions. [Anyleaf] has
a guide to the practical use of this math concept
which focuses more on practicality than theory. We like it!
Quaternions are one of at least two ways to model rotations in a 3D space. Most people are familiar with the classic Euler angles which cover yaw, pitch, and roll. However, this method is prone to some ambiguities — in other words, there are multiple ways to go from one Euler state to another and all are equally valid. In addition, Euler angles are prone to gimbal lock where two of the axes are parallel and, thus, don’t have a different effect on the object’s orientation. There are several ways to combat that including the use of quaternions.
If you think gimbal lock isn’t a problem, don’t forget that the
Apollo IMU had this problem
because they used three gimbals instead of four. The system would detect it was in gimbal lock and require manual intervention. This prompted [Mike Collins] to joke
“How about sending me a fourth gimbal for Christmas?”
Of course, you can convert between Euler angles and quaternions subject to the ambiguity involved. The section about converting from quaternions is marked as future work, though, so you might need some more resources to fill in that blank. If you want more detail in general, [Anyleaf] suggests an excellent page from
[3Blue1Brown] and [Ben Eater]
that has explorable videos (the title graphic comes from one of these videos) and also
a PDF tutorial
from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Honestly, we know not everyone likes math and it is true that — especially today — you can do a lot without diving into math. But if you do know the math behind things it often makes things easier or, sometimes, even possible. It is like assembly language. You probably don’t need to know it these days, but if you do know it, helps sometimes in strange and unexpected ways. So why not brush up on
calculus
or advanced topics like the
Laplace transform
? | 44 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509929",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2022-09-06T02:21:08",
"content": "What I’d like to know is there some experiment to determine the mass of these things?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6509934",
"a... | 1,760,372,571.996816 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/05/aluminium-sulphur-batteries-for-local-grid-storage/ | Aluminium-Sulphur Batteries For Local Grid Storage? | Dave Rowntree | [
"Battery Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"18650 battery",
"aluminium-sulphur battery",
"lifepo",
"lithium ion"
] | Lithium-Sulphur batteries have been on the cusp of commercial availability for a little while now, but nothing much has hit the shelves as of yet. There are still issues with lifetime due to cell degradation, and news about developments seems to be drying up a little. Not to worry, because MIT have come along with a new battery technology using some of the most available and cheap materials found on this planet of ours. The
Aluminium-Sulphur battery
developed has very promising characteristics for use with static and automotive applications, specifically its scalability and its incredible charge/discharge performance.
The cell is based upon electrodes constructed from aluminium metal and sulphur, with a electrolyte of molten catenated chloro-aluminate salts. With an operating temperature of around 100 degrees Celsius, you’re not going to want this in a mobile phone anytime soon, but that’s not the goal. The goal is the smoothing out of renewable energy sources, and localised electricity grid balancing. A major use case would be the mass charging of battery electric vehicles. As the number of charge points increases at any given location, so does the peak current needed from the grid. Aluminium-Sulphur batteries are touted to offer the solution to ease this, with their high peak discharge current capability enabling a much higher peak power delivery at the point of use.
Right now many of us have household solar installations utilising LiFePo battery technology, with the sheer cost of the battery units limiting the amount of capacity that is installed. Aluminium-Sulphur batteries could easily replace them at a fraction of the cost. With a cost-per-cell less than one-sixth that of Lithium Ion, and construction from extremely common materials, this might be just the technology to disconnect us from the global lithium and cobalt supply chains and enable many more people to generate and make use of electricity in our own homes, after all, the sun doesn’t shine all day.
Lithium-Sulphur technology still shows some promise,
here’s a little thing about that
. If you were wondering what the deal is with lithium, and why it could be a problem in the future, then do checkout
this piece from a couple of years back
. Food for thought, certainly.
via [MIT News] | 45 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509886",
"author": "Charles Sprinkle",
"timestamp": "2022-09-05T23:13:54",
"content": "Many will mention all of the “revolutionary battery technology” of the last 10 years that never made it to market. In general, it really doesn’t matter if the technology is commercially viable,... | 1,760,372,572.123511 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/05/hackaday-prize-2022-a-backup-battery-pack/ | Hackaday Prize 2022: A Backup Battery Pack | Lewin Day | [
"Battery Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"18650",
"18650 battery",
"18650 cell",
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"battery pack"
] | These days, we’re all running around toting smartphones and laptops that could always use a bit more charge. Portable battery packs have become popular,
and [Anuradha] has designed one that packs plenty of juice to keep everything humming.
The pack is designed to be charged via solar panels, at 18 V and up to 5 A of current. It’s intended to work with a Maximum Power Point Tracking module to ensure the maximum energy is gained from the sunshine available. For storage, the pack relies on 75 individual 18650 lithium cells, arranged with 3 cells in series, each with 25 in parallel (3s25p). They’re spot welded together for strength and good conductivity. Nominally, the output voltage is on the order of 10-12 V. The included battery management system (BMS) will allow an output current up to 100 A, and the pack can be used with an AC inverter to power regular home appliances.
Overall, it’s a tidy pack that’s more than capable of keeping a few devices charged up for days at a time. If you’re building something similar yourself, though, just be sure to package it well and keep it protected. So many lithium batteries can quickly turn fiery if something goes wrong, so store and use it appropriately! Fear not, however –
we’ve got a guide on how to do just that.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509865",
"author": "wibble",
"timestamp": "2022-09-05T20:51:42",
"content": "I wonder what the logic was behind choosing 3s rather than 6s. Halving the current to the inverter would be a big win – 42A instead of 83A – not least because the tails and connectors they’re using don’t l... | 1,760,372,572.046132 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/05/nanoparticles-rip-hydrogen-from-water/ | Nanoparticles Rip Hydrogen From Water | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"aluminium",
"aluminum",
"gallium",
"hydrogen",
"nanoparticles"
] | Hydrogen fuel is promising, and while there’s plenty of hydrogen in the air and water, the problem is extracting it. Researchers have developed a way to use
aluminum nanoparticles to rip hydrogen out of water
with no additional energy input. It does, however, require gallium to enable the reaction. The reaction isn’t unknown (see the video below), but the new research has some interesting twists.
Aluminum, of course, is cheap and plentiful. Gallium, not so much, but the process allows recovery and reuse of the gallium, so that makes it more cost-effective. There is a patent pending for the process and — of course — the real trick is making the aluminum nanoparticles. But if you have that, this is a simple way to extract hydrogen from water with no extra energy and at room temperature. Since the reaction of creating aluminum oxide and releasing hydrogen with gallium is pretty well-known, it appears the real research here is determining the optimal properties of the aluminum and the ratio of aluminum to gallium.
While gallium isn’t a common item around the typical hacker’s workshop — unless you count the stuff bound up in semiconductors — it isn’t that expensive and it is relatively easy to handle. Hydrogen, though, not so much — so if you do decide to use this method to produce hydrogen, be careful!
We’ve seen gallium
robots
and even an
antenna
. So if you do get some of the liquid metal, there are plenty of experiments to try. | 38 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509810",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2022-09-05T17:10:05",
"content": "“There is a patent pending for the process and — of course — the real trick is making the aluminum nanoparticles. But if you have that, this is a simple way to”No, the process shown here *creates* the aluminu... | 1,760,372,572.477718 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/05/kittyos-writing-a-toy-os-for-the-atmega168-from-scratch/ | KittyOS: Writing A Toy OS For The ATmega168 From Scratch | Dave Rowntree | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Development"
] | [
"ATmega168",
"AVR",
"embedded",
"multitasking",
"operating systems"
] | Writing an operating system for a computing platform is one of those non-trivial tasks few people actually need to do, regardless of whether it’s for a small microcontroller or a larger general-purpose computer. Many of us spend a large amount of our time working on producing robust code for embedded systems, occasionally diving deeper into the abstraction when we’re stuck on a problem. Quite often this work is sitting on top of an RTOS, which we consider a solved problem. [Jonathan Diamond] had picked up a fair bit of knowledge of some of the low-level AVR black magic, as well as some details of how operating systems work internally, and so decided to have a crack a
building a toy operating system
called KittyOS, for the learning experience alone.
[Jonathan] hastens to add that this is not a practical OS, but a learning platform that needs a few more bells and whistles added to be useful. Aimed at the 8-bit AVR ATmega168 with its mere 16kB of flash and 1kB of SRAM, the diminutive chip can still perform more than well enough to host the rudimentary OS — up to four application tasks, and some basic system call support.
Already, KittyOS sports preemptive multitasking, with prioritization and support for applications written in C. Hardware support is a bit limited, with just serial I/O and a spot of GPIO, but that’s more than enough for a demonstrator. Applications can be loaded into any of the four available slots, with per-slot run state control, using the Python-based host interface. The post is a long one, with an absolute ton of the gory details we love around these parts, and we’re very glad [Jonathan] took the time to make a proper write-up as well as a
demonstration video
, which can be found after the break.
There have been many such DIY operating systems gracing these pages over the years, like
ZARDOS
, which is aimed at the Arduino Mega/UNO boards. Getting a bit more complex, we’ve seen
Snowdrop, which was written in pure x86
and even sports a BASIC interpreter. Finally, we should mention
our guide to RTOS
and how to choose the ideal one for your needs. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509764",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-09-05T14:39:53",
"content": "When will it be ported to the Arduino IDE?B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6509780",
"author": "rtyhrthrt",
"t... | 1,760,372,572.402012 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/05/why-youve-never-heard-about-nintendos-u-force/ | Why You’ve Never Heard About Nintendo’s U-Force | Elliot Williams | [
"Games",
"Nintendo Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"game",
"ir sensor",
"nintendo",
"peripherals",
"uforce"
] | 90’s kids think that the Power Glove was the coolest game peripheral of the epoch. We might have thought so too, until we heard about
Don’t Touch: The Story of the U-Force
from [The Gaming Historian]
.
The device itself folded up like a laptop, and on the two surfaces had four IR LED/sensor pairs. All of these combined would localize your fist in space for playing
Mike Tyson’s Punch Out
, or would work with various other passive controller add-ons like a flight yoke for playing
Top Gun
. (One of the coolest bits is the flip-out IR reflectors triggered by the buttons in the yoke.)
All-in-all, the video’s take is that a number of factors doomed the U-Force to play second fiddle to the Power Glove. Battling Mattel’s marketing prowess is obvious, but other things like manufacturing problems due to bad hinges and inconsistent IR sensors delayed release and added cost. In the end, though, [Dave Capper], the U-Force’s inventor, puts it down simply to non-convincing gameplay. There were no blockbuster games that used it to its full potential.
At the time, the U-Force utilized more IR LEDs than any other consumer electronic device.
We think there’s interesting hacker potential in a simple interface like this. Perhaps its biggest Achilles heel outside of the lack of a killer application was the fact that it required calibration. We can imagine all sorts of awesome interactions, and we’re not afraid of a little tweaking. Or maybe we would update the sensors to something more modern, like those inexpensive time-of-flight distance units.
Thanks [Karl Koscher] for bringing this documentary to our attention in the comments about the very
similarly interesting laser theremin project
we featured last year. It’s definitely opened our eyes to an old interaction of the past that would seem no less magical today. | 21 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509751",
"author": "70sJukebox",
"timestamp": "2022-09-05T13:50:26",
"content": "I had heard of this, firstly from ads in imported comics (US -> UK), then later in the UK launch. I did own an imported powerglove. Looking back I can only think that I’d been drawn into the powerglobe... | 1,760,372,572.360342 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/05/the-7805-is-dead-long-live-the-7805/ | The 7805 Is Dead! Long Live The 7805! | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"7805",
"78xx",
"voltage regulator"
] | The 78XX series of regulators are very handy to use. If you need, say, a 5V regulator, you grab a 7805, add a capacitor for stability, and send in enough voltage for the regulator to work with. Cheap and easy. However, the part is not without its faults.
A stock 7805 can’t convert 5.1V to 5V. You need to have a good bit more voltage coming in. But the more voltage you put in, the more the part is going to dump out as heat. So running from 9V is going to be cooler than running from 24V. All that heat isn’t very energy efficient on batteries, either. [Stefan] wanted to do better, so he made
a drop-in replacement for these venerable regulators
some time ago. But he’s recently made
the board layouts available
so you can build your own replacement, too.
The device accepts 4.5 to 16V, and you can select the output voltage using two resistors. You can draw up to 2A out of the regulator, which is more than you can say for a stock 7805.
The heart of the tiny board is an SD8942 buck converter. There are two voltage-setting resistors, one more resistor, a handful of capacitors, and — of course — an inductor. The schematic notes you can also replace the IC with an MT2492. With a right-angled header, you can swap the board in for a standard 78XX. Note the values on the schematic are set for 5V, but you can change them pretty easily.
This is a great example of how surface mount has changed so many things. We remember old 7805 “drop in” switching supplies that were much fatter and they weren’t inexpensive. Boards are cheap these days, and if you want the boards assembled, it looks like they’d cost $20 or $25 each in small quantities. But most of that is in setup and loading, so in larger quantities, the unit price would drop quickly. Or just solder them yourself.
If you want to see how the real McCoy works, we’ve watched [Ken]
look inside the 7805 before
. If you want to dive into the
mechanics of buck converters
, we did
two simulations
about that, too. | 70 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509683",
"author": "Anool Mahidharia",
"timestamp": "2022-09-05T08:31:40",
"content": "This is great for old projects that already use a 78XX regulator. I made a similar design long back using the LM2675. Link attached FWIW.https://github.com/wyolum/lin2sw",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,572.599973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/lithium-ion-batteries-are-your-friends/ | Lithium-Ion Batteries Are Your Friends | Arya Voronova | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"18650",
"batteries",
"battery",
"how-to",
"lithium ion"
] | Need some kind of battery for a project? You can always find a few Lithium-Ion (LiIon) batteries around! They’re in our phones, laptops, and a myriad other battery-powered things of all forms – as hackers, we will find ourselves working with them more and more. Lithium-Ion batteries are unmatched when it comes to energy capacity, ease of charging, and all the shapes and sizes you can get one in.
There’s also misconceptions about these batteries – bad advice floating around, fearmongering videos of devices ablaze, as well as mundane lack of understanding. Today, I’d like to provide a general overview of how to treat your LiIon batteries properly, making sure they serve you well long-term.
What’s A Battery? A Malleable Pile Of Cells
Lithium-Ion batteries are our friends. Now, there can’t be a proper friendship if you two don’t understand each other. Lithium-Ion batteries are tailored for human needs by the factory that produced them. As for us hackers, we’ll want to learn some things.
First thing to learn – a single LiIon “unit” is called a cell. An average laptop contains three or six Li-Ion cells, a phone will have one, a tablet will have from one to three. What we refer to as “battery” is typically one or multiple cells, together with protection circuitry, casing and a separate connector – most of the time all three of these, but not always. The typical voltage is 3.6 V or 3.7 V, with maximum voltage being 4.2 V – these are chemistry-defined, the same for most kinds of cells and almost always written on the cell.
In multiple-cell batteries, the cells are arranged into a mixture of parallel and series arrangements, called a ‘configuration’. For instance, a typical 6-cell laptop battery could be described as a “3s2p” configuration, meaning “three sections in series, in which each section consists of two cells in parallel”. The voltage of such a battery is typically described as one of the battery voltages multiplied by number of series stages; a 3sXp battery voltage could be labelled as 10.8 V, 11.1 V, or 12.6 V.
Parallel cells can be functionally treated as a larger-capacity cell – for instance, if you have two 1000 mAh cells and you need 2000 mAh capacity, you can connect the two cells in parallel and get exactly what you need. Make sure not to parallel cells of significantly different capacity – then, one of those will take more charging current than it perhaps should. This arrangement has one problem: if one of the cells fails internally and starts self-discharging, it brings all the other parallel-connected healthy cells down as well. You might have encountered this failure mode if you have ever disassembled a dead laptop battery.
Shapes And Sizes, All The Same
There’s different physical form-factors for cells – cylindrical, pouch cells and prismatic. 18650 is the most popular cylindrical cell format, where 18 stands for diameter and 65 stands for length (in millimeters). These kind of cells, you’ll typically see in laptop and powertool batteries, electric transportation devices of all kinds.
Pouch and prismatic cells are typically rectangular, with exceptions like cylinder-shaped cells
in disposable vapes.
These, you’ll see in phones, thinner laptops, tablets, and in general all kinds of handheld devices. I’ll refer to rectangular form-factor cells as “pouch cells” interchangeably.
You’ll often see the term “LiPo” being used online when talking i.e. copter batteries, or just some pouch cells. LiPo technology is a subset of LiIon technology, typically indeed packaged into pouch cells, and is the same as LiIon for the purposes of this article. LiFePO4 is also a subtype of LiIon, it differs by some important aspects like voltages, but most of this article will apply still.
No matter which kind of LiIon cells you’re using, whether a 18650, some “LiPo” single-cell pack, or a pouch cell you took out of a dead smartphone, the electronic components required generally stay the same – mostly thanks to voltages involved being the same. For instance, if you have an ESP32 board with a JST-PH 2-pin input for a battery, it’ll function whether you have a 18650 in a holder with soldered wires, or a pouch cell you got from Adafruit. It isn’t arcane magic – you only have a few rules to follow. Here’s everything you’d ever want to know.
Bring Your Multimeter Out
LiIon batteries don’t like being overdischarged; as a rule, you don’t want to get a LiIon battery below 2.5 V – 3.0 V, depending on how much current you’re trying to draw at that voltage. Below a certain voltage, LiIon batteries suffer irreversible changes and lose their capacity. 3.0 V is my personal threshold, making sure my batteries last even longer. No, it’s not a requirement that you add an ADC to your payload – just make sure your battery has a protection circuit; those typically are set to protect from 2.5 V overdischarge, and you can get 3.0 V ones too if you’d like.
If you go gently on discharge, your battery will live longer. This is why your phone’s “0% battery” isn’t the real 0% of the battery’s capacity – there’s usually some juice left still, but using it up would have the battery capacity take a hit long-term. This is also why some laptops have a BIOS-accessible 80% battery charge level limitation for the purpose of extending the pack’s life expectancy – you trade some operational capacity for that, but it’s a worthwhile tradeoff to consider.
TP4056 is a hacker’s best friend when it comes to LiIon batteries – and now it comes in “non-compliant USB-C” flavor!
LiIon batteries want to be charged properly. You’ll see CC/CV mentioned – that refers to “constant current/constant voltage”, where first the battery is fed a constant current with the cell increasing its voltage as it charges, and once its voltage reaches some threshold, the charging mode is switched to keep the charging voltage somewhat constant and decrease the current over time instead. This two-stage charging process requires a charging IC – thankfully, those are omnipresent. If you have a device accepting a LiIon battery, it likely has an onboard charger; for your own devices, chargers are easy to find as modules.
When working with a small cells under 1000 mAh, you’ll want to ensure your charging current is half of the battery capacity number, or even less – so, for a 1000 mAh cell, it’d be 0.5 A or lower. For instance, the everpresent TP4056 modules are set up for 1 A current. Say, you tried to charge a 100 mAh battery with that – this is one of the rare cases where the cell might get fiercely dissatisfied with your treatment. Thankfully, for the blue “TP4056” modules, swapping a resistor is all it takes – and TP4056 boards often include a protection circuit as well!
Protection And Monitoring
Remember – LiIon cells can put a lot of current into whatever you connect to their terminals. When working with unprotected cells, it’s important that you don’t short them by accident. For instance, if you’d like to repair a powerbank, unsolder the negative terminal first – just like with car batteries. This will decrease the chances of you shorting the positive pin to to ground with your soldering iron – that would trip the protection circuit, cause a small spark, and possibly make your battery lose some of its capacity. This is one more reason why you have a protection circuit – these trip on overcurrent events.
The kind of mistake you quickly learn to avoid
Let’s recap: with a single-cell (or single-stage) battery, you’ll want a protection circuit, and there’ll be a charger somewhere in the picture. For LiIon packs where multiple cells are connected in series, you’ll want a protection circuit that’s wired into between-cell connections, for proper overdischarge monitoring – and you’ll also want some form of balancing wired into these, making sure that individual sections of the battery don’t overcharge. This protection+balancing circuitry combination is often referred to as “BMS” (battery management system).
If you end up having quite a few unused batteries or cells lying around, there’s something you could improve upon. It’s been found that you shouldn’t store your batteries long-term at 100% charge, as that might cause capacity loss – 50-60% charge is a better level for storage. So, if you want to put your cells on a shelf for a few months or more, it’s best if you get them to 3.8 V-3.6 V first. Not that full charge storage is going to kill your battery – can’t deny, I’ve been storing most of my cells fully charged and it hasn’t been a dealbreaker so far. This is a lot more of a concern for LiPo pouch batteries than LiIon cells.
Mechanical Manipulations
Not that bending a LiIon battery is disastrous – still, don’t do this to cells you care about.
If you ever need to use blunt force to remove a glued-in cell, use non-sharp plastic tools instead of metal ones – and try to find a different way first. Let’s say, you want to free a pouch cell from an old tablet. First, try to squirt liberal amounts of isopropyl under the battery and let it soften, and twist the cell instead of bending it – you might find that you don’t need any tools at all. If you do need to pry the cell with something, use a cut up old credit card. Heating (i.e. hairdryer) is generally advised against.
One thing I strongly recommend you avoid is puncturing a puffed up pouch cell. Of course, sometimes a puncture happens by accident when refurbishing things, and you’re going to be fine if you move away from the cell for a bit, but don’t go around poking holes in spicy pillows for fun.
For 18650 (cylindrical) cells, it’s harder to puncture them, but still possible. One of these cases is taking a laptop battery apart, cutting through the battery case plastic with sharp metal tools – beware! The case is the negative terminal, so if you nick the shrink wrap, don’t make contact with the positive tip. However, if your 18650 plastic covering is missing or torn, that’s fine – it’s just a special kind of heatshrink, you can buy it for cheap and put it on the cell with hot air.
Such holders are indispensable if you want to use 18650 cells
If you want to use 18650s in your own creations, you’re best off stocking up on holders,
or printing some
. The second best thing is spot welding metal strips onto them – some shops will do that for you, – and soldering wires to these. Soldering directly to 18650 cells is a tricky topic. The consensus is that it can be done, but it’s best if you don’t.
Applying heat to 18650 cell casing is best done in small amounts – as such, using a higher-power soldering iron for short amounts of time is probably the safest way you can do it. Perhaps one of your friends or a nearby hackerspace has a spot welder that you can use instead – or you can
build your own?
Storing cells and batteries long-term isn’t rocket science – a free shelf will do. Make sure that they’re not mechanically at risk, aka they won’t fall, nothing heavy/sharp is on them, yadda yadda. For pouch cells without protection circuits, you’ll want to wrap the exposed terminals in something like kapton tape while they’re being stored, and put them somehwere fire-safe just in case. For 18650s, there’s cheap plastic cases you can store them in. Ammo boxes might be tempting, but make sure the metal doesn’t short the cells out as they rattle inside.
Be Picky When Making Friends
As hackers, we can get LiIon cells from a myriad of different sources. This is wonderful, since our projects come in all shapes and sizes – some will be fine with 18650, some can be powered by a smartphone battery or an ultrabook-scavenged flat cell, some are small enough that perhaps a vape battery will be a better bet.
Corrosion on the protection circuit or its terminals? Bin it.
Not all of these cells will be good for you, however – there’s some easy indicators that the cell is subpar and perhaps internally damaged, and these signs, you should watch out for. I’ll give you an acronym – L.U.S.H., which stands for “
L
acerated,
U
ndervolted,
S
ubpar,
H
eated”.
Is the silver wrapper of your pouch cell cut? Is your 18650 dented on its side? Did you mishandle an RC car LiPo pack and now it’s squished together in the way it wasn’t before? If so, recycle it rather than reusing it. It’s okay to have a bit of a dent on your 18650’s negative terminal as you use tin snips to get rid of spot-welded strip remains. Other than that, there’s typically not a lot of mechanical leeway between the side wall of the cell and its internal layers of electrodes, and squeezing these layers together is a possible failure point.
If the cell is lower than 2.5 V, bin it. In case your cell has a protection circuit and that circuit’s output is at 0 V, you might want to measure before the protection circuit, directly on the cell’s contacts – typically gently cutting through kapton or plastic tape where necessary, perhaps using sewing needles held against your multimeter probes. Again, if below 2.5 V, bin it – and consider keeping the protection circuit, it might prove useful later! Also, be reasonable – if you’ve disassembled a laptop battery, where two sections are at 3.5 V and one is at 3 V, you better bin the latter.
Bin this one, too.
Capacity loss means the cell has been damaged, and you don’t want to be using a damaged LiIon cell. For instance laptop battery makers use indicators of cell damage (overdischarge, overcharge and overheating) as a trigger to shut the battery controller down and brick the entire battery – and it makes sense, since they don’t want to have the liability. Even then, overall severe capacity loss isn’t usually considered a trigger for such protection. That said – if a battery has subpar capacity for its size or rating, bin it.
When charging the battery for the first time after it’s freed up from its previous host, make sure it doesn’t heat up noticeably – if it does, bin it. After charging, measure the voltage and write it down. It’s going to gradually decrease after you stop charging, but it shouldn’t drop too much. If it drops more than 0.3 V from where it was after you stopped charging, or just keeps dropping and dropping over the week, bin it – high levels of self-discharge typically go hand in hand with capacity loss.
Wait, What About Those Fires?
The risks of fire with LiIon cell batteries in typical hacker usecases are negligible. After all, we typically have thousands of LiIon cells in our general vicinity – consider all the phones, laptops, electric cars and the like, and they work wonders long-term across thousands of cycles. Typical LiIon fires happen because of mechanical damage to the cell, severe neglect of its electrical requirements, and rarely, mis-manufacturing. Having learned to treat your cells well and bin them when called for, you’re well-equipped to avoid battery fires ever happening. Want to learn more about LiIon battery fire safety specifically? Our colleague
has talked about that in depth.
When you need to dispose of a dead or subpar LiIon battery, are you understandably worried about its terminals getting shorted or the cell getting punctured after you bin it? Good news – a fully discharged battery is completely safe from any accidents, no longer having internal energy for combustion.
How to fully discharge a cell? First, you could short the cell’s terminals with something like a 10 K through-hole resistor and leave it to discharge fully. Make sure to connect to the cell and not the protection circuit output! Another way I’ve seen people do is put the cell (or an entire pack) in saltwater and hold it there for a while – best done outdoors in an open container. This might sound a bit wack, but there’s
scientific research
aplenty! [Ed note: sounds wack! I just use a resistor.]
Go On, LiIon!
We haven’t always been well-equipped to handle LiIon batteries. It used to be that bargain bin devices used two diodes from a 5 V input to “charge” the battery – resulting in puffy and dissatisfied pouch cells. Nowadays, you’ll see hackers and makers equipping their devices with LiIon batteries left and right, protection boards and chargers are everpresent, and the skills ought to be ubiquitous too. Never stop learning, and you’ll always be equipped to make your projects more portable, failproof and trustworthy.
Next time, I’d like to talk about specifics – I want to give you a hacker-friendly cookbook with LiIon battery electronics examples that are easily repeatable at home. Until then – solder a JST-PH lead onto a smartphone cell and plug it into that ESP32 board you bought, see what that lets you achieve! | 56 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510114",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2022-09-06T17:13:44",
"content": "Nice article. I have a plethora of 18650 cells harvested from old laptop batteries. One tip — sometimes I pays to keep pairs together and to retain some of the metal strips and wires that wer... | 1,760,372,573.074965 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/2022-hackaday-prize-save-the-world-wildcard-challenge-begins-now/ | 2022 Hackaday Prize: Save The World Wildcard Challenge Begins Now | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"communication",
"disaster",
"environment",
"mesh network",
"sensing"
] | Continuing the concept of saving planet Earth with gnarly, repeatable hacks, the fifth and final challenge of the 2022 Hackaday Prize is all about making the world better with smart and sustainable hardware. While the focus is still on saving the planet, this time, anything goes. Does your project not fit within the confines of a previous challenge? Here is your last chance to enter the 2022 Hackaday Prize:
Start your entry today!
Go Wild!
We’ve already run contest rounds that focused on
green power generation
,
recycling
,
hacking tech out of the landfills
, and just finished up
making our world more climate-resistant and connected
. How else do you want to use your hacking powers to make the world a better place? Well, that’s up to you. This is the wildcard round, after all. If your project helps to keep this planet running for future generations, you can enter it here.
The Save the World Wildcard challenge starts right now and runs until October 16th. As with previous rounds, we’ll award one of ten $500 prizes to each finalist, and the best projects will have a chance at the overall 2022 Hackaday Prize. So get hacking!
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510112",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2022-09-06T17:07:28",
"content": "I have to say, this year’s HAD prize is tremendously restrictive.Lots of good projects are pushing the envelope of what’s possible in the hacker domain, but don’t fit into the definition of “save the plane... | 1,760,372,572.654014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/electric-surfboard-gets-an-overhaul/ | Electric Surfboard Gets An Overhaul | Matthew Carlson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"electric surfboard",
"surf",
"surfboard",
"surfing"
] | One of the realities of building your own hardware is that it will more often than not lead to constant tinkering and revisions. [Simon]’s 3D printed electric surfboard is no exception as it
recently got an overhaul.
The motors were upgraded from 5000 W to 7500 W, most parts were redesigned to use bearings, and the impellers were swapped out. Luckily, almost all the electronics inside were suitable for reuse.
We
previously covered the surfboard in question
, and we’re always excited to see an old project revisited. The bearing reduces vibrations and allows the system to last longer. Despite the water cooling on the motors, the temperatures were still getting relatively high when running full tilt. So rather than buying more efficient (and more expensive) motors, he opted to reduce the load on the motors by changing out the impeller from a double to a single. But this meant cutting and grinding a new shaft as now needed to be one impeller shorter.
It might not be a huge shock, but with two 7500 W motors, the run time is just 3 minutes, even with a 48 V 16 amp-hour battery bank made up of four cells. Measuring top speed was done by synchronizing two cameras set 100 meters apart, yielding a top speed of 45 km/h. Even with a short run time, it looks like an absolute blast. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510094",
"author": "craig",
"timestamp": "2022-09-06T16:04:27",
"content": "Well this is awesome. This is a video where a guy makes a new awesome thing using what is approaching engineering and product development principals, and documents the build, reasoning for design choices a... | 1,760,372,572.707649 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/stable-diffusion-and-why-it-matters/ | Stable Diffusion And Why It Matters | Matthew Carlson | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"art",
"DALL-E",
"image generator",
"stable difussion"
] | You might not have heard about Stable Diffusion. As of writing this article, it’s less than a few weeks old. Perhaps you’ve heard about it and some of the hubbub around it. It is an AI model that can generate images based on a text prompt or an input image. Why is it important, how do you use it, and why should you care?
This year we have seen several image generation AIs such as
Dall-e 2
,
Imagen
, and even
Craiyon
. Nvidia’s Canvas AI allows someone to create a crude image with various colors representing different elements, such as mountains or water. Canvas can transform it into a beautiful landscape. What makes Stable Diffusion special? For starters,
it is open source
under the
Creative ML OpenRAIL-M license
, which is relatively permissive. Additionally, you can run Stable Diffusion (SD) on your computer rather than via the cloud, accessed by a website or API. They recommend a 3xxx series NVIDIA GPU with at least 6GB of RAM to get decent results. But due to its open-source nature, patches and tweaks enable it to be CPU only, AMD powered, or even Mac friendly.
This touches on the more important thing about SD. The community and energy around it. There are dozens of repos with different features, web UIs, and optimizations. People are training new models or fine-tuning models to generate different styles of content better. There are plugins to
Photoshop
and
Krita
. Other models are incorporated into the flow, such as image upscaling or face correction. The speed at which this has come into existence is dizzying. Right now, it’s a bit of the wild west.
How do you use it?
After playing with SD on our home desktop and fiddling around with a few of the repos, we can confidently say that SD isn’t as good as Dall-E 2 when it comes to generating abstract concepts.
Boston Terrier with a mermaid tail, at the bottom of the ocean, dramatic, digital art.
Images generated by Nir Barazida
That doesn’t make it any less incredible. Many of the incredible examples you see online are cherry-picked, but the fact that you can fire up your desktop with a low-end RTX 3060 and crank out a new image every 13 seconds is mind-blowing. Step away for a glass of water, and you have ~15 images to sift through when you come back. Many of them are decent and can be iterated on (more on that later).
If you’re interested in playing around with it, go to
huggingface
,
dreamstudio.ai
, or
Google collab
and use their web-based interface (all currently free). Or follow a guide and get it set up on your machine (any guide we write here will be woefully out of date within a few weeks).
The real magic of SD and other image generation is human and computer interaction. Don’t think of this as a “put in a thing, get a new thing out”; the system can loop back on itself. [Andrew] recently did this,
starting with a very simple drawing of Seattle
. He fed this image into SD, asking for “Digital fantasy painting of the Seattle city skyline. Vibrant fall trees in the foreground. Space Needle visible. Mount Rainier in background. Highly detailed.”
Hopefully, you can tell which one [Andrew] drew and which one SD generated. He fed this image back in, changing it to have a post-apocalyptic vibe. He then draws in a simple spaceship in the sky and asks SD to turn it into a beautiful spaceship, and after a few passes, it fits into the scene beautifully. Adding birds and a low-strength pass brings it together in a gorgeous scene.
SD struggles with consistency between generation passes, as [Karen Cheng] demonstrates in her attempt to
change a video of someone walking to have a different outfit
. She combines the output of Dalle (SD should work just fine here) with EBSynth, an AI good at taking one modified image and extrapolating how it should apply to subsequent frames. The results are incredible.
6/ And it turns out, it DOES work for clothes!
It's not perfect, and if you look closely there are lots of artifacts, but it was good enough for me for this project
pic.twitter.com/Scl2as7lhJ
— Karen X. Cheng (@karenxcheng)
August 30, 2022
Ultimately, this will be another tool to express ideas faster and in more accessible ways. While what SD generates might not be used as final assets, it could be used to
generate textures
in a prototype game. Or
generate a logo for an open-source project
.
Why should you care?
Generated by Author via SD
Hopefully, you can see how exciting and powerful SD and its accompanying cousin models are. If a movie had contained some of the demos above just a few years ago, we likely would have called out the movie for being Hollywood magic.
Time will tell whether we will continue to iterate on the idea or move on to more powerful techniques. But there are already efforts to train larger models with tweaks to understand the world and the prompts better.
Open-source is also a bit of a double-edged sword, as anyone can take it and do whatever they want. The license on the model forbids its use for many nefarious purposes, but at this point, we don’t know what sort of ramifications it will have long term. Looking ten or fifteen years down the road becomes very murky as it is hard to imagine what could be done with a version that was 10x better and ran in real-time.
We’ve written about
how Dall-E impacts photography
, but this just scratches the surface. So much more is possible, and we’re excited to see what happens. All we can say is it is satisfying looking at a picture that makes you happy and knowing it was generated on your computer. | 51 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510071",
"author": "IIVQ",
"timestamp": "2022-09-06T14:30:39",
"content": "I can’t wait for a “A Scanner Darkly”-type movie which is entirely AI generated (visuals, audio, storeyline)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6510101",... | 1,760,372,572.894653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/the-coolest-1990s-film-scanner-to-work-with-windows-11/ | The Coolest 1990s Film Scanner To Work With Windows 11 | Jenny List | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"scanner",
"usb",
"USB Driver"
] | Unless you happen to be a retro enthusiast, it’s fair to say that any photography you do (whether on your phone or a dedicated camera) is going to be digital. The world of photography has all but completely moved away from film, but the transition was not instantaneous. Instead there was a period of about ten years from the mid-90s when film and digital existed side-by-side in some form. A profitable sideline for photography shops was providing scans of film, and there were a series of high-end scanners aimed at that market.
[Kai Kaufman]
shares the experience of making one of these work with a modern Windows version
, and it’s interesting both because of the scanner itself and the epic tale of software detective work required to bring it up to date. The scanner in question is a Pakon F135, the product of a Kodak acquisition, and an all-in-one device that simply spools in a roll of film and does all the hard work of identifying the frames, cropping the images, and reading any other data from the film.
You may never have seen one of these machines, but if you ever had your photos on a CD as well as printed back in the day you’ve probably had its output. The problem in 2022 is that these machines have drivers which only work with relatively ancient 32-bit Windows versions, so most of the write-up involves some significant detective work into the drivers.
Not every reader will be an expert on Windows driver de-compilation, but perhaps the most interesting pieces of the puzzle come from his detective work in finding the origin of some components. Example code from Microsoft and from a chip design company both make the job much easier, and the final result is a fully functioning 64-bit driver for the device. Not many people will have a Pakon film scanner, but for those who do it seems life may just have become a bit easier.
Thanks [adilosa] for the tip! | 47 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6510017",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2022-09-06T11:40:38",
"content": "“ a period of about ten years from the mid-90s when film and digital existed side-by-side”Id say that timeline is a bit early and short.I used an early digital camera early-mid 90s; pretty poor, complete nove... | 1,760,372,572.799485 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/06/digging-out-an-underground-workshop/ | Digging Out An Underground Workshop | Matthew Carlson | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"crawlspace",
"digging",
"underground",
"workshop"
] | [Michael] of
Teaching Tech
moved, and with a large crawlspace under the house,
he decided to turn it into a workshop.
There were a few challenges that needed to be addressed first. He had to dig out the crawlspace to provide a level surface, though the depth was limited by the concrete footers the building stands on. The house is sitting on and around large amounts of limestone, which is excellent from a stability standpoint but causes problems for [Michael]. Water can easily travel through limestone, meaning it ends up in his newly dug-out crawlspace. He dug trenches for water to exit and laid down gravel. After a few attempts to level the floor, he found some recycled plastic floor mats and finally got them where he liked them.
Wheeling his tools down a long and steep hill to the shop looks like most of the challenge. But with a few additions to the shop, like hard tube dust extractions and a french cleat system, he has an incredibly functional dedicated shop space.
If your crawlspace is too small for people, a
tiny remote-controlled forklift could turn it into the storage space you need
. | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509994",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2022-09-06T09:22:04",
"content": "Those French cleats really help out, being able to move containers around with you, and saves table top space.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6510006",... | 1,760,372,572.967937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/05/food-safe-3d-printing-a-study/ | Food Safe 3D Printing: A Study | Dave Rowntree | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"cleaning",
"Covid-19",
"face masks",
"food safety",
"medical safety",
"PPA"
] | [Matt Thomas] wanted to answer the question of
whether 3D printed structures can be food-safe
or even medical-safe, since there is an awful lot of opinion out there but not a lot of actual science about the subject. As a mechanical engineer who dabbles in medical technical matters, he designed as series of tests using a wide range of nasty-sounding pathogens, to find once and for all what works and what does not.
One common argument sprung up from the maker movement response to COVID-19, 3D printed masks and visors. Many of us (this scribe included) printed many thousands of visor frames and ear protectors, using the armies of 3D printers we had available, then distributed them to nursing homes and doctors’ surgeries, and anywhere else that couldn’t get ‘proper’ medical-grade items.
There was much opinion about the risks associated with contamination of such 3D printed structures, due to the allegedly porous nature of the prints. [Matt] has shown with some SEM imaging, that a typical 3D print does not have any detectable porosity, and that the grooves due to the layer lines are so positively huge compared to your average bacterium, as to also be irrelevant.
Cutting to the chase, [Matt] shows that ordinary dish soap and water are totally sufficient to remove 90% or more of all of the pathogens he tested, and that using a mix of culturing swap samples as well as protein detection, that 3D printed parts could be cleaned close to medical standards, let alone those of food handling. Even those pesky biofilms could be quickly dispatched with either a quick rinse in bleach-water or a scrub with baking soda. Does this article clear this up finally? Only you can decide!
We’ve obviously covered the subject of
3D printing masks a fair bit
, but it’s not all about PPA, sometimes
ventilators need some 3D printing love too
. Prusa did some
work on the subject of food safety
, looking specifically at post-processing for 3D prints, and produced some interesting results.
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip! | 43 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509952",
"author": "allOjects",
"timestamp": "2022-09-06T05:26:33",
"content": "Very interesting. Like the findings very much… and looking forward to drop the paranoia.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6510118",
"autho... | 1,760,372,573.164338 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/04/2022-cyberdeck-contest-the-black-beast-will-help-you-survive-a-robot-apocalypse/ | 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: The Black Beast Will Help You Survive A Robot Apocalypse | Robin Kearey | [
"contests",
"Cyberdecks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"2022 Cyberdeck Contest",
"apocalypse",
"cyberdeck",
"emergency preparedness",
"ruggedized"
] | With AI systems getting smarter every day, one might wonder if they might someday evolve into a sentient Skynet-like system and try to take over the world. We’re not sure how close we are to such a situation, but we do know that if the robot apocalypse were to happen, we would want to stay close to [LordOfAllThings],
who would likely be carrying the Black Beast.
This scary-sounding machine is in essence a Raspberry Pi-based portable computer built inside an outdoor carrying case, with a wide range of unusual peripherals that make it the digital equivalent of a Swiss army knife. In other words, it’s a cyberdeck built for end times — and whatever comes after.
For example, an array of ESP32-based modules plus an SDR module allow you to intercept and analyze hostile robots’ communications, whether they’re using Bluetooth, WiFi, LoRaWAN, or anything in the 433 or 868 MHz ranges. An FM transmitter comes in handy for reaching out to fellow citizens who are trapped with nothing more than an analog radio receiver, while a suite of environmental sensors (including a Geiger counter) should help determine if Skynet has released any harmful substances to flush out those last few pesky humans. (Ed. note:
No marigolds in the promised land
and all that.)
If you manage to find a wired Ethernet connection somewhere, a built-in five-port gigabit router lets you set up a local network, obviously with a custom network analyzer to detect any unwanted intrusions. A storage compartment contains every kind of cable you could need, as well as useful gadgets like flashlights and, indeed, an actual Swiss army knife.
Naturally, the Black Beast can be run from any power source you might encounter, ranging from various AC mains voltages to the 12~48 V DC found in car batteries and solar panels. A built-in 12 Ah lead-acid battery gives it quite a bit of autonomy as well: a wide range of voltage and current monitors, as well as a clever power distribution system help you to manage power flows throughout the Black Beast.
The main user interfaces connected to the Pi are a 10.1″ full-HD monitor and a Logitech K400 keyboard/touch pad unit. All of the components are built into 3D-printed plug-in modules that neatly fit inside custom slots in the carrying case.
STL files and an extensive component list are available in case you’d like to build your own; apart from apocalyptic scenarios, such a machine would definitely be useful for things like maintenance and debugging of machinery out in the field.
There will be others out there with rugged Raspberry Pi portables:
the Militarish Pi
for instance, or
this waterproof SDR machine
. If it’s mainly wireless gremlins that you’re worried about, then
the Pwnton Pack
might also be useful. | 19 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509656",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2022-09-05T06:16:48",
"content": "Ummm, here in the states, FM is a whole different band and useless for AM communicating.. IF it is sloppy enough, they might hear a hum",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,372,573.240611 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/09/04/magnetic-maniac-manages-mangled-memory/ | Magnetic Maniac Manages Mangled Memory | Jonathan Bennett | [
"computer hacks",
"News"
] | [
"3.5\" floppy disk",
"8 inch floppy disk",
"floppy",
"magnets"
] | Ahh, floppy disks. Few things carry nostalgia quite like a floppy — either 3 1⁄2 or 5 1⁄4, depending on which generation of hacker you happen to be. (And yes, we hear you grey-beards, 8-inch floppies were definitely a thing.) The real goodies aren’t the floppies themselves, but what they carried, like Wolfenstein 3d, Commander Keen, DOS, or any number of other classics from the past. Unfortunately a bunch of floppy disks these aren’t carrying anything anymore, as bit rot eventually catches up with them. Even worse, on some trashed floppies, a format operation fails, too. Surely, these floppies are destined for the trash, right?
Well, hold on. [AnotherMaker]
discovered something that might breathe a little more life into those dead disks
— magnets! To be specific, he’s using a Degausser, namely the Realistic Bulk Tape Eraser, though enough time with a strong magnet would probably work, too. Thoroughly treat the disk, pop it back into the vintage machine, and there’s a decent chance it happily formats. Now all that’s left is to figure out why.
Is this an alignment problem, where multiple drives have written in slightly different places, and the read heads are picking up these errant areas even after the write head starts to format? Or maybe there’s a spot in the disk that is going bad, and the stronger magnetic field is required to reset the floppy’s field. Let us know your guess, or if you know the answer, fill us in! | 29 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6509617",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2022-09-05T02:47:55",
"content": "In the days of cassettes it was known that a static field demagnetizing a tape was a way to make the tape noisier by 10db than if an AC field erased it. Worst of all were jam boxes that had a pivoted ma... | 1,760,372,574.061011 |
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