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https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/soviet-era-test-gear-defects-to-youtube/ | Soviet-Era Test Gear Defects To YouTube | Al Williams | [
"Teardown",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"russian",
"soviet"
] | If you want to work on communication gear — especially in the 1960s — you probably wanted a VTVM (a vacuum tube voltmeter), a way to generate frequencies, and a way to measure frequencies and power. The Soviet military had a piece of portable gear that could do all of this,
the IK-2
, and [msylvain59] shows up how one looked on the outside and the inside in the video below. Be warned, though. The video is hard to stop watching and it runs for over an hour, so plan accordingly.
We don’t read Russian, but based on the video, it looks like the lefthand piece of gear is a frequency generator that runs from 20 to 52 MHz and a power meter. The right-hand instrument is a VTVM that has some way to measure frequency and the center section is a quartz crystal frequency standard.
The device has a battery, although there were problems with it in this unit. It can also take external power. Inside the portable case is a sturdy-looking pair of 100 ohm resistors in parallel to form a 50 ohm dummy load. The circuits inside are, as you’d expect, large surely hand-soldered components.
According to one of the comments, the unusual tubes inside were originally designed for Sputnik. While it is hard to imagine today, in the 1960s this instrument was a marvel of miniaturization.
It is interesting how
similar military gear looks
from either side of the iron curtain. Or
space hardware
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505603",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2022-08-23T16:29:26",
"content": "+1 like",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6505718",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2022-08-23T23:57:37",
"content": "In the Land of the Free... | 1,760,372,587.835894 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/choose-your-own-vector-map/ | Choose Your Own Vector Map | Matthew Carlson | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"openstreetmap",
"vector map",
"WebGL"
] | There are adults out there driving who were born after Google Earth came out. Potentially distressing facts aside, those who were around to remember the magic of scrolling in and out with infinite levels of detail was an experience that burned into our brains. Perhaps still curious 21 years later, [Craig Kochis] dove into how
vector maps work by implementing one himself
.
Some standard helper functions convert latitude and longitude into Mercator coordinates (x and y coordinates on the screen). He used WebGL to draw a canvas, making the whole thing interactive on the webpage itself. The camera position and zoom level stored as a matrix that is used to transform the map projection. By grabbing polygons that describe the shape of various borders and then converting those polygons into triangles with
earcut,
[Craig] has a part of a country rendered to a screen.
Where it gets interesting is the tiling system. As he zooms in and out, he wants to load in different levels of detail for each tile. He determines what tiles are in view and switches between them accordingly. The tiles come from a vector tile server [Craig] wrote earlier that can serve up tiles from OpenStreetMap data. In a relatively small amount of code, he had a passable map solution that could zoom and pan around to your heart’s content. Passable doesn’t mean good, so he does all sorts of optimization for WebGL, web workers, filling in missing data, and caching tiles.
The
code is up on his GitHub
, and it’s just an incredible little journey into some of the techs that powers the way most of us get around the world.
This gorgeous laser-cut map
might fit the bill nicely if you’re looking for map data used in a more real-world setting. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505442",
"author": "Victor Martelli",
"timestamp": "2022-08-23T02:23:22",
"content": "Free and open-source maps.https://about.maps.earth/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6505444",
"author": "Victor Martelli",
... | 1,760,372,587.511401 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/make-multi-material-resin-prints-with-a-syringe-and-a-bit-of-patience/ | Make Multi-Material Resin Prints With A Syringe (And A Bit Of Patience) | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"multi-material",
"resin",
"sla",
"UV resin"
] | Resin printing is a fantastic way to create parts, but multi-material printing isn’t really a possibility with resin. That is, unless you use [Cameron Coward]’s method for
creating multi-material resin prints
.
[Cameron]’s idea relies on the fact that handling and curing UV resin can easily be done outside of the printer itself. First, one prints what we’ll call the primary object. This object has empty spaces representing the secondary object. Once the primary object is printed and finished, these voids are carefully filled with a different resin, then cured with UV light. The end result is a single multi-material object that is, effectively, made from two different resins.
[Cameron] demonstrates this concept wonderfully by printing a wheel in clear, flexible resin. This wheel has a void in it where the hub would go, but instead of printing a hub and gluing it in, the hub-shaped void is carefully filled with a different resin. Exposing that added resin to UV light cures it and bonds it to the flexible wheel. The result? A one-piece wheel with a squishy tire and a rigid hub.
Print in flexible resin.
Fill void with rigid resin.
Cure with UV light.
Multi-material wheel.
One shortcoming to this method is that UV has to be able to reach the added resin, so no filling of internal cavities where UV can’t shine directly on the liquid resin. Otherwise, it seems pretty flexible, and a good idea to keep in one’s mental toolbox. It’s also possible to work in stages, so complex shapes or large volumes don’t need to be done all at once.
There’s a short video embedded below that shows the whole process. Really helping this idea along is the fact that
resin choices and properties are considerably wider and more varied than they were even just a few years ago
, so whatever your needs, there’s probably a resin out there for it. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505449",
"author": "Charlie",
"timestamp": "2022-08-23T02:59:05",
"content": "Interesting approach… I would have gone for filling with polyurethane. No requirement for UV, and can be used in internal spaces too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,587.902117 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/printable-one-way-driver-skips-ratchet-for-a-clutch/ | Printable One-Way Driver Skips Ratchet For A Clutch | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"clutch",
"ratchet",
"screwdriver",
"tool hacks",
"tools"
] | Ratcheting screwdrivers can help you work faster, even if their bulk means they’re not the best option for working in tight spaces. [ukman] decided to build a similar device of his own, relying on a slightly different mechanism —
an overrunning clutch.
The design is similar to a freewheel used on a bicycle, allowing free movement in one direction while resisting it in the other. As the screwdriver is turned in one direction, the shaft is wedged by a series of cylinders that lock it in place. However, the geometric shape of the clutch allows the shaft to turn in the other direction without getting wedged in place. The result is a screwdriver that can be turned, rolled back, and turned further. Thus, screws can be tightened without loosening one’s grip on the tool.
With its 3D printed construction, it’s probably not the best tool for heavy-duty, high-torque jobs, but it looks more than capable of handling simple assembly tasks.
We’ve seen some other nifty screwdrivers around these parts, too
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506344",
"author": "Andrew Quitmeyer",
"timestamp": "2022-08-25T15:48:52",
"content": "Lovely ! Love the efficient elegance",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6506355",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"tim... | 1,760,372,587.553258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/i3c-no-typo-wants-to-be-your-serial-bus/ | I3C — No Typo — Wants To Be Your Serial Bus | Al Williams | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"I3C"
] | Remember old hard drives with their giant ribbon cables? They went serial and now the power cables are way thicker than the data cables. We’ve seen the same thing in embedded devices. Talking between chips these days tends to use I2C or SPI or some variation of these to send and receive data over a handful of pins. But now there is I3C, a relatively new industry standard that is getting a bit of traction.
I2C and SPI are mature but they do have problems. I2C can be relatively slow and SPI usually requires extra pins for each device. Besides that, there is poor support for adding and removing devices dynamically or discovering devices automatically.
I3C, created by the MIPI Alliance, aims to fix these problems. It does use the usual two wires, SCL for the clock and SDA for data. One device acts as a controller. Other devices can be targets or secondary controllers. It is also backward compatible with I2C target devices. Depending on how you implement it, speeds can be quite fast with a raw speed of 12.5 Mbps and using line coding techniques can go to around 33 Mbps.
Not I2C
The bus looks like a typical I2C bus, but addressing is dynamic, except for legacy I2C devices which still use their normal address. In other words, the controller assigns addresses to devices that it finds on the bus. Legacy devices can’t use extended addressing. You can also connect devices without stopping the bus. There is the capability for broadcast messages, multiple operations, and in-band interrupts. It also has specific features for designs that need low-power operation. In addition to specifying the physical connection between devices, there is also a specification for the host controller interface. That means software has a standard interface to talk to the controller and the bus.
There are a variety of ways to increase data throughput, although some require that no legacy I2C devices sit on the bus. For example, when talking to a target device, it is possible to agree to use a double data rate scheme where data appears on both edges of the clock. There is also a way to conscript both lines to use a base 3 encoding in a self-clocking scheme. The idea is that two bits can encode any of four states. From each state, there are three possible next values. So each transition provides a base 3 digit packing more data into the same amount of time compared to a traditional scheme.
Unfortunately, the full specification is available only to MIPI members. However, you can download the
basic specification
. This, unfortunately, documents a subset of all the available features. For example, only single and double data rate appear in the public spec. However, hosts and devices will negotiate, so it is possible to have a device that, for example, only speaks SDR coexist with other devices that want to do something more exotic.
Nothing Simple
If you want to try implementing any of this, it is significantly more work than bit banging an SPI interface. For example, check out the transaction for dynamically allocating addresses on the bus, which also works around having static allocations, including those for I2C devices.
Transaction for setting dynamic addressing
The ability to join devices while the bus is in operation is another complex issue. If you just want to keep part of a board powered down, it probably is pretty easy. But if you want to literally plug something in, you’ll need to figure out how to do that without disrupting the bus in action electrically.
Although the public spec isn’t everything, it still weighs in at nearly 450 pages! There’s a lot to digest. It is unclear, too, how much motivation there is to implement this yourself in software. There’s a bit of a dragon and egg problem here: Most processors don’t support I3C out of the box because there aren’t many devices that use it. But until there are more processors that support it, why build devices?
In Practice
That may not be the case in the future. But for most of us, the question is what devices use this protocol today? The Linux kernel has an I3C driver available, and there are a few devices out there. NXP, for example, lists
a few products with I3C
, with a few temperature sensors “coming soon.” They also offer several ARM CPUs with I3C peripherals, such as the
LPC553x
. Microchip has the
PIC18-Q20
which can act as a target, but not a controller. In addition, Renesas, ST, TI, and a handful of other vendors offer a few I3C target devices ranging from 6-axis IMU chips to temperature sensors. If you have a Saleae logic analyzer, there is
firmware
you can get for it that will help you read I3C.
Saleae logic analyzer decoding I3C with a 3rd-party plugin
Will it catch on? Maybe. As cheap embedded CPUs get more powerful, there’s less reason to stick with simple protocols. However, there’s something gratifying about knowing you could bit bang your UART or SPI bus in a few hours of fun coding if you had to. With I3C, you are probably going to rely on an embedded peripheral to do all the heavy lifting. Then again, if they become common, why not? | 71 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506309",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2022-08-25T14:14:08",
"content": "> Unfortunately, the full specification is available only to MIPI members.That’s gross. Hopefully they release the full spec after a while, but the fact that they’ve released a stripped-down one doe... | 1,760,372,587.746493 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/everything-you-didnt-know-you-need-to-know-about-glitching-attacks/ | Everything You Didn’t Know You Need To Know About Glitching Attacks | Dan Maloney | [
"hardware",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"ChipWhisperer",
"fault injection",
"glitching",
"PicoEMP",
"stm32",
"trezor"
] | If you’ve always been intrigued by the idea of performing hardware attacks but never knew where to start, then we’ve got the article for you:
an in-depth look at the hows and whys of hardware glitching
.
Attentive readers will recall that we’ve featured [Matthew Alt]’s reverse engineering exploits before, like the time he
got root on a Linux-based arcade cabinet
. For something a bit more challenging, he chose a Trezor One crypto wallet this time. We briefly covered
a high-stakes hack
(third item) on one of these wallets by [Joe Grand] a while back, but [Matthew] offers much, much more detail.
After introducing the theory of glitching attacks, which seek to force a processor into an undefined state using various methods, [Matthew] discusses the specifics of the Trezor wallet and how the attack was planned.
His target — the internal voltage regulator of the wallet’s STM32 microcontroller — required desoldering a few caps before the attack could begin, which was performed with a
ChipWhisperer
. After resolving a few initial timing issues, he was able to glitch the chip into dropping to the lowest level of readout protection, which gave access to the dongle’s SRAM through an ST-Link debugger.
While this summary may make the whole thing sound trivial, it’s obvious that the attack was anything but, nor was the effort that went into writing it all up. The whole thing reads a little like a techno-thriller, and there’s plenty of detail there if you’re looking for a tutorial on chip glitching. We’re looking forward to part 2, which will concentrate on electromagnetic fault-injection using
a PicoEMP
and what looks like a modified 3D printer. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6507011",
"author": "Bhav",
"timestamp": "2022-08-27T07:18:48",
"content": "It was amazing how clear and well explained the piece was! I can say I completely understand their approach (voltage line glitching) now. I am impressed how deep down the stack you can go to hack something…n... | 1,760,372,587.470803 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/pet-bottles-diligently-turned-into-filament/ | PET Bottles Diligently Turned Into Filament | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"controller",
"extruder",
"filament",
"pet",
"pid",
"plastic",
"recycle"
] | While the price of 3D printers has come down quite a lot in the past few years, filament continues to be rather pricey especially for those doing a lot of printing. This has led to some people looking to alternatives for standard filament, including recycling various forms of plastic. We’ve seen plenty of builds using various materials,
but none so far have had this level of quality control in the final project
.
What sets this machine apart from others is that it’s built around an Arduino Nano and includes controls that allow the user to fine-tune a PID controller during the conversion of the recycled plastic into filament. Different plastic bottles have different material qualities, so once the machine is started it can be adjusted to ensure that the filament produced has the exact specifications for the printer. The PCB is available for download, and the only thing that needs to be done by hand besides feeding the machine to start it is to cut the plastic into strips for the starter spool. There is also a separate 3D printed tool available to make this task easy, though.
Not only could this project save printing costs, but it also keeps harmful plastics out of landfills and other environments. Recycling plastic tends to be quite difficult since producing new plastic is incredibly cheap, and the recycled material can’t be used as often as other materials such as aluminum.
But there are still plenty of people out there trying to reuse as much of it as they can
. | 21 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506201",
"author": "rolf",
"timestamp": "2022-08-25T08:29:30",
"content": "This is a copy of one I know of. It is slightly better on some ways, and worse on some others.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6506208",
"auth... | 1,760,372,587.617848 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/24/building-a-gamecube-mini-because-nintendo-never-did/ | Building A GameCube Mini Because Nintendo Never Did | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"console",
"gamecube",
"nintendo"
] | Nintendo never made a GameCube Mini, with the console’s form factor remaining the same until the eventual launch of the Wii in 2006. [Bringus Studios]
decided to build one of his own instead
.
The build began with a Revision C GameCube motherboard, which comes without the digital video port and the second serial port. It also comes with an integrated power supply on the motherboard which makes it much easier to slim down into a smaller form factor. The main space saving, though, came from removing the rarely-used ports on the bottom of the console and the DVD drive. The latter was replaced with PicoBoot, which allows ISOs to be loaded from an SD card.
Once trimmed down and fitted with a replacement cooling fan, the console then got a custom half-height 3D-printed case. It’s tidy and functional, but we’d love to see a more finished resin-printed version more accurately aping the traditional GameCube aesthetic.
If you want something even more portable, consider building
a pocket-sized Wii
. Video after the break. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506264",
"author": "uc",
"timestamp": "2022-08-25T12:06:54",
"content": "But… This is not a cube!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6506283",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp": "2022-08-25T13:09:16",
"con... | 1,760,372,587.793885 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/24/coffee-with-kernighan/ | Coffee With Kernighan | Chris Lott | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"awk",
"computerphile",
"Kernighan",
"unicode"
] | There was an interesting tidbit buried in a Computerphile video released last week (below the break), featuring professors [David Brailsford] and [Brian Kernighan] having a chat over coffee. Among other topics, they discuss the history and current state of various text processing tools. We learn that [Kernighan] has taken on a summer project of updating the
AWK
text processing language to handle UTF-8 text, an omission he admits is embarrassing in this day and age. He is also working on a second edition of
The AWK Programming Language
book, which hasn’t been updated since being first released in 1988.
[Brian Kernighan] is a legend in the world of Unix and computing, working at Bell Labs during the 70s where Unix and C were developed. Among the many accomplishments in his career, he is well-known as the co-author with [Dennis Ritchie] of
The C Programming Language
, first published in 1972 and still being used decades later, AWK mentioned above, and major updates to troff. More recently, he co-authored
The Go Programming Language
book in 2015.
If an updated UTF-8-capable AWK interests you, keep an eye on the
AWK GitHub repository
where [Kernighan] anticipates an update,
once he wraps his head around git a little better
. We’re happy to see [Brian] so active at 80 years old. If you want to learn more about those early days at Bell Labs, we reviewed [kernighan]’s very interesting
UNIX: A History and a Memoir
a couple of years ago. | 29 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506098",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-08-25T02:20:32",
"content": "August pioneer",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6506104",
"author": "Bruce Perens",
"timestamp": "2022-08-25T02:34... | 1,760,372,588.11098 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/24/reactive-load-for-amplifiers-teaches-lessons-about-inductors/ | Reactive Load For Amplifiers Teaches Lessons About Inductors | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"amp",
"amplifier",
"baxandall",
"dummy load",
"equalizer",
"headphone",
"music",
"reactive load",
"tube",
"vacuum"
] | The sound produced by any given electric guitar is shaped not just by the instrument itself but by the amplifiers chosen to make that sound audible. Plenty of musicians swear by the warm sound of amplifiers with vacuum tube circuits, but they do have some limitations. [Collin] wanted to
build a reactive load for using tube amps without generating a huge quantity of sound
, and it resulted in an interesting project that also taught him a lot about inductors.
The reactive load is essentially a dummy load for the amplifier that replaces a speaker with something that won’t produce sound. Passive loads typically use resistor banks but since this one is active, it needs a very large inductor to handle the amount of current being produced by the amplifier. [Colin] has also built a headphone output into this load which allows it to output a much smaller quantity of sound to a headset while retaining the sound and feel of the amplifier tubes, and it additionally includes a widely-used tone control circuit as well.
There’s a lot going on in the design of the circuitry for this amplifier load, including a lot of research into low-frequency inductors that can handle a significant amount of current. [Collin] eventually ended up winding his own, but the path he took to it was long and winding. There’s a lot of other circuit theory discussed as well especially with regards to the Baxandall EQ that he built into it as well. And, if you’d like to learn more about tube amplifiers in general,
take a look at this piece which notes one of the best stereo amps ever produced
. | 26 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506052",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2022-08-24T23:06:43",
"content": "And then there are gyrators: Would save a lot of pain in making monster inductors.Though a gyrator to handle that kind of power brings its own headaches too, since it would require a heatsink.",
"parent_... | 1,760,372,588.181352 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/23/theres-gold-in-that-there-graphene/ | There’s Gold In That There Graphene | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"e-waste recycling",
"graphene"
] | There’s gold all around us, embedded in our electronics. There are people who collect e-waste and use various methods to extract gold from them. However, it is hard to qualify it as a “get rich quick” scheme because the amount of gold recovered is usually minute. Still, if you can do volume, you can make some money and recycling is always a good idea. At the University of Manchester, they have a better way to
extract gold from e-waste using graphene
. You can see a brief video about the process below, or
read the full paper
.
The process is relatively simple. You dissolve the e-waste in a solvent, add some graphene oxide, and the gold appears bound to the graphene. You pull out the graphene and burn it off to result in the gold you want. A gram of graphene can grab 2 grams of gold and graphene is relatively cheap per gram compared to gold.
Graphene oxide nanosheets are processed using ascorbic acid into a colloid suspension. The chemical process converts gold bound with chlorine into elemental gold. After diving into why the process works, they were able to increase the selectivity of the process by manipulating the pH so that the majority of the residue is actually gold.
The team believes they can build a continuous process that takes liquefied e-waste and extracts gold as it flows through the system. If you’d rather go with the traditional method,
here’s a start for you
. Then again, there are other
metals to recover besides gold
. | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505804",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2022-08-24T09:49:47",
"content": "“The chemical process converts cold bound with chlorine into elemental gold.” So the philosophers stone was just ICE all along?! :O omg!! Ciao, I’m moving to Alaska!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,372,588.25057 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/23/integrated-circuit-manufacturing-at-bell-labs-in-1983/ | Integrated Circuit Manufacturing At Bell Labs In 1983 | Dave Rowntree | [
"History"
] | [
"bell labs",
"fabrication",
"integrated circuit",
"vintage",
"wafer"
] | With the never ending march of technological progress, arguably the most complex technologies become so close to magic as to be impenetrable to those outside the industry in which they operate. We’ve seen walkthrough video snapshots of just a small part of the operation of modern semiconductor fabs, but let’s face it, everything you see is pretty guarded, hidden away inside large sealed boxes for environmental control reasons, among others, and it’s hard to really see what’s going on inside.
Let’s step back in time a few decades to 1983, with
an interesting tour of the IC manufacturing facility at Bell Labs
at Murray Hill (video, embedded below) and you can get a bit more of an idea of how the process works, albeit at a time when chips hosted mere tens of thousands of active devices, compared with the countless billions of today. This fab operates on three inch wafers, producing about 100 die each, with every one handled and processed by hand whereas modern wafers are much bigger, die often much smaller with the total die per wafer in the thousands and are never handled by a filthy human.
Particle counts of 100 per cubic foot might seem laughable by modern standards, but device geometries back then were comparatively large and the defect rate due to it was not so serious. We did chuckle somewhat seeing the operator staff all climb into their protective over suits, but open-faced with beards-a-plenty poking out into the breeze. Quite simply, full-on bunny suits were simply not necessary. Anyway, whilst the over suits were mostly for the environment, we did spot the occasional shot of an operator wearing some proper protective face shielding when performing some of the higher risk tasks, such as wafer cleaning, after all as the narrator says “these acids are strong enough to eat through the skin” and that would certainly ruin your afternoon.
No story about integrated circuit processing would be complete without mentioning the progress of [Sam Zeloof] and
his DIY approach to making chips
, and whilst he’s only managing device counts in the hundreds, this can only improve given time. | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505739",
"author": "Greg Garriss",
"timestamp": "2022-08-24T02:18:41",
"content": "They made bigger chips too. A friend at Bell Labs and I developed an analog image sensor / neural net chip that was fabricated there in the late 80s. It was about 75mm square. Qty: 4. Boeing had s... | 1,760,372,588.308237 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/23/flapping-pcb-fan-blows-a-little-bit/ | Flapping PCB Fan Blows A Little Bit | Danie Conradie | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"Carl Bugeja",
"fan",
"flexible PCB",
"pcb actuator"
] | Moving air with spinning blades is the most popular way, but it is not the only way. Using the PCB actuator technology he has been working on for the past few years, [Carl Bugeja] built a small
electromagnetic flapping fan
using a custom flexible PCB.
Inspired by
expensive piezoelectric fans
($400 for a 30mW fan), [Carl] wanted to see if a cheaper alternative could be made. Using a similar design to his other
PCB actuators
, he had a custom flexible PCB made with an integrated coil, which can flex on two thin supports. These supports also contain the power traces for the coil. By sticking the base of the PCB between two neodymium magnets, it can flap back and forth when driven by an alternating current. It produces a bit of airflow, but nearly enough to be useful. The power traces in the thin supports also break after an extended period of 180° flapping.
Although this probably won’t be a viable replacement for a rotary fan, it would be interesting to see how far one can push this approach by optimizing the design and magnet arrangement.
[Carl] has been experimenting with a variety of applications for his PCB actuators, from
tiny flopping robots
to
tiny speakers
, he doesn’t seem to be running out of ideas. A
flip-dot display
might be interesting… | 24 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505709",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2022-08-23T23:20:55",
"content": "I already have Flip-Dot display arrays which contain the coil in the PCB…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6505760",
"author": "S",
"t... | 1,760,372,588.407247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/23/high-speed-rc-car-needs-a-flight-controller/ | High-Speed RC Car Needs A Flight Controller | Danie Conradie | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"aerodynamics",
"ardupilot",
"R/C car"
] | The fastest ground vehicles on earth are not driven by their wheels but by an aircraft jet engine. At world record speeds, they run on an aerodynamic razor’s edge between downforce, which limits speed, and liftoff, which can result in death and destruction. [rctestflight] wanted to see what it takes to run an RC car at very high speeds, so he built a
ducted-fan powered car
with aerodynamic control surfaces and an aircraft flight controller.
This high-speed car is built on the chassis of a 1/14th scale RC buggy, powered by 4 EDF (electric ducted fans) mounted on a very long aerodynamic foam board shell. It also has an aircraft-style tail with elevons and rudders for stabilization and control at high speed using an ArduPilot flight controller. The flight controller is set up to stabilize in the roll and yaw axis, with only fixed trim in the pitch axis.
[rctestflight] got the car up to 71 MPH (114 km/h), which is fast for most RC cars but well short of the 202 MPH RC car speed record. It was still quite hard to keep in a straight line, and the bumpy roads certainly didn’t help. He hopes to revisit the challenge in the future with larger motors and high voltage batteries.
If you want to do more than just go in a straight line, or
drive upside down
maximum downforce is your friend. This can be done with
careful aerodynamic design
, or just
add fans
to suck the car onto the ground. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6507121",
"author": "Dremhmrk2",
"timestamp": "2022-08-27T18:19:36",
"content": "I’ve had Traxxas trucks with Traxxas motors and speed controllers hit gps-measured speeds over 80mph on city streets.There’s a lot of room to squeeze out performance if he only hit 71mph.My biggest prob... | 1,760,372,588.342922 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/23/2022-hackaday-prize-plant-monitoring-system-grows-to-include-lora/ | 2022 Hackaday Prize: Plant Monitoring System Grows To Include LoRa | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"automation",
"farm",
"FLORA",
"garden",
"green",
"moisture",
"plants",
"sensor",
"soil",
"water"
] | Change on industrial scales is slow, but if you’re operating your own small farm or simply working in a home garden there are some excellent ways to use water more effectively.
The latest tool from [YJ] makes it possible to use much less water while still keeping plant yields high
.
This is an improvement on a
previous project
which automates watering and lighting of a small area or single pot. This latest creation, called FLORA, includes a LoRa module for communication up to 3 kilometers, and the ESP32 on board also handles monitoring of soil moisture, humidity and other sensors. It also includes a pump driver for managing irrigation systems so that smart decisions can be made about when to water. Using this device, the water usage when testing was reduced by around 30% compared to a typical timed irrigation system.
Using a smart system like this is effective for basically any supply of water, but for those who get water from something like an off-grid rainwater system or an expensive water utility, the gains are immediate. If you aren’t already growing your own food to take advantage of tools like this, take a look at
this primer
to get you started.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 7 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505661",
"author": "Christoph",
"timestamp": "2022-08-23T19:57:28",
"content": "Is the range really 3km with this unmatched antenna? It looks very similar to the DN038 antenna from TI, which “requires” a matching network.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,588.460844 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/23/ibms-early-pc-attracts-time-travelers/ | IBM’s Early PC Attracts Time Travelers | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"ibm",
"retrocomputing"
] | It wasn’t long ago I was nostalgic about an old computer I saw back in the 1980s from HP. It was sort of an early attempt at a PC, although price-wise it was only in reach for professionals. HP wasn’t the only one to try such a thing, and one of the more famous attempts was the company that arguably did get the PC world rolling: IBM. Sure, there were other companies that made PCs before the IBM PC, but that was the computer that cemented the idea of a computer on an office desk or at your home more than any computer before it. Even now, our giant supercomputer desktop machines boot as though they were a vintage 1981 PC for a few minutes on each startup. But the PC wasn’t the first personal machine from IBM and, in fact, the IBM 5100 was not only personal, but it was also portable. Well, portable by 1970s standards that also had very heavy video cameras and luggable computers like the Osborne 1.
The IBM 5100 had a brief three-year life from 1975 to 1978. A blistering 1.9 MHz 16-bit CPU drove a 5-inch CRT monitor and you could have between 16K and 64K of RAM along with a fair amount of ROM. In fact, the ROMs were the key feature and a giant switch on the front let you pick between an APL ROM and a BASIC ROM (assuming you had bought both).
Computer hobbyists in the 1970s loved BASIC, so this was the object of desire for many. The entry price of around $9,000 squashed those dreams, though — that was even more money then than it would be today. The idea was influential, though and there was even a
dedicated book published
about the machine. Like the HP computer, the main mass storage was via tape drive. You could even get an add-on to make it work as an IBM remote terminal or use the serial port for a modem. If the screen was too small, a BNC connector on the back could drive an external monitor.
Oddities
A typical IBM 1401 weighed 5 tons so portability meant a truck!
It may seem funny to think of a 55-pound computer with a CRT as portable. But this was a time when computers sat on raised floors in special rooms with exotic power systems. Prior to this, the military had the most portable computer, also from IBM, which was an
IBM 1401 on a special truck
.
APL might seem like an odd choice, but in its day it was a prestigious language. Of course, that also meant the machine had to handle the oddball character set and strikeovers necessary for APL in those days. However, APL was very powerful for manipulating large sets of data and if you dropped $10K on a computer, that’s probably what you had in mind. Other workstations — like the one from HP — had you using BASIC which did not have a lot of facilities for dealing with high-level math and matrices, especially in those days.
The CPU board has mostly IBM-custom chips onboard. (Photo from:
http://computermuseum.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
)
However, a beta tester for the machine warned IBM that normal people weren’t going to learn APL just to use the machine. This spurred the addition of the BASIC option. However, the way the machine implemented APL and BASIC was perhaps the oddest thing of all.
IBM had no shortage of software to run APL. They also had a BASIC system for the IBM System/3. To save development costs, the 5100’s processor emulated most of the features of a System/360 and a System/3. This way, they could make minor changes to the existing APL and BASIC interpreters. What that means, though, is that the 5100 wasn’t just a portable computer. It was a portable and slow mainframe computer.
Time Travel
Maybe the oddest thing, though, isn’t a technical thing. I don’t remember it being widely known that the IBM5100 was really a tiny mainframe. It probably wouldn’t be attractive for IBM to make that well known, anyway. You don’t want your bread-and-butter mainframe customers either planning to buy a (relatively) cheap replacement or complaining that you are charging them way more than this cheap device that “does the same thing.”
However, in the year 2000, this became a key plot point in what was almost certainly a time travel hoax.
John Titor
claimed to be from the year 2036 and that the military had sent him back to 1975 to collect one of these computers. Why? Because after World War III (which supposedly would happen in 2015), they needed the computer to run old IBM software and they couldn’t transport a several-ton mainframe to the future.
Plausible? Maybe. Even though the predictions didn’t come to pass, true believers will simply say that was because his time travel changed events. We aren’t buying it, but we have to admire that someone knew enough about the IBM 5100 to craft this story.
Try It
I have never seen one of these in person, but I imagine if one came up for sale now, the price would be astronomical. But you can, of course, try the
obligatory emulator by [Norbert Kehrer]
. Or watch [Abort, Retry, Fail] run a real one in the video, below. There is a lot of detail over on the
Computer Museum site
if you want to dig into the technology. There were actually a few different models with slightly different options. You’ll find a lot of interesting info over at
oldcomputers.net
, too, which is where some of the photos in this post are taken from.
If you do dig into the diagrams, it is helpful to know some of the old IBM terminologies. For example, ROS is “read only storage” or what we call ROM. RAM is RWS or read/write storage. Don’t forget, IBM wasn’t keen on ASCII, either.
Maybe I’m biased, but if I had my choice, I’d rather have the
old HP machine
on my desk. But I will admit that this machine captured my imagination and was a precursor of things to come. Of course, I liked APL, so your take on it might be different. The original IBM PC, by the way, was the
model 5150
, so the 5100 is sort of its older geeky cousin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIJzCA2gmiY | 53 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505615",
"author": "Ale",
"timestamp": "2022-08-23T17:13:13",
"content": "It looks like a hobbyist made HP85 :) but that one came later",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6505684",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,588.686038 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/23/2022-hackaday-supercon-call-for-proposals-extended/ | 2022 Hackaday Supercon: Call For Proposals Extended | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"News"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Supercon",
"call for proposals"
] | Good news, procrastinators and those of you who simply have not yet worked up the nerve to submit! The
2022 Hackaday Supercon Call for Proposals
has been extended one more week. You’ve been waiting until the last minute? Well, it’s now one minute
past
the last minute, but we’ve got your back. You have until
Thurs, Sep. 1
to get your talk or workshop proposal in. (We’re not extending it
twice
!)
Everyone has a good story to share. Whether it’s a tale of software or hardware, or that tricky “firmware” that falls somewhere in the middle, we have a crowd who would love to hear it. You almost never leave a project as the same person who entered it, and you should tell us your story. We have two talk tracks, one for shorter talks and demos of around 20 minutes, and one for epic sagas of 45 minutes or so. Whether you’re a first-time presenter or a seasoned pro, we’d like to hear about your hacks.
To sweeten the pot, all presenters get in free. So what are you waiting for? Send in your ideas now – you’ve got a couple months to get the slides into shape. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505639",
"author": "Your comment is awaiting moderation",
"timestamp": "2022-08-23T18:28:36",
"content": "This flashing gif icon thing with loads of random big dots is infringing on my insanity. How do I turn it off please?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []... | 1,760,372,588.506 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/26/simple-breadboard-sdr-for-shortwave/ | Simple Breadboard SDR For Shortwave | Danie Conradie | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"breadboard",
"sdr",
"shortwave"
] | One of the best ways to learn about radios is to build your own, even in the age of cheap SDR dongles. [Aniss Oulhaci] demonstrates this with a simple
HF SDR receiver built on a breadboard
.
The receiver takes the form of a simplified Tayloe detector. An
RF preamp circuit
amplifies the signal from a
shortwave antenna
and feeds it into a 74HC4066D analog switch, which acts as a switching mixer. It mixes the input signal with the local oscillator’s
I and Q signals
to produce the intermediate frequency signals. The local oscillator consists of a SI5351 clock generator with a 74HC74D flip-flop to generate the I and Q pair. The signals pass through a low pass filter stage and get amplified by an LM358 op amp, resulting in the IQ signal pair being fed to a computer’s stereo sound card.
An Arduino is used to control the SI5351 clock generator, which in turn is controlled by the same program created for the
SDR Shield
. With the audio signal fed to HDSDR, [Aniss] was able to pick up a shortwave radio broadcaster.
While this is by no means a high-performance receiver, building an SDR on a breadboard is still a great weekend project, with plenty of potential for further experimentation. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506668",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-08-26T08:04:29",
"content": "The Tayloe mixer derives from the commutating filter. I saw the filter in the first ham magazine I ever saw, QST for April 1971. And while I saw later articles promiting the concept, I don’t reme... | 1,760,372,588.575886 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/buy-the-right-to-build-a-nakagin-tower-anywhere/ | Buy The Right To Build A Nakagin Tower Anywhere | Jenny List | [
"History",
"News"
] | [
"architecture",
"futurism",
"housing",
"modernism",
"modular housing"
] | We’re guessing that among Hackaday’s readership are plenty of futurists, and while the past might be the wrong direction in which to look when considering futurism, we wouldn’t blame any of them for hankering for the days when futurism was mainstream.
Perhaps one of the most globally iconic buildings of that era could have been found in Tokyo, in the form of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Kisho Kurokawa’s 1972 Metabolist apartment block. This pioneering structure, in which individual apartments were conceived as plug-in units that could be moved or changed at will, never achieved its potential and was dismantled, looking more post-apocalyptic than futuristic in early 2022, but
it could live on in both digital form and reconstructed elsewhere
as the rights to its design are being auctioned.
Unfortunately there appears to be some NFT mumbo-jumbo associated with the sale, but what’s up for auction is a complete CAD model along with the rights to build either real or virtual copies of the building. It’s unlikely that any Hackaday readers will pony up for their own Metabolist skyscraper, but the interest lies not only in the love of a future that never quite happened, but in the engineering behind the structure. Where this is being written as in many other places there is simultaneously a chronic housing shortage and a housing system wedded to the outdated building techniques of a previous century, so the thought of updated equivalents of the Nakagin Tower offering the chance of modular interchangeable housing in an era perhaps more suited to it than the 1970s is an intriguing one. Now that we’re living in the future, perhaps it’s time to give futurism another chance.
Regular readers will have spotted
this isn’t the first time we’ve brought you a taste of futuristic living
.
Header: Svetlov Artem,
CC0
. | 41 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506640",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-08-26T05:50:47",
"content": "Oh yes we will see more pods to live in. Like the “dog cages” of Hong Kong. Plenty.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6506650",
"author": "Klaus S... | 1,760,372,588.770107 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/objective-hotend-performance-measurement-is-hard/ | Objective Hotend Performance Measurement Is Hard | Danie Conradie | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer extruder",
"high flow nozzle",
"hotend"
] | Evaluating the performance of 3D printers and component upgrades is a more difficult than it may seem at first glance, and subjective observations can lead to incorrect conclusions. To objectively determine the maximum flow rates of different FDM 3D printer hotends, [MirageC]
is developing a robust testing standard backed by more than just visual observations
.
Defining the max flow rate threshold is not straightforward. A common method is to run a test print while slightly increasing the flow rate with each layer, and visually making a judgment on the last acceptable layer. It would be easy to miss errors, or unconsciously be inconsistent with observations over time. [MirageC] wanted to back up observations with measurements. To do this, he is measuring the true feed rate of the filament with an encoder wheel, and the backpressure of the filament on the extruder using a load cell. A Bowden tube helps to isolate the extruder from the vibration of the moving printhead.
After much testing, [MirageC] determined that the numerical threshold would be a specific deviation percentage between the desired and actual flow rate. At temperatures above 230°C, [MirageC] found that the last visually acceptable layer was consistently around 5.75% flow rate deviation for one specific PLA filament. It does not mean that 5.75% will be the magic number for all filaments and nozzle size, but it does provide a measurable parameter to back up visual observations.
In a world of questionable product reviews this dedication to objectivity is a breath of fresh air. If you are looking to upgrade your 3D printer’s hotend [MirageC]’s tests would be a good source of information.
We’ve covered a few hacks for improving the flow rate of a hotend, including adding nuts to a
volcano nozzle
, adding
copper wires to the inside of the nozzle
. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506651",
"author": "Jeff Ramble",
"timestamp": "2022-08-26T06:40:19",
"content": "Stefan at CNC kitchen has done a lot of work on this topic, not just hot ends but nozzles as well.https://www.youtube.com/c/CNCKitchen.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
... | 1,760,372,588.8159 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/a-self-spinning-tennis-ball-to-surprise-your-opponent/ | A Self-Spinning Tennis Ball To Surprise Your Opponent | Robin Kearey | [
"Games",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"flexible filament",
"spin",
"tennis ball"
] | In many ball sports like golf, football and tennis, controlling the ball’s spin is an important skill. Expert players can make golf balls curve around obstacles, launch footballs towards goal posts from impossible angles, or confuse their opponents by making a tennis ball bounce in a completely unexpected direction.
[Luis Marx], by his own admission, is not an expert tennis player at all, so when he found himself humiliated on the court by his roommate he set about finding a different way to win. In other words, to cheat. The basic idea was to make
a tennis ball that would start spinning at the push of a button
, rather than by skillful wielding of a racket: a spinning ball that flies through the air will follow a curved trajectory, so if you can make a ball spin at will, you can change its direction in mid-air.
Making a ball spin by itself is not as hard as it may sound. All you need is an electric motor that’s small enough to fit inside, along with a power source and some way to turn it on. When the motor inside the ball starts to spin, Newton’s third law ensures that the outside will spin in the opposite direction. [Luis] found a suitable DC motor and mounted it on a small custom-designed PCB along with an ESP8266 controller and powered it with a tiny lithium battery. A pushbutton mounted on his tennis racket operates the wireless interface to turn the motor on and off.
Although getting this setup to work wasn’t as easy as [Luis] had hoped, turning it into a ball that’s good enough to play tennis with was not straightforward either. [Luis] decided to 3D-print the outer shell using flexible filament in order to create something that would have the same amount of bounce as an ordinary rubber tennis ball. It took several rounds of trial and error with various types of filament to end up with something that worked, but the final result, as you can see in the video (in German, embedded below), was quite impressive.
Tests on the tennis court showed that [Luis] could now easily beat his roommate, although this was mostly due to the erratic bouncing caused by the ball’s spin rather than any aerodynamic effects. Still, the magic tennis ball achieved its objective and even survived several games without breaking. If you’re looking for a more brute-force approach to cheating at tennis,
this 180 mph tennis ball trebuchet
might come in handy. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506563",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2022-08-26T01:15:33",
"content": "Neat … but don’t understand a word he says….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6506569",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2022-08-26T01... | 1,760,372,588.933729 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/multispectral-imaging-system-built-with-raspberry-pi/ | Multispectral Imaging System Built With Raspberry Pi | Lewin Day | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"multispectral",
"multispectral imaging",
"raspberry pi"
] | Multispectral imaging can be a useful tool, revealing all manner of secrets hidden to the human eye. [elad orbach] built a rig to perform such imaging
using the humble Raspberry Pi.
The project is built inside a dark box which keeps outside light from polluting the results. A camera is mounted at the top to image specimens installed below, which the Pi uses to take photos under various lighting conditions. The build relies on a wide variety of colored LEDs for clean, accurate light output for accurate imaging purposes. The LEDs are all installed on a large aluminium heatsink, and can be turned on and off via the Raspberry Pi to capture images with various different illumination settings. A sheath is placed around the camera to ensure only light reflected from the specimen reaches the camera, cutting out bleed from the LEDs themselves.
Multispectral imaging is particularly useful when imaging botanical material. Taking photos under different lights can reveal diseases, nutrient deficiencies, and other abnormalities affecting plants.
We’ve even seen it used to investigate paintings, too
. Video after the break. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506817",
"author": "Comedicles",
"timestamp": "2022-08-26T16:18:51",
"content": "I wonder if this technique should have a name like Multi-Spectral Illumination Imaging? It isn’t the same as spectral slices of something illuminated by a continuous source.(Dear headline writer: IIRC ... | 1,760,372,588.868764 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/pi-pico-gives-its-life-for-overclocking/ | Pi Pico Gives Its Life For Overclocking | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"overclocking",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | How fast can a Raspberry Pi Pico go? Well,
apparently the answer is 1 GHz
if you freeze it and give it over twice the voltage it normally gets. Oh, one catch. After a few minutes, the chip will fry itself.
That’s the results reported by [David] who took a Peltier cooler and a pretty serious over-voltage. The dhrystone scores went from around 200 to over 1100. Of course, there’s that pesky early death to worry about, so you probably won’t want to try this at home.
Even before the chip bites the dust, there are other problems to address. For example, once you get much over 250 MHz, the Pico’s SPI flash can’t keep up, so all the
software you want to run has to be put in RAM first
. You’ll also want to do some poking at the system clock parameters.
Honestly, we enjoy overclocking PCs or just about anything else. The good news is if you fry a Pico, it won’t make a sizable dent in your wallet. It is also a fun way to learn a bit more about the internals of the processor. According to [David], the cooler took the part to -40 C. We wonder how it would fare in a bath of LN
2
?
Of course, you can
push a regular Pi
, too. If you really need a 1 GHz overclocked microcontroller, maybe
check out the Teensy
. | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506407",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-08-25T18:42:31",
"content": "Ethanol/Methanol + dry ice should be -78°C. I’d be worried LN2 being too volatile to stick much to the chiplet.Acetone would probably damage the epoxy, so it is ruled out.",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,372,588.982273 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/25/tech-in-plain-sight-rain-sensing-wipers/ | Tech In Plain Sight: Rain-Sensing Wipers | Al Williams | [
"car hacks",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"sensors",
"wipers"
] | While it is definitely a first-world problem that you don’t want to manually turn on your windshield wipers when it starts raining, it is also one of those things that probably sounds easier to solve than it really is. After all, you can ask a four-year-old if it is raining and expect a reasonable answer. But how do you ask that question of a computer? Especially a tiny cheap computer that is operating pretty much on its own.
You might want to stop here and try to think of how you’d do it. Measure the conductivity of the glass? Maybe water on the glass affects its dielectric constant and you could measure the resulting capacitance? Modern cars don’t do either. The problem is complicated because you need a solution that works with the glass and isn’t prone to false positives due to dirt or debris.
Source:
https://cecas.clemson.edu/cvel/auto/systems/wiper_control.html
Instead, they use infrared light shot at an angle at the windshield. The glass reflects most of the light back to the sensor, but water causes the reflection to scatter. If the sensor sees less return light, it turns on the wipers. Where is the sensor? It depends on the car, but [Jeff] helpfully points out the location on Toyota vehicles in the video below.
Typically, the whole assembly sits behind the windshield somewhere near the rearview mirror. There’s a good writeup and the graphic used here on the
Clemson Vehicular Electronics Lab website
.
Of course, the car companies aren’t designing these from scratch. They buy the technology from other companies, for example,
Hamamatsu
and other companies.
There was a time when you could buy
kits
to add this to your car if you couldn’t stand manually operating your wipers. It shouldn’t be too hard to roll your own if you were so inclined.
Of course, there are other ways to do the same thing. Some Tesla vehicles can use their cameras to passively detect rain. Also, if you don’t need to sense the glass, it is pretty easy to measure the effect getting wet has on a
PCB resistor
.
It is amazing how many things are easy to figure out for humans but much tougher for computers. While we do enjoy our automatic wipers, we also don’t really mind having to turn them on if we had to. We also do get the occasional false positive.
There is a surprising amount of tech
behind windshield wipers
. Not to mention, potentially,
rhythm
.
Banner image: “
Rain Rain Go Away
” by Basheer Tome. Thumbnail: “
Bank of America cash machines in a row, windshield wiper, rain, University Village, Seattle, Washington, USA
” by Wonderlane. | 38 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6506376",
"author": "Jack",
"timestamp": "2022-08-25T17:20:29",
"content": "Cool tech. I did know it was optical sensors, but I didn’t know it was based on the way water on the surface changes the way light reflects internally. That’s a pretty ingenious way of going about it. A dry ... | 1,760,372,589.064146 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/optimising-a-rc-tilt-rotor-vtol/ | Optimising An RC Tilt-Rotor VTOL | Danie Conradie | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"dRehmFlight",
"tom stanton",
"vtol"
] | There are a variety of possible motor configurations to choose from when building a fixed-wing VTOL drone, but few take the twin-motor tilt-rotor approach used by the V-22 Osprey. However, it remains a popular DIY drone for fans of the military aircraft, like [Tom Stanton]. He recently built his
5th tilt-rotor VTOL
and gave an excellent look at the development process. Video after the break.
The key components of any small-scale tilt-rotor are the tilt mechanism and the flight controller. [Tom]’s tilt mechanism uses a high-speed, high-torque servo that rotates the motor mount via 3D printed gear mechanism. This means the servo doesn’t need to bear the full load of the motor, and the gearing can be optimized for torque and speed. [Tom] also used the tilting motors for yaw and roll control during forward flight, which allows him to eliminate all the other conventional control surfaces except for the elevator.
The flight controller consists of a Teensy and gyro/accelerometer module, and runs
dRehmFlight flight stabilization firmware
. dRehmflight was specifically created to be easily adapted to a wide variety of experimental aircraft configurations, and it allowed [Tom] to get airborne on the first attempt.
Carbon fiber tubes are used for the wing spars and tail boom, and are bolted to a fuselage made from 3D printed brackets and 1 mm fiberglass-reinforced plastic sheet. [Tom] picked a NACA 4412 airfoil wing for its linear coefficient of lift over a wide angle-of-attack range, allowing a smooth transition between hover and forward flight. The wing was 3D printed with
lightweight foaming PLA
(LW-PLA), which required some careful design for a quality print. The foaming of LW-PLA means it will always ooze if it stops extruding, so [Tom] designed the wing surface and internal ribs to be extruded in one continuous line using the slicer’s “vase mode”. There were some issues with the matt black wings starting to warp in the sun, which was solved by re-printing the wings in white.
The aircraft performs well in both flight modes, but had some trouble slowing down when transitioning back to hover. It’s a major improvement over the
previous version
, which lacked yaw control in a hover, and was a bit unstable in forward flight. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505377",
"author": "U",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T20:07:57",
"content": "The v22 is the closest we have to a transformer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6505380",
"author": "Mel",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T20:11:56",
... | 1,760,372,589.227446 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/small-combat-robots-pack-a-punch-in-antweight-division/ | Small Combat Robots Pack A Punch In Antweight Division | Donald Papp | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"antweight",
"combat robot",
"rc"
] | Two robots enter, one robot leaves! Combat robotics are a fantastic showcase of design and skill, but the mechanical contenders don’t
have
to be big, heavy, and expensive. There is an Antweight division for combat robots in which most contenders weigh a mere 150 grams, and
[Harry Makes Things] shows off four participants for Antweight World Series (AWS) 64
.
Clockwise: ReLoader, Shakma, Sad Ken, and HobGoblet antweight combat robots.
Each of them have very different designs, and there are plenty of photos as well as insightful details about what was done and how well it worked. That’s exactly the kind of detail we love to read about, so huge thanks to [Harry] for sharing!
In combat robotics, contenders generally maneuver their remote-controlled machines to pin or immobilize their opponent. This can happen as a result of damaging them to the point that they stop functioning, but it can also happen by rending them helpless by working some kind of mechanical advantage.
One of the robots is tracked, two are wheeled, and the fourth is a walker. The yellow
ReLoader
is a tracked design in the shape of a low, flat wedge with a central lifting arm. The idea is to get under one’s opponent and lift them up, ideally taking their wheels off the ground and removing their ability to move. Another design is
Sad Ken
, which uses as a weapon a horizontally-spinning bar with which to deal opponents a good ol’ smack. The green
HobGoblet
has a front-mounted aluminum “beater” mounted directly to a brushless motor, and resembles a combine or thresher. The last design is
Shakma
, a cam-based walker which hobbles slowly along while dramatically spinning a comically-large sawblade.
As one might imagine, 3D printers have contributed a lot to combat robotics in general. [Harry]’s preferred method is printing a robot’s body as a big block of solid ABS with nooks for all the worky bits. There is plenty of cross-pollination with the RC aircraft world, and brushless motors, radio hardware, and ESCs (electronic speed controls) are common sights. That doesn’t mean people don’t push the envelope. Enthusiasts have
used a Raspberry Pi Zero and Bluetooth game controller instead of RC equipment
, and
carbon fiber is commonly used
to save weight.
Watch the video (embedded below) to get a tour of the 150 gram
ReLoader
, and see some additional views of the hardware and design. Maybe you’ll come away with some inspiration of your own? | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505430",
"author": "Gryd3",
"timestamp": "2022-08-23T00:44:38",
"content": "If anyone has a plug-in or solution to amp up the audio of this clip without cranking all my volume settings to 100% it would be appreciated.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,589.273801 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/a-brief-history-of-drywall-or-how-drywall-came-to-dominate-the-world-of-construction/ | A Brief History Of Drywall Or: How Drywall Came To Dominate The World Of Construction | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"home hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"construction",
"construction materials",
"Drywall",
"gyprock",
"gypsum"
] | Drywall is common and ubiquitous in commercial and residential buildings today. Many of us barely think about it until we have to repair a hole smashed in it.
However, drywall has not been around forever, and actually took many years to establish itself as a popular building material. Today, we’ll look at how it came about, and why it went on to dominate the world of construction.
Before Drywall
A lath and plaster wall, with wallpaper applied over the top. Significant skill is required to apply a smooth, consistent plaster finish. Credit: Lmcelhiney.
CC-BY-SA-4.0
Before drywall existed, walls were constructed with a time-consuming process referred to as lath and plaster. This usually involved nailing up many thin strips of wood to the wooden structure of a house, to make up walls and ceilings. The wood strips, or lath, served as a substrate onto which skilled tradespeople would apply plaster.
The plaster was applied wet, and would take a significant amount of time to dry. Plastering walls was often impossible in cooler weather, and the job required significant skill to get quality results. Over the years, techniques and materials changed and improved, such as the introduction of metal mesh lath and quicker-drying plasters. However, the fundamental limitations of the process remained.
Quicker, With Less Mess
Various companies and individuals started experimenting with various methods of producing stiff, prefabricated boards of plaster in the late 19th century. The main root of modern drywall began when the Sackett Plaster Board company went on to develop SackettBoard around this time. It was made of alternating layers of plaster and wool felt paper, usually four layers thick.
Eventually, the Sackett operation was bought out by the United States Gypsum Corporation. The product was developed further, and was introduced to the market as “Sheetrock.” It featured a layer of compressed gypsum powder, in between a layer of paper on either side.
Some of these early products were used as lath, with small panels fixed to walls as a substrate for additional hand-plastering. However, the material was quickly developed into today’s large-scale drywall sheets.
Drywall after installation, prior to paint. Note the white vertical lines, where paper tape and jointing plaster has been applied to cover the joints between adjacent sheets. Credit:
Amaxson, public domain
Drywall offered significant benefits over the traditional lath and plaster technique. The large boards could quickly be affixed to a wooden frame, covering huge areas of wall in a fraction of the time it would take to nail up lath and start applying plaster. The resulting walls offered good strength and fire resistance, too. No longer would construction have to stop for cold weather, or wait for weeks while the plaster dried. Construction could instead continue at a rapid pace as soon as the boards had been fixed down, a job which required only basic skills. The only hand-plastering required was to cover up the joints between boards, and techniques developed rapidly to make this as quick and easy as possible.
Despite the step-change improvement that drywall offered, it struggled to catch on. The building industry was set in its ways, and using drywall was seen as corner-cutting rather than smart business.
World War II changed all that, however, when the labor force was suddenly tapped out on the war effort and efficiency gains were badly sought across all industries. Drywall had found its moment, and by 1945, it was quickly becoming the dominant way to build in the USA. It slashed weeks off the time required to build a house, leaving little room for traditional building techniques to compete.
The Downsides
Drywall does have its own drawbacks, of course. It can be difficult to get a truly smooth finish on drywall, as the paper surface tends to make that difficult. It’s also quite easy to damage. If you’ve ever been casually tossing your hammers around a room, or had a punch-the-wall competition, you’ve found out how easy it is to knock a hole through drywall.
It can also be a haven for mold, thanks in part due to the paper layer acting as a food source. Its semi-porous nature means such occurances generally require complete replacement. Water damage is a drywall killer, as well, whether by flood or by plumbing leaks. It’s far less hardy in such conditions versus traditional cement-based plaster construction.
The Future
Technology rarely stands still, and there are many options these days for finishing walls. New drywall formulations focus on environmentally sustainable production, or cutting down on acoustic transmission for comfortable, quiet homes. The veneer plaster method uses special thin “blueboard” drywall, which is then given a coat of plaster over the top for a higher-quality, faster, yet more expensive finish. Other options like concrete, wood panelling, and brick interior walls are all viable, too. And, if you’ve got the money to spend, one can still hire a traditional lath-and-plaster tradesperson, which is a particularly popular option for old-school “country-style” builds and classic restorations.
As it stands, though, drywall’s dominance doesn’t look to be fading anytime soon. It’s still often the cheapest way to finish interior walls, and the industry is worth billions of dollars a year worldwide. Expect to see drywall dominating residential and commercial construction for some time to come.
Banner image: “
drywall and wallpaper
” by Jo Naylor. Thumbnail: “
Applying drywall joint compound
” by Georgia National Guard | 106 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505311",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T17:25:54",
"content": "“It can also be a haven for mold, thanks in part due to the paper layer acting as a food source. Its semi-porous nature means such occurances generally require complete replacement. Water damage is a dry... | 1,760,372,589.673521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/superconference-2022-hack-chat/ | Superconference 2022 Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday,
August 24
August 31 at noon Pacific for the
Superconference 2022 Hack Chat
!
[
Sorry folks — due to a scheduling snafu, we’ve got to push this off a week. — ed
]
To say that a lot of water has passed under the bridge since 2019 is something of an understatement. When last we met as a group, in Pasadena in November of that year, the Covid-19 pandemic and its fallout were ahead of us. Supercon 2019 was a smashing success, a three-day meetup that brought together the best the hacker community has to offer to exchange ideas, share their projects, and meet up IRL rather than reading about everyone’s exploits and adventures online. It was a fantastic time, but how were we to know that it would be the last meatspace meetup for a painfully long time?
Thankfully, that’s all behind us now, and
Supercon 2022
is back, live and in person! Everyone in the hacker community is going to want to be in Pasadena, but since it’s been so long since we’ve met up in person, we thought a Hack Chat focusing on Supercon would be a good idea. We’ve invited
Majenta Strongheart
on to field your questions, plus hopefully we’ll have a few surprise guests too. But this will mainly be your chance to sort of “pre-network” before the con. If you’re a Supercon first-timer, this is a great way to ask questions about how it all works and whether it’s worth it to attend (answer: it is —
go buy tickets
now!) For vets, this is your chance to share your stories of Supercons past, or perhaps to reconnect with con-buddies you’ve lost touch with. There’ll be something for everyone, both at the Hack Chat and at Supercon, so drop by the chat and find out what all the hype is about.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 31 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 6 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505848",
"author": "Nicolas Tremblay",
"timestamp": "2022-08-24T14:07:30",
"content": "I hope that they’ll still keep a big online presence. I loved both Remoticons and would like to participate again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment... | 1,760,372,589.319559 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/magic-mirror-isnt-transparent-metal/ | Magic Mirror Isn’t Transparent Metal | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"Magic Mirror",
"mirror",
"optics"
] | One of the Star Trek movies has a McGuffin called “transparent aluminum.” While
magic mirrors
aren’t really transparent, it appears that way to a casual observer. If you haven’t seen one of these, they are polished metal mirrors with a pattern embossed on the back. When you shine a point source of light on the mirror, however, the reflection matches what is on the back of the mirror. Is it transparent? No, and the video by [Steve Mould] below explains what’s really going on.
The reality is that very subtle variations of the surface produce the image. You need some understanding of optics and calculus to fully understand what’s going on.
The real mystery, though, is how these parts are made. There is some speculation about the thickness of the embossing, but keep in mind that the surface variations are a fraction of a micron. Even more interesting is that not all mirrors reflect the image on the back, which makes you think the image on the back is just a subterfuge and not necessarily part of the fabrication process.
We figure if anyone can figure out how to make these, it is our readers. We’ll entertain any speculation other than using a 555 or an Arduino. We wonder if you could
cast these out of epoxy.
We’ll admit optics aren’t our strong suit, but we do dig into it occasionally. There’s always a use for a
fresnel lens
. | 20 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505284",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T15:46:00",
"content": "It has been Known for years that even if you grind the serial numbers off of a piece of metal (engine block, gun, etc.) the numbers can still be recovered through stresses made... | 1,760,372,589.377357 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/unpacking-the-stowaway-science-aboard-artemis-i/ | Unpacking The Stowaway Science Aboard Artemis I | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Space"
] | [
"Artemis I",
"artemis program",
"nasa",
"orion",
"sls",
"Space Launch System"
] | NASA’s upcoming Artemis I mission represents a critical milestone on the space agency’s path towards establishing a sustainable human presence on the Moon. It will mark not only the first flight of the massive Space Launch System (SLS) and its Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), but will also test the ability of the 25 ton Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) to operate in lunar orbit. While there won’t be any crew aboard this flight, it will serve as a dress rehearsal for the Artemis II mission — which will see humans travel beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
As the SLS was designed to lift a fully loaded and crewed Orion capsule, the towering rocket and the ISPS are being considerably underutilized for this test flight. With so much excess payload capacity available, Artemis I is in the unique position of being able to carry a number of secondary payloads into cislunar space without making any changes to the overall mission or flight trajectory.
NASA has selected ten CubeSats
to hitch a ride into space aboard Artemis I, which will test out new technologies and conduct deep space research. These secondary payloads are officially deemed “High Risk, High Reward”, with their success far from guaranteed. But should they complete their individual missions, they may well help shape the future of lunar exploration.
With Artemis I potentially just days away from liftoff, let’s take a look at a few of these secondary payloads and how they’ll be deployed without endangering the primary mission of getting Orion to the Moon.
Flying Economy Class
Ultimately, the goal of Artemis I is to demonstrate that the Orion capsule can enter lunar orbit, navigate and maneuver while near the Moon, and then safely return to Earth. Should this test fail, it will undoubtedly delay future Artemis missions, and could even put the plans for a human landing in jeopardy. For NASA’s long-term goals, it’s absolutely critical that this mission is a success.
The CubeSats along for the ride are in no way, shape, or form, a priority for NASA or Mission Control. While everyone would like to see them succeed, no special treatment or consideration will be given to these craft. If a decision needs to be made that will save the Orion at the expense of the secondary payloads, there’s no question which way it will go.
To prevent any possible interaction with the primary mission, the CubeSats won’t even be deployed until nearly two hours after Orion has separated from the ICPS. Once the capsule has moved a safe distance away, the small satellites will be sequentially released from angled dispensers mounted to the inside of the stage adapter.
The stage adapter includes a dedicated avionics package that is isolated from the primary mission electronics, and is responsible for determining when each spring-loaded dispenser is to activate and push out its respective CubeSat. A power bus was provided to charge the 18560 cells used in the CubeSats, but for safety, it is also isolated from the SLS’s own electrical system.
Unfortunately, that means the last time the CubeSats were charged was before the Orion spacecraft was mounted to the adapter in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) back in October 2021. To further complicate matters, the status of each individual craft is currently unknown, as NASA requires the satellites to be powered-down until 15 seconds after their release from the stage adapter.
After sitting for nearly a year, there’s a very real possibility that the batteries in some of the satellites might have become depleted. In that case, the craft’s onboard photovoltaic cells will hopefully be able to recharge them once deployed. If not…at least the ride to space was free.
Research Worth the Risk
Riding to space on an untested rocket is already risky enough, but when you’re flying your satellite as the secondary payload on a prototype rocket without even knowing if its batteries are charged, that’s really rolling the dice. Given the odds, you might assume that the CubeSats would have simplistic missions — after all, why would researchers invest valuable time and material into such an uncertain proposition? But that ignores the one-in-a-career siren’s call of being offered a free trip to the Moon.
As it so happens, there’s some very interesting science crammed into those secondary payload dispensers, with several experiments representing the first of their kind. Here are just a few of the highlights:
OMOTENASHI
Perhaps the most ambitious of the secondary payload missions is the
O
utstanding
MO
on exploration
TE
chnologies demonstrated by
NA
no
S
emi-
H
ard
I
mpactor (OMOTENASHI) built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). This CubeSat will follow Orion all the way to the Moon, and use its thrusters to put itself on a collision course with the lunar surface. When the onboard radar determines it’s at the appropriate altitude, a solid rocket motor will ignite to decelerate the landing module, which will then free-fall some 100 meters (328 feet) to the surface. Just before touchdown, a 50 cm (1.6 foot) airbag will inflate to cushion the impact.
If everything goes according to plan, OMOTENASHI (which translates to “welcome” or “hospitality” in Japanese) will be by far the smallest vehicle to make a controlled landing on the lunar surface. While the mission is primarily designed to test the landing technique, the lander does have an accelerometer and UHF transmitter onboard that will hopefully return useful data should the 0.7 kg (1.5 lb) craft survive its close encounter with the lunar regolith.
As an interesting aside, the team behind OMOTENASHI has
challenged the community to detect its telemetry signals
both during its flight to the Moon and after it’s touched down on the surface. In the event that any Hackaday readers manage to pick it up,
we’d love to hear about it
.
ArgoMoon
The Italian ArgoMoon mission will demonstrate the techniques necessary for a CubeSat to maneuver in close proximity to another spacecraft,
using the ICPS itself as the target
. Once dispensed the satellite will fly in close formation with the ICPS, and will use its onboard cameras to photograph the SLS upper stage for historical purposes.
As ArgoMoon is scheduled to be one of the first secondary payloads to be released, it will also have the opportunity to record the deployment of several other CubeSats. Due to the limited instrumentation of the dispensers, imagery from the craft will be used to determine if all of the satellites have been successfully deployed.
Eventually, ArgoMoon will use its onboard thrusters to move away from the ICPS and put itself into a high-altitude orbit above the Earth. During the following months, the craft will be exposed to the sort of deep space conditions that traditionally CubeSats avoid by staying within the confines of Earth’s magnetic field. This time will be used to
validate the radiation-hardened components
developed by ArgoMoon’s manufacturer, Argotec.
NEA Scout
While Orion and several of the secondary payloads are headed to the Moon, the NEA Scout will be setting course for a different target: 2020 GE, a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) with a diameter of less than 18 meters (60 feet). While the CubeSat has thrusters for orienting itself, its primary means of propulsion will be a 86 square meter (925 square foot) solar sail. It will be unfurled between four extendable booms, using a mechanism
derived from the one used in the Planetary Society’s LightSail spacecraft
.
After a lunar gravity assist, NEA Scout will be on course to intercept 2020 GE in late 2023. The craft will get within 1.6 km (1 mile) of the asteroid, and perform what mission planners believe will be the slowest flyby in the history of space exploration, passing it at a relative speed of just 30 meters (100 feet) per second. This will give NEA Scout hours to image the asteroid with its camera and sensors, making it the first time such a small object has ever been directly observed from a free-flying spacecraft.
The mission will not only be another important step in the development of solar sail technology, but the data collected from 2020 GE will help inform future planetary defense systems. Currently scientists don’t know if NEAs of this scale are actually solid objects or a loose mass of small rocks and dust, and it’s hoped the results of this up-close study will allow scientists to come up with plans to destroy or deflect similar objects if need be.
One for the History Books
While they may differ in scale and complexity, all of the secondary payloads on Artemis I promise to deliver exciting new science. The LunaH-Map,
developed by Arizona State University
, will attempt to create a detailed map of water deposits on the Moon’s surface which could greatly benefit future human exploration. BioSentinel will be the first
long-duration biology study outside of low Earth orbit
, and will study the impact of space radiation on DNA. Pick any mission from the list, and you’ll find yourself falling down a fascinating rabbit hole.
Over the years, much has been said about the
enormous cost of the Space Launch System
, which at this point has been in development for over a decade. Many argue that it’s a relic of “Old Space” mentality, and that
new and more agile rockets from SpaceX
and Blue Origin will make it obsolete before it’s even flown more than a handful of times. Only time will tell if those criticisms are valid, but the incredible scientific potential of this inaugural flight seems a clear indicator that at the very least, NASA intends to get their money’s worth out of their brand-new megarocket. | 40 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505253",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T14:33:00",
"content": "“no special treatment or consideration will be given to these craft. If a decision needs to be made that will save the Orion at the expense of the secondary payloads, there’s no question which way it will go.... | 1,760,372,589.517252 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/is-this-the-oldest-open-source-hvac-project-in-existence/ | Is This The Oldest Open Source HVAC Project In Existence? | Dave Rowntree | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"air conditioning",
"esphome",
"heating",
"Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning",
"hvac",
"mqtt",
"raspberry pi",
"ventilation",
"xbee"
] | Homebrew HVAC systems are one of those projects that take such a big investment of time, effort and money that you’ve got to be a really dedicated (ideally home-owning) hacker with a wide variety of multidisciplinary skills to pull off an implementation that can work in reality. One such HVAC hacker is [Vadim Tkachenko] with his multi-zone
Home Climate Control (HCC) project
that we covered first back in 2007. We now have rare opportunity to look at the improvements fifteen years of part-time development can produce, when a project is used all day, all year round in their own home. At the start, things were simple, just opening and closing ventilators with none of those modern MQTT-driven cloud computing stuff.
The current implementation, called DZ (
GitHub project link
) has been rewritten using modern
reactive programming
techniques (which apparently is a good thing for an HVAC control system) with the HCC-core application running on anything UNIX, but fits nicely on the Raspberry Pi. Measurement data (temperature, humidity, etc.) can be taken from 1-wire devices as well as XBee modules, enabling wired and wireless sensing around the installation. The system can control various air management appliances, such as heaters, heat pumps and fans depending on the need for heating, cooling or ventilation. Don’t forget that often neglected third leg of HVAC, the ‘V’ part is critical for a healthy house. The remote control and monitoring is courtesy of an Android application (HCC-Remote) which allows users to visualise the current status and what the HCC is currently doing to keep the programmed climate in check.
Data are transported using the common MQTT protocol, allowing simple connectivity to any sensors or controllers that already exist in an installation, with HCC providing integrations for
ESPHome
as well as
Home Assistant
, so there are plenty of options for building a system around existing hardware. The project is fairly big (as you’d expect for this length of time) but [Vadim] would like to stress that they see a lot of re-inventing of the wheel on this subject, and a good look at HCC may save some people a lot of pain implementing a system without such a solid grounding.
If your needs are more basic, perhaps this
simple ESP8266-based smart vent
will suffice? And, if the control system is less of a problem, and you’re more interested in the actual physical implementation, why not check out this
DIY Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV)
project? | 19 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505206",
"author": "wibble",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T11:11:57",
"content": "Not a hope, as you well know – and shameful clickbait. Steve Ciarcia’s Circuit Cellar HVAC/home automation system “HCSII” predates this to 1992. I think the original HCS dates back to somewhere post 1985."... | 1,760,372,589.431861 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/22/ssb-in-your-pocket/ | SSB In Your Pocket | Al Williams | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"shortwave",
"single-sideband",
"ssb"
] | In the old days, a shortwave radio was a major desk fixture. These days, you can get truly diminutive radios. However, most of them only have AM capability (that is, no simple way to receive single-sideband or SSB signals) and — maybe — the ability to pick up FM broadcast. Small radios also often have no provision for an external antenna which can be crucial for shortwave radios. [Farpoint Farms] shows off the
Raddy RF7860
which is a palm-sided radio, but it has the elusive sideband modes and an external antenna port and wire antenna. It even has a rechargeable battery.
Reading the comments, it appears this is a rebadged version of a HanRongDa HRD 747 radio. Of course, there are other smaller radios with sideband reception like the Tecsun
PL368, but they aren’t this small. If you are in the market for a really tiny shortwave radio, this might be the thing for you.
Of course, the question is
what you want to listen to on the shortwave bands
these days. There are fewer and fewer broadcasters on shortwave, especially those that broadcast to a general audience. However, if there is something you want to hear, pairing this radio with a
good portable antenna
, would do the job. | 66 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505187",
"author": "ty5tg",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T09:11:57",
"content": "how using this in arduino or esp?i need read data from any band from this dev and digital signal",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6505315",
"a... | 1,760,372,589.777169 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/21/an-ascii-terminal-like-its-1974/ | An ASCII Terminal Like It’s 1974 | Jenny List | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"ASCII",
"serial terminal",
"terminal"
] | It’s quite probable that any of you who have built a keyboard will have done so using a matrix of keys connected to a microcontroller, or if you are old-school, a microprocessor. A CPU can scan the keyboard matrix with ease, and pass whatever is typed either to whatever software it is running, or to a host computer. There was a time however when available CPUs were not considered powerful enough to do all this and also perform a useful task, so a keyboard would have its own decoder chip that would output ASCII over a parallel interface. It’s an era
[John Calhoun] harks back to with Adam74
, a little ASCII terminal which takes its input from that 7-bit parallel port.
In the place of a forest of TTL chips which might have graced the originals, within that attractive curved laser cut acrylic case is an LCD display and a Teensy microcontroller board. There’s a level shifter for the classic 5 volt logic, and of course a small buzzer for the essential BEL character. In these days when a parallel interface is relatively rare, he describes the rediscovery of alternate earth lines in a ribbon cable to minimize cross-talk. Should you wish to try your own,
everything can be found on GitHub
.
All in all it’s a fun way to rediscover an old idea. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505167",
"author": "Missing Link",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T06:08:09",
"content": "“ here’s one from earlier this year”Should there be a link here?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6505178",
"author": "Elliot Williams"... | 1,760,372,589.817959 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/21/better-3d-printing-via-chemistry/ | Better 3D Printing Via Chemistry? | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"abs",
"acetone",
"stefa"
] | If you have problems getting a 3D print to stick to the bed, you might consider using glue to — hopefully temporarily — attach the print to the bed. In addition, some plastics glue together well if you use a solvent. [Stefan] asks the question:
What if you use solvent to glue each layer of a 3D print to the previous layer?
The answer is in the video below.
If you know [Stefan], he is always meticulous, so the first test was with normal ABS parts. Then he used a solvent to glue two broken parts together to show how a single layer does with bonding. Then he moved toward trying the solvent for each layer.
Obviously, if you already knew this was a good idea, you’d want to rig up something to apply the solvent automatically. Since this was experimental, though, [Stefan] just had the gcode move the print head aside for each layer so he could manually apply the solvent. This was trickier than you might think because acetone boils off quickly from hot plastic. In addition, if it doesn’t boil off, it makes the existing layer swell, so the appearance of the parts wasn’t great.
Unfortunately, the strength of the printed parts was disappointing. ABS parts were not any better — and in some ways worse — than the reference parts. He then tried PVB which dissolves in alcohol. While it was easier than acetone, the results were not that great.
[Stefan] hopes there might be some process to make this work, but the simple methods he tried aren’t useful. It would be great if this simple idea would have led to stronger 3D printed parts. But as [Stefan] points out, negative results are important, too. Otherwise, we will all spend time trying things that won’t work repeatedly. Based on these results, you can try something different and maybe you’ll have better luck.
We really like the detailed and rigorous work [Stefan] does. From
homebrewing high flow extrusion gear
to
putting bends in gcode
, [Stefan] always has something interesting and well thought out. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505142",
"author": "theRainHarvester on YouTube",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T02:36:30",
"content": "Nice “fail”. There should be a website dedicated to “attempts”. It would avoid redundant experimenting….then again, maybe seemingly inconsequential differences would lead to a succes... | 1,760,372,589.864781 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/21/hackaday-links-august-21-2022/ | Hackaday Links: August 21, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"5400-rpm",
"apollo",
"bacon",
"decoder",
"EAS",
"emergency",
"emergency alert system",
"exploit",
"hackaday links",
"hdd",
"mushroom",
"mycelium",
"resonance",
"side channel attack",
"stage separation",
"ullage"
] | As side-channel attacks go, it’s one of the weirder ones we’ve heard of. But the tech news was filled with stories this week about how
Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” is actually a form of cyberattack
. It sounds a little hinky, but apparently this is an old vulnerability, as it was first noticed back in the days when laptops commonly had 5400-RPM hard drives. The vulnerability surfaced when the video for that particular ditty was played on a laptop, which would promptly crash. Nearby laptops of the same kind would also be affected, suggesting that whatever was crashing the machine wasn’t software related. As it turns out, some frequencies in the song were causing resonant vibrations in the drive. It’s not clear if anyone at the time asked the important questions, like exactly which part of the song was responsible or what the failure mode was on the drive. We’ll just take a guess and say that it was the drive heads popping and locking.
Speaking of security, news came out ahead of DEFCON of
a vulnerability in the Emergency Alert System
, the US civil preparedness notification system. The first part of the video below covers the vulnerability, which involves
one brand of EAS encoder/decoder
, a box all broadcasters are required to have in their studios, which might let an attacker override legit alerts or send out a false one.
The original warning
from the Department of Homeland Security urged broadcasters to patch its firmware before DEFCON, when exploit details would go public. We were curious about what exactly this fancy-schmancy box is, but judging by
a rear panel photo
, it seems like this is just a small commodity PC in a rack-mount case, which a couple of GPIO connectors and some antenna jacks. The user manual does state that the PC runs Linux, so at least it’s not Windows XP, but we could easily see a box like this being tucked in a console somewhere and forgotten about. Pretty scary.
We’ve often felt that if you want to know what the future will look like, pay attention to the small details in science fiction. Sci-fi authors have a particular knack for extrapolating current trends and using them to spice up their work. That came to mind when we read about
a new effort to make fake bacon from mushrooms
, which will resonate with anyone who has read
The Expanse
series, where almost all the food is made with mushrooms. It makes sense; mushrooms grow well without a lot of sunlight and can survive on composted waste, making them ideal as a food source for a space-faring species in a resource-constrained environment. The terrestrial fake bacon factory will grow enormous slabs of fungal mycelium in large vertical farms; oil, flavoring, and colors will make the sliced mycelium look and taste a little like bacon. It sounds pretty dreadful, honestly, but no worse than some of the things mentioned in
The Expanse
. Mushroom whiskey, anyone?
And finally, we’ve probably all seen those iconic shots of stage separations from the Apollo program, and just accepted that they exist and are very cool artifacts of an amazing engineering feat. And we just sort of take it for granted that spaceflights are highly instrumented events, rockets bristling with cameras and sensors to catch every marketable moment — looking at you, SpaceX. But in the 1960s? Not so much — we barely got sub-potato video of Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon. So how did we get those awesome engineering views?
Fran Blanche has the answer
, the short version of which is film cameras that dropped their payloads back to Earth to be snagged by aircraft while descending on parachutes. There are a lot of neat technical details in the video, including the fiber optics used to film the interior of the liquid oxygen tanks. And the raw stage separation footage at the end is very relaxing, too. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505132",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T00:13:46",
"content": "In Ice Station Zebra, they missed snagging the camera as it came to earth. But the russians grab it, and send it skyward with a balloon, where a jet plane is supposed to snag it. Except Rock Hudson... | 1,760,372,589.907968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/21/drastic-plastic-enclosure-rebuild-uses-donor-material/ | Drastic Plastic: Enclosure Rebuild Uses Donor Material | Kristina Panos | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"amplifier",
"plastic welding",
"relief"
] | Although 3D printers are great, people tend to use them as a universal hammer wherein almost everything becomes a nail that’s just begging to be struck. So as hacker appetites become finicky with the same old fare, it’s refreshing to see an enclosure restoration done in such an old-school fashion. To wit:
[Doidão Santos]’ classic repair of the crumbling side fairings on a vintage amplifier
.
Yes, instead of designing replacement pieces, printing them, and hiding the layered evidence with paint or an acetone blur, [Doidão] called upon a broken sound system whose chassis bore a relief in the corners similar to that of the amplifier.
After cutting out two matched pieces of donated plastic, [Doidão] taped them together and welded ’em with a soldering iron outfitted with a curved-but-flattened spade tip that looks ideal for this purpose. Although the donor enclosure provided much-needed relief, one corner was lacking in this aesthetic, so [Doidão] cast a little bit of molten plastic using the relief as a mold.
Once the pieces were tacked together, [Doidão] filed them down, sanded them, polished them to a nice shine, and installed them on the amplifier. They look great, and no one will be the wiser. But if we were in [Doidão]’s shoes, we’d tell everyone what we’d done. Be sure to check it out after the break.
Ready for more fantastic plastic resto-hacks?
Let us introduce you to [drygol]
.
Thanks for the tip, [danjovic]! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505131",
"author": "Saabman",
"timestamp": "2022-08-22T00:08:53",
"content": "I must do some more investigating this technique- I’ve never had satisfactory results trying to melt plastics together for repairs . I don’t have much success getting good penetration on the join.",
"... | 1,760,372,589.960688 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/21/knight-rider-keeps-on-truckin/ | Knight Rider Keeps On Truckin’ | Adam Fabio | [
"classic hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"KITT",
"knight rider",
"Knight Rider Historians",
"larson scanner",
"The Hoff"
] | [AJ] and [Joe], collectively the [Knight Rider Historians] are
bringing back one of the most iconic vehicles of the 1980’s
. Everyone remembers KITT driving into the F.L.A.G. truck. Even the Mythbusters re-enacted the stunt back in 2007. The duo managed to track down the original tractor and trailer from the show for restoration, and part of that process means uncovering the Hollywood hacks used to make the car-driving-into-trailer stunt work.
Back in the ’80s when a movie or TV show wrapped up, the props were often re-used in other productions or sold off. The 1975 Dorsey trailer used on
Knight Rider
was eventually purchased, stripped down, and painted white. It spent the last 30 years serving as a racing trailer. Carrying cars, and tools, and serving as a mobile shop at the track.
Unsurprisingly, most of the custom parts from
Knight Rider
are gone – but some hints remain. Specifically, [KRH] are trying to figure out how the drive-up door operated. Originally they assumed it was a hydraulic ram system that pulled the cables. However, above a dropped ceiling they found a welded hard mount and a 24-foot rail running down the trailer roof.
They believe the hard mount was for a winch, and the rail was used as a cable guide for two winch cables. A set of pulleys just behind the door directed these cables down to the ramp itself.
Of course, this is all speculation – the blueprints from the build are long gone, and many of the crew have forgotten how it was built. All [KRH] has to go on are screenshots from
Knight Rider
episodes and the physical evidence in the truck itself. So how did the door mechanism really work? Let us know what you think in the comments. | 39 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505069",
"author": "Matt Cramer",
"timestamp": "2022-08-21T17:44:46",
"content": "Now I have to wonder – did the racing crew ever try to recreate the driving into the trailer stunt? If they knew the trailer’s history and the mechanism still worked, how could they resist?",
"par... | 1,760,372,590.045322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/21/clover-computer-a-modern-z8000-cp-m-machine/ | Clover Computer: A Modern Z8000 CP/M Machine | Chris Lott | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"16-bit",
"retro",
"z8000",
"zilog"
] | Seeing some old Zilog 16-bit chips on eBay recently, [Scott Baker] was curious enough to snap them up and
build himself a Z8000 computer
. It started as a two-board solution, then he added a display module. Instead of layering the boards vertically à la a PC/104 stack, [Scott] decided to build them flat. His first backplane was triangular, but he opted for a square to accommodate one more expansion board in the future. The assembled contraption resembles a clover, hence the name Clover Computer.
The Z8000 was Zilog’s first 16-bit microprocessor, introduced in 1979. It was not hugely popular for a variety of reasons (the
Z8000 Wikipedia article
has some interesting details). The Z8000 was eclipsed in the marketplace by Intel’s 8088 and Motorola’s 32-bit 68000. One interesting point is that the Z8000 did not use microcode, and as a result, its transistor count was significantly less than its contemporaries. The Z8000 was used in some military applications, and despite its limited commercial success, it continued to be available from Zilog and licensed second sources up until 2012.
[Scott]’s design splits the system into a CPU board, a memory and serial board, and a display board. Along the way, he learns 1980’s era tricks from the
Olivetti M20
, one of the few computer systems designed around the Z8000. He also manages to find a recent Z8000 implementation of CP/M by GitHub user [
4sun5bu
], which [Scott] forked and adapted to his project (see
project repo here
). He succeeds in getting everything working, and ports a monitor, Tiny Basic, and Zork.
Check out his project write-up introductory link, and see it in action in the video below the break. Did you ever use or encounter the Z8000? Let us know in the comments! | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6505034",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2022-08-21T14:33:38",
"content": "No, I have never worked with a Z8000. In case anyone is interested, though, there’s a Z8000 computer (a Zilog System 8000) for sale on Ebay at the moment:https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/234662720325?hash=item3... | 1,760,372,590.204282 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/21/why-didnt-we-think-of-making-a-remote-trigger-button/ | Why Didn’t We Think Of Making A Remote Trigger Button? | Jenny List | [
"hardware"
] | [
"oscilloscope",
"remote trigger",
"trigger"
] | One of the many functions a digital oscilloscope offers over its analog ancestors is a trigger button. Alongside the usual electronic means of triggering the instrument, you can reach over and press a button to “freeze-frame” the action and preserve the trace. Sometimes doing it repeatedly it can become a chore to reach for the ‘scope. That’s where [Kevin Santo Cappuccio]’s
remote trigger button
comes in.
The button itself is about as simple a hack as it gets. The ‘scope was carefully dissected and some fine wires laid from the contacts within the front panel to a connector on the case. From there a cable goes to a box with a momentary action button switch. Plug in the box, and you can trigger the ‘scope from a distance!
We have to admit to rather admiring this hack, as needing to trigger the ‘scope is a well-known problem here. It’s easy to stab the wrong button and lose what you are looking for, so we’re rather surprised we didn’t think of this one ourselves. But then again from another viewpoint, it involves dissecting an expensive instrument which is best left unmolested. Perhaps manufacturers should consider adding this functionality.
This may be the most straightforward oscilloscope hack we’ve shown you, but
it’s certainly not the first
. | 44 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504975",
"author": "iliasam",
"timestamp": "2022-08-21T11:10:50",
"content": "I really don’t understand why oscilloscope manufacturers do not include such feature into their the high-priced probes.While megohmmeter insulation meters already have such feature: “TP165X probe” is an e... | 1,760,372,590.290903 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/21/blog-title-optimizer-uses-ai-but-how-well-does-it-work/ | Blog Title Optimizer Uses AI, But How Well Does It Work? | Donald Papp | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"GPT-3",
"hacker news",
"headlines",
"machine learning",
"openai",
"writing"
] | [Max Woolf] sometimes struggles to create ideal headlines for his blog posts, and decided to apply his experience with machine learning to the problem. He asked:
could an AI be trained to optimize his blog titles
? It is a fascinating application of natural language processing, and [Max] explains all about what it does and how it works.
The machine learning framework [Max] uses is GPT-3, a language model that works with natural-seeming human language that is capable of being tweaked in different ways. [Max] uses OpenAI’s GPT-3 API (which, by the way,
is much easier to experiment with than one might think
) and here is the basic workflow for his title optimizer:
The optimizer takes as input a blog post title to optimize.
OpenAI’s pre-trained GPT-3 engine is used to generate six alternate titles.
For each of those alternate titles, a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 is consulted to judge how “good” they are based on custom training data. (“Good” in this context means “similar to titles of successful submissions on
Hacker News
“, but more on that in a moment.)
Print the results.
The custom training data in step 3 comes from bulk submission data from Hacker News, obtained via Google’s BigQuery service. [Max] separated Hacker News submissions into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ depending on how many points the submission ended up with. Step 3 simply asks GPT-3 to grade each potential headline based on this data. The hypothesis that a submission’s rating on Hacker News can be directly correlated to the quality of its headline is an interesting idea, and the
Title Optimizer
can be thought of as an experiment in seeing whether this idea can be applied in the other direction: making posts more successful with the help of a good headline.
So, does [Max] now just use the highest-scoring headlines for his blog posts and call it a day? Sadly, no. Many of the results aren’t terribly suitable for one reason or another. They may neglect to emphasize the right elements, or sound too much like clickbait, or are lacking in some other way.
The AI-generated headlines might be a mixed bag, but that doesn’t mean they are not useful. There is genuine variety in the machine-generated suggestions, and they provide useful inspiration even when none of the results themselves are a home run.
[Max]’s
GPT-3 Blog Title Optimizer
is
here on GitHub
if you’d like a closer look. It’s an interesting application of natural language AI, and is also a perfect example of how machine learning’s best creative results so often come from having a human in the loop. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504944",
"author": "R",
"timestamp": "2022-08-21T08:36:24",
"content": "“A robot just created this headline, now everybody is raging.”“AI created these words, and you won’t believe what happened next.”These came from my AI clickbait generator, which I use to train journalists.",
... | 1,760,372,590.395332 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/20/picostepseq-is-small-but-perfectly-formed/ | PicoStepSeq Is Small But Perfectly Formed | Jenny List | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"midi",
"midi sequencer",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | The Raspberry Pi Pico is what you might call the board of the moment, thanks to its combination of affordability, features, and continued availability during the component shortage. We have seen plenty of great projects using it, and the latest to float past is [todbot]’s
PicoStepSeq, an extremely compact MIDI sequencer
.
All the components are mounted on a PCB, with the sequencer’s eight steps selected by a row of buttons with integrated LEDs. The interface is via an SSD1306 OLED, and there is also a rotary encoder. Software comes courtesy of CircuitPython, and the output is delivered via a 3.5 mm TRS jack. Finally the whole is wrapped in a 3D printed enclosure.
The result is a sequencer that could almost be a product in its own right, and we think anyone whose interests lie in electronic music should find straightforward enough to build. All the files and information required to build your own can be found in the linked repository, and he’s placed a Tweet with a video online which we’ve embedded below the break.
I did it! In 2 weeks I designed, coded, PCB fabbed, & CAD'd an enclosure for a product idea: a tiny Pico-based MIDI step sequencer "PicoStepSeq". Thx to
@johnedgarpark
for inspiration &
@adafruit
for prototyping tools
https://t.co/WpGZIhJpHv
pic.twitter.com/kek4U2Y4mq
— Tod Kurt (@todbot)
August 19, 2022
Thanks [Abe Tusk] for the tip. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504966",
"author": "just passing",
"timestamp": "2022-08-21T10:14:46",
"content": "“Paspberry Pi Pico”? I know Hackaday adores its alliterations, but…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6505973",
"author": "Kristina Pano... | 1,760,372,590.340891 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/20/batteries-get-tiny/ | Batteries Get Tiny | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"battery",
"nanotechnology"
] | Steve Martin had a comedy routine that focused on the idea of “getting small.” That probably didn’t inspire the researchers at the Institute for Integrative Nanoscience when they set out to create a
sub-square-millimeter microbattery
. As you might expect, you won’t be starting your car with a battery the size of a grain of sand anytime soon, but these batteries do have a surprising capacity.
The key is creating what they call “micro-swiss rolls” where the electrodes are wrapped in a tiny cylinder. This isn’t a new idea. However, creating workable rolls at the scale where a grain of rice looks huge isn’t trivial.
Combining a zinc wire and manganese dioxide in tiny proportions makes the battery possible. The manufacturing process is novel and involves making a slurry of the MnO
2
with a solvent. Placing the diminutive swiss roll on a glass substrate allows tiny circuits to exist along side of the battery. The battery itself is about the size of common SMD components, but the circuits it will power are likely more like tiny IC dice.
Building a better battery
isn’t a new pursuit
, although usually, you aren’t going for tiny. We are
always a sucker for novel battery tech
, even though most of what we read about never shows up on the store shelves. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504945",
"author": "easy",
"timestamp": "2022-08-21T08:40:20",
"content": ">these batteries do have a surprising capacity.never tells us the capacitywhere’s the reporting? May as well just put the link to the paper into a feed and forget the article.",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,372,590.457907 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/20/deepdeck-going-beyond-the-macro-pad/ | Deepdeck: Going Beyond The Macro Pad | Jenny List | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"api",
"keypad",
"macropad"
] | We’re used to the idea of a macropad, a small extension keyboard for your computer whose keys can be programmed to the functions of your choice. They can be made in many ways, but they all follow a similar functionality. Deepdeck from [Nick Velasquez] is another matter,
an attempt to make a macropad with functionality that goes way beyond simply pressing keys
.
At its heart is an ESP32 module, and it makes full use of both Bluetooth and wireless networking capabilities. It can use Bluetooth when connecting to the host computer, and the wireless connection hosts both the configuration interface via a web server and an Internet connection from which it derives those special powers. This is a macropad with programmable keys just like all the others, but it also has the ability to connect to online APIs programmed by the user. This allows it to automate complex queries involving other sources into a keypress, which gives it many more possibilities.
A tool such as this one is one of those things which requires a bit of thought as to exactly how it might be used. A normal API connected device might display the weather on a screen for instance, but how often does one need to type the weather forecast? However we can see that this extra online dimension will find as yet unseen applications, and we look forward to the idea being taken up with other macropads. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504943",
"author": "heatgap",
"timestamp": "2022-08-21T08:19:25",
"content": "Those caps def weren’t cheap I can tell you that much!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6505112",
"author": "WallPhone",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,590.539874 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/20/building-a-spot-welder-from-500-junk-capacitors/ | Building A Spot Welder From 500 Junk Capacitors | Dave Rowntree | [
"Battery Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"capacitor",
"ESR",
"spot welder",
"supercapacitor"
] | [Kasyan TV] over on YouTube was given a pile of spare parts in reasonably large quantities, some of which were useful and allocated to specific projects, but given the given the kind of electronics they’re interested in, they couldn’t find a use for a bag of 500 or so low specification 470uF capacitors. These were not low ESR types, nor high capacitance, so unsuitable for power supply use individually. But, what about
stacking them all in parallel
? (video, embedded below) After a few quick calculations [Kasyan] determined that the total capacitance of all 500 should be around 0.23 Farads with an ESR of around 0.4 to 0.5 mΩ at 16V and packing a theoretical energy total of about 30 joules. That is enough to pack a punch in the right situation.
A PCB was constructed to wire 168 of the little cans in parallel, with hefty wide traces, reinforced with multiple strands of 1.8mm diameter copper wire and a big thick layer of solder over the top. Three such PCBs were wired in parallel with the same copper wire, in order to keep the total resistance as low as possible. Such a thing has a few practical uses, since the super low measured ESR of 0.6mΩ and large capacitance makes it ideal for smoothing power supplies in many applications, but could it be used to make a spot welder? Well, yes and no. When combined with one of the those cheap Chinese ‘spot welder’ controllers, it does indeed produce some welds on a LiPo cell with a thin nickel plated battery strip, but blows straight through it with little penetration. [Kasyan] found that the capacitor bank could be used in parallel with a decent LiPo cell giving a potentially ideal combination — a huge initial punch from the capacitors to blow through the strip and get the weld started and the LiPo following through with a lower (but still huge) current for a little longer to assist with the penetration into the battery terminal, finishing off the weld.
[Kaysan] goes into some measurements of the peak current delivery and the profile thereof, showing that even a pile of pretty mundane parts can, with a little care, be turned into something useful. How does such an assembly compare with a single
supercapacitor
? We talked about
supercaps and LiPo batteries
a little while ago, which was an interesting discussion, and in case you’re still interested,
graphene-based hybrid supercapacitors
are a thing too!
Thanks to [Danjovic] for the tip! | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504923",
"author": "PeterJ",
"timestamp": "2022-08-21T04:52:35",
"content": "By Chance a electronics magazine has such a project …. see it (partly)https://www.siliconchip.com.au/Issue/2022/March/Capacitor+Discharge+Welder%2C+part+one",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,372,590.498623 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/20/2022-cyberdeck-contest-extruded-rig-exudes-coolness/ | 2022 Cyberdeck Contest: Extruded Rig Exudes Coolness | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Cyberdecks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"2022 Cyberdeck Contest",
"aluminum extrusion",
"raspberry pi 400"
] | When we came up with the cyberdeck contest, we figured we would see all kinds of builds, and so far, y’all haven’t disappointed us. Take for instance
this tidy but post-apocalyptic build by [facelessloser]
. It has that “I used what I could find among the rubble” appeal, yet it looks so clean. Now why is that?
It must be partially because of the frame, which is 2020 aluminium extrusion. Now as you can see, this cyberdeck is based on the Raspberry Pi 400, which combines the power of a Pi 4 with a chiclet keyboard and the retro feel of the all-in-one computers of yore.
But this cyberdeck build really began because [facelessloser] had a 7″ HDMI screen kicking around for a while and finally settled on this design. The screen connects to the extrusion rail with a pair of
custom-printed brackets
, and is prevented from sliding back and forth with more plastic, including a nice enclosure that holds the speaker, amp board, headphone jack, and USB-C port.
Since the screen has no sound of its own, [facelessloser] added a 3 W amplifier board and a speaker for playing chiptunes and other kinds of electronic noise that provide just the right ambiance. We absolutely love the printed mesh cover on the back made of hexagons — not only does it look nice, it’s a functional, minimal, breathable solution to corralling the cabling while simultaneously showing off the internals. You can find
a bit more detail and some extra build pictures over on the blog post
, and be sure to check out the video after the break to see how [facelessloser] has implemented this cyberdeck into their bench, and stick around for a tour of the build. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,590.907367 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/20/dream-projects-face-reality/ | Dream Projects Face Reality | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"newsletter",
"Practice",
"prototyping",
"theory"
] | Do you ever get a project stuck in your mind? An idea
so good
you just keep thinking about it? Going over iterations and options and pros and cons in the back of your mind, or maybe on paper, but having not yet subjected it to the hard work of pulling it into reality? I’ve had one of those lurking around for the last couple weeks, and it’s time for me to get building.
And I’ve got to get started soon, because it’s rare that any project makes the leap from thought to reality unscathed, and when I hold on to the in-thought project too long, I become far too fond of some of the details and nuances that just might not make the cut, or might get in the way of getting a first pass finished. When I really like a (theoretical) solution to a (theoretical) problem, I’ll try to make it work a lot longer than I should, and I can tell I’m getting attached to this one now.
The only cure to this illness is to get prototyping. When the rubber hits the road, and the bolts are tightened, either the solution is a good one or it’s not, and no amount of dreaming is going to change that. Building is a great antidote to the siren song of a dream project. Although it feels now like I don’t want the fantasy to have to adapt to reality, as it inevitably will, I know that getting something working feels a lot better. And it frees me up to start dreaming on the next project… To the workshop!
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
! | 26 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504776",
"author": "wydmynd",
"timestamp": "2022-08-20T14:09:37",
"content": "we should so have a group session.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6504787",
"author": "Jack",
"timestamp": "2022-08-20T14:38:05",
"conte... | 1,760,372,590.815386 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/20/z80-single-board-computer-looks-like-it-could-have-been-a-killer-product/ | Z80 Single-Board Computer Looks Like It Could Have Been A Killer Product | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"cpld",
"retrocomputing",
"vga",
"z80",
"zilog"
] | Most retrocomputer builds seem to focus on either restoring old machines or rebuilding them from scratch. Either way, the goal is to get as close as possible to the original machine, and while we certainly respect those builds, there are other ways to celebrate the computers of yesterday, as
this Z80 single-board computer
nicely demonstrates.
[Ivan Farafontov]’s SBC is sort of a “Z80 that never was” build, one that would
almost
have been possible back in the heyday of 8-bit computing, and would have made quite a splash if it had. Most of the peripheral chips are from Zilog and would have been found in many of the Z80 machines of the day, like the TRS-80 and ZX Spectrum. Where it goes off the old-school path is with the video section, which uses an Atmel CPLD chip and a dual-port RAM to drive a VGA monitor. It still looks the part, though, with a 256×192 pixel, 16-color display. The compact video section helps keep the overall footprint of this machine pretty small, at least by the standards of the old machines. The machine is barely larger than its custom keyboard, which is populated with mechanical switches and really nice-looking custom keycaps, and everything fits into a 3D-printed case.
The demo that starts at the 4:30 mark of the video below will be a nostalgia storm for a lot of readers, starting as it does with a version of
Boulder Dash
that [Ivan] wrote from scratch, along with the tile editor he used to create the sprites for the game. All the design files and code are available if you want to build your own, of course. We recently featured
another Z80 that never was
, but [Ivan]’s machine really makes a statement with its compact size and its capabilities. | 30 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504739",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-08-20T11:20:35",
"content": "Given the era, the CPLDs would need to be merged into an ASIC.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6504759",
"author": "hartl",
"timesta... | 1,760,372,591.239525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/20/fridge-compressor-teardown-reveals-engineering-compromises/ | Fridge Compressor Teardown Reveals Engineering Compromises | Jenny List | [
"Teardown"
] | [
"compressor",
"fridge compressor",
"lubrication"
] | Probably one of the most reliable devices you will have in your house is the refrigerator, as its compressor has the minimum of moving parts and carries its own lubrication. It’s not uncommon to find fridges many decades old still in use, and fridges are far more likely to be discarded due to broken fittings rather than a failed compressor. An interesting teardown of a failed fridge compressor comes from [turbokinetic], who gives us a
professional analysis of how shortcomings in its construction caused it to fail
. It’s both an opportunity for a look at the inside of a fridge compressor, and a commentary on the quality of consumer grade hardware.
Electrically the unit seemed unhurt, but the motor wouldn’t pump anything. Cutting the lid off revealed the motor, and it was soon established that the bearing had failed. As the teardown proceeded the conclusion was that the fault lay in the oil being too low viscosity. The designer had picked a very light oil in pursuit of low friction for lower energy consumption, but had ended up with one too light to provide adequate coverage within the bearing. The compressor has a lifetime of around ten years baked into it from manufacture, whether the designer intended it to or not.
You can see the full video below the break, but meanwhile
this isn’t the first fridge compressor we’ve seen
. | 108 | 27 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504706",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-08-20T08:33:22",
"content": "Just a guy and his workshop and this is what I love about these videos! Simply straight to the point and enjoying the moment of finding the problem and discussing it. Sadly the “algorithm” filters such vi... | 1,760,372,591.049888 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/livestreaming-backpack-takes-streaming-on-the-go/ | Livestreaming Backpack Takes Streaming On-The-Go | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"4g modem",
"battery",
"GoPro",
"heat sink",
"livestream",
"portable",
"raspberry pi",
"streaming"
] | Anyone who’s anyone on the internet these days occasionally streams content online. Whether that’s the occasional livestream on YouTube or an every day video game session on Twitch, it’s definitely a trend that’s here to stay. If you want to take your streaming session on the go, though, you’ll need some specialized hardware like [Melissa]
built into this livestreaming backpack
.
[Melissa] isn’t actually much of a streamer but built this project just to see if it could be done. The backpack hosts a GoPro camera with a USB interface, mounted on one of the straps of the pack with some 3D printed parts, allowing it to act as a webcam. It is plugged into a Raspberry Pi which is set up inside the backpack, and includes a large heat sink to prevent it from overheating in its low-ventilation environment. There’s also a 4G modem included along with a USB battery pack to keep everything powered up.
The build doesn’t stop at compiling hardware inside a backpack, though. [Melissa] goes into detail on the project’s page about how to get all of the hardware to talk amongst themselves and where the livestream is setup as well. If you’d like a more permanently-located streaming setup with less expensive hardware, we have seen
plenty of builds like this
which will get the job done as well. | 17 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504697",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2022-08-20T07:00:22",
"content": "What am I missing…? Can’t you just livestream from a phone?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6504740",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,591.100644 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/keycap-shine-no-shiny-keycaps/ | Keycap Shine? No, Shiny Keycaps | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks"
] | [
"abs",
"ABS keycaps",
"ABS shine",
"acetone",
"acetone vapor",
"vapor polishing"
] | No matter how often you wash your hands, ABS keycaps will eventually exhibit shine wherever you strike them the most. And that’s the problem right there: the shine might be okay if it were somehow uniform across the surface of the keycaps, but instead it just tends to make one feel seen. And since there’s really nothing you can do except to replace your keycaps (or start with PBT), you might as well embrace the shine, right?
Well, that’s how [mmalluck] feels, anyway. He recently experimented with
using acetone vapors to refinish a set of keycaps
from Drop, making them super-duper shiny in the process. Now, the operative word here is
vapors
, because straight acetone would acid-wash those ‘caps faster than you can say ‘bad idea jeans’.
So to that end, [mmalluck] poured acetone in a glass cake pan, used a piece of cardboard to separate the keycaps from the acetone, and
covered it all with a glass cutting board
. It doesn’t take very long to achieve a good result, and [mmalluck] says it’s better to err on the side of too-short instead of risking reaching the point of too-melted.
We wouldn’t have thought we’d react this way, but we think they’re pretty cool looking. That particular set seems just right for this process, which makes them look like new old-stock typewriter keys or something. Looks way better than the ultra-personalized shine of usage. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
Via
KBD #90 | 34 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504665",
"author": "BrendaEM",
"timestamp": "2022-08-20T02:28:52",
"content": "Well, if the chemistry in the oils on your skin makes ABS shiny, then the Acryonitle, butadene, and styrene are getting on your hands. All three of those chemicals either causes cancer or is strongly sus... | 1,760,372,591.172942 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/ro%cc%86%cc%bdta-counting-with-style/ | Rŏ̽ta: Counting, With Style | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"counter",
"dial",
"high voltage",
"nixie",
"rotary",
"stopwatch"
] | Rǒta counts things
. That’s it, really — what a cheap little mechanical counter does with a thumb press, or what you can do by counting on your fingers and toes, that’s pretty much all that Rǒta does. But it does it with
style
.
OK, that’s being a bit unfair to [Kevin Santo Cappuccio] — Rǒta has a few more tricks up its sleeve than simple counting. But really, those functions are just icing on the cake of how this little gadget looks. Rǒta was built around the unbeatable combination of a rotary telephone dial mechanism and a trio of Nixie tubes. The dial looks like it might have come from an old pay phone, all shiny and chrome and super robust looking. The Nixies sit atop the dial on a custom PCB, and everything, including the high-voltage supply for the tubes, is enclosed in a 3D printed case with a little bit of a
Fallout
vibe.
But what does this thing do? Actually, quite a lot. It’ll count up and down, using whatever number you dial into it. You can either increment from zero, or enter any three-digit number as the starting count. It keeps track of the score of your golf game, if that’s your thing, and it’s also got a stopwatch function. You can even dial up a display of the current battery voltage. It takes some ingenuity to use just the dial for all these functions, but that’s as easy as dialing the operator used to be — dialing 0 puts it in menu mode, allowing you to access any of the functions printed on the card in the center of the dial. It’s pretty clever — check out the video below.
Is it particularly useful? Perhaps not. But when has that ever been a measure of the worth of a project? Something like
this rotary cellphone
might be more useful, but sometimes looking great is good enough. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504641",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-08-20T00:38:29",
"content": "“but sometimes looking great is good enough.”“It is better to look good, than to feel good!”-Billy Crystal as Fernando",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,372,592.994782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/reverse-engineering-a-smoker/ | Reverse-Engineering A Smoker | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"barbeque",
"ESP32",
"grill",
"meat",
"rotary",
"smoker"
] | In certain parts of the world, cooking meat in a regionally-specific way is a critical part of the local culture. From barbeque in the American south to boerewors and braaivleis in South Africa to Montréal smoked meat in French Canada, almost every location has its cookout specialty. So much so that various manufacturers of the tools used for these foods include all kinds of gadgets to monitor the sometimes days-long process of cooking various cuts of meat.
[megamarco833]’s smoker
, though, includes some tools of his own design.
The smoker is made by a company called Pitboss and includes a rotary switch and control board for maintaining a precise temperature in the smoker. The switch works by changing the voltage value sent to a small microcontroller. By interfacing an ESP32 to this switch, [megamarco833] can remotely change the smoke level and temperature of the smoker. On the software side, it uses a combination of Node-RED and Domoticz to handle the automation and control.
For a cookout that can last hours (if not days) a remotely accessible smoker like this is an invaluable tool if you want to do something other than manually monitor the temperature of your meat for that much time. And, if your barbeque grill or smoker of choice doesn’t already have an embedded control board of some type, we’ve seen
analog cooking tools adapted to much the same purpose
as this one.
Thanks to [Peter] who sent in the tip and also helped [megamarco833] with the reverse-engineering of the control board! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504647",
"author": "Criatura",
"timestamp": "2022-08-20T00:49:24",
"content": "“For a cookout that can last hours (if not days) a remotely accessible smoker like this is an invaluable tool if you want to do something other than manually monitor the temperature of your meat for that... | 1,760,372,593.129756 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/steamy-hack-chat-vents-some-high-pressure-wisdom/ | Steamy Hack Chat Vents Some High Pressure Wisdom | Tom Nardi | [
"Engineering",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"Boiler",
"Hack Chat",
"locomotive",
"steam power"
] | Ask the average person about steam power and they’ll probably imagine a bygone era, a time when the sky was thick with smoke belched out by coal-burning locomotives and paddle-wheel ships. Steam is ancient technology they’ll say, and has as much to do with modern living as the penny-farthing.
Naturally, the real story is a bit more complex than that. Sure the reciprocating steam engine has fallen out of favor as a means of propulsion, but the concept of running machinery with steam is alive and well. In fact, unless you’re running on wind or solar power, there’s an excellent chance that a steam turbine is responsible for keeping the lights on in your house.
In honor of all things steam,
we invited Quinn Dunki to host this week’s Hack Chat
. Those who follow her exploits on YouTube will know that over the last several years she’s built a number of steam engines, from miniature scratch-built models to commercial kits that can do useful work. Who better to answer your
burning
steaming questions?
The first questions in the Chat were logical enough, with several users wanting to know just how hard it is to build a functional steam engine if you don’t have access to a mill or other means of high precision machining. According to Quinn, while better equipment will certainly allow you to build a more powerful and efficient engine, the basic premise is so simple that it doesn’t take much to get one going. If you’ve got a mini lathe and some bar stock, you’re half way there. In fact, they are so forgiving that she opines you’d struggle to build a steam engine that didn’t at least turn over — though that doesn’t mean it will necessarily run well.
Naturally some comparisons were drawn between the complexity of building a steam engine and putting together a small internal combustion engine (ICE). But while they might seem conceptually similar, Quinn cautions that building a working ICE from scratch is far more difficult and dangerous. She explains that steam engines have a tendency to fail gracefully, that is, mistakes in the design or poor tolerances generally result in little worse than wasted steam and extra noise. Comparatively, a faulty ICE design could easily turn into a bomb on your workbench.
Of course, that’s not to say working with steam is without danger. You certainly don’t want to underestimate high pressure steam, which is why boilers that are over 6 in (15 cm) in diameter or that produce more than 100 PSI will often require the operator to be licensed. They may also need to be inspected, though Quinn notes that your local government official probably won’t be able to make heads or tails of your homebrew build — so if you need an official stamp of approval, your best bet is to find a local model engineering club or society that would have the appropriate connections. All that being said, most hobbyists make it a point to try and get their engine running at the lowest pressure possible, so unless you’ve got something really massive in mind, you’ll probably never need to build up more than 60 PSI or so.
A DIY electric boiler and small steam engine.
Another topic of discussion was how to fuel the boiler itself. An electrically powered boiler is perhaps the easiest option, but is somewhat counterproductive if you hope to put your steam engine to useful work. Coal and wood fires are an option, and indeed were commonly used in the old days, but the soot and ash they produce can be a problem.
Quinn also notes that if you’re using such fuels, you need a way to quickly remove the firebox from the boiler in an emergency; something she likens to the starship
Enterprise
having to eject its warp core before it explodes. For her own projects,
Quinn says she uses either an electric element
or a camping gas burner.
While most of the questions during this Hack Chat had to do with the work Quinn has already featured on her blog and YouTube channel, naturally there were questions about where things go from here. After she completes the steam engine kit she’s working on currently, she says she’ll likely to back to another scratch-built engine. She also plans on coupling some of her engines to generators, as she’s gotten many requests about seeing these machines put to useful work. Looking further ahead Quinn says she’s interested in casting her own bronze and aluminum components, and specifically wants to work with “lost PLA” casting,
which is a variant of lost wax casting
that uses a mold based on a 3D printed part.
We’d like to thank Quinn Dunki for stopping by the Hack Chat and sharing some insights into this unique hobby. While a handcrafted boiler or a desktop steam reciprocating engine might not be on the average Hackaday reader’s list of future projects, it’s still fascinating to see how they work. We owe much of our modern life to steam power, so the least we can do is show it some respect.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the
transcripts posted to Hackaday.io
make sure you don’t miss out. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504593",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-08-19T20:36:39",
"content": "“In fact, unless you’re running on wind or solar power, there’s an excellent chance that a steam turbine is responsible for keeping the lights on in your house.”https://www.turbinegenerator.org/steam/hom... | 1,760,372,593.305197 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/hackaday-podcast-182-sparkpunk-photography-anti-xiomi-air-filters-and-keyfob-foibles/ | Hackaday Podcast 182: Sparkpunk Photography, Anti-Xiomi Air Filters, And Keyfob Foibles | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi are here to bring you the best stories and hacks from the previous week (and maybe a little older). Things kick off with news that the Early Bird tickets for the 2022 Hackaday Supercon tickets sold out in only two hours — a good sign that the community is just as excited as we are about the November event. But don’t worry, regular admission tickets are now available for those who couldn’t grab one out of the first batch.
This week there’s plenty of vehicular hacks to talk about, from John Deere tractors running DOOM to a particularly troublesome vulnerability found in many key fobs. We’ll also lament about the state of 3D CAD file formats, marvel at some retro-futuristic photography equipment, and look at the latest in home PCB production techniques. Wrapping things up there’s a whole lot of cyberdeck talk, and a trip down silicon memory lane courtesy of Al Williams.
Direct download it for yourself right here
.
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 182 Show Notes:
News:
2022 Hackaday Supercon Tickets on Sale Now
Did You See a John Deere Tractor Cracked at DEF CON?
What’s that Sound?
It was a sonar sweep/ping, and [Jared from Beijing] won it.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
RollBack Breaks Into Your Car
PrusaSlicer Now Imports STEP Files, Here’s Why That’s A Big Deal
STL isn’t an abbreviation,
but it’s been backronymed, and we weren’t far off
!
Sputtering Daguerreotypes, Batman!
Forget The UV Resist Mask: Expose Custom PCBs Directly On Your SLA Printer
A New Way To Produce PCBs With Your 3D Printer
Take Your PCBs From Good To Great: Toner Transfer
Air Filter DRM? Hacker Opts Out With NFC Sticker
SquareBoi Is The DIY Game Boy Cart You’ve Always Wanted
The Ultimate Game Boy Talk
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Starlink Ground Stations Successfully Hacked
Just How Good Is A Tape Measure Antenna Anyway?
An Amstrad NC100 Has A New Purpose In Life
Tom’s Picks:
USB-C Charging Mod Brings In The Juice
DIY Gaming Mouse Beats The Competition, Costs Less
This Simple Media Player Will Inspire Beginners And Invite Experimentation
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Cyberdeck Builders Talk Shop In Roundtable Chat
2022 Hackaday Cyberdeck Contest
Chips Remembered: The Scenix/Ubicom/Parallax SX | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504583",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2022-08-19T19:41:23",
"content": "It’s sad times when someone argues about home-made PCBs and says you can’t drill holes.What’s stopping you?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6505172",
... | 1,760,372,592.766087 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/tracing-in-2d-and-3d-with-hall-effect-sensors/ | Tracing In 2D And 3D With Hall Effect Sensors | Lewin Day | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"geometry",
"hall effect sensor",
"pantograph",
"tracing"
] | Pantographs were once used as simple mechanical devices for a range of tasks, including duplicating simple line drawings. [Tim] decided to make a modern electronic version
that spits out G-Code instead.
The design relies on a 3D-printed pantograph assembly, mounted upon a board as a base. A pair of Hall effect sensors are mounted in the pantograph, which, along with a series of neodymium magnets, can be used to measure the angles of the pantograph’s joints. The Hall sensors are read by an Arduino Nano, which computes the angles into movement of the pantograph head and records it as G-Code. This can simply be displayed on the attached LCD display, or offloaded to a computer for storage.
[Tim] explains the basic theory behind the work in an earlier piece, where he built a set of electronic dividers
using the same techniques.
He didn’t stop there, either. He also built a more complex version that works in 3D that he calls it the Electronic Point Mapper, which can be used to generate point clouds with a
3D-capable pantograph
mechanism.
It’s a neat way to learn about geometry, and could even be useful if you’re doing some work in tracing
2D drawings
or
measuring 3D objects
.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=25-7GnLkfDI%3Ffeature%3Doembed%26autoplay%3D1 | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504527",
"author": "KSanger",
"timestamp": "2022-08-19T16:48:29",
"content": "Using GIMP’s Path Tool we trace lines and drawings of scanned images. Then export the paths into an SVG File. Then import the SVG file into libreCalc to convert the SVG points into lines and splines. ... | 1,760,372,593.041882 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/this-week-in-security-secure-boot-bypass-attack-on-titan-m-kaslr-weakness/ | This Week In Security: Secure Boot Bypass, Attack On Titan M, KASLR Weakness | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Attack on Titan",
"KASLR",
"sonic",
"This Week in Security"
] | It’s debatable just how useful Secure Boot is for end users, but now there’s yet another issue with Secure Boot, or more specifically, a trio of signed bootloaders.
Researchers at Eclypsium have identified problems
in the Eurosoft, CryptoPro, and New Horizon bootloaders. In the first two cases, a way-too-flexible UEFI shell allows raw memory access. A startup script doesn’t have to be signed, and can easily manipulate the boot process at will. The last issue is in the New Horizon Datasys product, which disables any signature checking for the rest of the boot process — while still reporting that secure boot is enabled. It’s unclear if this requires a config option, or is just totally broken by default.
The real issue is that if malware or an attacker can get write access to the EFI partition, one of these signed bootloaders can be added to the boot chain, along with some nasty payload, and the OS that eventually gets booted still sees Secure Boot enabled. It’s the perfect vehicle for really stealthy infections, similar to CosmicStrand, the
malicious firmware we covered a few weeks ago
.
Gambling?
Online gambling. Just like gambling in a casino, the house pretty much always wins, by design. But also like a real casino, there are some clever techniques like counting cards at Blackjack, that is just enough to shift the odds back into your favor. In that case, you keep track of how many big and small cards have been played, and adjust your bet accordingly.
NCC Group looked into a “Big Six” online casino game
— this one is a bit different from most online gambling, as there is a real person serving as the croupier. The Croupier spins the wheel that determines the outcome of the bets placed. Humans have something in common with computers, in that we’re both intrinsically terrible at producing good randomness.
They started by collecting data, and then analyzed it for notable patterns. A spread of over 7000 rounds of the game were crunched, and what popped out was a correlation between the position of the wheel just before betting was closed, and the winning number. Put simply, the croupier had a tendency to spin the wheel with the same force each time. A little computer vision and scripted betting, and they had a winning combination. How much winning? Just over a 20% return on investment after 1000 rounds.
Attack on Titan
The team at Quarkslab
have something of a fascination with the Titan M
, Google’s security chip on their Pixel phones. Among its other functions, the Titan provides a secure enclave for secrets. It communicates with the phone’s main processor over SPI, and has all the expected security features and mitigations to keep secrets safe. Well, almost all of them. The simple design of this dedicated processor also means that it doesn’t have any of the complex memory corruption protections that a more complicated processor might. It’s also simple enough that the memory layout is rather static.
Quarkslab’s first attack was to use their
nosclient
to send arbitrary messages to the Titan — black box fuzzing. Think of this as throwing spaghetti of all sizes up against the virtual wall to see if any stick, or rather crash. It’s definitely a worthwhile technique, and sometimes it’s all that’s available, but you usually cannot reach the more interesting code paths this way. These guys really know their way around the Titan M, so went with a different approach, emulating parts of the firmware, and fuzzing the emulated device. It’s tricky to pull off, and there are limitations as your emulation usually isn’t going to perfectly match the real hardware, but the advantage is that you can get at code paths that would be really difficult to randomly land on with fuzzing alone.
And find a bug they did. By sending an
ImportKeyRequest
, a
0x01
can be written to a not-entirely-arbitrary out-of-bounds location. By including multiple tags in the request, this can be done several times in a fell swoop. It was a very limited, but solid, start. They key was to overwrite a pointer used by a different routine, the Keymaster request handler. The pointer was to where incoming requests would be copied to, and thus the attack starts to take shape. Use the one-byte primitive to poison the keymaster, then send a request that gets written to this new location. Through experimentation, they discovered that they could send 556 arbitrary bytes, followed by a memory address, and execution would jump to that address. It took a bit of doing, but with some Return Oriented Programming, this was enough to read memory from anywhere on the chip and send it back over the SPI bus to their client. The June security round-up from Google includes the fix for this very clever vulnerability.
KASLR Bypass on MacOS
One of the mitigations missing in the Titan M is Kernel
Address Space Layout Randomization
, but KASLR is quite present in MacOS, making kernel-level exploits that much harder to pull off. Or it should, except there’s a pretty big
hole in the MacOS KASLR by design
. That feature is hibernation, or more accurately, waking up from hibernation. There is a
__HIB
kernel segment that is always mapped to the same address, and gets called as part of wakeup. Part of this segment is the
dblmap
memory block, which actually gets mapped twice onto the virtual memory space. It is used, among other things, in the userspace/kernelspace context switch. Because of its availablity in usermode, it is vulnerable to reading through a Meltdown attack, and the pointers there give away the “slide” value — the KASLR base address. Even on a Meltdown-proof CPU, the
__HIB
sector has some other uses. There’s lots more in the post, and it’s not likely to get fixed soon, so if MacOS exploitation is your thing, have fun!
Whois? WTFIS?!
If XNU hacking is above your pay-grade, like it is mine, then this tool might be more our speed.
wftis
is a new tool that pulls from multiple sources, and
acts like a revved up iteration
of
whois
. It pulls information from Virustotal, Passivetotal, and IPWhois to get data on the given domain name. If a weird domain shows up in your logs, wtfis might be the tool to turn to. It does require API keys for the first two services, but should work just fine on their free tier.
Sonic Attack
And finally, the weirdest bit of Internet lore I’ve come across recently. Many thanks to [mtxyz] on Discord for pointing out
CVE-2022-38392
, an
old problem that’s just now coming to light.
A laptop OEM discovered that the music video for Rhythm Nation would reliably cause their laptops to crash. Even weirder, playing the song on one laptop would make a nearby laptop crash as well. It was eventually discovered that the 5400 RPM hard drive shipped in those laptops had a resonant frequency that was energized by the song, leading to a temporary failure. The solution was a hard-coded frequency filter to pull out that frequency. Sounds a bit like shouting at hard drives in the data center. Enjoy: | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504512",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-08-19T15:52:33",
"content": "I’m having a bit of trouble finding more about “fishworks analytics” as mentioned in the video.Is it deprecated?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,592.957265 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/every-frame-a-work-of-art-with-this-color-ultra-slow-movie-player/ | Every Frame A Work Of Art With This Color Ultra-Slow Movie Player | Dan Maloney | [
"Art",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"art",
"coprocessor",
"e-ink",
"e-paper",
"ESP-32",
"movie",
"seven-color",
"waveshare"
] | One of the more recent trendy builds we’ve seen is the slow-motion movie player. We love them — displaying one frame for a couple of hours to perhaps a full day is like an ever-changing, slowly morphing work of art. Given that most of them use monochrome e-paper displays, they’re especially suited for old black-and-white films, which somehow makes them even more classy and artsy.
But not every film works on a monochrome display. That’s where
this full-color ultra-slow motion movie player
by [likeablob] shines. OK, full color might be pushing it a bit; the build centers around a 5.65″ seven-color EPD module. But from what we can see, the display does a pretty good job at rendering frames from films like
Spirited Away
and
The Matrix
. Of course there is the problem of the long refresh time of the display, which can be more than 30 seconds, but with a frame rate of one every two hours, that’s not a huge problem. Power management, however, can be an issue, but [likeablob] leveraged the low-power co-processor on an ESP32 to handle the refresh tasks. The result is an estimated full year of battery life for the display.
We’ve seen that same Waveshare display used in
a similar player
before, and while some will no doubt object to the muted color rendering, we think it could work well with a lot of movies. And we still love
the monochrome players
we’ve seen, too. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504436",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2022-08-19T11:15:27",
"content": "My maths may be suspect, but doesn’t that mean (asssuming 24fps) that Spirited Away will take about 40 years to play?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id... | 1,760,372,593.260996 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/19/mecanum-wheeled-robot-chassis-takes-commands-from-ps4-controller/ | Mecanum-Wheeled Robot Chassis Takes Commands From PS4 Controller | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"mecanum",
"mecanum wheels",
"playstation 4",
"ps4",
"ps4 controller"
] | Mecanum wheels are popular choices for everything from robots to baggage handling equipment in airports. Depending on their direction of rotation, they can generate forces in any planar direction, providing for great maneuverability.
[ATOM] set about building just such a robot chassis, and learned plenty in the process.
The design is similar to those we’ve seen in the past. The robot has four mecanum wheels, each driven by its own motor. Depending on the direction of rotation of the various wheels, the robot can move forward, backwards, and even strafe left and right. Plus, it can effectively tank turn without excessive slippage thanks to the rollers
on each wheel.
An ESP32 serves as the brains of the ‘bot, allowing it to be readily remote controlled via a PS4 gamepad over Bluetooth.
If you’re looking to build a small robot chassis that’s great at moving about in tight, small spaces, this could be a great project to learn with. All the necessary parts are relatively easily available, and the PCB files
can be had on GitHub.
If you like the idea of mecanum wheels but need something bigger, consider starting with a set of hoverboard wheel motors. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504516",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-08-19T15:59:53",
"content": "For friends that don’t know what Mecanum wheels are, seeing this little ‘bot drive “sideways” should initiate a “WOW! response.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"re... | 1,760,372,592.805717 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/18/im-your-overlord-may-i-take-your-order/ | I’m Your Overlord, May I Take Your Order? | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"restaurant",
"robot",
"vending machine"
] | If you’ve ever been at an eatery and thought the server was a bit robotic, you should try
San Francisco’s Mezli
. The restaurant claims to be the first one to be totally automated. There are no humans in there. The restaurant serves Mediterranean grain bowls. Honestly, it is hard to decide if
Mezli
is a restaurant or a very sophisticated vending machine.
Then again, that makes sense. Only in science fiction do you have androids flying spaceships. In real life, the robot probably is the spaceship. Obviously, someone is still loading ingredients into the machine — some precooked — but that’s about it. Some restaurants let you order from a computer while a human makes your food and we’ve seen a few automated chefs, but nothing with this degree of mechanization.
Three humans do all the behind-the-scenes work which includes chopping and cooking components in an off-site kitchen. Once a day, the restaurant is loaded with raw materials. Based on orders, it mixes bowls and uses an oven to either finish the cooking or bring the ingredients to temperature.
The restaurant itself is pretty simple. It looks like a converted shipping container or a trailer and requires only electricity to operate. No water, gas, or even a vent hood. It can serve about 75 meals an hour with dishes ranging from lemon za’atar chicken with turmeric rice to a falafel bowl. Including customized options, the machine can create nearly 65,000 possible combinations.
Is it the wave of the future? In a way, it is a sophisticated form of the old automat. Will it be a modern-day coffee machine where the bowl doesn’t land right and the machine throws your rice on the bottom of the tray? We don’t know, but we will be more impressed when you load the machine with raw materials instead of the output of a kitchen.
Make no mistake:
robot automation is coming to restaurants
. We just wonder where the line is between a restaurant and
a vending machine
. | 44 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504377",
"author": "Peter",
"timestamp": "2022-08-19T05:14:43",
"content": "This type of automatic “restaurant” has existed for ~40 years – in the stable for the pigs of my uncle. Three different “meals” for the different age classes each day, from up to eight components.",
"pa... | 1,760,372,593.209265 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/back-to-the-future-prop-can-tell-when-it-hits-88-mph/ | Back To The Future Prop Can Tell When It Hits 88 MPH | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"back to the future",
"DeLorean",
"futaba",
"prop",
"RC transmitter",
"time machine"
] | Obviously, the most iconic piece of fictional hardware from the
Back to the Future
films is Doc Brown’s DeLorean DMC-12 time machine. But we’d have to agree with [Jason Altice] of
CodeMakesItGo
that the second-most memorable gadget is the modified Futaba remote control used to control the DeLorean from a distance. Now,
thanks to his detailed build guide
, you can build your own version of the time machine’s controller — complete with working speed readout.
Now to be clear, [Jason] isn’t claiming that his build is particularly screen accurate. It turns out that the actual transmitter used for the prop in the film, the Futaba PCM FP-T8SGA-P, has become difficult to find and expensive. But he argues that to the casual observer, most vintage Futaba transmitters are a close enough match visually. The more important part is recreating the extra gear Doc Brown bolted onto his version.
All but four of the display wires are fake.
To that end, [Jason] was able to source some screen accurate hardware to kit out his transmitter, such as the Unibox 140 project box and the metal 9 V battery clips. Other components, like the lighted Molex 1820 switch, were harder to track down. Luckily we live in the age of cheap desktop 3D printers, and he was able to run off an impressively accurate replica without too much trouble.
Of course, the stand out feature is the seven-segment LED speed indicator. Each digit is a separate 25 mm (1 inch) SC10-21SRWA display, which have been mounted together on a custom PCB along with a TM1650 controller. An Arduino Uno inside the Unibox 140 drives the display, and receives speed data from the transmitter in the car using a long-range Reyax LoRa RYLR998 module.
[Jason] built the GPS-equipped “speed box” to closely resemble the movie version, albeit with three functional digits compared to only two in the original prop. Internally it’s using the same LED display, LoRa module, and Arduino Uno as the transmitter. We liked the approach of keeping the hardware more or less the same on both sides of the link, keeps things nice and simple.
Now you certainly don’t
need
a DeLorean time machine to test out your finished remote control, but we appreciate that [Jason] went through the trouble of renting one so he could show off his creation in style. The final product looks great, and
ranks right up there with the replica time circuits
on the list of
BttF
props we’d love to have up on the shelf. | 8 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503749",
"author": "Winchester73",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T15:26:16",
"content": "I hope Zemekis rots in hell ! He’s the reason I sold my pristine Delorean. Resisting the urge to punch someone in the face when they approach you and ask (for the billionth time) – “where’s the flux ... | 1,760,372,593.088687 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/coils-in-the-road-could-charge-evs-while-driving/ | Coils In The Road Could Charge EVs While Driving | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bus",
"car",
"electric highway",
"electric highways",
"inductive charger",
"inductive charging",
"transport",
"truck"
] | One of the primary issues with EVs is that you need to pull over and stop to get a charge. If there isn’t a high-speed DC charger available, this can mean waiting for hours while your battery tops up.
It’s been the major bugbear of electric vehicles since they started hitting the road in real numbers. However, a new wireless charging setup could allow you to juice up on the go.
Electric Highways
Over the years, many proposals have been made to power or charge electric vehicles as they drive down the road. Many are similar to the way we commonly charge phones these days, using inductive power transfer via magnetic coils. The theory is simple. Power is delivered to coils in the roadway, and then picked up via induction by a coil on the moving vehicle.
Taking these ideas from concept into reality is difficult, though. When it comes to charging an electric vehicle, huge power levels are required, in the range of tens to hundreds of kilowatts. And, while a phone can sit neatly on top of a charging pad, EVs typically require a fair bit of ground clearance for safely navigating the road. Plus, since cars move at quite a rapid pace, an inductive charging system that could handle this dynamic condition would require huge numbers of coils buried repeatedly into the road bed.
Busses are the Beginning
The OLEV system buries a “power track” in the road, which powers the buses wirelessly via receivers mounted underneath. The receiver operates with a nominal airgap of just 17 cm above the coil. Credit:
KAIST, press release
Despite these challenges, the idea has been proven in the real world to a limited extent.
The Online Electric Vehicle
, or OLEV, was developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Technology (KAIST), and used to power a shuttle bus in 2009. The system slowly expanded to four lines by 2016, with the buses charging wirelessly thanks to inductive power transmitters buried in the road along the bus’s route.
The second-generation of the system used on the buses transmits 100 kW of power wirelessly across an air gap of 17 cm at a power efficiency of 85%. This is achieved by using multiple power pickup coils mounted on a single vehicle. Much research went into finding the optimum coil geometries and electrical parameters to enable the system to run at this level. With power delivered from the road surface, the buses can rely on smaller batteries to get around, saving weight and improving efficiency. The system is buried in 5-15% of the roadway on the bus routes, and a vehicle detection system powers down the induction coils when not in use. While some of the routes have since closed, a shuttle service still operates at KAIST using the technology.
Other companies are also working in this space, too. Startup Magment is named for a portmanteau of “magnetic cement,” and is working on a special inductive road demonstration
with the Indiana Department of Transport
. Details are scarce, but the company is pioneering a special method of mixing ferromagnetic materials in with cement to produce a more cost-effective and efficient wireless charging road system. The company intends to use the system for non-road applications, too, like forklifts and electric scooters.
Workers installing inductive charging coils in the road surface at Smartroad Gotland. Much research goes into coil geometry to ensure the maximum power transfer and efficiency while still working at a reasonable air gap distance. Credit:
Smartroad Gotland, News Blog
Another standout is Israel-based company Electreon operating a pilot program
in Gotland, Sweden
. First deployed in December 2020, the project has successfully run a 40-ton truck on a 1.65-km long test section of road. Again using copper coils buried in the road surface, it’s able to deliver around 70 kW of power to a moving vehicle at speeds up to 80 km/h. The company is also working on other pilot programs around the world, including a facility
with Ford Motor Company
to be installed near Detroit’s Michigan Central Terminal.
Not There Yet
The problem for such systems remains cost. For a start, burying power transmission lines and fancy coils in the road surface itself costs a lot to do in the first place. It’s expensive enough for new roads, and even worse when you need to dig up an existing road to put the hardware in afterwards.
Estimates for one Swedish project
indicated that a wireless system like Electreon’s would cost on the order of $2 million USD per km in a new build. This cost comes in around twice as much to install as more traditional methods of power transfer, like simple rails or overhead wires, while delivering much less power to boot. The latter are already proving their value in trucking tests in several locations
around the world.
Maintenance is also a major issue. Burying anything in a roadway means that it’s a huge job to repair it if something goes wrong. At the least, it will require shutting down the road, and at worst, it will mean digging it up. Upgrading to higher-performance technology will similarly require invasive work to remove the old hardware and reinstall the new.
Finally, there’s the issue of standardization. Powering vehicles via inductive coils in the road is great, but cars and trucks will need special pickups fitted to receive this energy. The inductive pickup must be carefully tuned to the coils in the road, so there’s little chance of retrofitting a one-size-fits-all pickup that can traverse multiple electric roadway systems. Thus, in order to make such systems practical, one company’s system would have to be rolled out across broad sections of roadway, to the point where it became economically worthwhile for individual and commercial users to contemplate fitting their vehicles with pickup hardware.
It seems unlikely that we’ll be digging up our roads to fit charging coils anytime soon. After all, we’ve barely equipped our cities and towns with regular EV chargers, and they’re already a mature and established technology. However, in some applications, such as specialist bus or trucking routes, the technology may just catch on. From there, it could spread further, but only if the heavy investment makes sense. | 131 | 34 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503725",
"author": "r-bryan",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T14:19:57",
"content": "Am I the only one who saw coils buried along the road and thought “linear motor”? I haven’t bothered to investigate whether linear-motor-buses would be a loony idea (or at least any loonier than any other... | 1,760,372,593.607578 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/did-you-see-a-john-deere-tractor-cracked-at-def-con/ | Did You See A John Deere Tractor Cracked At DEF CON? | Jenny List | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"DEF CON",
"john deere",
"right to repair"
] | The Internet, or at least our corner of it, has been abuzz over the last few days with the news of a DEF CON talk by [Sick.Codes] in which he demonstrated the jailbreaking of the console computer from a John Deere tractor. Sadly we are left to wait the lengthy time until the talk is made public, and for now the most substantive information we have comes from a couple of Tweets.
The first comes from [Sick.Codes] himself
and shows a game of
DOOM
with a suitably agricultural theme, while
the second is by [Kyle Wiens]
and reveals the tractor underpinnings relying on outdated and un-patched operating systems.
You might ask why this is important and more than just another “Will it run
DOOM
” moment. The answer will probably be clear to long-term readers, and is that Deere have become the poster child for improper use of DRM to lock owners into their servicing and deny farmers the right to repair. Thus any breaches in their armor are of great interest, because they have the potential to free farmers world-wide from this unjust situation. As we’ve reported before the efforts to circumvent this
have relied on cracked versions of the programming software
, so this potential jailbreak of the tractor itself could represent a new avenue.
As far as we’re aware, this has so far taken place on the console modules in the lab and not in the field on a real tractor. So we’re unsure as to whether the door has been opened into the tractor’s brain, or merely into its interface. But the knowledge of which outdated software can be found on the devices will we hope lead further to what known vulnerabilities may be present, and in turn to greater insights into the machinery.
Were you in the audience at DEF CON for this talk? We’d be curious to know more. Meanwhile the Tweet is embedded below the break, for a little bit of agricultural
DOOM
action.
Playing Doom on a John Deere tractor display (jailbroken/rooted) at
@defcon
pic.twitter.com/ih0QUTGNuS
— Sick.Codes (@sickcodes)
August 14, 2022 | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503677",
"author": "ono",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T12:23:21",
"content": "That would allow a bunch of stolen tractors to avoid being dismantled for parts…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6503978",
"author": "Judy",
... | 1,760,372,593.349147 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/motorized-camera-mount-was-once-a-3d-printer/ | Motorized Camera Mount Was Once A 3D Printer | Sven Gregori | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"Arduino Mega 2560",
"camera mount",
"dslr",
"dslr mount",
"ESP32",
"g-code",
"pan and tilt",
"RAMPS"
] | If you plan on building your own motorized camera mount, a 3D printer can definitely be of help. But in this case, [dslrdiy] didn’t use it for printing out parts — finding himself with little use for an old printer built from scrap back in the day, he decided to repurpose it and turn it into a
remote controlled DSLR camera mount
that’s capable of panning, tilting, and sliding.
The main goal was to not only salvage the stepper motors and controller board, in this case an Arduino Mega 2560 with RAMPS board, but also to keep the original firmware itself in use. For this to work, [dslrdiy] redesigned the mechanical parts that would allow him to perform the different camera movements using regular G-Code instructions operating the X, Y, and Z axes to pan, tilt, and slide respectively.
The G-Code instructions themselves are sent via UART by an accompanying control box housing an ESP32. This allows the camera mount to operated by either via joystick and buttons, or via serial Bluetooth connection, for example from a phone. The ESP32 system also allows to set predefined positions to move to, along with speed and other motor tweaks. You can see it all demonstrated in the video after the break.
While there’s
simpler solutions for camera mounts out there
, this is certainly an interesting approach. It also shows just how far desktop 3D printers have come if we already find the older generations repurposed like this. For more of [dslrdiy]’s work with 3D printers and cameras,
check out his customizable lens caps
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503713",
"author": "Hassi",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T13:47:11",
"content": "Ohhh, he meant “Focus Motor”…. Don’t ask what I heard xD",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,593.847042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/usb-c-charging-mod-brings-in-the-juice/ | USB-C Charging Mod Brings In The Juice | Jenny List | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"usb",
"USB C",
"USB Power"
] | By now we’re well under way with the consolidation of low-voltage power supplies under the USB-C standard, and the small reversible connector has become the
de facto
way to squirt some volts into our projects. But for all this standardization there are still a few places where the harmony of a unified connector breaks down, and things don’t work quite the way they are supposed to. One such case has occupied [James Ide] — devices which will accept power from a USB-A to USB-C cable, but not from a USB-C to USB-C one. His solution?
A small flexible PCB upgrade
.
The problem lies with how different power supplies and peripherals identify each other, and quite likely in device manufacturers skimping on a few components here and there. A compliant USB-C power supply expects to see pull-down resistors on the data lines, and will thus refuse to serve power to devices that don’t possess them. Meanwhile the USB-A supply will quite happily serve juice without such checks, which is what the manufacturer is relying on. The solution is a tiny flexible PCB with the resistors, designed to be retrofitted behind a USB-C socket. On one hand it’s probably one of the simplest circuits we’ve ever shown you, and on the other it’s a cleverly designed solution to the issue at hand.
If the nitty-gritty of USB-C interests you, then
we’ve taken a much closer look in the past
.
Thanks to [Andrea] for the tip. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503620",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T05:59:49",
"content": "nice one!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6503625",
"author": "RobHeffo",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T06:29:23",
"content": "Oh neat. I got a s... | 1,760,372,593.809438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/squareboi-is-the-diy-game-boy-cart-youve-always-wanted/ | SquareBoi Is The DIY Game Boy Cart You’ve Always Wanted | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"game boy",
"game boy hacks",
"nintendo",
"Nintendo Game Boy"
] | Running unofficial code on a Nintendo Game Boy has long been a solved problem. However, you still need a way to get that code onto the handheld console. The Squareboi cartridge promises to do just that,
as created by [ALXCO-Hardware]
.
It’s a well-featured cartridge, with up to 4 MB of ROM storage onboard. It also features a ferromagnetic RAM part for savegame storage, which doesn’t need a battery to hang on to your precious data. It’s designed to be compatible with the vast majority of Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, with efforts made to support the most common mapping schemes. It can be built using entirely through-hole components, and is readily programmable via an Arduino.
For those eager to tinker with code on the Game Boy, diving into the Squareboi is a great way to get closer to the bare metal and understand what’s really going on at the low level. Those interested in building their own can get all the relevant details
over on Github.
We’ve seen similar hacks before, too, like the cartridge that brought Wikipedia to the humble Nintendo handheld. If you’ve been whipping up your own Nintendo hacks, be sure to
drop us a line! | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503589",
"author": "Josiah Gould",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T02:32:58",
"content": "FeRAM is a great addition. I really like that I can go back to my Sonic & Knuckles saves years or decades later and know that my save is intact. I had to backup my wifes Pokemon Yellow save before sw... | 1,760,372,593.903336 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/halloween-mirror-offers-a-mighty-fright/ | Halloween Mirror Offers A Mighty Fright | Lewin Day | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"halloween",
"Halloween hacks",
"holiday hacks"
] | Jump scares are controversial in the horror world, whether you’re talking about movies or video games. You can bring that same irritating thrill into real life, too,
with this Halloween mirror from [jasonwinfieldnz].
During the day, or simply when it’s bright inside, the mirror appears normal, like any other. However, behind the special two-way mirrored glass surface is a spooky 3D print, such as a skull or an annoying yellow cartoon character. When the lighting level gets low, everything changes. A light-dependent resistor hooked up to a Digispark detects the change, and then fires up some 5V LEDs to light the scary image, revealing it behind the mirror. Even better, it plays a loud screaming sound with the help of a DFplayer MP3 module.
We’d love to see the concept taken even further, too. It would be quite something if, when a passer-by approached, the room lights suddenly cut out and the mirror activated in its full glory.
We’ve seen
some great Halloween builds
over the years. If you’re eager to get one out this season, you might wanna get hacking now! Video after the break. | 22 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503576",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T01:20:09",
"content": "“such as a skull or an annoying yellow cartoon character”SpongeBob?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6503661",
"... | 1,760,372,593.965559 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/18/the-tools-to-fight-against-single-use-plastic/ | The Tools To Fight Against Single-Use Plastic | Kristina Panos | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"die-cast",
"forging",
"laser-cut tools",
"plastic",
"single-use plastic"
] | Imagine for a moment that you design products for a living. But you can’t design all the things, so you have to buy some of your stuff from big-box stores just to go about your everyday life. This is more or less what happened to [Eric Strebel], who recently bought a bathroom faucet from IKEA. This particular flat-pack faucet came with a single-use plastic nut driver to be used in putting the faucet together. Since there is no marking that indicates the plastic type, it can’t be easily recycled. Not even the size of the business end is indicated. So between the shoddy plastic construction and the lack of information, most people are going to just throw this thing away. And that’s terrible.
So what’s to be done? Aside from boycotting IKEA (which [Eric] may do in the future for all we know), there’s not much to do but to offer up solutions on public platform and see what happens. To that end,
[Eric] came up with five different ways of making this nut driver that are arguably more sustainable than single-use mystery plastic
.
Say what you will about sustainability of using metals, which have to be mined, versus plastic – many of these methods use no tooling, so that’s something. Nut drivers made by [Eric] would instead be laser-cut from flat stock and either folded up and welded, or assembled from a multi-piece cut into a single-piece tool via perpendicular members that slot together. Or as [Eric] points out, the design could stay exactly the same as the plastic original and be die-cast instead.
It’s certainly an interesting exercise in design, and it’s really cool to see a little bit into [Eric]’s thought process when it comes to improving existing things. Be sure to check it out after the break, and let us know how you’d have done it better. | 91 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504360",
"author": "James",
"timestamp": "2022-08-19T03:28:52",
"content": "Interesting, but I think this is the wrong solution; the right solution being “supply your own non-disposable tool”. Well made tools last a lifetime or even longer, and they rarely become outdated. There’s ... | 1,760,372,594.304937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/18/lcd-monitor-plays-the-hits/ | LCD Monitor Plays The Hits | Al Williams | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"tempest",
"van eck"
] | In the old days, it wasn’t uncommon to put an AM radio near a computer or a monitor and deliberately cause interference to have a crude form of sound generation. Did you miss out on that? No! Thanks to [luambfb] you can now
do the same trick with a common LCD monitor
. You’ll need the horizontal refresh rate of the monitor in question.
Of course, doing it is somewhat less interesting than learning
how it works
. The effect relies on the fact that the LCDs emit signals as it refreshes a row. A black row emits relatively low energy while a white row emits more. Grayscale… well, you get the idea.
The software takes an input file that allows you to compose your own tunes. There is a fixed number of beats per minute and a set of notes and rests encoded in a text file. The project borrowed ideas from an older project known as
Tempest for Eliza
which you can see in the video below (there’s also a video of this project over on its page).
Tempest, of course, comes from the term for
reading the data on a monitor
using these signals which is possible, but difficult. While it might seem this is a modern issue,
its origins date back to WWII
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6524934",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2022-10-26T14:03:51",
"content": "Cool! Bookmarked.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,594.005957 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/18/angled-drill-guide-helps-you-with-those-tricky-holes/ | Angled Drill Guide Helps You With Those Tricky Holes | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"drill",
"drill guide",
"power drill",
"tool hacks",
"tools"
] | If you’ve ever tried to drill a hole on an angle with a power drill, you’ve probably drilled some pretty shocking holes. To do it right, you really need some mechanical assistance,
and this jig from [Kartik_Nandrui] should do the trick.
The device uses a guide that sits on the surface to be drilled, with a pair of angled connectors that fit two wooden dowels. These connect the guide to a corresponding sleeve that fits around the drill body. The sleeve then slides up and down the dowels, allowing the drill to move in a straight line towards the targeted area.
It’s a useful hack, but we can see room for some improvements that would take it to the next level. Having a way to lock the angle of the guide base would be great for accuracy. As it’s 3D printed, it would also be simple to create a version with a curved guide base that could fit over pipes, or other designs to fit complex geometries like roof sheeting or other corrugated materials.
Sometimes the most interesting hacks are the ones that get us
thinking about our own potential projects.
If you’ve got any creative tool hacks you’ve been brewing up in the lab,
be sure to let us know! | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504272",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T20:26:51",
"content": "Psst… glue a protractor to the side",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6504274",
"author": "Jon Mayo",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T20:29:21",
"conte... | 1,760,372,594.175381 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/18/put-3d-metal-printing-services-to-the-test-by-making-a-watch/ | Put 3D Metal Printing Services To The Test, By Making A Watch | Jenny List | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"metal 3d print",
"sls",
"wristwatch"
] | Have you ever been tempted by those metal 3D printing services? [Carter Hurd] has,
and puts them to the test with a wristwatch
. (Video, embedded below.)
It’s fair to say that among Hackaday readers you will find a very high percentage of 3D printer ownership compared to the general population, but for most of us that means an FDM or perhaps even an SLA printer. These two technologies have both effectively delivered polymer printing at the affordable end of the market, but as readers will also be aware they are only the tip of the 3D printing iceberg. We know the awesomeness of your industrial 3D printer is defined by the size of your wallet, and while our wallets are small, we are offered a chance at the big time through the services of rapid prototyping companies that will print our models on these high-end machines. Thus [Carter]’s project video is as much about using these services as it is about making a wristwatch.
The watch movement comes off-the-shelf, but we’re treated to the production of an enamel watch face on a sheet of copper, and the testing phase of trying an impressive range of designs in polymer print before selecting one for metal printing. The metal parts are SLS printed, and he gives them a polish on some parts. The crown takes some very careful assembly, with an o-ring for an attempt at water resistance.
The result is a very nice timepiece which would make this a fascinating video in itself, but we think that the investigation of metal printing services makes this an essential piece of viewing for anyone. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504252",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T18:52:56",
"content": "Bloody clickbait :PYou printed a WATCH CASE… NOT A WATCH. World of difference. Even an entry level SLA printer can manage a super high quaity watch case (Albeit in resin,but castable resins mean you can act... | 1,760,372,594.357544 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/18/cute-nfl-standings-tracker-uses-little-mini-helmets/ | Cute NFL Standings Tracker Uses Little Mini Helmets | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"american football",
"football",
"mini helmets",
"NFL",
"sports",
"stepper motor"
] | If you’re a die-hard sports fan, there’s nothing you love more than staying abreast of developments in the league, from top to bottom. [Kiu] had a family member that was big into NFL, so set about building them
a remarkably cool ladder tracker.
The tracker displays the NFL league table with a ten-minute delay, thanks to a paid live data feed from MySportsFeeds.com. When an update comes in, miniature helmets representing each team in the competition are moved into the correct order. The helmets sit on little plastic tags that make moving them easy, reliable, and repeatable. Built using parts familiar to the 3D printer world, this tracker relies on steppers and V-rails for linear movement, under the command of an Arduino Nano.
It’s a build that would look great in any games room, and we bet a scaled-up version would look
the business
in an upmarket sports bar. Let’s be honest – the league’s top quarterbacks will all be fighting to have one of these sooner rather than later. That’s not to say it won’t sting to come home to your team’s helmet scooting down the board after a painful loss!
We’ve seen some other interesting
sports tracking projects
over the years, too. Video after the break! | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504191",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T16:25:28",
"content": "There are some teams where you just glue a stack of their helmets in the Last Place position, saving the trouble of moving them.B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,594.417464 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/18/bufferbloat-the-internet-and-how-to-fix-it/ | Bufferbloat, The Internet, And How To Fix It | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"internet hacks",
"Network Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"bandwidth",
"Bufferbloat",
"internet",
"latency",
"openwrt",
"TCP",
"tcp/ip"
] | There’s a dreaded disease that’s plagued Internet Service Providers for years. OK, there’s probably several diseases, but today we’re talking about
bufferbloat
. What it is, how to test for it, and finally what you can do about it. Oh, and a huge shout-out to all the folks working on this problem. Many programmers and engineers, like Vint Cerf, Dave Taht, Jim Gettys, and many more have cracked this nut for our collective benefit.
When your computer sends a TCP/IP packet to another host on the Internet, that packet routes through your computer, through the network card, through a switch, through your router, through an ISP modem, through a couple ISP routers, and then finally through some very large routers on its way to the datacenter. Or maybe through that convoluted chain of devices in reverse, to arrive at another desktop. It’s amazing that the whole thing works at all, really. Each of those hops represents another place for things to go wrong. And if something really goes wrong, you know it right away. Pages suddenly won’t load. Your VoIP calls get cut off, or have drop-outs. It’s pretty easy to spot a broken connection, even if finding and fixing it isn’t so trivial.
That’s an obvious problem. What if you have a non-obvious problem? Sites load, but just a little slower than it seems like they used to. You know how to use a command line, so you try a
ping
test. Huh, 15.0 ms off to Google.com. Let it run for a hundred packets, and essentially no packet loss. But something’s just not right. When someone else is streaming a movie, or a machine is pushing a backup up to a remote server, it all falls apart. That’s bufferbloat, and it’s actually really easy to do a simple test to detect it. Run a speed test, and run a ping test while your connection is being saturated. If your latency under load goes through the roof, you likely have bufferbloat. There are even a few of the big speed test sites that now offer bufferbloat tests. But first, some history.
History of Collapse
The Internet in the 1980s was a very different place. The Domain Name System replaced
hosts.txt
as the way hostname to IP resolution was done in 1982. January 1st, 1983, the ARPANET adopted TCP/IP — the birthday of the Internet. By 1984, there was a problem brewing, and in 1986 the Internet suffered a heart attack in the form of
congestion collapse
.
In those days, cutting edge local networks were running at 10 megabits per second, but the site-to-site links were only transferring 56 kilobits per second at best. Late 1986, links suddenly saw extreme slowdowns, like the 400 yard link between Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley. Instead of 56 Kbps, this link was suddenly transferring at an effective 40 bits per second. The problem was congestion. It’s a very similar model to what happens when too many cars are on the same stretch of highway — traffic slows to a crawl.
The 4.3 release of BSD had a TCP implementation that did a couple interesting things. First, it would start sending packets at full wire speed right away. And second, if a packet was dropped along the way, it would resend it as soon as possible. On a Local Area Network, where there’s a uniform network speed, this works out just fine. On the early internet, particularly this particular Berkeley link, the 10 Mb/s LAN connection was funneled down to 32 kbps or 56 kbps.
To deal with this mismatch, the gateways on either side of the link has a small buffer, roughly 30 packets worth. In a congestion scenario, more than 30 packets back up at the gateway, and the extra packets were just dropped. When packets were dropped, or congestion pushed the round trip time beyond the timeout threshold, the sender immediate re-sent — generating more traffic. Several hosts trying to send too much data over the too-narrow connection results in a congestion collapse, a feedback loop of traffic. The early Internet unintentionally DDoS’d itself.
The solution was
a series of algorithms added to BSD’s TCP implementation
, which have now been adopted as part of the standard. Put simply, in order to send as quickly as possible, traffic needed to be intelligently slowed down. The first technique introduced was slow start. You can see this still being used when you run a speed test, and the connection starts at a very slow speed, and then ramps up quickly. Specifically, only one packet is sent at the start of transmission. For each received packet, an acknowledgement packet (an ack) is returned. Upon receiving an ack, two more packets are sent down the wire. This results in a quick ramping up to twice the maximum rate of the slowest link in the connection chain. The number of packets “out” at a time is called the congestion window size. So another way to look at the issue is that each round-trip success increase the congestion window by one.
Once slow-start has done its job, and the first packet is dropped or times out, the TCP flow transitions to using a congestion avoidance algorithm. This one has a emphasis on maintaining a stable data rate. If a packet is dropped, the windows is cut in half, and every time a full window’s worth of packets are received, the window increases by one. The result is a sawtooth graph that is constantly bouncing around the maximum throughput of the entire data path. This is a bit of an over-simplification, and the algorithms have been developed further over time, but the point is that rolling out this extension to TCP/IP saved the internet. In some cases updates were sent on tape, through the mail, something of a hard reboot of the whole network.
Fast-Forward to 2009
The Internet has evolved a bit since 1986. One of the things that’s changed is that the price of hardware has come down, and capabilities have gone up dramatically. A gateway from 1986 would measure its buffer in kilobytes, and less than 100 at that. Today, it’s pretty trivial to throw megabytes and gigabytes of memory at problems, and router buffers are no exception. What happens when algorithms written for 50 KB buffer sizes are met with 50 MB buffers in modern devices? Predictably, things go wrong.
When a large First In First Out (FIFO) buffer is sitting on the bottleneck, that buffer has to fill completely before packets are dropped. A TCP flow is intended to slow-start up to 2x available bandwidth, very quickly start dropping packets, and slash it’s bandwidth use in half. Bufferbloat is what happens when that flow spends too much time trying to send at twice the available speed, waiting for the buffer to fill. And once the connection jumps into its stable congestion avoidance mode, that algorithm depends on either dropped packets or timeouts, where the timeout threshold is derived from the observed round-trip time. The result is that for any connection, the round-trip latency increases with the number of buffered packets on the path. And for a connection under load, the TCP congestion avoidance techniques are designed to fill those buffers before reducing the congestion window.
So how bad can it be? On a local network, your round trip time is measured in microseconds. Your time to an Internet host should be measured in miliseconds. Bufferbloat pushes that to seconds, and tens of seconds in some of the worst cases. Where that really causes problems is when it causes traffic to time out at the application layer. Bufferbloat delays all traffic, so it can cause DNS timeouts, make VoIP calls into a garbled mess, and make the Internet a painful experience.
The solution is
Smart Queue Management
. There’s a lot of work that’s been done on this concept since 1986. Fair queuing was one of the first solutions, making intermediary buffers smart, and splitting individual traffic flows into individual queues. When the link was congested, each queue would release a single packet at a time, so downloading an ISO over Bittorrent wouldn’t entirely crowd out your VoIP traffic. After many iterations, the the CAKE algorithm has been developed and widely deployed. All of these solutions essentially trade off a little bit of maximum throughput in order to ensure significantly reduced latency.
Are You FLENT in Bufferbloat?
I would love to tell you that bufferbloat is a solved problem, and that you surely don’t have a problem with it on your network. That, unfortunately, isn’t quite the case. For a rough handle on whether you have a problem, use the speed tests at
dslreports
,
fast.com
, or
speedtest.net
. Each of these three, and probably others, give some sort of latency under load measurement. There’s
a Bufferbloat specific test hosted by waveform
, and seems to be the best one to run in the browser. An ideal network will still show low latency when there is congestion. If your latency spikes significantly higher during the test, you probably have a case of bufferbloat.
For the nerdier of us, there is a command line tool,
flent
, that does an in-depth bufferbloat test. I used the command,
flent rrul -p all_scaled -H flent-fremont.bufferbloat.net
to generate this chart, and you see the latency scaling quickly over 100 ms under load. This is running the Real Time Response under Load test, and clearly indicates I have a bit of a bufferbloat problem on my network. Problem identified, what can I do about it?
You Can Have Your Cake
Since we’re all running OpenWrt routers on our networks… You are running an open source router, right? Alternatively there are
a handful of commercial routers
that have some sort of SQM built-in, but we’re definitely not satisfied with that here on Hackaday. The FOSS solution here is
CAKE
, a queue management system, and it’s already available in the OpenWrt repository. The package you’re looking for is
luci-app-sqm
. Installing that gives you a new page on the web interface — under Network -> SQM QoS.
On that page, pick your WAN interface as
Interface name
. Next, convert your speed test results into Kilobits/second, shave off about 5%, and punch those into the upload and download speeds. Flip over to the
Queue Discipline
tab, where we ideally want to use
Cake
and
piece_of_cake.qos
as the options. That last tab requires
a bit of homework
to determine the best value, but
Ethernet with overhead
and
22
seem to be sane values to start with. Enable the SQM instance, and then save and apply.
And now we tune and test. On first install, the router may actually need a reboot to get the kernel module loaded. But you should see an immediate difference on one of the bufferbloat tests. If your upload or download bufferbloat is still excessive, tune that direction’s speed a bit lower by a couple percent. If your bufferbloat drops to 0, try increasing the speed slightly. You’re looking for a minimal effect on maximum speed, and a maximum effect on bufferbloat. And that’s it! You’ve slain the Bufferbloat Beast!
“
Thompson Router
” by
Simeon W
is licensed under
CC BY 2.0
. | 48 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504154",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T15:04:05",
"content": "I was prioritizing TCP ACK’s to speed up my internet access. (ref:https://www.benzedrine.ch/ackpri.html). Of course if everyone did that *ponder*, I’m not quite sure what the overall outcome would be.",
... | 1,760,372,594.520127 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/18/esp8266-smart-vents-keep-tabs-on-home-temps/ | ESP8266 Smart Vents Keep Tabs On Home Temps | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"home automation",
"hvac",
"mqtt",
"smart home"
] | Have you ever found that, despite having a central heating and air conditioning system, that not all the rooms in your home end up being the temperature you want them to be? Maybe the dining room gets too hot when the heater is running, or the bedroom never seems to cool off enough in the summer months. If that sounds like your house, then these
motorized “smart vents” from [Tony Brobston] might be exactly what you need
.
The idea here is pretty simple: an ESP8266 and a servo is built into the 3D printed vent register, which allows it to control the position of its louvers. When connected to your home automation system via MQTT, the vents allow you to control the airflow to each room individually based on whatever parameters you wish. Most likely, you’ll want to pair these vents with an
array of thermometers distributed throughout the house
.
While [Tony] says the design still needs some testing, he’s released smart vents in a range of sizes from 2×10 to 6×12 inches. He’s also provided excellent documentation on how to print, assemble, and program the devices. It’s clear that a lot of care and thought went into every element of this project, and we’re excited to see how it can be developed further by the new ideas and contributors that will inevitably pop up now that it’s gone public.
Want to add some automation to your HVAC, but don’t have a fancy central unit? Don’t worry, as long as
your heater or air conditioner has an infrared remote
, you should be able to
wedge a WiFi-enabled microcontroller in into the equation
. | 50 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504077",
"author": "sxmwht",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T11:02:28",
"content": "Really nice",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6504080",
"author": "Doobie",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T11:10:56",
"content": "Living in a 3000... | 1,760,372,594.611653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/revamping-the-camping-trailer-with-more-power/ | Revamping The Camping Trailer With More Power | Matthew Carlson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bike camping",
"camping",
"camping trailer",
"ebike",
"solar"
] | Pulling a trailer behind your bike has an aspect of freedom and exploration to it. However, the reality is that pulling a large, heavy box behind your bike is incredibly draining physically. So [Drew] returned to the drawing board for his
bike camper and added a motor, making some tweaks along the way
.
We
covered his first attempt at a bike trailer
; this update encompasses everything he mentioned as future improvements. First, he strengthened the axle, and the trailer mount bolted straight into the chainstay arm for added strength. Then he built a custom battery pack out of 18650 cells clocked in at just under 3kw. Next, he installed a hub motor kit into the bike’s back wheel. Finally, a flexible 100W PV solar panel was added to the roof and routed to a small battery bank inside that provides USB and a few AC outlets for laptops and phones while camping. [Drew] does note that he could charge the big e-bike battery with the smaller bank, but since the e-bike battery is much larger than the small one, it would take a few cycles.
[Drew] takes a journey to a music festival and is happy to report better stability and the battery having fantastic range even without him pedaling. We love seeing a good project revisited, and we hope [Drew] gets some good use out of his camper. Video after the break. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503505",
"author": "X",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T20:13:07",
"content": "My friend was told by the cops that he needed a license plate and insurance for his bicycle trailer. Trailers need a plate and insurance, no matter what is pulling them. (His trailer is full lane width, actual... | 1,760,372,594.66046 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/2022-hackaday-prize-talking-clock-built-with-old-school-gear/ | 2022 Hackaday Prize: Talking Clock Built With Old-School Gear | Lewin Day | [
"clock hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"clock",
"speech synth",
"speech synthesis",
"talking clock"
] | Any smartphone or laptop could be a talking clock if you wished it so. However, we think this build from [Marek Więcek] is more fun, which uses discrete vintage chips to get the job done
the old fashioned way
.
The work started when [Marek] was tinkering with a 65C02 CPU, giving it an EPROM, some RAM, and some logic ICs to create something akin to a modern microcontroller in functionality. It came to be known as the
6502 Retro Controller Board
. Slowly, the project was expanded with various additional modules, in much the same way one might add shields to an Arduino.
In this case, [Marek] expanded the 6502-powered board with a series of 7-segment displays, along with an RTC to keep accurate time. A classic SP0256-AL2 speech synthesis chip was then added, allowing the system to not only show the time, but read it aloud, too. As a bonus, not only can it tell you the hour, minute, day, and date, but it will also read various science-fiction quotes on demand.
Like most 80s speech synths, the output is robotic and a little difficult to parse. However, that’s part of the charm that makes it different compared to
the speaking virtual assistants of today.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503527",
"author": "Craig",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T21:26:17",
"content": "I guess you have to be a certain age to already know the dialect. :D Very cool project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6503595",
"author": "Lily",... | 1,760,372,594.697126 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/ask-hackaday-how-can-you-store-energy-at-home/ | Ask Hackaday: How Can You Store Energy At Home? | Maya Posch | [
"green hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"home hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"heat pumps",
"home energy storage",
"pv solar"
] | Amidst the discussions about grid-level energy storage solutions, it is often easy to forget that energy storage can be done on the level of a single house or building as well. The advantages here are that no grid management is needed, with the storage (electrical, thermal, etc.) absorbing the energy as it becomes available, and discharging it when requested. This simplifies the scale of the problem and thus the associated costs significantly.
Perhaps the most common examples of such systems are solar thermal collectors with an associated hot water storage tank, and of course batteries. More recently, the idea of using a battery electric vehicle (BEV, ‘electric car’) as part of a home storage solution is also gaining traction, especially for emergencies where the grid connection has failed due to a storm or similar emergencies. But all-in-all, we don’t see many options for home-level energy storage.
The Grid Storage Problem
Bath County Pumped Storage Station (Credit: CHA)
A while back, we looked at the motivations behind grid-level storage, including
current
and
future
technologies. The increasing focus on long-duration storage is driven by the increasing amount of intermittent, non-dispatchable energy sources on the grid, including PV solar and wind turbines. As these produce highly fluctuating levels of energy, storing excess power for later use is useful and arguably essential.
Unfortunately, the conclusion there is that grid-level storage at a scale sufficient to store and time-shift such amounts of energy on the level of an entire nation is not feasible. Of note here is that virtually all of newly produced battery capacity today and for the future will go into BEVs, which is where the idea of Vehicle2Grid (V2G) was pitched as a potential grid-level storage, This we
looked at too
, and found it wanting from an economical and practical perspective.
Much of the problem comes down to the highly fluctuating amounts of energy being supplied, and the increasing mismatch between supply and demand the more intermittent sources are added to the grid. Having e.g. roof-based solar panels that feed into the grid contributes to this problem, causing increased local power surges whenever there’s a lot of sun in an area, even as feed-in tariffs are being cut and even abolished in more areas. This leads to both utility providers and home owners facing increased costs and decreased (financial) benefits.
All of this only concerns electrical power, of course. Homes, offices and the industry also require heating, hot water and e.g. steam for industrial processes. Here local options would seem to make significant sense where e.g. district heating is not an option. With the use of existing solutions such as heat pumps and hot water storage tanks, it would seem that here at least straightforward solutions exist.
Energy Sources
While it is possible to also charge a battery and heat water in a hot water storage tank from the local grid for later consumption (e.g. with off-peak rates), another energy source that is readily available is the Sun. Adding solar thermal collectors on the roof as part of a
solar water heating
solution can be cost-effective, depending on the
solar irradiance
levels (power per unit area). The effectiveness is here mostly determined by the payback period, which can range between in the order of 4 years to closer to 20 years.
An important consideration here is too whether anti-frost features are required. While a purely passive and thus rather cheap system would be fine in a warm climate, if temperatures drop below 0°C during winters, it’s essential that measures are taken. This can include adding anti-freeze to the water in the system, in which case a more expensive closed-loop system is required as well.
In addition to the heat from solar irradiation, the energy from the Sun can also be converted into electricity using photovoltaic (PV) solar panels. Currently, most roof-based PV solar installations do not have local storage, and self-consumption is not considered, with the prevailing business model being that of selling the produced power to the local utility.
Some locations may also have space for other energy sources, like a (small) wind turbine, but solar thermal collectors and PV solar panels are likely to be the primary sources of energy when other sources (like hydro) are not available.
Storage Solutions
Hot water storage setup using solar thermal collectors as well as resistive heating using (PV) electricity.
As mentioned, heating water is a very common way of capturing and storing solar thermal energy. Many houses have a
hot water storage tank
in which a supply of water is kept at a specific temperature for immediate use. The main difference is in how the water in these tanks is heated. Often fossil fuels like mineral oil or natural gas are used, while in other areas electrical (resistive) heating is more common. When used in a context where solar thermal collectors and/or PV solar panels are available, the water can also be heated purely by these sources.
The advantage of this system is that it provides a potentially cost-effective source of hot water, which tends to be one of the more energy-intensive uses. It also provides an effective use of the electricity from PV solar panels when it is not used to charge batteries.
This leads to the other obvious storage solution in the form of large battery storage, such as Tesla’s Powerwall and similar offerings by competitors. Recently,
Broughton et al. (2021)
detailed the economics of battery storage for residential solar customers in Southern California.
In California the feed-in tariff has been dropping for years now, with the current NEM 3.0 program reducing the financial incentive to produce PV power for the grid. Not surprisingly, the introduction of Time-of-Use (TOU) with the NEM 2.0 program, saw the number of battery storage installations by home owners already increase significantly.
The conclusion by Broughton et al. was however that with the payback period when having a single Tesla Powerwall 2 system installed, along with a PV solar installation, was too long for this to make any financial sense. Where having battery storage like this installed does make sense, is when the grid power is unreliable, as is increasingly the case in California.
This then makes the argument to instead charge a BEV with the power from a (roof-mounted) PV solar installation, and have a charger that is capable of inverting the energy flow so that the BEV can act as an emergency battery to power the house. Even so, the economics of whole-house battery storage do not seem to be quite there yet when one lives in an area where utility-provided power is an option.
Wrapping Up
The general theme here when looking through the recent studies on home energy storage and related fields seems to be that storing energy in large quantities is only likely to be economical when it concerns heating up water in a hot water storage tank. The payback period here can be rather minimal when the conditions are right, and even adding a PV solar panel for resistive heating of the water may make financial sense depending on local factors.
This is also the case with battery storage solutions. Considering that the main cost of a BEV is due to the battery pack, it isn’t too surprising that something like a Tesla Powerwall costs about the same as a BEV. Here one could run the numbers on whether perhaps running a large array of (sealed) lead-acid batteries might nudge the numbers closer to financial sense.
Either way, the topic of home energy storage is not one which is likely to go away any time soon. Even if one’s intention isn’t to go off the grid, there are many other incentives that would lead one to look at the options. Whether it’s cost-savings, or having a backup option when there are rolling blackouts as we have seen around the world the past years, there are many reasons to take a look at the available storage options. But we simply didn’t come up with much.
What are your experiences and thoughts in this regard? Since the Hackaday community tends to have a lot of tinkerers, no doubt some of you have implemented any of these generating and storage systems, or have at least looked at the cost picture. If you have a whole-house battery system and/or solar-powered hot water system, how is it working for you? | 156 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503394",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T17:03:09",
"content": "Fun fact: If you have a 24¢ delta between peak and off-peak then the payback on a Tesla PowerWall is 7 years doing nothing but ToU arbitrage.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,372,595.360997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/this-simple-media-player-will-inspire-beginners-and-invite-experimentation/ | This Simple Media Player Will Inspire Beginners And Invite Experimentation | Dan Maloney | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"ESP32",
"lcd",
"media player",
"sd",
"video",
"WROOM"
] | While it would have been considered science-fiction just a few decades ago, the ability to watch virtually any movie or TV show on a little slab that fits in your pocket is today no big deal. But for an electronics beginner, being able to put together
a pocketable video player like this one
would be quite exciting, and might even serve as a gateway into the larger world of electronics design.
For inspiration, [Alex] from
Super Make Something
on YouTube looked to
the Rickrolling keychain media players
we featured back in January. His player is quite a bit larger and more capable, with a PCB design that allows the player to be built in multiple configurations, from audio-only to full video and a LiPo battery. The guts of the player center around an ESP32 module, with an audio amp and speakers plus a 1.8″ LCD screen with SD card reader for storing media files. Add in a few controls and switches and a little code, and you’ll be playing back media files in a snap. Build info and demo in the video below.
It may be a simple design, but we feel like that’s the whole point. [Alex] has taken pains to make this as approachable a build as possible. All the parts are cheap and easily available, and the skills needed to put it together are minimal — with the possible exception of soldering down the ESP32 module, which lacks castellated edge terminals. For a beginner, getting a usable media player by mixing together just a few modules would be magical, and the fact that it’s still pretty hackable afterward is just icing on the cake. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503411",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T17:33:12",
"content": "Dread to think of the power draw, run time of 30 mins on a 2kg battery? :P",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6503424",
"author": "Joshua",
"times... | 1,760,372,594.889926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/why-do-brits-drink-warm-beer/ | Why Do Brits Drink Warm Beer? | Jenny List | [
"Beer Hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"ale",
"brewing",
"lager",
"yeast"
] | Traveling through mainland Europe on a British passport leads you to several predictable conversations. There’s
Marmite
of course, then all the fun of the Brexit fair, and finally on a more serious note, beer. You see, I didn’t know this, but after decades of quaffing fine ales, I’m told we do it wrong because we drink our beer warm. “Warm?”, I say, thinking of a cooling glass of my local
Old Hooky
which is anything but warm when served in an Oxfordshire village pub, to receive the reply that they drink their beers cold. A bit of international deciphering later it emerges that “warm” is what I’d refer to as “cold”, or in fact “room temperature”, while “cold” in their parlance means “refrigerated”, or as I’d say it: “Too cold to taste anything”. Mild humour aside there’s clearly something afoot, so it’s time to get to the bottom of all this.
Too cold to taste anything
On the left in this London pub are the ale hand pumps, on the right the pressure dispensers including lagers. Edwardx,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
Should you walk into a British pub, assuming it’s a good one you’ll see a range of beers on tap. There will be the tall polished levers of the hand pumps delivering the local ales, and there will be at one end of the bar a shiny silver pressure keg dispenser or two with a few mass-market beers. These usually come out of the tap refrigerated like my continental friends would expect, and invariably include the usual highly-advertised pilsener-style lagers. It’s on that bar then that you’ll see in microcosm what lies behind this great beer divide, and the clue came in the names “ale”, and “lager”. They are both beers, but their different styles reveal the story.
To make beer as we’d know it, one must boil up a quantity of malt and hops in water, add a yeast culture, and leave it to ferment for a while. That’s the basic recipe, but it’s in the myriad variations of ingredients and places that we find all the different styles we’ve come to know. Those ales and lagers both start out in the same way with malt and hops, but it’s in their yeast cultures that they diverge. Yeasts are a type of unicellular organism, and some varieties have the useful property of producing alcohol when the anaerobically consume sugar. Yeasts are all around us in the air so it’s entirely possible to make a beer using only whatever natural yeasts settle in the liquid without having to add a culture as such, this is the process behind the Belgian
lambic beers
.
It’s All In The Yeast
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
cells under an electron microscope. Mogana Das Murtey and Patchamuthu Ramasamy,
CC BY-SA 3.0
.
Because brewers value consistency of their product and hate to risk a batch going bad due to bacterial infection, most of them use a culture. This can be one specific to their brewery and bred across countless brews over years, or it can be one bred by a laboratory. The family of yeast varieties of interest to brewers are the
Saccharomyces
strains, and it’s two different varieties of
Saccharomyces, Saccharomyces cerevisiae
and
Saccharomyces pastorianus,
that are responsible for ales and lagers in turn. Even then it’s not as simple as just changing the yeast , because they each have very different properties. The ale yeasts ferment quickly at a high temperature and float on top of the liquid, while the lager yeasts ferment slowly and sink to the bottom. In there is the origin of the world “lager”, which refers to the practice of storing the beer in caves, or lagering it, as it completed its fermentation.
We now have some idea why ales and lagers are different types of beer, but why do Brits drink their ale at room temperature? Hackaday isn’t a beer review publication, no matter how much some of we scribes might like to spend more time in the pub, but it’s safe to describe a lager as having a lighter taste than an ale, and then to make the observation that the former tastes better when colder while the latter loses its flavour if it’s chilled. Hence those hand pumps in a British pub, and my perplexed Continental friends when faced with a British pint.
So we’ve got to the bottom of the warm beer question, but there’s a final injustice I must correct. Brits refer to any vaguely pilsener style beer as “lager” as if that were the only style of lager, while in fact lagers come in a huge range of styles of which pilsener is only one. Even then the pilseners we consume would probably shock a brewmaster from Pilsen to his core, such is their blandness. It’s clear that our Continental friends have much to learn about ales, but by Bacchus, we have a lot to learn about lagers! | 152 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503311",
"author": "SayWhat?",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T14:12:00",
"content": "Long ago I learned that the best beer is Free Beer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6503395",
"author": "GAHNOO-SLASH-FREEDOM",
"t... | 1,760,372,595.560756 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/discreet-co2-monitor-hides-elegant-internal-layout/ | Discreet CO2 Monitor Hides Elegant Internal Layout | Tom Nardi | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"3D printed en",
"co2",
"environmental monitoring",
"ws2812b"
] | Outwardly, this
sleek CO2 monitor designed by [Daniel Gernert]
might look like something cooked up in Amazon’s consumer electronics division. But open up that 3D printed case, and you’ll find a surprisingly low parts count that’s been cleverly packed in so as to make the most of the enclosure’s meager internal dimensions.
No wasted space here.
There are, if you can believe it, just three principle components to this device: a Seeed Studio Seeeduino XIAO microcontroller, a Infineon S2GO PAS CO2 sensor board, and a ring of WS2812B LEDs. You could even delete the ring altogether and replace it with a single addressable LED to accomplish the same goal, but we’d say the full ring is money-well-spent if you’re going to spin up your own copy.
Functionality is very straightforward — the LED ring will indicate the detected CO2 concentration by lighting up green and working its way through yellow and onto red. The sensor has no wireless capability, but if you plug it into your computer, you can get a local readout of current conditions.
We love environmental monitoring solutions here almost as much as we love intricately designed 3D printed enclosures. If you’d like to see another project where those two concepts aligned,
check out this printable ESP8266 sensor enclosure
. | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503389",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T16:51:53",
"content": "Way to Lede with a pun. I see what you did there. Discrete",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6503510",
"author": "AggregatVier",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,594.936043 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/16/recreating-doom-on-a-homebrew-8-bit-cpu/ | RecreatingDOOMOn A Homebrew 8-Bit CPU | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"8 bit",
"doom"
] | [James Sharman] has been working away on a 8-bit CPU of his own design. Naturally, with his computing device largely functional, the obvious question was asked: can it run
DOOM
? [James’] latest video explores this question,
showing just how close he was able to get.
[James’] 8-bit pipelined CPU also has its own UART, VGA adapter, and sound adapter all built up on discrete components on various PCBs. There’s also a custom interface for a SNES controller as an input device. However, it’s fundamentally well below the specs that
DOOM
originally required at launch. His 8-bit CPU runs at just 4 MHz, with 64 KB of RAM. This compares poorly to the 32-bit, 33 MHz Intel 386 chips and 4 MB of RAM originally recommended to run the game.
In lieu of running the real thing, [James] demonstrated the limitations of his machine by coding his own demo, nicknamed
Doomed
. It’s able to average 19 fps video output at a resolution of 80×60, and consists of over 5,000 lines of hand-written assembly code. Fundamentally, it’s a basic 3D engine not dissimilar to
Wolfenstein
3D, though without any actual gaming interactions involved.
[James] could have simply stated the machine won’t run
DOOM
. However, trying to get something similar up and running was a useful learning experience, and in his own words, highly satisfying. This attitude of pushing on in the face of adversity is what propels many other
DOOM
porting efforts.
[Thanks to Keith Olson for the tip!] | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503279",
"author": "Ale",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T11:39:58",
"content": "Homebrew CPUs are something special",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6503281",
"author": "Phil Ashby",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T11:59:38",
"co... | 1,760,372,595.050151 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/sputtering-daugerotypes-batman/ | Sputtering Daguerreotypes, Batman! | Elliot Williams | [
"Art",
"classic hacks",
"High Voltage"
] | [
"camera",
"daguerrotype",
"high voltage",
"magnetron",
"sputtering",
"vacuum"
] | The Daguerreotype was among the earliest photographic processes, long before glass plates or film, that relied on sensitizing a thin layer of silver on top of a copper plate. The earliest Daguerreotype plates were made physically, by rolling a copper-silver plate thinner and thinner until the silver layer was just right. Good luck finding a source of Daguerreotype plates made this way in 2022. (There are electroplating methods, but they all end up with chemically contaminated silver.)
On the other hand, magnetron sputtering is a process of depositing pure metal in thin layers using plasma, high voltages, and serious magnets, and [Koji Tokura] is
making his own sputtered Daguerreotype plates this way
, giving him the best of both worlds: the surreal almost-holographic quality of the Daguerreotype with the most difficult film preparation procedure imaginable.
The star of the show is [Koji]’s sputtering rig, which consists of a Tupperware glass sandwich box as a vacuum chamber and a microwave oven transformer as the high voltage source. In use, he pumps the chamber down, introduces a small amount of argon, and then lights up the plasma. The high voltage accelerates the plasma ions into a sheet of silver, and the silver particles that get knocked free coat the copper plate.
A strong magnet creates a local plasma
, which accelerates the coating procedure, but since [Koji] only had a relatively small magnet, he scans the plate with the magnet, using a scavenged 2D pen plotter mechanism.
Check out his
video on the Hackaday.io page
, and his
Daguerreotype gallery
as well. (We don’t think that they were all made with this procedure.)
The result is a chemically pure Daguerreotype plate produced in a seriously modern way, and we’d love to see the images in person. In these days of disposable
images made by the AIs
in your cell phone, it’s nice to see some people taking photography in strange directions. For instance, maybe you’d like to
make your own ultra-large collodion plates
. Or something else? If you do, show us! | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503089",
"author": "greg",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T14:38:48",
"content": "Begorrah!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6503101",
"author": "RunnerPack",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T15:18:24",
"content": "Very impressive!... | 1,760,372,594.993855 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/diy-led-bulb-lacks-correct-lugs-so-m3-bolts-to-the-rescue/ | DIY LED Bulb Lacks Correct Lugs, So M3 Bolts To The Rescue | Donald Papp | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"12 V",
"diy",
"GU10",
"LED lamp",
"m3 bolt",
"socket-head",
"wiring"
] | [Damo] has an interesting LED bulb project with a neat twist: he
converted some outdoor lighting to 12 V LED lighting with some self-designed bulb
replacements and decided to reuse the existing GU10 sockets and wiring. That meant putting GU10 lugs onto his custom PCBs, but he ran into a snag.
These GU10 bulb lugs are tough to buy in small quantities. Luckily, M3 socket head bolts are a near-perfect match.
Those distinctive lugs that twist into GU10 sockets? [Damo] simply couldn’t find anywhere offering to sell them in small quantities. So he did what any enterprising hacker would do and found a substitute that was both accessible and economical: M3 bolts. Apparently, socket-headed M3 bolts are pretty much identical in size to GU10 lugs. Who’d have thought?
[Damo]’s retrofit worked great, and thanks to M3 bolts he was able to re-use the existing weatherproof wiring and sockets in his yard. His design files are
here on GitHub
.
We do love using things for other than their intended purpose, but as [Damo] points out, GU10 sockets are normally connected to mains power. So if you decide to use his design (or use GU10 sockets for your own purposes), be aware that you’ll have hardware that
looks
interchangeable with other (mains-connected) sockets, but isn’t. Be mindful of that, and take appropriate precautions.
Avoiding electrical oopsies
is always worth putting effort into, after all. | 30 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503041",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T12:05:52",
"content": "For a moment I thought this runs on mains, then I saw the 12V print. I only have LED bulbs running on mains at home. At least this is not another self-electrocution HaD :)",
"parent_id": null,
"de... | 1,760,372,595.678165 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/mac-mini-mini/ | Mac Mini Mini | Matthew Carlson | [
"computer hacks",
"Mac Hacks"
] | [
"Case mod",
"mac mini"
] | The Mac Mini has been roughly the same size and shape for 12 years, as the current design was released in June 2010. However, despite being the same general form factor, the internals has shrunk over the years. [Snazzy Labs] took advantage of this to
make a miniaturized Mac Mini
.
With a donor Mac in hand, they cracked it open and found an oversized power supply, a diminutive logic board, and a good bit of space. Unfortunately, the logic board attaches to a wide IO shield. He removed that, and the fan attached to the heatsink (checking to ensure it still booted). Relocating the WiFi antennas was the trickiest part of the whole build. Given that he wanted to shrink the power supply and the Mac Mini accepts just 12 volts, he devised a clever solution to use MagSafe as a connector. However, Magsafe negotiates over a complex protocol when attached. So, rather than smarten his port up, he dumbed the charger down by replacing it with a Microsoft Surface power supply spliced into the MagSafe connector.
With his mini Mac Mini board ready to go, he began designing a case to fit what was now a single-board computer. A fan of the channel offered a design reminiscent of the 2019 Mac Pro. Unfortunately, FDM printing struggled with the cheese-grater pattern, so [Snazzy Labs] printed it in resin with some mica powder. As a result, the mini mini looks fantastic while taking up just 28% of the volume of the original.
They’ve
posted the STL files online with detailed instructions
and a parts list if you want to recreate it at home. Perhaps with the smaller motherboard, it might be worth
revisiting the Mac Mini inside a PowerBook
hack from a few years ago. Video after the break. | 28 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503007",
"author": "punkdigerati",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T08:14:48",
"content": "Mini Mac MiniAlmost sounds Latin",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6503086",
"author": "Neuron Plectrum",
"timestamp": "2022-08-... | 1,760,372,595.743275 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/14/a-simple-streaming-radio-receiver/ | A Simple Streaming Radio Receiver | Jenny List | [
"internet hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"internet radio",
"streaming radio"
] | For those interested in a career in broadcast radio there aren’t many routes into the business. Student radio, pirate radio, and hospital radio usually feature somewhere near the start of any DJ’s resumé. Hospital radio stations often don’t have a transmission license and have historically relied on wired systems, but since those can’t reach everywhere they are now more likely to look to the Internet. [AllanGallop] has created
the Mini Web Radio
for
the hospital station
in the British city of Milton Keynes, a compact battery-powered single station streaming radio receiver that can pick up those tunes anywhere with a wireless network connection.
Inside the neatly designed 3D printed box the hardware is quite straightforward, a WeMos ESP32 board and a MAX98357A I2S digital amplifier module all powered by an 18650 cell. There’s a volume control and headphone socket, which is all that’s needed for the user interface. The software has code for both Arduino and Platform.io and is configured as you might expect through a web interface.
Everything can be found in a handy GitHub repository
should you wish to build one yourself. Meanwhile, it’s particularly pleasing as a Hackaday scribe to feature a project with roots in one’s own hackerspace, in this case,
Milton Keynes Makerspace
.
Thanks [Cid] for the tip! | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503002",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T07:41:57",
"content": "Nice and simple! Some features to consider: add a USB charging option (of course ;), put the system into deep sleep if the battery voltage gets to low to avoid damaging the LiPo and use syslog to send statu... | 1,760,372,595.607369 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/14/whats-that-scope-trace-saying-upd-and-wireshark/ | What’s That Scope Trace Saying? UPD And Wireshark | Al Williams | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"network",
"wireshark"
] | [Matt Keeter], like many of us, has a lot of network-connected devices and
an oscilloscope
. He decided he wanted to look into what was on the network. While most of us might reach for Wireshark, he started at the PCB level. In particular, he had — or, rather, had someone — solder an active differential probe soldered into an Ethernet switch. The scope attached is a Textronix, but it didn’t have the analyzer to read network data. However, he was able to capture 190+ MB of data and wrote a simple parser to analyze the network data pulled from the switch.
The point of probing is between a network switch and the PHY that expands one encoded channel into four physical connections using QSGMII (quad serial gigabit media-independent interface). As the name implies, this jams four SGMII channels onto one pair.
As is common in networking schemes, the 8-bit byte is encoded into a 10-bit code group to ensure enough bit transitions to recover the synchronous clock. The decoding software has to examine the stream to find framing characters and then synchronize to the transmitted clock.
What follows is a nice tour of the protocol and the Python code to decode it. It seems complex, but the code is fairly short and also executes quickly. The output? Pcap files that you can process with Wireshark. Overall, a great piece of analysis. He also points out there are other tools already available to do this kind of
decoding
, but what fun is that?
Wireshark
can do a lot of different kinds of analysis, even if you aren’t usually capturing from a scope. You can even
decrypt SSL
if you know the right keys. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6502990",
"author": "Artenz",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T06:09:50",
"content": "What’s the purpose of those little square copper islands on the PCB?(very nice hack btw)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6502993",
"author":... | 1,760,372,595.78614 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/14/hackaday-links-august-14-2022/ | Hackaday Links: August 14, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"bartender",
"Chevy Thunder",
"cyberdeck contest",
"fiber",
"hackaday links",
"ice",
"internal combustion engine",
"isp",
"quadruped",
"rigid-body simulator",
"robot dog"
] | What’s this? News about robot dogs comes out, and there’s no video of the bots busting a move on the dance floor? Nope — it looks like quadruped robots are finally going to work for real as
“ground drones” are being deployed to patrol Cape Canaveral
. Rather than the familiar and friendly Boston Dynamics “Big Dog” robot, the US Space Force went with Ghost Robotics Vision 60 Q-UGVs, or “quadruped unmanned ground vehicles.” The bots share the same basic layout as Big Dog but have a decidedly more robust appearance, and are somehow more sinister. The dogs are IP67-rated for all-weather use, and will be deployed for “damage assessments and patrols,” whatever that means. Although since this is
the same dog that has had a gun mounted to it
, we’d be careful not to stray too far from the tours at Kennedy Space Center.
If you’re living out in the sticks, your choices for high-speed internet are sometimes limited to Starlink or paying out tens of thousands of dollars to have utilities extended to your house. Or, if you’re Jared Mauch from Scio Township in Michigan, there’s another way — take the hacker credo to extremes and
build your own ISP
. Having been quoted $50,000 by Comcast to extend lines to his house, about five years ago he decided instead to just start his own ISP by laying two miles of underground fiber to connect to the nearest network provider. He installed all the gear needed to service his own house plus his surrounding neighbors. He has built up his network to 14 miles of fiber servicing about 70 customers. He now has a contract with the State of Michigan to extend service to 417 addresses in Scio and surrounding towns. At $55/mo for 100 Mbps or $79/mo for 1 Gbps, it sounds like he could easily cover the $50k Comcast wanted, but in reality, increased costs are really eating into the bottom line of his mini-ISP. Still, hats off to Jared for getting this off the ground.
Hopefully, by now you’ve heard about
our new Cyberdeck Contest
! We’re really excited by this one — cyberdecks are a fun way to celebrate the cyberpunk aesthetic while potentially building something that really turns out to be useful. The cyberdecks we particularly love are the ones that bristle with sensors and radios, but we’re keen to see anything that you can come up with. We know it’s a hard time to be putting a Pi into any project, but maybe that’s a good thing — it’ll force you to think outside the Pelican case a bit and maybe look at atypical architectures. You can check out all the details on
the contest page
, and scope out the current competition
here
.
We don’t go to bars much — OK, ever — but from what we gather, a big part of the experience can be the social interaction with the bartender. There’s the old trope about getting a little liquid courage on board and pouring one’s heart out to the barkeep, which really sounds just awful for the person making the drinks. So, mixologists would appear to have some measure of job security, right? Maybe not, if you don’t mind crying into your beer in front of
a dual-wielding Robo-tender with a personality
. The bot is a little terrifying — the link is just an abstract, but has an embedded video showing it in action at around the 8:30 mark. We’ll let you decide if you’d be willing to have this thing mix drinks and chat you up for tips.
And finally, astronomy buffs are living their best life these days, as breathtaking images pour in from the new James Webb Space Telescope, not to mention the seemingly endless bounty of pictures coming down from the ever-expanding fleet of Mars rovers. It’s hard to keep up with what NASA makes publically available, so space nerds might want to look at what Z3R0C1PH3R has done to
automate the process of downloading interesting astronomy pictures
. The script automatically downloads an image from
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
via its
API
— far and away the best use of taxpayer dollars we’ve heard of in a long time — and creates a voiceover of the image description using Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech API. It’s a nice piece of work, and subscribing to the YouTube channel is a great way to keep up on what’s going on at APOD. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6502942",
"author": "Jonathan Wilson",
"timestamp": "2022-08-14T23:24:39",
"content": "No doubt Comcast and the other last-century dinosaur ISPs are already working up laws in Michigan to prevent this guy (and others like him) from competing with them.",
"parent_id": null,
"... | 1,760,372,595.837919 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/14/starlink-ground-stations-successfully-hacked/ | Starlink Ground Stations Successfully Hacked | Elliot Williams | [
"ARM",
"classic hacks",
"News"
] | [
"defcon",
"pwn",
"Starlink",
"voltage glitching"
] | Belgian security researcher [Lennert Wouters] has gotten his own code running on the Starlink “Dishy McFlatface” satellite terminals, and you can too! The hack in question is a
“modchip” with an RP2040 and a MOSFET that crowbars the power rails
, browning out the main CPU exactly when it’s verifying the firmware’s validity and bypassing that protection entirely. [Lennert] had previously figured out how to
dump the Starlink firmware straight from the eMMC
, and with the ability to upload it back, the circle of pwnership is closed. This was a talk at DEFCON, and
you can check out the slides here
. (PDF)
The mod chip itself was a sweet piece of work, being tailored to fit into the Starlink’s motherboard just so, and taking good advantage of the RP2040’s PIOs, which are
probably the microcontroller’s superpower
.
[Lennert] says he submitted his glitch attack to Starlink and they took some precautions to make the glitching harder. In particular, [Lennert] was triggering his timing off of the USART port coming up on the Starlink unit, so Starlink just shut that down. But it’s not like he couldn’t trigger on some other timing-relevant digital signal, so he chose the eMMC’s D0 data line: they’re not going to be able to boot up without it, so this hack is probably final. No shade against Starlink here. It’s almost impossible to shield a device against an attacker who has it on their bench, and [Lennert] concludes that he found no low-hanging fruit and was impressed that he had to work so hard to get root.
What can you do with this? Not much, yet. But in principle, it could be used to explore the security of the rest of the Starlink network. As
reported in Wired
, Starlink says that they’ve got a defence-in-depth system and that just getting into the network doesn’t really get you very far. We’ll see!
Thanks [jef] for the tip! | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6502914",
"author": "doragasu",
"timestamp": "2022-08-14T20:15:21",
"content": "Glitched on Earth by Humans 🤣",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6502918",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-08-14T20:24:41",
"conten... | 1,760,372,595.898118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/redesigning-the-lumenpnp-tape-feeder/ | (Re)designing The LumenPnP Tape Feeder | Dave Rowntree | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"component feeder",
"machine tools",
"pick and place",
"pick and place machines"
] | Many of the hardware orientated hackers among us will likely have been following along with the story of [Stephen Hawes] and the Lumen pick-and-place project but kind of waiting a bit for the project to mature some more before maybe taking the plunge and ordering a kit. One reason for this might be that whilst the basic machine design is there and working, the tape feeders did need a fair bit of work, and a lack of usable feeders does not make a great PnP machine. [Stephen] has been working on a newer design that addresses some of the identified shortcomings, and
has started documenting his progress
(video, embedded below) along the way.
Gone is the PCB-based ‘case’, reverting back to a 3D printable affair and a much smaller PCB. After flip-flopping a bit between different geared DC motors, [Stephen] settled back on the original, smaller unit, which after a wee spot of hacking, was convinced to accept an optical encoder stripped from another unit, and this proved that it was indeed more than up to the tape-advancement duty. The reason for this change was physical size — the original motor resulted in an assembly 38mm wide — this limited the number for feeders on the front rail to barely eleven units. This is not really enough, but with the narrower assembly, the width is reduced to 15.5mm allowing 27 feeders to snuggle together on the rail, and that should make the machine much more usable.
Another area of concern was the cover tape peeler. It is critical that as the tape advances, for each picking
operation, the cover film is peeled back at the correct rate, with sufficient tension to overcome any extra sticky areas of glue holding it down. The original design used a separate motor to wind the film around a spool, but again that spool was quite wide, and a narrower solution was needed. This was improved by feeding the film into a pair of opposed straight gears, driven from one side by a worm gear. The film is peeled off on one side, passed through a guide groove in the feeder body and then onwards to the puller mechanism. Simple and effective.
One final area for concern was that the mounting method of the feeder unit onto the front rail (which looks like a length of 2020 extrusion) was a bit wobbly, allowing movement in a few directions, and that’s not great for repeatable picking, even with the awesome OpenPNP vision system dialling it in as best it can. The redesigned enclosure is shaped to the rail profile, allowing it to fit tighter and is retained under tension with a replaceable 3D printed flexure. A quick ‘snap’ and it now locks in place under tension and the wobble is history.
We’ve obviously
covered the LumenPnP recently
, and
here, a little earlier
and we’re not going to end the story just yet. The machine is now starting to look a lot more viable for those of us who do a lot of PCB assembly runs in small quantity, and we’ll sure be watching progress closely in the coming months!
Thanks to [Abe] for the tip! | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503291",
"author": "Dave B.",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T12:49:00",
"content": "Stephen’s persistence with this is truly admirable.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6503298",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2022-08-... | 1,760,372,595.993502 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/getting-to-the-trackpoint-quicker/ | Getting To The TrackPoint Quicker | Matthew Carlson | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"Teensy",
"thinkpad",
"TMK",
"TrackPoint"
] | Love it or hate it, TrackPoint can be a powerful tool. Love it or hate it, the idea of moving the mouse without removing your hands from the keys has an appeal. [Alon Swartz]
incorporated one into his custom wired split mechanical keyboard and wrote a helpful guide on how to do it yourself
.
The first step was to determine the pinout of the Trackpoint, which he provides
a handy repository of various devices with annotations and pictures
. The next step is swapping the little rubber nub at the top for something a bit longer. As the PCB sits below the keys, a labret cheek piercing happens to be a perfect candidate. Strong, thin, easily obtainable in different lengths, and threaded on one end. With jewelry in hand, [Alon] created a reset circuit with just a few resistors and a capacitor so the teensy can trigger a reset of the Trackpoint. The keyboard’s TMK firmware also needed a few tweaks to support reading the Trackpoint.
It’s a great guide, and we love the use of the jewelry as a piece of the keyboard. A knitting needle was used in
a previous attempt to add a Trackpoint to a mechanical keyboard
, and we’re excited to see what other household items end up in keyboards. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503223",
"author": "Marty",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T02:34:03",
"content": "Not only is this hack already 5 years old at this point (I’ve seen it before, though probably not through Hackaday), it basically recreates the Trackpoint prototypes seen in one of Ted Selker’s videos:https... | 1,760,372,595.940566 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/fyto-is-fido-for-phytophiles/ | Fytó Is Fido For Phytophiles | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"3d printing",
"anthropomorhized plant life",
"ldr",
"lm35",
"smart planter",
"soil moisture sensor"
] | On the surface, most plants really aren’t all that exciting, save for maybe the Venus flytrap. Sure, you can watch them grow in the long run, but for the most part, they’re just kind of there, quietly bringing peace and cleaner air. Day by day, they hardly move at all, although if you’re one of those people who likes to get the Sim into the pool and take the ladder away, you could always play the drought game just to watch it droop and come back to life a half hour later.
Fytó the smart planter
is a much more cool and far less cruel way of spicing up your plant life. The idea is to turn a plant into a pet by giving it an expressive face. Sure, plants have needs, but they communicate them more subtly than the average Earthing. By assigning animated emoji to various conditions, the plant becomes more familiar and in turn, feels more like a pet. Plus, the whole thing is just so darn cute.
Fytó runs on a Raspberry Pi 2W and has six emotions that are based on a capacitive soil moisture sensor, an LM35 temperature sensor, and an LDR module to detect light levels. If everything is copacetic, Fytó puts on a happy face, and will lick its lips after getting a drink of water. If the light is insufficient, Fytó looks sleepy; if the plant needs water, Fytó appears sweaty, red-faced, and parched. Don’t conflate this with the temperature-taking emoji, which indicates that Fytó is too hot. Finally, if the spot is too drafty and cold, Fytó looks like it’s nearly frozen. Be sure to check out the video after the break and watch Fytó work through their range of emotions.
Would you rather hear your plant complain in English?
There’s a build for that
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503252",
"author": "Shoe",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T07:04:15",
"content": ">Fytó runs on a Raspberry Pi 2WIt uses a Pi *Zero* 2W, the Pi 2 didn’t get a W version.I’m not so sure about having the LDR on the side of the pot, isn’t that potentially going to miss most of the light hitt... | 1,760,372,596.035739 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/diy-gaming-mouse-beats-the-competition-costs-less/ | DIY Gaming Mouse Beats The Competition, Costs Less | Tom Nardi | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"gaming mouse",
"input device",
"mouse"
] | We’ve seen plenty of custom keyboards here on Hackaday. Seriously, like more than we can count. But custom mice? Those are far more elusive. Though we wouldn’t be surprised to see that change
should this excellent example from [Tyler Richard] catch on
.
How the mouse sees the date on a US quarter
The goal was to build a customizable mouse that could match the performance of Logitech’s MX Master 3, but without the $100 USD price tag. In the end, [Tyler] says his mouse is around 10x as responsive thanks to a 1,000 Hz refresh rate, and the total cost is just a fraction of the retail price of the Logitech. Though as you might expect, there’s a catch or two.
For one thing, he says getting your hands on the PixArt PMW3389 mouse sensor in single quantities can be difficult. It seems like he was able to secure a sample because he’s a student, but you’ll have to figure out your own way to
con
secure one from the company. There’s also no friendly GUI to configure the mouse, and indeed, you’ll need to write some code should you want to modify any of its buttons. Oh, and despite the fact that the cheapo donor mouse you need to use for parts is wireless, the replacement guts you’ll be fitting it with currently only support wired operation.
Alright, we’ll admit it’s not perfect. But it’s still a huge step in the right direction if you care about being able to spin up your own input devices. With some refinement, and perhaps somebody willing to do bulk buy of the sensors, we could see this project becoming quite popular. In the meantime,
you may have to settle for a macro stool
. | 33 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503206",
"author": "AwD",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T23:02:22",
"content": "It should be noted that I’m not a gamer that expects much from their equipment so I have little authority on what makes for a good gaming mouse. I have been told, however, that the MX Master 3 isn’t a good g... | 1,760,372,596.147095 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/get-your-raspberry-pi-jamming-with-mupibox/ | Get Your Raspberry Pi Jamming With MuPiBox | Tom Nardi | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"jukebox",
"music player",
"pi musicbox",
"touch screen navigation"
] | Over the years we’ve seen a lot of Raspberry Pi boards pushed into service as media players. In fact, second to emulating old game consoles, that’s probably the Pi’s most common vocation when it comes to DIY builds. But despite the popularity of this particular use case, it seems like each one has had to reinvent the wheel.
Perhaps there’s where MuPiBox fits in. Developed by [Eric Gerhardt] and [Olaf Split] with the assistance of [Andreas Lippmann] and [Andrew Frericks], this project aims to
turn everyone’s favorite Linux single-board computer into everyone’s favorite music player
. MuPiBox provides not only the software to run your new high-tech boom box, but it even standardizes the hardware design and provides a 3D printable enclosure — though naturally there’s still room for interpretation if you don’t want yours to look
exactly
like all the others.
Your MuPiBox can look like whatever you want.
At the very minimum you’ll need a Raspberry Pi, a HifiBerry MiniAmp, and a speaker, though the instructions also recommend you invest in a Pimoroni OnOff SHIM (or wire up something comparable) to facilitate more graceful shutdowns. For the best experience you’ll also want a five inch Waveshare touch screen display and a USB power bank so your beats can go mobile.
The video below shows off the polished stock GUI, which is simple enough that even children should be able to navigate around and find their favorite tracks. Which is good, especially since it’s in German. The video also shows off some advanced setup features so you don’t have to pull the SD card out of the Pi just to change the WiFi network it’s attached to. There’s also a web interface that you can access from other devices on the network.
It’s a slick project, and we really like the aesthetics of the 3D printable enclosure. But even if you don’t want to replicate the project exactly, there’s certainly components here which could be
utilized in your own Pi media center build
. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503175",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T19:53:14",
"content": "That (blue) triangular design looks pretty neat and practical, nice!Fun project!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6503204",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
... | 1,760,372,596.408373 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/2022-hackaday-supercon-tickets-on-sale-now/ | 2022 Hackaday Supercon Tickets On Sale Now | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Featured",
"News"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Supercon",
"tickets"
] | Did I tell you about the time that [Spetku] turned the schwag bottle into a Jacob’s Ladder?
Supercon Tickets go on sale right now
! And the true-believer tickets usually sell out fast, so if you’re as excited about the thought of a real-life Supercon as we are, get yours now for a healthy discount.
We might be biased, but Supercon is our favorite conference of the year. Smaller than most and hardware-focused, you really can’t beat the signal/noise ratio of the crowd in attendance and the talks on the stage. People bring their projects, their great ideas, and their big dreams with them. And we have a cool badge to boot. It’s Hackaday, but in real life. And you should join us!
The conference starts on Friday Nov. 4th with registration, a mellow afternoon of badge-hacking, and a party to kick things off right. Saturday and Sunday are the main show, with a hacker village in the alley, workshops aplenty, and of course all of the talks. It’s only a weekend, but it’s one you’ll keep going back to in your mind for the whole year.
The Nitty Gritty Details
One hundred (100) True-believer Tickets are on sale now for $128 apiece, or until Aug. 29th. We call them True-believer Tickets because we haven’t even finished the call for proposals yet, much less selected the talks, but trust us, it’s going to be a good slate. (In past years, the True-believer tickets have sold out in as little as a day, so don’t sleep on this!) After that, regular admission is $256.
Of course, there’s always a back door if you want to sneak in for free. In our opinion, the
coolest way to attend a conference is to give a talk
, and you’ll get a complimentary ticket to boot! And even if you don’t get selected, we’ll give everyone who submits a serious talk proposal a ticket at the discounted price, so don’t hesitate. Volunteers also get in free, and we’ll be putting out the call on Aug 29th.
No matter how you get yourself a ticket,
get one, and get to Supercon
. We’re excited to see you in person again! | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503159",
"author": "Mike Szczys",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T18:16:35",
"content": "In for 1!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6503243",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2022-08-16T06:21:28",
"c... | 1,760,372,596.766131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/15/steam-power-hack-chat/ | Steam Power Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, August 17 at noon Pacific for the
Steam Power Hack Chat
with
Quinn Dunki
!
The steam power age may be behind us now, but that doesn’t mean that the engineering that went into steam engines isn’t worth exploring. In a lot of ways, the steam age is what made modern engineering what we know it as today. Where wind- and water-powered devices could often work well enough with a couple of inches of tolerance, steam engines required parts measured to the hundredth or even thousandth of an inch. Optimizing steam engines required a deep understanding of thermodynamics, too, which unveiled more about the way the universe works than had ever been realized before. And the need for parts strong enough to withstand steam pressure and the lubricants needed to keep the wheels turning paved the way for advances in materials science and chemical engineering that are still paying dividends today.
Celebrating the achievements of steam power may seem anachronistic, but in light of everything steam has done for us, it makes a lot of sense. And that’s not to mention the cool aesthetics of steam engines, with beefy castings and brass parts sliding back and forth, complicated linkages doing who-knows-what to make the engine work on nothing more than a little bit of boiling water. There’s the attraction of danger, too; improperly built boilers can be a disaster, so building one that’s safe to use can be quite a challenge.
All this and more is what the steam hobby is all about, an area that Quinn Dunki has been exploring for a while now. Over on
her YouTube channel
, Quinn has documented the process of turning raw metal into
a working steam engine and boiler
, and is currently working on
a bigger, more powerful engine
. We’ve invited her on the Hack Chat to talk about all things steam — where to get started in the hobby, what kinds of things you can learn by building your own steam engines, and how her current builds are going. If you’ve ever wanted to explore steam power, here’s your chance to ask a real steam aficionado.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 17 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 35 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503128",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-08-15T16:37:47",
"content": "Steam power has never been bigger, as they ramp up production and release SteamOS for other devices like Anbernic and Ayn.Lol",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,372,596.841659 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/18/a-particularly-polished-atx-bench-power-supply/ | A Particularly Polished ATX Bench Power Supply | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"atx power supply",
"atx psu",
"bench power supply"
] | Let’s be real, yanking the ATX power supply out of an old desktop computer and turning it into something you can use on the workbench isn’t exactly an advanced project. In fact, you could probably argue it’s one of the first DIY builds a budding electronic hobbyist should tackle — after all, you’re going to need a reliable bench supply if you want to do any serious work anyway.
But of course, there’s a big difference between doing the minimum and really giving something your all, and we think this
ATX bench supply from [Steve Thone] of
The Neverending Projects List
is a phenomenal example of the latter. It not only
looks
impressive, but it’s been tricked out with plenty of bells and whistles to make it as capable as possible. What was once a basic 230 watt PSU pulled from an old Dell is now a piece of gear that any hacker or maker would love to have in their collection.
As with your basic ATX conversion, this bench supply has outputs for 3.3, 5, and 12 volts. [Steve] has taken things a step further though, and given each one not only its own pair of banana jacks, but a dedicated switch, fuse, and LED volt/current meter. In addition, he’s added an adjustable buck boost converter that can output up to 36 V and features an attractive color LCD display.
Everything is mounted into a sturdy 3D printed enclosure that’s large enough to give all the components and wiring some breathing room. The labels on the front panel were created with the classic pause-and-swap-filament trick, and go a long way towards making the project look like a commercial offering.
While this isn’t the first
tricked out ATX PSU we’ve seen here at Hackaday
, it may well be one of the most polished. Of course, even if you don’t need a new bench supply, there’s still
plenty you can do with these ubiquitous pieces of hardware
. | 43 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504074",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T10:57:23",
"content": "I made a power supply using one of those modules. I really like it. I used a printer ac adapter that provides 32v. The higher voltage should allow for higher amps. If I remember correctly, they accept up to ... | 1,760,372,596.711092 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/circuit-less-pcb-featured-as-faceplate-for-a-digital-clock/ | Circuit-less PCB Featured As Faceplate For A Digital Clock | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"diffuser",
"ESP32",
"FR-4",
"led",
"mask",
"ntp",
"pcb",
"Wemos"
] | If there’s no circuitry on a printed circuit board, does it cease being a “PCB” and perhaps instead become just a “PB”?
Call them what you will, the fact that PCBs have become so cheap and easy to design and fabricate lends them to more creative uses than just acting as the wiring for a project. In this case, [Jeremy Cook] put one to work as the faceplate for his
“742 Clock,”
a name that plays on the fact that his seven-segment display is 42 mm tall, plus it’s “24/7” backward.
In addition to the actual circuit board that holds the Wemos ESP32 module and the LEDs, a circuit-less board was designed with gaps in the solder mask to act as light pipes. Sandwiched between the boards is a 3D printed mask, to control the light and direct it only through the light pipes. [Jeremy] went through a couple of iterations of diffuser and mask designs, finally coming up with a combination that works well and looks good. He mentions a possible redesign of the faceplate board to include a copper backplane for better opacity, which we think is a good idea. We’d also like to see how different substrates work; would boards of different thickness or using FR-4 with different glass transition temperatures work better? Check out the video below and see what you think.
We’re seeing more and more PCBs turn up as structural elements, from
enclosures
to
control panels
and
even tools
, and we approve of this trend. But what we really approve of is what [Jeremy] did here by making this clock just a dumb display that gets network time over NTP. Would that all three digital clocks in our kitchen did the same thing — maybe then they wouldn’t each be an infuriating minute out of sync with the others. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6504021",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T06:05:07",
"content": "What a chore to hand solder all those Neopixel RGB LEDS! But the result seems worth it :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6504032",
"author": "big... | 1,760,372,596.503257 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/an-emmc-gives-up-its-secrets/ | An EMMC Gives Up Its Secrets | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"data recovery",
"emmc",
"flash"
] | An increasing phenomenon over the years since mobile phones morphed from simply telephones into general purpose pocket computers has been that of the dead device taking with it some treasured digital resource. In most cases this means the device has died, but doesn’t necessarily mean that that the data has completely gone. Inside the device will be an eMMC flash chip, and if that can be read then the data is safe. This applies to some single board computers too, and thus [Jeffmakes]’
adventures in recovering an eMMC from a dead Raspberry Pi CM4
are particularly interesting.
The whole thing relies on the eMMC presenting the same interface as an SD card, so while it comes in a multi-pin BGA package it can be addressed with surprisingly few wires. Using the PCB from another dead CM4 he traced the relevant connections from eMMC to SoC pads, and was thus able with some very fine soldering to construct an interface for an SD card reader. The disk could then be imaged in its entirety.
This work will be of huge use to experimenters who’ve fried their Compute Modules, but of course the information it contains will also be of use to retrieve those photos from the phone that fell in the bath.
It’s not the first time we’ve taken a look at someone’s efforts in this area
. | 32 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503990",
"author": "spryte",
"timestamp": "2022-08-18T02:58:59",
"content": "Having been in the audio business for a while I have a old bulk demagnitizer sitting around somewhere. Would passing it over the eMMC a couple of time erase, or at least mess up any data in it. Presumably ... | 1,760,372,596.910462 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/prusaslicer-now-imports-step-files-heres-why-thats-a-big-deal/ | PrusaSlicer Now Imports STEP Files, Here’s Why That’s A Big Deal | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D Printering",
"3d printing",
"cad",
"step",
"stl"
] | PrusaSlicer has a new feature: the ability to import a CAD model for 3D printing. Starting in version 2.5.0-beta1,
PrusaSlicer can import STEP format 3D models
. An imported STEP file is converted to a triangle mesh on import (making it much like a typical
.stl
or
.3mf
file) which means that slicing all happens as one would normally expect. This is pretty exciting news, because one is not normally able to drop a CAD format 3D model directly into a slicer. With this change, one can now drag
.stp
or
.step
files directly into PrusaSlicer for printing.
First, a brief recap. In the world of 3D models there are two basic kinds: meshes and CAD models.
The two work very differently
, especially when it comes to editing. 3D printing has a long history of using
.stl
files (which are meshes) but making engineering-type changes to such files is difficult. Altering the size of a thread or changing mounting holes in a CAD model is easy. On an STL, it is not. This
leads to awkward workarounds when engineering-type changes are needed on STLs
. STEP, on the other hand, is a format widely supported by CAD programs, and can now be understood by PrusaSlicer directly.
Perhaps this will help shift people more towards sharing the STEP files of any models they create, because access to the CAD file makes it so much easier for others to make modifications, and now the CAD file and the printable model don’t have to be two separate formats. While nothing was ever actually
stopping
folks from sharing their CAD models in STEP format, perhaps this will help normalize it more.
You may be wondering why it has taken so long for a slicer to get a feature like this. One reason is that
the STEP format is difficult to implement
. For one thing, entities (the elements defining the model) in STEP can be in any order, and can themselves freely reference other entities regardless of “where” any of them may appear in the file. This makes it impossible to read and parse a STEP file sequentially. STL format is, by comparison, almost trivial to implement. This has in part contributed to the inertia keeping STL as the format making the 3D printing world go round.
Want to try it out? Beta releases of PrusaSlicer can be safely run on a machine alongside production releases, and PrusaSlicer has support for many other printers (not just Prusa machines), so if you’re curious,
give it a peek
. | 44 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503949",
"author": "Vinny",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T23:31:21",
"content": "> Starting with this release, PrusaSlicer is able to import STEP files, which is a format widely used for 3D modelling data exchange. Note that the model is tessellated on import and the slicing algorithms ... | 1,760,372,597.124833 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/rollback-breaks-into-your-car/ | RollBack Breaks Into Your Car | Elliot Williams | [
"car hacks",
"classic hacks"
] | [
"keyfob",
"rolling code",
"RollJam"
] | Rolling codes change the signal sent by car keyfobs unpredictably on every use, rendering them safe from replay attacks, and we can all sleep well at night. A research team lead by [Levente Csikor] gave a presentation at Black Hat where
they disclose that the situation is not pretty at all
(PDF).
You might know [Samy Kamkar]’s
RollJam attack
, which basically consists of jamming the transmission between fob and car while the owner walks away, fooling the owner into clicking again, and then using one of the two rolling codes to lock up the car, keeping the other in your back pocket to steal it once they’re getting coffee. This is like that, but much, much worse.
It seems that most of the rolling-key systems accept a sequence of valid keys as kind of a “resync” code – the actual number varies from a sequence of two to five. RollBack, as the new hack is called, takes advantage of this behavior. You somehow eavesdrop on a few keyfob presses in a row, and you can reset the code and open the car forevermore. As with RollJam, probably the easiest way to get multiple codes from a fob is to jam a couple and record them all, but the jamming isn’t even necessary. Simply having a handful of consecutive keycodes suffices.
This “resync” behavior
does
seem to be documented in the rolling-code chips’ datasheets, as the researchers point out in their slides. In hindsight, it’s a horrendous security hole. Having a series of keyfob codes compromises a car forever, in contrast to [Samy]’s RollJam attack, which must be executed before the owner presses the fob again. We never got the details on a couple of
prior claimed attacks
, but it’s quite possible that this is what was going on.
If this flaw is as widespread as the researchers fear it is, we would be very careful about pressing our keyfob twice, because mitigation is going to be a nightmare. | 68 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503874",
"author": "TG",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T20:19:10",
"content": "Just grab some toggle switches and implement the security system from Fury Road under the dashboard",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6503887",
"a... | 1,760,372,597.239257 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/chips-remembered-the-scenix-ubicom-parallax-sx/ | Chips Remembered: The Scenix/Ubicom/Parallax SX | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Microcontrollers",
"Rants",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"parallax",
"retrocomputing"
] | If you are a bibliophile, going to a used bookstore is a distinctly pleasant experience. Sure, you might discover an old book that you want to read. But at least some of the endorphin rush comes from seeing old friends. Not humans, but books you read years or even decades ago. Most often, you don’t buy the book — you probably have one stashed in a box somewhere. But it is a happy feeling to see an old friend and maybe thumb through it reading a passage or two among shelves of musty books. I wish we had something like that for chips. Outside of a few notable exceptions, chips tend to have a short life span of popularity and then give way to other chips. This is especially true of CPUs. One that I especially miss is the Scenix/Ubicom/Parallax SX chip.
I had a bookstore-like experience with this processor the other day. I produced a few products based around these chips and I have a small stash of them left. I jealously guard the hardware needed to program them “just in case.” Well, naturally, someone needed a few for some reason so I had to dig it all up. Knowing these might be some of the last of the unprogrammed SX chips in the world made me a little nostalgic.
The Story
In the late 1990s, a company called Scenix started producing a microcontroller called the SX in a few footprint sizes. So the SX18 was, for example, an 18-pin part. By 1999, they were already in full swing with the SX18 and SX28 and they introduced the SX52.
Of course, a lot of companies produced microcontrollers. The Scenix offering was a bit special. In those days, the Microchip PIC was the king of the hill. The PIC is an odd beast that evolved from a very limited controller made to be small and inexpensive. Notably, while it could support relatively high clock frequencies — 20 MHz was common — each normal instruction took 4 clock cycles. So when your crystal said 20 MHz, you were running instructions at 5 MHz.
The SX duplicated the Microchip instructions, but not the opcode mnemonics, since that was legally encumbered. In theory, you could take binary code meant for a PIC and deploy it on the SX. So the device had all the same architectural quirks as the PIC which was both a plus and a minus. However, it did have one huge advantage over the PIC: It could run at 50 MHz for real. The SX used a pipelined architecture so it was able to run one instruction per clock once the pipeline was full (and assuming you didn’t invalidate the pipeline with a jump).
That was 10 times the actual speed of a PIC. Granted, at 50 MHz, the chip drew a lot of power, but you could tune that by scaling down the frequency. Even at 10 MHz, you were running twice as fast as a PIC. Later versions could run at 75 MHz and even 100 MHz, although these were rather quickly discontinued. However, these chips were routinely overclocked to at least 80 MHz in, for example,
the XGameStation
.
The SX-Key provided programming and debugging over the SX clock pins.
There was another killer feature that seems normal today but was a revolution at the time: cheap in-circuit debugging. Most older CPUs had to have an expensive special part to do live debugging with no extra software on the chip. Sure, you could write a debugger that talked to a serial terminal, but that assumes a lot of things are already working. To do real hardware-level debugging was generally very pricey. But the SX had all the hardware required on every chip. A small serial port dongle that didn’t cost very much was available and with it, you could debug the chip in your circuit with no real impact on your code.
Peripherals Virtually
One key concept to the SX was that the CPU was kept very simple to hold down costs and increase speed. The trend, of course, was to add things to CPUs like UARTs, timers, PWM generators, and things like that. The SX did it differently. Running fast and having a very deterministic way to handle interrupts, Scenix touted a “virtual peripheral” library. The idea was that by using interrupts, you could build software peripherals and even if they ate up, say, half of your CPU time, you were still running many times faster than a PIC with peripherals.
Of course, if that works, it is great because you can tailor all the things you want. Need three UARTs and one PWM channel? No problem. If the next project needs five PWM channels and no UART, you can do that too. Of course, this was always better in theory than in practice. The “library” was little more than some example code and sometimes integrating it into your code was challenging. This was especially true if you were trying to integrate more than one since they would sometimes have conflicting requirements.
Still, you could do quite a few things that would have been almost impossible to do in software on a slower CPU.
The Parallax Connection
Scenix eventually became Ubicom, which would eventually get vacuumed into Qualcomm, but these chips are also associated with Parallax, a company well known for their Basic Stamps which were once the gateway drug to microcontrollers. Their products used the Microchip PIC, and they started selling a line of SX-based Stamps that were pretty much drop-in replacements for their existing products but much faster. (And of course more power hungry.) They also offered the chips and programming hardware they designed at affordable prices making the SX somewhat popular in the hobby community.
A Parallax development board with the SX-Key plugged in.
Parallax also developed books and courses for the chip. (
I even wrote some of them.
) A library existed that had code to do many common operations like FSK, I2C, SPI, run LCDs and stepper motors, and a lot more.
By 2005, Ubicom would step away from the SX and sell them only to Parallax with Parallax branding. By the middle of 2009, Parallax announced the end of the road for the SX. These days, you can pick up a 32-bit processor that can run at 100 MHz for a song, and integrated debugging is common. Modern CPUs will have architectures that are a bit saner than the PIC’s old bank-switching scheme and more amenable to C compilers, too. So I don’t miss those old days. But like an old book in a bookstore, it is good to see my old friend the SX.
What old processors are your friends? I’m very fond of the RCA
1802
. I did a lot of work on old Motorola devices, too, like the 6805 and the 68HC11. I enjoyed the
Basic Stamp
, too. I can’t help but wonder if, in 30 years, people will fondly look back at an STM32 device or maybe the Raspberry Pi Pico? | 70 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "6503788",
"author": "Jon McPhalen",
"timestamp": "2022-08-17T17:07:21",
"content": "Just found an old PDB that was setup for BASIC Stamp (1 & 2, all sizes) and SX28 development. I liked the SX, especially with Terry Hitt’s SX/B and bits of your code, Al.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,597.0207 |
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