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https://hackaday.com/2022/07/12/open-firmware-for-pinephone-lte-modem-whats-up-with-that/ | Open Firmware For PinePhone LTE Modem – What’s Up With That? | Arya Voronova | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Phone Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Slider"
] | [
"cellular modem",
"custom firmware",
"Firmware modding",
"LTE",
"open smartphone",
"open-source firmware",
"pinephone",
"PinePhone Pro",
"smartphone hacking"
] | In their monthly announcement,
among all the cool things Pine64, they talked about the open firmware for PinePhone’s LTE modem. The firmware isn’t fully open – a few parts remain closed. And Pine emphasizes that they neither pre-install nor officially endorse this firmware, and PinePhones will keep shipping with the vendor-supplied modem firmware image instead.
That said, the new firmware is way more featureful – it has less bugs, more features, decreased power consumption, and its proprietary parts are few and far between. I’d like to note that, with a special build of this firmware, the PinePhone’s modem can run Doom – because, well, of course.
And with all that, it’s become way easier to install this firmware –
there’s
fwupd
hooks now!
You can think of
fwupd
as the equivalent of Windows Update for firmware, except not abusive, and aimed at Linux. A perfect fit for keeping your open-source devices as functional as they can be, in other words.
What’s the deal? If open firmware is that much cooler, why don’t more of our phones have open firmware options available?
What’s The Deal?
Phone modems are fairly complex. Your phone, numpad or “smart” alike, has a modem chip from someone like Mediatek or Qualcomm, and that chip has a reasonably powerful CPU core inside. For instance, if you take the SIM800 modem (a 2G-only modem module), it has
the MT6260 chipset,
which is an ARM7 single-core CPU and GSM baseband in one chip. You can think of it as an ESP8266 on steroids, but for GSM.
In the SIM800 module, this CPU acts as a “receive AT commands and do GSM things” intermediary, but it’s also been used as the does-everything processor for GPS trackers, smartwatches and other GSM-connected devices. In fact, the MT6260 can run
an entire Nokia 3310!
The 2017 version, to be exact.
With the PinePhone modem, the situation turned out to be the same. It was quickly found that the Quectel modem ran a stripped down version of Android on its ARM core, with
adb
shell available over the modem’s USB interface. When a few adventurous hackers started probing it and got shell access, they found tools like
ffmpeg
,
vim
,
gdb
and
sendmail
compiled in – certainly not something you’d need on a cellular modem, but hey. Firmware images got unpacked, some code got reverse-engineered, and the modem got itself a newly compiled Linux heart.
The specific chip powering the PinePhone’s Quectel EC25-G LTE modem is a Qualcomm’s MDM9207, with a single-core CPU and 256 MB of RAM and flash by its side –
this Pine64 Wiki page
will get you up to speed with the technical details. If you think about it, the PinePhone isn’t a quad-core CPU device, really – it’s a penta-core dual-CPU device, running two Linux installs side by side. And yes, it’s not impossible that same goes for your Android phone.
Why Is This Valuable?
Why value cellular modem firmware openness, anyway? We’ve been living quite fine without it, some might say. Turns out that open firmware for modems brings
good things aplenty!
One of the most noteworthy ones is the ability to downclock the CPU core of the PinePhone modem – bringing it from 400 MHz to 100 MHz. This makes the modem consume less power, and not heat the phone up as much. The modem’s configuration, for instance audio bitrates, is made more dynamic – no longer requiring a modem reboot to change audio parameters. There’s all kinds of developer-friendly features like logging capabilities and testing facilities; PinePhone’s integration can also be improved upon – i.e. debugging and improving call handling while the PinePhone’s CPU is suspended to improve battery life further.
And, of course, Doom.
It’s also possible to fix many of the problems that impede upon PinePhone’s cellular capabilities – as it tends to be with cellular modems, there’s
plenty of firmware problems.
Some of these are fixable by using a different vendor firmware image, but going between binary images and looking for the least glitchy one is an exercise in frustration. It’s also possible to patch vulnerabilities, like the “render the modem inoperable” one that was exploited by the PinePhone-targeting
weird piece of malware
half a year ago.
You can get one of these modems standalone on a mPCIe card!
This is the kind of control that large-scale phone manufactures already get over the modems they embed into phones, to be clear. An open phone project
has
to have this kind of control – otherwise, it is bound to be disadvantaged, purely because of reliance on proprietary firmware images with all sorts of glitches and mis-features. Without firmware modifiability, open phones have one more roadblock towards feature parity, and our technology is already quite hostile to open phones as-is.
Not everything is open in this firmware. The baseband firmware, aka the RF bits known as ADSP firmware, remains closed and not yet reverse-engineered by anyone – you’re not gonna be running OpenBTS on this modem yet.
The TrustZone kernel remains closed too – my understanding is that it’s signed by Qualcomm. However, the Linux install is fresh and no longer stinks, and the Qualcomm’s application stack seems to have been replaced with a more lightweight one – removing any need for
closed userspace tools or drivers,
too. This is a firmware you can modify to your needs in many aspects,
then compile and flash yourself.
I keep listing all this background and benefits – to think of it, it’s a bit unfair that I haven’t answered the intro question yet. Why haven’t we had modem open firmware earlier? Well, we’re finally arriving at the “why”.
Regulatory Irregularities
The open firmware for the PinePhone modem is technologically superior, and code-wise, the baseband, aka RF paths don’t change. So, why not ship this firmware from the factory? Why the “not officially endorsed or recommended” thing? The answer is, Pine64 could lose regulatory approval in certain countries if endorsing or pre-installing this firmware – which is why they’re not doing either.
You can get one of these modems on a Pi Pico shield, even!
As it stands, one would be foolish to expect Pine64 endorsement of this firmware. They work hard to ensure that PinePhone remains certified in as many countries as possible – without pre-established networks of representation and competencies that phone manufacturers benefit from, it’s a complicated task. If you’re legally able to run this firmware, godspeed – otherwise, all possible responsibility, however unlikely, shall be yours. Here on Hackaday, we revel in the freedom to do things as a private individual that you couldn’t do with gear for sale.
And one such area is radio-relevant firmware. Direction from the US FCC on regular WiFi router firmware
resulted in router manufacturers attempting to restrict you from installing OpenWRT
. Which is to say, it should be possible for routers to remain custom firmware-friendly, but I’m not optimistic. Observing the trends over the years, noticing firmware get more and more locked down, I’ve been thinking a lot about a certain question.
Do The Manufacturers Just Not Bother?
It’s important to understand that regulatory restrictions can be worked around by the cellular modem manufacturers. Beyond all excuses and laws, there’s the question of effort. It’s not impossible to open-source modem firmware with certain caveats, it’s that manufacturers are not motivated to bother with the effort of making it open. Laws can be worked around – we know full well there’s no shortage of legal creativity in marketing departments. The sheer lobbying power of corporations, sizeable when they stand to lose profits, isn’t on display when firmware-restricting laws get passed. Why not here?
What I’ve seen used as an excuse is the sheer complexity of cellular tech – and it holds some water. These standards are complex indeed. However, it didn’t take wading through cellular protocol nuances to downclock the modem’s CPU frequency, or fix interfacing bugs. Some parts of it could be open, or at least open-source, and yet they’re not.
We’re moving away from OpenWRT-flashed routers capable of years-long uptime
Other excuse is the regulatory compliance, and that holds some water, too – however, the conversation was never started to begin with, there was never an acknowledgement of our needs, needs that can and should be discussed. Some modems have an SDK that integrator companies can make use of, a few modems will provide you with some kind of code interpreter, even – more often than not, access to documentation for these requires an established business relationship, and then, regulatory troubles seem to not be as much of a blocker.
A lot of problems excused by regulatory compliance happen to benefit the manufacturers financially – whether through new hardware sold because of planned obsolescence, or money not spent on effort they technically aren’t forced to put in. Firmware customization stays behind NDAs and business relationships, as opposed to being at least partially open and competitive. Which suits monopolistic players just fine.
Firmware openness is a question of committing to it and working through the hurdles – and if manufacturers won’t put that effort in, at least we the hackers can compensate here and there. For now, if we want feature parity for open phones, we’ll have to get our reverse-engineering tools hooks-deep in proprietary firmware at some points.
Why Now?
You might be wondering – why specifically now, and why Pine64? There have been open-source baseband projects before, but not many of them have reached this far. Well, a good few factors played in their favour, and I’d like to talk about the primary one.
It’s hard not to appreciate a $150 open smartphone
Getting hardware into hands of hackers is key to breakthroughs like these – this is what Pine64 has managed to do well. PinePhones have been shipping for over two years now, and basically everyone who wants one can get one, resulting in a fair few hackers owning an open device with a Quectel modem in it.
From there, it was a matter of time until hackers started poking at the modem! The low price also helps – while PinePhone is nothing to marvel at when compared to flagship phones, it also only costs a fraction of the price, and having Linux on it helps you squeeze out more when it comes to performance, negating the downside that’d be more significant if it were to run Android.
I would also add that having a hacker-friend phone at such a low price means that you make it accessible for specifically the kind of hackers already used to squeezing more and more out of the devices they own – for financial reasons, among others. Sometimes our skills are sharpened by need, which is one of the reasons work done by Pine64 is all that more valuable – helping a new generation of hackers access tools and playgrounds they’d previously be financially locked out of.
New Opportunities
It could very well be that one of your personal phones is hackable in the same way – ripping out the subpar Linux build running your phone’s modem and replacing it with a Linux build you have more control over. PinePhone’s availability has helped us get over this hurdle, and now future projects stand to benefit from it. In fact, you can get one of these Quectel modems as a mPCIe card, and build an open-firmware modem into your own devices easily!
This firmware is not fully open, but a large portion of it is – which happens to be the portion most useful for improving PinePhone’s cellular capabilities. With modifiability like this, what are we going to achieve next? And given these capabilities, what challenges will we face in the future? We don’t yet know everything that will happen, but this work is good news for us. | 30 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491924",
"author": "ScriptGiddy",
"timestamp": "2022-07-12T15:19:16",
"content": "What do you mean by “we’re moving away from openwrt flashed routers…” in the caption? I see it being adopted more and more every day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,633.286078 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/12/even-doom-can-now-run-doom/ | EvenDOOMCan Now RunDOOM! | Jenny List | [
"Games",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"doom",
"gaming",
"Will It Doom?"
] | For years now, the standard test of any newly hacked piece of hardware has been this: can it run
DOOM
? id Software’s 1993 classic first-person shooter has appeared on everything, but here’s one from [kgsws] that’s a bit special.
It’s
DOOM
, running inside
DOOM
itself
.
So how has this feat been achieved? There’s a code execution exploit inside the original DOS
DOOM II
executable, and that has been used to run the more modern
Chocolate Doom
within the original. It appears as an in-game texture, giving an odd effect as if it’s being watched in a cinema.
The video below the break shows the game-in-game in action, but the real value lies in its in-depth description of the exploit, that takes us through some of the inner workings of the game and ably explains what’s going on. It finishes up with a specially made cinema WAD in which to play
DOOM
-in-
DOOM
, and even
Hexen
-in-
DOOM
. Pick up your trusty chainsaw, it’s going to be a long night. | 30 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491889",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2022-07-12T11:22:17",
"content": "Now you load the original doom inside the doom in doom and make infinite layers of doom inception.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491893",
... | 1,760,372,632.862165 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/overwhelmed-by-odd-inputs-the-contest-winners-and-more/ | Overwhelmed By Odd Inputs: The Contest Winners And More | Elliot Williams | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"contests",
"diy",
"hid",
"kerbal",
"keyboard",
"macropad",
"mechwarrior",
"odd inputs",
"peculiar peripherals",
"usb"
] | The
Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals Contest
wrapped up last week, and our judges have been hard at work sifting through their favorite projects. And this was no easy task – we had 75 entries and so many of them were cool in their own right that all we can say is go check them all out. Really.
But we had to pick winners, not the least because Digi-Key put up three $150 gift certificates. So without further ado, here are the top three projects and as many honorable mentions as you have fingers and toes – if you don’t count your thumbs.
The Prize Winners
Keybon
should be a mainstream commercial product. It’s a macro keypad with an OLED screen per key. It talks to an application on your desktop that detects the program that you currently have focused, and adapts the keypress action
and
the OLED labels to match. It’s a super-slick 3D-printed design to boot. It’s the dream of the
Optimus Maximus
, but made both DIY and significantly more reasonable as a macro pad. It’s the coolest thing to have on your desk, and it’s a big winner!
On the ridiculous side of keyboards, meet the
Cree-board
. [Matt] says he got the idea of using beefy COB LEDs as keycaps from the bad pun in the name, but we love the effect when you press down on the otherwise blinding light – they’re so bright that they use your entire meaty finger as a diffuser. Plus, it really
does
look like a keypad of sunny-side up eggs. It’s wacky, unique, and what’s not to love about that in a macropad?
Finally, [Josh EJ] turned an
exercise bike into a wireless gamepad
, obliterating the choice between getting fit and getting high scores by enabling both at the same time. An ESP32-turned-Bluetooth-gamepad is the brains, and he documents in detail how he hooked up a homebrew cadence sensor, used the heart-rate pads as buttons, and even added some extra controls on top. Watching clips of him pedaling his heart out in order to push the virtual pedal to the metal in
GRID Autosport
, we only wish he were screaming “vroooom”.
Strange Topographies
If you type for a living, a bespoke keyboard personalizes the routine.
Dichotomy
takes the two standards of the desktop, mouse and keyboard, and fuses them together so that you don’t have to move your hand off to the side all the darn time. Nice. [Peter Lyons]’
Squeezebox
is the further evolution of his ultra-low-travel design. If you didn’t see
our coverage of a previous iteration
, you’ve never seen anything like this before. And finally, we just have to tip our fedora to [Matthew Sparks] and his conversion of a museum-piece
Morse code key into an HID-compliant USB keyboard
. Dit-dah-dit!
Better Mouse(trap)
Pointers. If there’s one complaint we have about GUIs, it’s pointers. Always pointing and clicking. If only there were a way to make this more fun… Try the
Magic Stick
, which uses a similar IR camera to the Wii remote as a rodent substitute. Or [Maciej Witkowiak]’s
Lightpen to HID
that brings an older lightpen to his RetroPie setup. Or maybe there’s nothing wrong with the classic mouse after all, and what you really need is a custom-shaped wooden one? You’ll need to make your own, of course, but follow along with
the Dwergmuis
.
Press the Any Key
Custom peripherals are all about fitting a particular niche, and sometimes that niche is something small and simple. Like a single-button keypad? Or a gimbal joystick with a few keys? Check out [Yannick]’s
collection of simple peripherals
. [Sven]’s
Tiny Mute Button
has just one job, if you don’t count glowing, while [Rich T]’s
12-key pad with Encoder
does a lot, with style. [Wing-Sum Law]’s keyboard looks
suspiciously like an NES controller
, but there’s no mistaking [John Loeffler]’s
Vo-LUM Control
for anything but a literally concrete volume knob. Or maybe you need to type math all day? [Magne]’s
custom keypad
has all the squiggly symbols.
Cyborg
Wearables take personal inputs to the next level, and [Peter Walsh]’s
Wearable Haptic Sensor
is a lovely entry. It’s an output rather than an input, and lets you
feel
what the computer is saying. [Nait]’s
Glovraille
braille keyboard glove is still in the early stages, but it’s a cool idea that’s worth watching.
VR
Gaming is better with better peripherals, and we saw two stellar cockpit builds:
KSP Gegi
for
Kerbal Space Program
(of course) and
Mechwarrior 4
Simulator Cockpit Panel
for, well you know that already. What we didn’t expect were two (2!) custom
Arkanoid
controllers. One
uses a slidepot to better physically match the game
, and the other a
more traditional knob
, but both support the
MSX computer architecture
, which we suppose has the best
Arkanoid
version?
And these were just the choices that our judges could agree on. There are many more projects that tickled exactly one judge’s fancy, which is kinda what you expect with ultra-personal hacks like these. So check them all out, and let us know which additional projects you wish made the list!
And thanks again to Digi-Key for sponsoring the contest. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492319",
"author": "voxnulla",
"timestamp": "2022-07-13T20:24:27",
"content": "Not really sure why a literal single button keyboard or a telegraph key interpreter were chosen over some others. Those have literally been done to death for years, even on HAD.IO. Single button keyboard... | 1,760,372,632.729521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/bringing-some-discipline-to-an-sdr-transmitter/ | Bringing Some Discipline To An SDR Transmitter | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ADALM-PLUTO",
"amateur radio",
"Es'hail-2",
"gps",
"gps disciplined oscillator",
"ham",
"QO-100",
"radio",
"sdr"
] | The proliferation of software-defined radio (SDR) technology has been a godsend for RF hobbyists. SDR-based receivers and transmitters have gotten so cheap that you’ve probably got a stick or two lying around your bench right now — we can see three from where we sit, in fact.
But cheap comes at a price, usually in the form of frequency stability, which can be prohibitive in some applications — especially amateur radio, where spectrum hygiene is of the utmost concern. So we were pleased to see [Tech Minds]
tackle the SDR frequency stability problem
by using a GPS-disciplined oscillator. The setup uses an ADALM-PLUTO SDR transceiver and
a precision oscillator from Leo Bodnar Electronics
. The oscillator can be programmed to output a rock-solid, GPS-disciplined signal over a wide range of frequencies. The Pluto has an external oscillator input that looks for 40 MHz, which is well within the range of the GPSDO.
Setup is as easy as plugging the oscillator’s output into the SDR’s external clock input using an SMA to UFL jumper, and tweaking the settings in the SDR and oscillator. Not all SDRs will have an external clock input, of course, so your mileage may vary. But if your gear is suitably equipped, this looks like a great way to get bang-on frequency — the video below shows just how much the undisciplined SDR can drift.
Like any good ham, [Tech Minds] is doing his bit to keep his signals clean and on target. His chief use case for this setup will be to work
QO-100
, amateur radio’s first geosynchronous satellite repeater. We’ve got to say that we hams living on the two-thirds of the globe not covered by this satellite are just dying to get a geosynchronous bird (or two) of our own to play with like this. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492251",
"author": "Varga Tom",
"timestamp": "2022-07-13T16:11:12",
"content": "ublox GPS module support PPS out of the box without any SW.When we gonna see actual DIY GPS spoofing?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6492254",
... | 1,760,372,633.342465 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/you-wouldnt-3d-print-a-house-would-you/ | You Wouldn’t 3D Print A House, Would You? | Matthew Carlson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Featured",
"home hacks",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printed house",
"construction"
] | Most houses built in the US today are platform construction: skinny two-by-fours are stacked and layered to create walls with studs. Each floor is framed on top of the other. It is fast, relatively cheap, and easy to learn how to do. However, it is not without drawbacks. Some estimates put the amount of waste generated per square foot (0.09 m
2
) at around 3.9 lbs (1.8 kg).
Timber framing is an older style where giant beams are used to create the structure of the house. Each timber is hand-carved and shaped, requiring skill and precision. Some cabins are still built this way because it is easy to source the timber locally and cutting into big logs is less work than cutting into lots of small logs. It’s relatively ecologically friendly, but slow and skilled-labor intensive.
We live in a world where there is a vast need for cheaper, faster, more eco-friendly housing, but finding a solution that can tick all the boxes is fiendishly difficult. Can 3D-printed housing accomplish all three of those goals? We’re not there yet, but we’re working on it.
Current State Of The Art In 3D Houses
The idea of a
machine to build homes has existed all the way back to 1930
. The thought behind 3D-printed houses is that by eliminating some of the human work required, it can scale better and lower costs. But despite the novel machinery, the overall methods of house-building haven’t changed that much. Broadly there seem to be three categories in the market today: prefab, print-in-place, and cut-on-site.
Prefab
Prefab is exactly what you think. Pieces are printed in some facility, ideally close to the building site, and then shipped to be assembled by a team of workers. This allows the prints to benefit from a controlled environment with calibrated and reliable tooling. Or even to print very large pieces like
this absolutely massive printer in China
. Companies such as
Mighty Buildings
are working towards prefab modules and whole units that are built from glass fiber reinforced thermoset resin. The benefit of a thermoset material is that it cures stronger and harder than traditional resins you might see in a printer. However, layer-to-layer adhesion suffers as a result.
Mighty Buildings came up with a clever workaround by using multiple UV sources. Layers only partially cure when depositing the top layer and then are cured fully later as the layers stack up above. It is important to note that these buildings are not significantly cheaper or faster than a prefab houses made with traditional methods, but there should be less waste and more flexibility in design.
Print in Place
Print in place often involves a
giant 3d printer setup on the site like this one back in 2015
. Over the years, advancements have been made making the printer faster, more precise, easier to set up, easier to transport, and so on. However, one area that seems to be much harder to figure out is what to actually extrude.
The real advantage of these systems is they can run around the clock, slowly printing the structures as needed. But if it is printing unsupervised and the nozzle clogs or the layers don’t adhere, it is a big deal. Those who own 3D printers can you imagine starting a four-day print on your printer? One that you can’t just scrape up off the bed and pitch in the recycling when it goes sideways? You need to get it right the first time.
Most companies use some sort of concrete mixture that’s been optimized to flow cleanly through a nozzle. However, concrete isn’t particularly well known for its eco-friendliness as it is
a major contributor to greenhouse gases emitted globally
.
House Zero courtesy of ICON and Casey Dunn
ICON uses a print-in-place method and has produced several houses and is on track to build several hundred more. What’s unique about one of their houses, House ZERO pictured above, is that it leans into what 3D-printed houses are good at. Walls can be any shape: unlike most houses that are square and boxy out of necessity, this house has a sort of wave to it. Whether you visually like it or not, achieving the same effect in the structural elements of the house would be incredibly difficult and wasteful. What is more important is that this house is for sale and is livable.
Cut On-Site
Cut-on-site is a bit of a different approach. It is somewhat of a hybrid between prefab and print in place. It’s not really printed but brings in some of the same ideas. A company brings the machine that creates pieces onto the site but rather than creating one monolithic print, you create smaller pieces that can be built and assembled together as they come out of the machine. A large CNC shipped to the site accepts sheets of plywood and turns them into boxes with holes for insulation, wiring, plumbing, and all the other strange tubes we have running through our walls.
Facit Homes
is a company that produces homes using this technique. Their CNC router produces “cassettes” according to the design of the house and they’re assembled. While it generates more waste than pure additive manufacturing, each cassette is made from a standard piece of plywood and it makes it easy to reuse and recycle. They’ve produced a dozen houses that are quite modern but otherwise normal-looking homes.
The Verdict
Currently, 3D printed houses don’t achieve their goals of being cheaper, faster, or environmentally friendly. None of the homes we reviewed here were cheaper than traditional methods, and some cost significantly more. While some were faster, there is still the issue of finishing. After the structure of the house has been constructed, professionals need to come and install windows, doors, trim, and all the things we enjoy about homes. Electrical and plumbing also need to be installed in the structure.
Despite their shortcomings, 3D homes have two major strengths. They can create shapes and forms that traditional construction cannot, as seen in the House ZERO. Additionally, they are far less wasteful than traditional construction. Platform construction creates literal tons of waste and 3D-printed structures are printed with only what they need. It’s just in the nature of comparing additive and subtractive manufacturing.
Obviously, this isn’t a complete overview of the industry. There are companies and techniques under development that aren’t covered here. We’s say there’s been slow but exciting progress in the industry. What was a pipedream twenty years ago is now in its infancy — homes have been built and people have bought them and moved in, which is a major milestone. We’ll keep our eyes on it.
Anything we missed? Let us know in the comments. | 66 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492212",
"author": "Inhibit",
"timestamp": "2022-07-13T14:25:47",
"content": "What’s the qualifier and breakdown on that waste figure? Is it just biodegradable wood offcuts?Seems like those’d be more environmentally friendly than a huge concrete structure. And usable in a variety o... | 1,760,372,632.98887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/tio-is-a-serial-terminal-for-us/ | Tio Is A Serial Terminal For Us | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"rs232",
"serial port",
"terminal"
] | With Linux and the serial port there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that Linux has great support for serial hardware of all sorts and a host of tools for accessing the serial port. That’s important when you use a lot of serial-like devices like Arduinos with USB ports and the like. The bad news is that most of the terminal software is made to accommodate the days when a computer had real serial terminals and modems with people interacting with them. We bet that’s why [lundmar] developed tio,
a serial device I/O tool for people like us
.
Honestly, how many times have you needed Zmodem file transfers and recognition of the DCD signal to detect an incoming connection? Sure there are many other programs that will do the job, but tio brings a clean simplicity along with functionality that embedded developers need.
The software will support arbitrary devices, show statistics, and give you control of the RS232 lines. There’s support for delayed characters and lines, useful if you are dealing with a super simple device with no handshaking. There’s also hex support and many ways to log data and statistics. We especially like that it can automatically reconnect which is a great feature.
Of course, you want some terminal features and tio includes those. For example, you can elect to have local echo turned on or map characters so that, for example, a carriage return turns into a carriage return and a line feed. You can use command line options to set up most items including features like redirecting to a network socket. Other commands inside the program — by default, triggered by Control+T — let you do things like send a break, toggle handshaking lines, and more.
You might think the serial port is dead, but it really just transformed into
a USB port.
Of course, like everything else these days, you can also get your
terminal in the browser
. | 31 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492173",
"author": "ka1axy",
"timestamp": "2022-07-13T11:11:46",
"content": "My first job out of college was on the team that designed the Data General D200 serial terminal, so I’m getting a kick out of this. Thanks for developing this. The serial interface is probably the simplest... | 1,760,372,633.163825 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/a-guitar-from-scratch/ | A Guitar From Scratch | Jenny List | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"electric guitar",
"guitar",
"homemade guitar"
] | You can pursue your dreams of rock superstardom with any guitar, be it from an expensive luthier, a pawn shop, or a mail order catalog. But to join the ranks of rock greats there’s one way to have a truly special instrument, which is to build it yourself. [Bensoncraft] may not be [Bryan May]’s dad or indeed [Eddie van Halen], but he has at least joined the exclusive ranks of home made guitar builders with his video “
Guitar from scratch: hard mode
“.
It’s a fairly long video and we’ve placed it below the break, but a compelling one as we learn just how many operations go into making an electric guitar. When he says hard mode he’s not joking, there are no pre-made parts save for the strings and he’s not following a set of plans. Everything including the tuners and pickups are made from scratch, but for a non-guitar-player it’s she sheer number of different pieces of wood that go into making the solid body and neck of the instrument that’s so interesting. Even if you’ll never make a guitar you should watch it.
We’ve never seen a guitar build quite like this one before, but we have brought you
a 3D printed guitar body
,
and neck
.
Thanks [Aaron] for the tip. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492152",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2022-07-13T09:08:49",
"content": "Rob Scalion helped a professional luthier build an acoustic guitar and made a YT video about it. After watching that video I’d say building an electric guitar is easy.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,372,633.209838 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/12/its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-live-air-traffic-plane-spotting-simulation/ | It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s… A Live Air Traffic Plane Spotting Simulation | Ryan Flowers | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ads-b",
"air traffic control",
"atc",
"flight simulator",
"planespotting",
"simulation",
"virtual"
] | Plane spotting has been a hobby of aviation enthusiasts for generations. Hanging out by the airport, watching aircraft come and go, maybe even listening to Air Traffic Control on a scanner from your local Radio Shack. Yep- we’ve been there, and it can be a lot of fun! But how can those of us who don’t live near a major controlled airport keep up on the action?
As demonstrated by the [Information Zulu] YouTube channel’s Live Stream, seen below the break, the action may be closer than you think
!
Aircraft on approach to LAX- Virtually
By using publicly available information, software, and some ingenuity, [Information Zulu] has created a live simulation of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) for your simulated plane spotting pleasure. Aircraft positional data is gained through an ADSB receiver and piped into a the flight simulator software with a
Traffic Injection Addon
, and the simulator itself is used to properly place aircraft, set the weather, and even the correct aircraft types and liveries. Setting off the illusion of a real plane spotting adventure is the live Air Traffic Control radio chatter!
We love the creativity that went into not just making all of the software available, but in combining it into a cohesive product that can be viewed 24/7 on YouTube that, if you squint just right, could be mistaken for a view of the real thing.
If you’re not familiar with ADSB and how it’s used to track aircraft in such a way that anybody can receive it with the right equipment, check out this
beginner’s course on ADSB
from a few years back! | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492216",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2022-07-13T14:49:37",
"content": "Another place to listen to ATC is onhttps://www.liveatc.net/. You don’t get all the ADSB data, but you can choose what airport you want to listen to.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": ... | 1,760,372,633.098687 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/12/build-your-own-whatever/ | Build Your Own… Whatever | Al Williams | [
"how-to"
] | [
"how-to",
"library",
"repository"
] | You can read all about making, say, a bookshelf or bowling, but unless you’ve actually done it, you don’t really know how it works. That’s the idea behind [codecrafters-io]
Build-Your-Own-X GitHub repository
. It is a collection of software projects from around the Web that offer “step-by-step guides for recreating our favorite technologies from scratch.”
What can you find there? Well, how about writing your own version of Git itself? Or maybe you’d like to dive into a physics engine, blockchain code, or a text editor. Then there’s our favorite: an operating system.
Since these are collected from around the internet, the quality might vary, of course. But there are many gems. For example, writing
a 3D renderer to match Wolfenstein
looks pretty good. The video about producing a chess engine looks great, but we will admit we didn’t make it through the 96 videos.
Make your own blog in PHP
might not be the most interesting to us, but we bet someone will enjoy it.
There are some old favorites, too.
Jones on Forth
makes an appearance as does
From Nand to Tetris
. Something for everyone. We didn’t, though, see any of our projects on the site. We were hoping some of our
mbed
,
FPGA
, or
interrupt handler
stuff would have popped up. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492097",
"author": "Bunsen",
"timestamp": "2022-07-13T02:43:26",
"content": "Hey, give the “Make your own blog” series a shot. Maybe they’ll teach you how to make replies appear under their parent comments.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,632.795659 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/14/its-linux-on-an-esp32/ | It’s Linux. On An ESP32 | Jenny List | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP32",
"linux",
"RISC-V"
] | By today’s standards, the necessities for running a Linux-based operating system are surprisingly meagre in terms of RAM and processor power. Back in the day we ran earlier Linux versions on Intel 386 and 486 machines with tiny quantities of memory compared to the multi-gigabyte many-core powerhouses we do today.
So it stands to reason that many of the more powerful microcontrollers should also run Linux, but of course they are often unable because the lack a memory management unit. The original ESP32 is just such a candidate, plenty of power but unable to run Linux. Not so fast, because [Dror Gluska] has managed to boot a Linux kernel on Espressif’s dual-core chip. How on earth?
By emulating a RISC-V processor on it and booting a RISC-V version of the kernel
.
The emulator in question is [Fabrice Belard]’s
TinyEMU
, a piece of software that brings both RISC-V and x86 to limited-spec platforms, and the write-up describes the extensive optimization and tracing of ESP32 bottlenecks which was finally able to get a Linux kernel booting in 1 minute and 35 seconds. Of course it’s simply an exercise to prove it can be done and we won’t be seeing Linux-based ESP projects any time soon, but it’s still an impressive piece of work.
This isn’t the lowest-spec microcontroller we’ve seen run Linux,
back in 2012 we saw it on emulated ARM running on an 8-bit AVR
. | 30 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492474",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2022-07-14T11:17:21",
"content": "Isn’t ESP32 supposed to have an actual MMU? Or is the datasheet just misleading?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6492475",
"author": "doragasu"... | 1,760,372,633.050877 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/14/game-boy-repurposed-solely-as-a-camera/ | Game Boy Repurposed Solely As A Camera | Lewin Day | [
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"c mount lens",
"camera",
"game boy camera",
"lens",
"lens mount",
"nintendo",
"Nintendo Game Boy"
] | As much as we all love the Game Boy Camera, it’s really just an add-on to the popular handheld console. Twitter user [@thegameboycam] decided to build a dedicated camera platform using the hardware, and the result was
the Game Boy DSLR.
Camera pedants will note that it’s not really a DSLR, but that’s not really the point. It’s a Game Boy with the camera accessory built into a proper camera-like housing. There’s a CS/C mount for the lens, and it’s got a custom shell with leatherette, just like the cameras of last century. It’s also got a cold shoe, and a 1/4″ screw thread for tripod mounting. Oh, and strap lugs! So you can really rock that old-school aesthetic with your tweed suit on.
More practical modern features include a 1800 mAh battery that charges over USB Type C and a backlit IPS display. The screen has been turned through 90 degrees, and the cartridge port and buttons are relocated to create a more traditional camera-like form factor. If you really want, though, you can still play it like a regular Game Boy. Just swap out the modified camera cart with the lens mount for a regular Game Boy Camera or another game cartridge.
It’s a fun hack that scores big on style points. No longer can you be the cool kid just by rocking a Game Boy with
a big ol’ lens hanging off the back
. Now you gotta compete with this!
Our tipsline is waiting for when you’ve got the next big thing in Game Boy Camera hacks. Video after the break.
Cart swapping action
pic.twitter.com/Q4s9GehHcb
— Game Boy Camera (@thegameboycam)
July 10, 2022 | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492447",
"author": "no",
"timestamp": "2022-07-14T09:09:46",
"content": "This begs for a nice B&W display, like a low-power Sharp memory display, readable in full sun.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6492634",
"author... | 1,760,372,633.384822 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/cp-m-is-now-freer-than-it-was/ | CP/M Is Now Freer Than It Was | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8080",
"CP/M",
"open source",
"z80"
] | It’s easy to think of the earlier history of desktop computing operating systems in terms of DOS, Windows, and Mac OS with maybe a bit of AmigaOS, TOS, or RiscOS thrown in. But the daddy of desktop computing, the OS that put word-processors and spreadsheets in 1970s offices and had a huge influence on what followed, isn’t among that list. Digital Research’s CP/M ran initially on Intel 8080-based machines before losing out to MS-DOS as IBM’s choice for their PC, and then gradually faded away over the 1980s. Its source has been available in some form with a few strings for a long time now, but
now we have confirmation from Digital Research’s successor company that it’s now available without restrictions on where it can be distributed
.
For years it was something an operating system that had been bypassed by the hardware and hacker communities, as the allure of GNU/Linux was stronger and most available CP/M capable machines were also 1980s 8-bit gaming platforms. But with the more recent increased popularity of dedicated retrocomputing platforms such as
the RC2014
it’s become a more common sight in our community. Brush up your command line skills, and
give it a go
!
Header: Michael Specht,
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 32 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492448",
"author": "hartl",
"timestamp": "2022-07-14T09:13:01",
"content": "The website linked above says “Let this paragraph represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance, and otherwisemake available in a nonexclusive manner CP/M and its derivatives.”It is still unclear wh... | 1,760,372,633.647976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/cracking-the-mifare-classic-could-get-you-free-snacks/ | Cracking The MiFare Classic Could Get You Free Snacks | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"mifare",
"mifare classic",
"NFC",
"NFC tag",
"vending machine"
] | [Guillermo] started a new job a while back. That job came with an NFC access card, which was used for booking rooms and building access. The card also served as a wallet for using the vending machines.
He set about hacking the card to see what he could uncover.
Initial scans with
NFC Tools
revealed the card was an Infineon MIFARE Classic Card 1k. These cards are considered fairly old and insecure by now. There’s plenty of guides online on how to crack the private keys that are supposed to make the card secure. Conveniently, [Guillermo] had a reader/writer on hand for these very cards.
[Guillermo] was able to use a tool called mfoc to dump the keys and data off the card. From there, he was able to determine that the credit for the vending machines was stored on the card itself, rather than on a remote server.
This means that it’s simple to change the values on the card in order to get free credit, and thus free snacks. However, [Guillermo] wisely resisted the urge to cash in on candy and sodas. When totals from the machine and credit system were reconciled, there’d be a clear discrepancy, and a short investigation would quickly point to his own card.
He also managed to successfully clone a card onto a “Magic Mifare” from Amazon. In testing, the card performed flawlessly on all systems he tried it on.
It goes to show just how vulnerable some NFC-based access control systems really are.
RFID tags are often not as safe as you’d hope, either! | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492380",
"author": "Val",
"timestamp": "2022-07-14T02:08:25",
"content": "Picking a lock can get you some freebies too. It’s called theft, though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6492446",
"author": "Frankel",
... | 1,760,372,633.505682 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/because-its-cool-to-make-a-watch-that-thin/ | Because It’s Cool To Make A Watch That Thin | Matthew Carlson | [
"clock hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"ferrari",
"watch",
"watchmaking"
] | Recently [Richard Mille] and Ferrari (yes, that Ferrari) announced
the thinnest mechanical watch ever made, the RM UP-01
.
It measures a scant 1.75mm thick (~1/16 of an inch). The aesthetic is debatable, and the price tag is not even listed on the page, but we suspect it is a rather significant sum. But setting aside those two things, we’d like to step back and appreciate this as a piece of art. This is not a practical watch by any stretch of the imagination. This watch is the equivalent of a human-powered airplane. Impractical, costly, and not as effective as other modern mechanically-powered solutions. But that doesn’t make it any less impressive.
Since it is so thin, a regular stacked assortment of gears wasn’t an option. So instead, the gears were distributed over the watch’s surface, which led to a thin watch face. This means that winding is manual to save space, and a single winding will last around 45 hours. The heartbeat of any mechanical watch is the
escapement
. So they had to redesign the escapement to be flatter, doing away with the guard pin and the safety roller, instead using the anchor fork to bank the lever in case of unexpected forces or shocks.
The design is incredible but perhaps just as noteworthy is the fact that it could be machined. Machined out of titanium with a micron of accuracy, which is an incredible feat if you’ve seen
a savage discussion of measurements
. The smaller and more accurate you get, the steeper the difficulty curve.
A short teaser is available after the break. | 48 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492354",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-07-13T23:37:24",
"content": "I can hardly wait for Lamborghini’s response!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6492358",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
... | 1,760,372,634.189453 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/throwback-designing-addressable-leds-from-scratch/ | Throwback: Designing Addressable LEDs From Scratch | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"addressable led",
"addressable leds",
"ws2812",
"ws2812b"
] | These days, addressable LEDs are all the rage. A little chip paired with each LED receives signals and modulates the light output as needed. [John Peterson] was working on a project along these very lines,
designing his Curilights back in 2008!
[John] wasn’t the first to come up with the idea; he designed the Curilights to replicate a string of programmable LEDs he’d seen called Triklits. His design involved each RGB LED being fitted with a Microchip PIC 16F688 microcontroller, which could receive serial data and control the LED channels with PWM. These LEDs could then be strung up to create an addressable chain. It’s fundamentally the same concept as the WS2812, just in a larger format and built by hand. His design also had the benefit of non-volatile memory onboard the PICs, so animations could be stored even after power off. [John] later went on to build a
controller for his lights
, complete with sensors. It could be triggered by a motion sensor or light sensor, and would run animations on the string without the use of a computer.
While [John]’s design didn’t go on to bigger things or commercial success, it did win first place at the Third Annual Lantronix Wireless Design Contest. It also goes to show that many people will come around to the same idea when it makes good sense!
If you’re interested in the wider world of addressable LEDs,
check out our breakdown on some of the products out there.
Meanwhile, if you’re brewing up your own flashing, glowing projects,
be sure to notify the tipsline! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492372",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2022-07-14T01:07:54",
"content": "It’s funny, I wanted to do something like that around that time :-)But the business never materialised…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6492408",
... | 1,760,372,633.95555 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/13/one-shot-ir-helper-is-a-great-beginner-project/ | One Shot IR Helper Is A Great Beginner Project | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ir blaster",
"pi pico",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | Sometimes you need a little utility device to do a very simple job, and do it well.This
one-shot IR helper from [Gregory Sanders] is just that.
[Gregory] had a TV that didn’t support automatically turning on when the power was applied. This is frustrating when you like to leave devices switched hard off when not in use to save on standby energy draw. Thus, there needed to be a way to send the screen an on signal when his multi-monitor setup was powered on.
A simple circuit paired with a Pi Pico was pressed into service. The Pico flashes an IR LED, squirting out the requisite code to tell the TCL branded TV to switch on. [Gregory] figured out the codes by using an Arduino to read the output of the TV’s remote with an IR sensor. The hook here is the code is written in MicroPython, using IR libraries from [Peter Hinch].
Now, when [Gregory] powers up his rig, the IR sender will trigger the TV to switch on. It’s a little frustrating that the auto-on function wasn’t available in the factory, but regardless, now everything’s working as it should. If you want to do this in reverse, consider building a
TV-B-Gone
or
a silencer for the boomboxes used by dancing grandmas
! | 50 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492290",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2022-07-13T18:40:43",
"content": "That wiring job is exactly the right mixture of pragmatic and bonkers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6492292",
"author": "Rumble_in_the_J... | 1,760,372,634.317717 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/the-digital-ham-hack-chat/ | The Digital Ham Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, July 13 at noon Pacific for
The Digital Ham Hack Chat
with Rosy Schechter and John Hays!
For most of its existence, amateur radio has been the quintessence of the analog arts. From the very earliest days of radio, hobbyists have been piecing together circuits to ply the radio spectrum, using whatever bits of RF wizardry they managed to pick up — or invent — along the way. From the architecture of the radios to the nature of the conversations they had over the airwaves, ham radio was very much an analog experience.
But if hams are anything, they’re resourceful, and they’ve got a long history of leveraging whatever the current state of the art happens to be. And so when electrical engineering began to dive into the digital world, so too did the hams. Radioteletype, facsimile, and other text-and-data modes lead to things like packet radio, which in turn gave us powerful tools like APRS, FT8, and PACTOR, upon which the current rich infrastructure of location reporting,
weak signal digital contacts
and
beacons
, and email service independent of an Internet connection have been built. There’s even a complete TCP/IP network using amateur radio as the physical layer, which even predates the widespread public Internet by many years.
Amateur radio always has been at the forefront of digital communications, but it takes work to keep hams in their leadership position in the field. To help with that,
Amateur Radio Digital Communications
(ARDC) was established. ARDC is a non-profit dedicated to supporting amateur radio and digital communication science and technology, chiefly through their programs of grants that are available to fund the development of technically innovative open and non-profit projects in amateur radio.
For this Hack Chat, ARDC Executive Director Rosy Schechter (KJ7RYV) and Staff Lead John Hays (K7VE) will be joining us to discuss the world of digital communications on the ham bands. Here’s your chance to share your experiences with digital modes, find out about what’s new in digital comms, and find out how to participate in the ARDC grant program and possibly fund the next big thing for the digital ham.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 13 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
.
Featured images:
Chrumps
, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ptolusque
, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6492035",
"author": "Jason Guerard",
"timestamp": "2022-07-12T21:57:07",
"content": "Once you start realizing how deep into nothing digital modes can grab a signal the world becomes a different place. #JS8CALL",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,634.232978 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/watching-a-boat-get-welded-together-is-workshop-asmr/ | Watching A Boat Get Welded Together Is Workshop ASMR | Tom Nardi | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"aluminum",
"boat",
"boatbuilding",
"metalworking",
"welding"
] | If you’ve been on the Internet long enough to know about Hackaday, we’ll wager you’re familiar with the concept of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) — a tingling sensation in the scalp that’s said to be triggered by certain auditory stimuli. There are countless videos on YouTube that promise to give you “the tingles” using everything from feather dusters to overly starched shirts, but for us, the tool of choice is apparently a
Lincoln Electric Magnum PRO 100SG spool gun in the hands of [Bob]
.
You’ll want a friend to help wrangle the panels.
Admittedly we can’t promise the latest
Making Stuff
video will induce a euphoric physical sensation for all viewers, but at the very least, we think you’ll agree that watching [Bob] and his brother methodically welding together the twelve foot hull of what will eventually be a custom jet boat is strangely relaxing.
While we usually associate [Bob] with scratch builds
, this time he’s actually working his way through a commercial kit. Sold by Jet Stream Adventure Boats, the kit includes the pre-cut aluminum panels that make up the hull, stringers, and top deck — niceties like a windshield and seats are offered as extras. The engine and jet drive need to be salvaged from an existing personal watercraft (PWC), but that will have to wait for a future video. For now, there’s a
boat-load
(get it?) of tack welding to be done.
The build process looks to go pretty smoothly, except for when they attempt to put the bow of the boat together. Unable to get the two side panels to meet properly, [Bob] eventually has to contact the manufacturer. After some back and forth, it turns out that a bit must have broken on the CNC when the hull panel went through, as a key cut was made nearly 8 inches (20 cm) too short. He was able to complete the cut with a jigsaw and continue on with the build, but we’re still scratching our heads at how this wasn’t caught before it got shipped out.
It won’t be the first homemade boat we’ve covered
, but given [Bob]’s attention to detail, we’re particularly excited to see how this one develops in future videos.
Especially
since he’s
foolishly
bravely asked the commenters to come up with a name for his new craft. | 33 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491637",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T15:05:23",
"content": "Why doesnt it sink?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491642",
"author": "Amiable Ninja",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T15:38:00",
... | 1,760,372,634.094201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/nasas-flying-telescope-is-winding-down-operations/ | NASA’s Flying Telescope Is Winding Down Operations | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"astronomy",
"Hubble Space Telescope",
"infrared",
"james webb space telescope",
"SOFIA",
"space telescope"
] | NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is arguably the best known and most successful observatory in history, delivering unprecedented images that have tantalized the public and astronomers alike for more than 30 years. But even so, there’s nothing particularly special about Hubble. Ultimately it’s just a large optical telescope which has the benefit of being in space rather than on Earth’s surface. In fact, it’s long been believed that Hubble is not dissimilar from contemporary spy satellites operated by the National Reconnaissance Office — it’s just pointed in a different direction.
There are however some truly unique instruments in NASA’s observational arsenal, and though they might not have the name recognition of the Hubble or James Webb Space Telescopes, they still represent incredible feats of engineering. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), an airborne infrared telescope built into a retired airliner that is truly one-of-a-kind.
Unfortunately this unique aerial telescope also happens to be exceptionally expensive to operate; with an annual operating cost of approximately $85 million, it’s one of the agency’s most expensive ongoing astrophysics missions. After twelve years of observations, NASA and their partners at the German Aerospace Center have
decided to end the SOFIA program after its current mission concludes in September
.
With the telescope so close to making its final observations, it seems a good time to look back at this incredible program and why the US and German space centers decided it was time to put SOFIA back in the hangar.
Eye In the Sky
By making its astronomical observations while flying through the stratosphere at an altitude of approximately twelve kilometers (40,000 feet), SOFIA is literally and figuratively a middle ground between ground and space based telescopes. Its operational altitude means the telescope is above the vast majority of atmospheric water vapor that would otherwise block certain infrared frequencies from reaching the Earth’s surface, while its ability to be regularly serviced and upgraded gives it the sort of scientific flexibility that would normally be associated with an observatory on the ground.
The key to the SOFIA program is an aircraft large enough to carry the telescope, along with its instrumentation and the personnel to operate it, up to the required altitude for stable, long-duration flights. In this case, it’s a Boeing 747SP wide-body airliner that originally started its career with Pan Am back in 1977.
This special “SP” variant of the iconic 747 was specifically engineered to fly longer, faster, and higher by removing a section of the fuselage and performing other mass-saving modifications. Built in relatively limited numbers specifically for flights between New York and the Middle East, the airframe used for SOFIA is one of only four 747SPs still flying.
Considerable structural modifications were required for the 747SP to carry the 17 metric ton (38,000 lbs) telescope, but certainly none more obvious than the large door that can be opened during flight to expose the 2.7 m (8.8 ft) primary mirror. To prevent an inrush of wind when the door is open, which would introduce unacceptable vibrations in the optics, a pronounced “hump” was added to the rear of the fuselage to redirect the high-speed airflow before it hits the opening. Some turbulent air does invariably enter the chamber, but it can be compensated for using the telescope’s mount, which uses a combination of pressurized oil bearings, counterweights, gyroscopes, and magnetic torque motors to stabilize and aim the instrument.
Powerful Competition
The SOFIA telescope is by far the largest ever to be mounted in an aircraft, a record which will almost certainly never be broken. Even still, its primary mirror is dwarfed by the 6.5 m (21 ft) reflector of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA’s new flagship infrared telescope that is just days away from coming online. While it’s difficult to directly compare the two observatories and their capabilities, there’s no question that the JWST represents the future of infrared astronomy. At the same time,
SOFIA has faced criticism over the last few years
over how little scientific data it has been able to collect relative to its high development and operational costs.
While the JWST largely makes SOFIA redundant, that’s not to say the scientific community won’t mourn its loss. Not only is SOFIA capable of observing a much wider range of IR frequencies, but its unique ability to target the moon led directly to the
2020 confirmation of water on the sunlit lunar surface
. It can also be upgraded over time to make observations with instruments that today might not even exist, whereas the JWST is too far from Earth to ever receive the sort of incremental upgrades that Hubble did.
Put simply, there’s a valid need for an observatory like SOFIA. But unless NASA can figure out a cheaper way to build and operate one, it might be a scientific niche that goes unfulfilled. | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491667",
"author": "Witold Witkowski",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T16:57:55",
"content": "Marcus on the OmegaTau podcast had a good deep dive episode about SOFIA. He actually rode on one of the missions, and had a great chat with some of the scientists involved.Good listening:https://... | 1,760,372,634.012034 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/injecting-a-bit-of-rust-via-dll/ | Injecting A Bit Of Rust Via DLL | Matthew Carlson | [
"Games",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"DLL Injection",
"rust",
"snes9x"
] | Ever been frustrated that a software package was missing a feature you want? In the best-case scenario, the software would be open source and you could just tweak the code and rebuild. But in many cases, the software is closed-source. In the case of [Faster than lime], he found a SNES emulator (Snes9X) that didn’t support controllers to showcase the technique. So with a little bit of Rust,
he wrote some code that could be injected into the emulator via DLL injection
.
It’s a fantastic tutorial that shows the technique. He starts by creating a Rust project that uses the
DLL-Syringe
crate (the rust version of dependency management). This crate does much of the heavy lifting involved with injecting a DLL into a target process. The rest of the journey is an excellent process of going through the Windows documentation and implementing the features. The DLL just reads the controller and then sends the right input to the program. In the end, [Faster than lime] has a great injected DLL and we have a wonderful time learning about Rust and debugging in an injection environment!
It’s been a while since
we last covered DLL injection
, and it’s nice to see how the process has evolved. Video after the break. | 16 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491602",
"author": "Matt",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T12:10:54",
"content": "Wait, Snes9x *is* open source isn’t it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491608",
"author": "Grizzly Adams",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T... | 1,760,372,634.371089 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/a-custom-outdoor-cooking-station-for-city-life/ | A Custom Outdoor Cooking Station For City Life | Dave Rowntree | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"burner",
"cooking",
"outdoor",
"Wok Hei"
] | [shoobs] relocated from Australia to Luxembourg, and was really
missing the whole outdoor cooking scene that is apparently very common in those parts
. Now living in a modest apartment building in the city, he had no easy way to recreate some of his favorite cooking methods — specifically that of Wok Hei (breath of a wok) — the art of Cantonese stir-frying which uses searing heat and a lot of flinging around of the food to mix it up with the burning oil. This results in a complex set of reactions utilizing smoking, caramelization, and
Maillard reactions
to produce the classic Cantonese smoky flavor. Not wanting an off-the-shelf solution [shoobs] took it on himself to build a balcony cooking station capable of the temperatures needed for Wok Hei, and documented it for our viewing pleasure.
Nice custom laser cut details on the regulator mounting
The build started with sourcing a free-standing burner unit from Alibaba, which proved to be a little less powerful (at 30 kW) than ideal, but still sufficient. After locating a matching regulator and pressure gauge capable of the needed flow rate to feed the hungry burner, the next task was to construct a sturdy enough bench to mount it all. This was constructed from Douglas fir slabs, butt-jointed using a 3D printed drilling jig for ease of construction.
Using a flatbed scanner, the existing burner base was digitized in order to make a model suitable for laser-cutting a new mounting plate from steel. [Shoobs] isn’t lucky enough to have access to a metal-capable laser cutter — he sent his cad files off to a cutting service.
A second plate was mounted below with a sufficient gap above the bench to act as a heat shield. This keeps the wooden worktop safe from the heat. Whilst he was laser cutting steel, [shoobs] took the opportunity to design a few other custom parts to mount the regulator and other bits, because, why wouldn’t you? We reckon the end result is pretty nice, in a minimalist and understated way.
We’re no strangers to neat cooking hacks ’round these parts, here’s a
nice double-sausage burner
for those emergency situations and if you need a custom BBQ burner,
then look no further
. | 13 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491558",
"author": "Jan Ciger (@janoc200)",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T08:36:12",
"content": "Lucky author that is able to cook on the balcony – most places I have been to explicitly prohibit grilling/cooking on balconies because of the smoke, especial in rented flats. Or maybe the l... | 1,760,372,634.48682 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/10/grok-rust-in-a-flash/ | Grok Rust In A Flash | Matthew Carlson | [
"how-to",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"learning",
"rust"
] | Here at Hackaday, we are big proponents of using the best tool for the job (or making your own tool if required). But when all you know how to use is Java, everything looks object-oriented. Bad jokes aside, it is important to have many tools at your disposal to allow you to choose wisely. Why not spend a few minutes with
[No Boilerplate] and understand the basics of Rust
?
The focus of the video is to go through as much Rust as possible and teach you how to read it. The idea is that rather than work your way from basic concepts, [No Boilerplate] will go over the vast majority of what you’ll see in a Rust-based program. Whether you’re coming from an object-oriented, functional, or just plain C-based background; you’ll feel comfortable since he makes an effort to compare to what you already know. Some of Rust’s more unique features are covered such as mutability, scope, matching, and strings. However, lifetimes, closures, and traits were left out to keep the video short. These topics are covered in
an excellent blog post
by [Faster than lime] which this video was based on.
What isn’t discussed is
running Rust in a no-std environment like a PIC32
. Rust has seen exciting development over the past few years with the
Linux kernel getting rusty
and the compiler getting continually better. Video after the break. | 19 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491533",
"author": "Jouni",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T05:45:13",
"content": "Is there somewhere some summary what real problem Rust tries to solve (and really solves)?What I mean is; considering how small part actual coding is of the software projects, is it really worth learning an... | 1,760,372,634.431283 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/10/venting-your-pc-outside/ | Venting Your PC Outside | Matthew Carlson | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"Gaming Computer",
"Linus Tech Tips",
"PC cooling"
] | As the power requirements of CPUs and GPUs in modern gaming machines continue to rise, they are quickly becoming more and more of a space heater that happens to play games. If you’re using your PC in a tight space with a door shut, you might find the temperature in your office rising relatively rapidly. Some solutions to this include fans, window AC units, or moving the computer somewhere else and routing cables back to the office. The fine folks at [Linus Tech Tips] tried something a little out of the box by
putting the whole computer in a box
.
We don’t usually cover [Linus Tech Tips] here at Hackaday, but we thought the approach was somewhat novel. PC cases have many exhaust fans and holes, so it’s hard to extract the hot air from a single point. So after purchasing a comically large but cheapish “plant” growing tent, they could enclose the PC and remove the heat through some insulated ducting. A laser-cut adapter plate and 3d printed hose connector allowed the hose to sit in the window to vent outside. An inline fan pulls all the needed air from the tent to the outside. Ultimately, the temperature in the room stayed chill while some benchmarks were running, but there was speculation that the fan was pulling in air from the rest of the apartment to vent the PC’s heat. We’d love to see a more closed system with a heat exchanger to the outside.
Perhaps they can borrow
[Diy Perks]’s bellow PC build
and connect the hose right to it, getting rid of the tent. Video after the break. | 83 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491491",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T02:13:49",
"content": "“If you’re using your PC in a tight space with a door shut, you might find the temperature in your office rising relatively rapidly.”Not a new thing. Had an old AMD that was a real heater with a matching... | 1,760,372,634.60524 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/12/automate-internet-life-with-python/ | Automate Internet Life With Python | Al Williams | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"python"
] | Most of us are adept enough with computers that you know what they can easily do and what they can’t. Invent a new flavor of ice cream? Not easy. Grab the news headlines related to Arduinos from your favorite news feed? Relatively easy. But, of course, the devil is in the details.
FreeCodeCamp
has a
3-hour course
from [Frank Andrade] that dives into the gory details of automating web tasks using Python and a variety of libraries like Path, Xpath, and Selenium. You can watch the course, below.
Topics start off with grabbing tables from websites and PDFs. But it quickly graduates to general-purpose web scraping and even web automation. These techniques can be very useful for testing browser-based applications, too.
By the end, you’ve created an executable that grabs news every day and automatically generates an Excel report. There’s also a little wind down about WhatApp automation. A little something for everyone. We also greatly approved of [Frank]’s workspace which appears in the background. Looks like he would enjoy reading Hackaday.
Honestly, while we’ve seen
easier methods of automating the browser
, there’s something appealing about having the control something like Python affords. Sure beats building
hardware to simulate a human-in-the-loop
. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491880",
"author": "dfsrger",
"timestamp": "2022-07-12T10:16:11",
"content": "why not ruby? is faster than python",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491914",
"author": "Dustin",
"timestamp": "2022-07-12T14:02:14... | 1,760,372,634.658782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/water-drips-up-in-kid-friendly-engineering-experiment/ | Water Drips Up In Kid-Friendly Engineering Experiment | Ryan Flowers | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"illusion",
"strobe",
"water"
] | Did you know that water can drip UP instead of down? It’s true! Okay, okay- it’s a bit of an optical illusion, but one that’s mesmerizing no less, and it’s one that is especially awe-inspiring for kids.
As [Science Buddies] explains in the video below the break
, it’s also achievable for anyone with some basic supplies.
On first glance, the “water dripping upward” illusion looks like it must be extremely complicated with precisely timed drops, and perfectly triggered strobing lights and the like- right? Well, not so much. [Science Buddies] demonstrates a highly simplified experiment using only an aquarium pump, a basic frame, a smart phone with a strobing app, and naturally, water. The experiment is presented in a simple manner that would allow a young person to replicate it without too much adult intervention.
The video goes into such concepts as frequency, duty cycle (pulse width modulation), and other basic engineering principles. The experiment can be completed for just a few dollars for the pump and tubing, and the rest can be improvised. What a great way to get a young one started on their way to engineering!
If you’d like to see a more fleshed out version of a similar machine, check out this
gravity defying dripper we featured a few years ago
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491851",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2022-07-12T07:30:45",
"content": "A Kelvin water dropper is the logical next step, necessarily.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6492404",
"author": "Greg Skyles",
"tim... | 1,760,372,634.702853 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/why-you-should-totally-roll-your-own-aes-cryptography/ | Why You Should Totally Roll Your Own AES Cryptography | Maya Posch | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"aes",
"cryptography",
"security",
"software"
] | Software developers are usually told to ‘never write your own cryptography’, and there definitely are sufficient examples to be found in the past decades of cases where DIY crypto routines caused real damage. This is also the introduction to [Francis Stokes]’s article on
rolling your own crypto system
. Even if you understand the mathematics behind a cryptographic system like AES (symmetric encryption), assumptions made by your code, along with side-channel and many other types of attacks, can nullify your efforts.
So then why write an article on doing exactly what you’re told not to do? This is contained in the often forgotten addendum to ‘don’t roll your own crypto’, which is ‘for anything important’. [Francis]’s tutorial on how to implement AES is incredibly informative as an introduction to symmetric key cryptography for software developers, and demonstrates a number of obvious weaknesses users of an AES library may not be aware of.
This then shows the reason why any developer who uses cryptography in some fashion for anything should absolutely roll their own crypto: to take a peek inside what is usually a library’s black box, and to better understand how the mathematical principles behind AES are translated into a real-world system. Additionally it may be very instructive if your goal is to become a security researcher whose day job is to find the flaws in these systems.
Essentially: definitely do try this at home, just keep your DIY crypto away from production servers :) | 27 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491818",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2022-07-12T03:09:30",
"content": "I always translate to French, ROT13, put it through a Polybius/Playfair square then encode it with a one time pad based on values derived from reel to reel tape of 20M band radio emissions from Jupit... | 1,760,372,634.773742 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/iceblaster-a-dragndrop-bitstream-loader-for-ice40/ | ICEBlaster: A Drag’n’Drop Bitstream Loader For ICE40 | Dave Rowntree | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"fpga",
"iCE40",
"lattice",
"USB mass storage"
] | The iCE40 series of FPGAs gets a fair bit of coverage on these pages, largely due to its accessibility (thanks to huge efforts in reverse engineering and open tool chains) and likely also due to Lattice Semiconductors’ attitude to open source in general. Whilst these devices are small and rather limited, you can’t really beat them for a first foray into the subject. They’re plenty beefy enough for many of the simpler FPGA applications. [TinLethax] over on Hackaday.IO has plenty of experience with the devices, and has added another tool to our collective iCE40 arsenal, namely iCEBlaster, a
USB mass storage device (MSC) style bootloader
for drag-n-drop bitstream loading. The days of needing dedicated special programmers are starting to be numbered, with many chips now presenting a USB mass storage device to the host in order to upload the firmware image.
FPGAs don’t tend to operate this way, needing a device-specific bitstream loading upon start-up, which (unless they have OTP memory) is usually the job of an external configuration memory. iCEBlaster (a play on the Xilinx ByteBlaster programmer, maybe?) runs on the STM32F4xx series devices at least, but should be easily portable to others. The idea is pretty straightforward — dragging a new bitstream file onto the storage device initiates an FPGA target reset, which in turn allows the STM32 to send the bitstream over to the iCE40 via the SPI interface. Nothing more than that.
If you’ve been looking to get into the iCE40,
this guide might be a good starting point
, and every learning experience needs a good project to drive it, how about
running Doom on a softcore RISC-V
? | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491800",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-07-12T01:00:30",
"content": "“based on STM32”They totally passed up the chance to program it with another iCE40!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491822",
"author": "Tin... | 1,760,372,635.204918 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/old-cnc-brain-swapped-with-an-arduino/ | Old CNC Brain Swapped With An Arduino | Arya Voronova | [
"cnc hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"cnc",
"CNC controller",
"cnc conversion",
"CNC machine",
"grbl",
"isel"
] | [Sebastian] and [Stefan Shütz] had a ISEL EP1090 CNC machine at home, sitting unused, and they
decided to bring it to life.
With
pretty good mechanical specs,
this CNC looked promising – alas, it was severely constrained by its controller. The built-in CPU’s software was severely outdated, had subpar algorithms for motor driving programmed in, and communication with the CNC was limited because the proprietary ISEL communications protocol that isn’t spoken by other devices.The two brothers removed the CPU from its PLCC socket, and went on to wiring a
grbl
-fueled Arduino into the controller box.
They reverse-engineered the motor driver connections – those go through a 74HC245 buffer between the original CPU and the drivers. Initially, they put an Arduino inside the control box of the CNC and it fit nicely, but it turned out the Arduino’s CPU would restart every time the spindle spun up – apparently, EMC would rear its head. So, they placed the Arduino out of the box, and used two CAT7 cables to wire up the motor and endstop signals to it.
For tapping into these signals, they took the 74HC245 out of its socket, and made an interposer from two small protoboards and some pin headers – letting them connect to the STEP and DIR lines without soldering wires into the original PCB. There’s extensive documentation, GRBL settings, and more pictures
in their GitHub repo,
too – in case you have a similar CNC and would like to learn about upgrading its controller board!
After this remake, the CNC starts up without hassles. Now, the brothers shall CNC on! Often, making an old CNC machine work is indeed that easy, and old controller retrofits
have been a staple of ours.
You can indeed use an Arduino, one of the various pre-made controller boards like
Gerbil
or
TinyG,
or even
a Raspberry Pi
– whatever helps you bridge the divide between you and a piece of desktop machinery you ought to start tinkering with. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491746",
"author": "Phil Barrett",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T21:14:21",
"content": "Always fun to see a dead CNC machine brought back to life. Old iron is good iron.A better way to handle EMI is to use standard isolation techniques: isolated power supply, opto isolators for I/O, e... | 1,760,372,634.918621 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/burn-pictures-on-a-cd-r-no-special-drive-needed/ | Burn Pictures On A CD-R, No Special Drive Needed | Jenny List | [
"Art"
] | [
"CD-R",
"CD-ROM",
"lightscribe"
] | When we routinely carry devices holding tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data, it’s sometimes a shock to remember that there was once a time when 650 MB on a CD was a very big deal indeed. These now archaic storage media came first as silver pre-recorded CD-ROMs, then later as recordable CD-Rs. Most people eventually owned CD writer drives, and some fancy ones came with the feature of etching pictures in the unused portions of the disc.
Haven’t got a fancy drive and desire an etched CD-R?
No worries, [arduinocelentano] has a solution
, in software which writes a disk image for a standard CD writer whose data makes the visible image on the disc.
CD-Rs have a thin layer of phthalate dye sandwiched between the polycarbonate disc and a silvered layer of lacquer. They’re often gold coloured, but the silvering is in fact just aluminium. The data is encoded as a series of pits and lands crested by the laser vapourising small portions of the dye to make holes.
The code creates a data structure of a standard CD-ROM session which doesn’t contain any usable data, instead whose pits and lands are arranged to form the image. You can find it all in a GitHub repository, and have a go at creating your own offerings. We would have made a Wrencher disc for our pictures, but
sadly for some of us who were once in the thick of it
we don’t have any CD-Rs any more. | 63 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491696",
"author": "0xfred",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T18:33:56",
"content": "I recently threw away a large stack of unused DVD-Rs because there seems to be no use for them any more. Some were LigtScribe ones that were designed to have an image burned on to the top.https://en.wikipe... | 1,760,372,635.108347 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/11/where-are-our-video-phones/ | Where Are Our Video Phones? | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Original Art",
"Phone Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"history",
"video phones"
] | Videoconferencing has been around in one form or another for quite a while, but it took the pandemic to thrust into prominence with just about everyone. In a way, it has been the delivery of something long-promised by phone companies, futurists, and science fiction writers: the picture phone. But very few people imagined how the picture phone would actually manifest itself. We thought it might be interesting to look at some of the historical predictions and attempts to bring this technology to the mass market.
The reality is, we don’t have true picture phones. We have computers with sufficient bandwidth to carry live video and audio. Your FaceTime call is going over the data network. Contrast that with, say, sending a fax which really is a document literally over the phone lines.
So how did people imagine picture phones? And when did they become available? The answers might surprise you. We aren’t sure how far back people imagined such a device, but we know that one was built as early as 1930.
Even as early as the 1870s, science fiction mentioned telephonoscopes, an intention a cartoonist attributed to a future version of Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell did think such a thing was possible and even wrote of using selenium as a way to sense light to convert it into electricity. He knew, though, that the sensor would have to be very tiny. This was years before electromechanical TV started to appear in the early part of the 20th century.
A Brief Survey of Picture Phones
From the Radio Shack comic: The New Science Fair Story of Electronics” from 1978.
You can argue what exactly constitutes a picture phone. AT&T offered a picture phone commercially in 1992 — we’ll talk about it soon — that showed black and white images at 10 frames per second. While that’s crude by today’s standards, most people would agree it was video. But some old attempts used something akin to what ham radio operators call slow scan TV. A camera would grab a black and white image and send it fax-like via audio tones. That means you got an 6- or 8-second delay and you could see the picture. Most people wouldn’t consider that video, but it is a slippery slope where you draw the line.
We remember Radio Shack briefly advertising these phones, although we can’t find any evidence of it now. But we think they were Mitsubishi Luma phones. Regardless, these kinds of phones were mostly novelties and didn’t sell well in the consumer space.
Ancient History
It is no secret that the phone company itself had the biggest interest in Picturephones (a trademark) and, in fact, everyone assumed that by 2001, every payphone would have a camera and a screen. Not many people thought the payphone itself would be an endangered species. Even the 1927 classic
Metropolis
had a video phone call in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXokqxBQsFM
The phone company started working on video calling when it sent a speech by Herbert Hoover — then the Secretary of Commerce — from Washington to New York in 1927. The video was only one way and with a limited frame rate. The New York Times noted that Hoover’s face was not clearly distinguishable.
The equipment used probably looked like the 1927 prototype seen here. The scanning for the image was
done with a mechanical disk
, which is limiting.
Getting that much data across phone lines would be a challenge before there was any way to compress the signal. In fact, the image traveled over multiple phone lines. With a mechanical system, the motors on the sending and receiving disk also needed to be synchronized, presenting another technical challenge. The phone company kept working on this system — dubbed Ikonophone — for several years with a team of around 200 people. Work slowed during World War II, but by the 1950s, the company would resume work on the system now known as Picturephone.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, Germans had public video phone service as early as 1936 between the post offices in Berlin and Leipzig. A dedicated cable 100 miles long connected the two phones that combined a flying-spot scanner and a cathode ray tube. The video was respectable, at 25 frames per second and 150 lines of resolution. The system eventually increased to 180 lines of resolution and other routes including Hamburg, Munich, and Nuremberg. Each city had two booths and a call cost about 1/15th of the average worker’s weekly wage. The French also had a similar system. These post office video phones, like the United States version, halted during the War.
Picturephone
By the mid-1950s, prototype picture phones using signal compression could transmit an image every two seconds over regular phone lines. The phone contained a storage tube or magnetic drum. By 1964, the Picturephone Mod I which had a better frame rate was seen at the New York World’s Fair and Disneyland. By 1964, there were several Picturephone booths, but they were not very popular, mainly because of the cost which could be as high as $27 for three minutes — over $250 today. By 1968, the phonebooths were gone.
The Mod II, however, found use for videoconferencing in 1970. The cost was high. The phone cost $150 along with a service fee of about $160 per month for the first phone and $50 for each additional phone. For that price, you got a whole 30 minutes of calls, after which you would pay a quarter a minute. Eventually, the price came down, but it was a lot of money in the early 1970s.
For that price, you got about 250 lines of resolution at 30 frames per second. It looks like you also needed a speakerphone for the audio and — by way of an additional box — signaling. There were two separate phone lines for the video. Early models were not color.
Final Analysis
Unfortunately for AT&T, the video phones they had developed over decades were a commercial failure. The official program alone was over 15 years and cost around $500 million. The phone company had predicted 100,000 phones in service by 1975. The real number was in the hundreds.
They tried again in the early 1990s with the VideoPhone 2500 marketed at consumers. At $1,500 a pop and anywhere from 10 frames per second to 1/3 of a frame per second, they didn’t sell very well. Surprisingly, they apparently sold about 30,000 units, but that was hardly enough to recoup their investment.
Other countries tried similar systems with similar results. France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom all had some form of video phone and all suffered from the same problems — low bandwidth over phone lines is simply not conducive to live video.
Villemard’s 1910 drawing of life in the year 2000 shows a video call in progress.
The answer would be digital networks and techniques, even though that wasn’t always obvious. For example, ARCNET — an early competitor to Ethernet — could — in some configurations — reserve bandwidth for analog video signals.
You can compress video with digital techniques, and network bandwidth has been on an upward slope. So as compression gets better, bandwidth goes up, and today it isn’t unusual to video conference with a large number of participants at once. While it doesn’t look much like Villemard’s 1910 imagining of videoconferencing in the year 2000, it isn’t that far off, either.
If you have the urge to hack something related, you can create a mirror system that lets you read your screen and
make eye contact at the same time
. Or, be a real hacker and do your
conferences in text mode
. We’re just glad today’s version of the video phone doesn’t let you see us pacing in the control room waiting for a call like the one in Metropolis (see below) does. We still aren’t sure what the paper tape coming out of those phones is for. | 72 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491673",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T17:20:22",
"content": "I blame the failure on morning hair.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491683",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2022-07-11T1... | 1,760,372,635.322976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/10/hackaday-links-july-10-2022/ | Hackaday Links: July 10, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"beaver",
"book",
"calculus",
"crypto",
"exchange",
"hackaday links",
"Idaho",
"parachute",
"radio shack",
"radioshack",
"WWV"
] | We always like to call out a commercial success stemming from projects that got their start on Hackaday.io, and so we’re proud to announce the release of
MAKE: Calculus
by Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron, a book that takes a decidedly different approach to teaching calculus than traditional courses. Geared to makers and hackers, who generally tend to have a visual style of learning, the book makes heavy use of 3D-printed models to illustrate the relationships between functions.
The project
started five years ago as a 2017 Hackaday Prize entry, and resulted in
a talk at the 2019 Supercon
. Their book is now available for preorder, and might be a great way to reacquaint themselves with calc, or perhaps even to learn it for the first time.
So what were you doing at 11:15 UTC on Friday, July 8? Whatever it was,
chances are excellent
that you were doing it under at least partial sunlight. That’s because at that moment, an estimated 99% of the world’s 8 billion or so people are somewhere between dawn and dusk. A glimpse at
the day-night map for that moment
shows what happened — with the Sun directly above northern Niger, the only populous continent (sorry, Antarctica) in the dark is Australia. The curve of the terminator almost exactly matches the outline of the other continents, from Japan where the Sun was just setting to the west coasts of the Americas, where it was just coming up. This bit of trivia is almost certainly of zero practical use to anyone, but that doesn’t make it any less cool or worth thinking about.
It seems like we might need to talk about RadioShack. Depending on how old you are, you’ll either recall a Radio Shack (notice the space) which was a one-stop shop for everything from rebadged stereo gear to individual resistors, or later as the camel-cased place where your parents bought their cell phones. We’ve been tracking the storied retailer’s downward spiral since at least 2011, including a few head-fakes that seemed to promise its
return to brick-and-mortar
or at least as
an online entity
. But now were hear that RadioShack has transmogrified itself yet again, this time into
a mean-tweeting crypto exchange
. Somewhere along the way, Retail Ecommerce Ventures, the private equity firm that bought RadioShack in 2020 along with such dying retailers as Pier 1 Imports and Modell’s Sports, launched crypto exchange RadioShack Swap, and started blasting out
some pretty raunchy tweets
for some reason. It’s… really weird.
If you’re looking for a palate cleanser after that, you could do worse than listening to the dulcet tones of WWV, the Colorado-based “all time, all the time” radio station. WWV has been on the air pretty much since there’s been air to be on, transmitting time signals from their atomic clocks. Trouble is, their signals are on the shortwave and HF bands, so unless you’ve got a radio to receive them, you’re out of luck. Or are you? Turns out that if all you’re interested in is the sounds of WWV,
there’s an app for that
. The WWV Simulator plays the unique combinations of tones, clicks, and voice announcements that WWV listeners have come to love. It’s not clear whether the simulation includes WWV’s digital time codes; we’d guess no, but it should be easy enough to figure out.
And finally, if you’ve never seen the work of a beaver up close, consider yourself somewhat deficient in your engineering education. What these fur-bearing critters can accomplish in a single night or work is beyond belief, if sometimes beyond the pale, as their infrastructure projects have the capacity to flood out human structures. And so some clever social engineering by their human neighbors has been required to relocate them, as this gem with footage from 1948 shows. A passel of pesky beavers caught by the Idaho Fish and Game Department was relocated by
dropping them from airplanes
. Unlike
fish-bombing
, beavers require a gentler landing, so the Fish and Game people came up with a clever box that keeps each animal contained during its ride to the ground on surplus WWII parachutes. The box opens on touchdown and out pops the critter, no doubt confused by his new surroundings and the wicked strange thing that just happened to him. | 9 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491462",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T23:19:03",
"content": "I can just hear the BeeGees sing:“It’s a flight beaver, flight beaver…we know how to move it!”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_... | 1,760,372,635.156346 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/10/remembering-nicam-deep-dive-into-a-broadcasting-legacy/ | Remembering NICAM: Deep-Dive Into A Broadcasting Legacy | Maya Posch | [
"History",
"Teardown"
] | [
"MTS",
"NICAM",
"public television",
"Zweikanalton"
] | Although for many the introduction of color television would have seemed to be the pinnacle of analog broadcast television, the 1970s saw the development of stereo audio systems to go with TV broadcasts, including the all-digital NICAM. With NICAM broadcasts having ceased for about a decade now, the studio equipment for encoding and modulating NICAM can now be picked up for cheap. This led [Matthew Millman] to not only buy a stack of Philips NICAM studio gear, but also
tear them down
and
set up
a fully working NICAM encoding/decoding system with an Arcam Delta 150 as receiver and Philips PM5687 encoder.
Philips PM5687 with lid off.
Finally, the Philips PM5688
test receiver is analyzed
. This is the component that studios would have used to ensure that the NICAM encoding and modulating systems were working properly. Although public
NICAM
broadcasts started in the late 1980s, the system was originally developed to enable point to point transfers of audio data within a transmission system. This was made very easy due to the digital nature of the system, and made enabling it for public broadcasts relatively straightforward once receivers became affordable enough.
Of note is that NICAM was only ever used in Europe and some Asian-Pacific countries, with others using the German
Zweikanalton
. This was a purely analog (two FM channels) system, and the US opted to use its
MTS
system, that was quite similar to the German system in terms of transmitting multiple FM channels alongside the TV signal. With digital TV gradually overtaking analog TV transmissions, the future of NICAM, MTS and others was sealed, leaving us with just these time capsules we can build up using old studio equipment. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491460",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T22:55:20",
"content": "It seems NICAM was never a big thing in the United States:NICAM – Historyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NICAM#History",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,372,635.383676 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/10/when-combat-robot-wheels-need-to-be-nice-and-cheap-but-mostly-cheap/ | When Combat Robot Wheels Need To Be Nice And Cheap (But Mostly Cheap) | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"cheap",
"combat robot",
"diy",
"E-6000",
"EVA foam",
"robot",
"robot wheels"
] | It started with [CHORL] making a promise to himself regarding constructing a new combat robot:
no spending of money on the new robot
.
That rule was violated (but only a little) by
making his robot’s wheels out of
EVA
kneeling pads
. EVA (Ethylene-Vinyl Acetate) is a closed-cell foam that makes for durable yoga mats, kneeling pads, and products of a similar nature. [CHORL] found a way to turn them into light but serviceable wheels for his robot: the
Susquehanna Boxcar
.
Nested hole saws create concentric holes. Perfect for wheels.
Here’s how the wheels were made: [CHORL] began with two hole saws. Nesting a smaller hole saw into a larger one by putting both on the same arbor created a saw with two holes, both of which were centered with respect to one another. The only problem was that this hole saw was not actually deep enough to cut completely through the thick foam. Luckily, cutting roughly halfway through on one side, then flipping the sheet over and cutting through from the other side was a good workaround. That took care of turning the thick foam sheet into round wheels.
A 3D-printed part served as a wheel hub as well as gear for the drivetrain. We want to call attention to the clever method of reinforcing the connection between the parts. [CHORL] didn’t want to just glue the geared hub directly to the surface of the foam wheel, because he suspected it might separate under stress. To address this, he designed six slots into the hub, cut matching slots into the foam wheel, and inserted six spline-like reinforcements in the form of some ABS strips he had on hand. Gluing it all together with E-6000 and leaving it to cure overnight under a weight resulted in a geared wheel assembly that [CHORL] judged to be about as round and rigid as a wheel should be, so the robot had a solution for nice light wheels that were, above all, cheap!
Lots of robots need wheels, and unsurprisingly,
DIY solutions are common projects
. [CHORL]’s approach here looks pretty scalable, as long as one can cut some accurate holes.
Interested in knowing more about the robot these wheels are destined for? [CHORL]’s still working on the
Susquehanna Boxcar
, but it’s almost done, and you can read a bit more about it (and see a few more pictures)
here
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491411",
"author": "rpavlik",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T18:19:23",
"content": "Oh there are a lot of clever ideas here. Thanks for sharing this one!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6491434",
"author": "paul",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,635.438136 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/10/masking-tape-pen-plotter-gets-an-upgrade/ | Masking Tape Pen Plotter Gets An Upgrade | Chris Lott | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"grbl",
"label printer",
"masking tape",
"pen plotter"
] | [Mr Innovative] decided to
make his version of a small pen plotter
(video after the break) to make labels on masking tape. The result is an impressive compact machine that is remotely controlled using your smartphone. The plotter is constructed using several different techniques, a piece of plywood as the base, a 3D printed bracket for the motors and pen carriage, and a routed acrylic plate that holds the lead screw and linear rail assembly. The whole thing is controlled by an Arduino Nano mounted on a custom motor driver carrier board.
The inspiration for this build came from a project by [michimartini] aka [Molten Cheese Bear] that
we covered a few months ago
. [Mr Innovative] went for belt vs direct drive and no local screen. It also appears to plot a little bit faster, but that might be due to differences in the ink pens used. An Android app called
TextToCNC
converts label text into G-Code, and the
Grbl Controller
app sends those commands to the plotter.
We like continued iterations of open source projects and look forward to seeing what the next generations look like. Thanks to [keithfromcanada] for submitting this tip. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491388",
"author": "makefu",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T14:35:09",
"content": "Very cool! The only issue i see is that masking tape generally not made for sticking too long due to its primary use case. Putting some other tape (e.g. white Duct Tape) on would be pretty cool though",
... | 1,760,372,635.545355 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/10/vapor-trails-and-fan-make-for-fantastic-photos-in-diy-wind-tunnel/ | Vapor Trails And Fan Make For Fantastic Photos In DIY Wind Tunnel | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Art"
] | [
"3d printed",
"diy",
"fog machine",
"model car",
"vape pen",
"wind tunnel"
] | Every wanted a mini wind tunnel to check the aerodynamics of scale model cars, drones, or other small objects? Then check out [dannyesp]’s
mostly-3D-printed DIY wind tunnel
(video, embedded below). Don’t forget to also browse the additional photos
in this Reddit thread
.
A junk parts project doesn’t have to
look
like a hack job.
There’s not much for plans available, since as [dannyesp] admits, this device was very much the product of trial-and-error and junk bin parts. The video and photos are more than enough for any enterprising hacker to work with.
The core of the device is a large fan made from a junked drone motor. This fan is located at the rear of the tunnel. A small anemometer is placed at the front, where some 3D-printed baffles also work to smooth out turbulent incoming air.
The foggy trails of vapor come from a hacked-up vape pen. Vapor gets piped through some tubing to the front of the tunnel. There, the vapor trails are drawn towards the low-pressure area at the rear, traveling over and around the object on the way. [dannyesp] also mentions that the platform holding the object is mounted on a rail, which incorporates some kind of pressure sensor in an attempt to quantify wind drag.
We want to take a moment to appreciate just how clean this “junk parts” project looks — even though it is made from things like broken photo frames. All of this comes down to thoughtful assembly. A hack doesn’t have to
look
like a hack job, after all. We also love the little control box that, instead of having a separate power indicator, lights up like a little nightlight when it has power.
Hacking vaporizers is a fantastic way to create
a small, portable fog machine
. These can create fantastic costume effects like
this smoking Ghost Rider skull
. They are a great way to turn an off-the-shelf consumer item into something that cost quite a bit more just a few years back. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491395",
"author": "Kevin M Parrotte",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T15:20:56",
"content": "Wow, I love it!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6491412",
"author": "no",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T18:19:36",
"content": "Congra... | 1,760,372,635.48977 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/10/carver-m-400-amplifier-repair-keeps-the-1980s-alive/ | Carver M-400 Amplifier Repair Keeps The 1980’s Alive | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"amplifier",
"audio",
"carver",
"HiFi"
] | Carver is a famous name in audio equipment although they have been known to use odd names for things. For example, the 1980’s vintage M-400 magnetic field power amplifier that [JohnAudioTech] is repairing (see the two videos below). That sounds like something off a bad Star Trek remake, but, apparently, we weren’t alone in thinking that,
judging by this 1982 review of the unit
from a UK magazine.
Still, it is an interesting high-power amplifier and we love seeing gear of this age torn apart. The beast is rated at 201 watts — you have to wonder if the extra watt is another marketing ploy.
There were actually two units and they looked pretty good for four-decade-old boxes. One sounded pretty good outside of some noticeable buzzing. The other had something shorted inside. If you enjoy watching repair videos, you’ll appreciate this two-parter.
We have to admit — and it may be a personal bias — there is something more pleasing about seeing a PCB populated with a bunch of interesting-looking through-hole components. Modern boards with a sea of surface mount parts tend to look a little bland, aesthetically speaking. Of course, when it comes time to make our own boards, we are happy to use SMD and forego all that hole drilling!
We like watching
computer repair videos
, in particular. Or sometimes,
something really exotic
. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491438",
"author": "Bryantherobotman",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T20:51:45",
"content": "This amplifier has a positively weird power supply – a triac switched 60Hz fly back converter? I’ve got to study this one more. Full schematics can be found here on page 19:https://www.manualslib... | 1,760,372,635.599378 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/09/gcore-make-portable-devices-with-less-frustration/ | GCore: Make Portable Devices With Less Frustration | Donald Papp | [
"hardware",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"charge control",
"dev board",
"ESP32",
"lcd",
"portable",
"touchscreen"
] | [Dan Julio]’s
gCore
(short for
Gadget Core
) is aimed at making GUI-based portable and rechargeable gadgets much easier to develop. gCore is the result of [Dan]’s own need for a less tiresome way to develop such hardware.
A touchscreen is great, but high-quality power control and charging features are what really make a portable device sing.
[Dan] found that he seemed to always be hacking a lot of extra circuitry into development boards just to get decent power management and charge control. To solve this, he designed his own common hardware platform for portable gadgets and the gCore was born.
While the color touchscreen is an eye-catching and useful addition, the real star of his design is the power management and charging features. Unlike most development hardware, the gCore intelligently shares load power with charging power. Power on and power off are also all under software control.
Sound intriguing? That’s not all the gCore has to offer, and you can learn more from
the project page at hackaday.io
(which has a more in-depth discussion of the design decisions and concept.) There are also some additional photos and details on
[Dan]’s website
.
[Dan] is no stranger to developing hardware. The
tcam-mini thermal imager
(and much more) is his work, and we have no doubt the gCore’s design and features are informed directly by [Dan]’s actual, practical development needs. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491315",
"author": "Thomas Anderson",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T07:09:15",
"content": "Cool design, let’s see if any of these parts can actually be bought anywhere.. sad truth about projects these days.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,372,635.651352 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/09/easier-self-hosting-with-umbrel/ | Easier Self Hosting With Umbrel | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"docker",
"HomeAutomation",
"linux",
"Nextcloud"
] | While it is undeniable that cloud-based services are handy, there are people who would rather do it themselves. For many of us, it is because we want what we want the way we want it. For others, it is a distrust of leaving your personal data on someone’s server you don’t control.
Umbrel is a Linux distribution
just for people who want to self-host popular applications like NextCloud or Home Assistant. [ItsFoss] has a good review that points out some of the plusses and minuses of the early version of Umbrel.
What’s really interesting, though, is the approach the distro takes to installing software. Like most modern distributions, Umbrel has a package manager. Unlike most, though, the packages are actually docker containers. So when you install an app, it is preconfigured and lives in its own bubble, unlikely to conflict with other things you might install.
We also like that it has a specific build for a Raspberry Pi, although it will work on other 64-bit hardware and you can even install it within docker on top of your normal operating system. Of course, the docker container concept is also a drawback — at least for now — because it can be difficult to adjust settings inside the container compared to a more conventional install.
It amazes us that hardware has become so capable that it is easier to just duplicate entire operating systems than it is to work out the required dependency interactions. Still, it works, and in most cases, it works well.
If you want to know more about
Docker
, we’ve covered it a few times in the past. You can even
use it for very simple development cases
if you like. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491305",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T04:12:34",
"content": "Looks like some useful tools even if one doesn’t go for Umbrel",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6491319",
"author": "vazhnov",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,635.791735 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/09/can-peripheral-for-rp2040-courtesy-of-pio/ | CAN Peripheral For RP2040, Courtesy Of PIO | Arya Voronova | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"CAN",
"can-bus",
"PIO",
"rp2040"
] | [Kevin O’Connor] writes to us about his project,
can2040
–
adding CAN support to the RP2040.
The RP2040 doesn’t have a CAN peripheral, but [Kevin] wrote code for the RP2040’s PIO engine that can receive and send CAN packets. Now we can all benefit from his work by using this openly available CAN driver. This library is written in C, so it’s a good fit for the lower-level hackers among us, and in all likelihood, it wouldn’t be hard to make a MicroPython wrapper around it.
The CAN bus needs a peripheral for the messages to be handled properly, and people have been using external chips for this purpose until now. These chips, [Kevin] tells us, have lately been unavailable due to the chip shortage, making this project more valuable.
The documentation is extensive and accessible,
and [Kevin] details how to best use this driver. With such a tool in hand, you can now turn your Pico into a CAN tinkering toolkit, or wire up some CAN devices for use in your own projects!
[Kevin] says this code is already being used in Klipper,
a framework powering
3D printers and other machines like them. As for your own purposes, you can absolutely use such a CAN tool to hack on your car – here’s
a treasure trove of car hacking documentation,
by the way! Thanks to
the PIO engine,
there seems to be no end to the RP2040’s versatility – you can even drive HDMI monitor with
this PIO-based DVI code.
Title picture
by Florent.david.lille1,
CC BY-SA 3.0 | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491274",
"author": "OG",
"timestamp": "2022-07-09T23:16:09",
"content": "I wonder how difficult it would be to make an OBD-II pass-through device that filters out error codes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491275",
... | 1,760,372,635.744264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/09/sneeze-into-your-hand-not-your-elbow-with-this-nose-shaped-sanitizer-dispenser/ | Sneeze Into Your Hand, Not Your Elbow With This Nose-Shaped Sanitizer Dispenser | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"hand sanitizer",
"nasal",
"nose",
"proximity",
"reflective",
"servo",
"sneeze",
"sternutation"
] | You’ve got to love a language like German, where not only is it possible for a word or two to stand in for a complex concept, but you don’t even need to speak the language to make a good guess at what it all means. Of course when your project is a
giant nose that mock-sneezes sanitizer into your hands
, it doesn’t really matter that you call it
Der niesende
Desinfektionsmittelspender
. Humor based on bodily functions is, after all, the universal language.
Working knowledge of German or not, figuring out exactly what [Nina] is doing here isn’t too difficult. Judging by the video below and the build log, the idea is to detect the presence of a hand underneath the dispenser with a simple IR reflective sensor hooked to some kind of microcontroller — an ESP32 in this case. Audio clips of sneezes are stored on an SD card and played back through a small speaker, while a hobby servo pushes the button on an atomizer. It seems as if selecting the proper dispenser was the hardest thing about the project; [Nina] finally settled on a battery-operated mister that was just the right size to fit into the nose. Oh, didn’t we mention the giant, pink, 3D-printed nose that houses the whole thing? Sorry about that — it’s quite subtle and easy to miss.
Anyway, the whole project is a lot of fun and brought a genuine laugh when we saw it. It’s a clever way to poke gentle fun at the germaphobes who came up with
other, less whimsical methods
of dispensing hand sanitizer. But let’s face it, they ended up being proven pretty much on the mark about things.
Danke
, [Stefan], for this tip. | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491171",
"author": "poiuyt",
"timestamp": "2022-07-09T17:39:37",
"content": "Thank you [Dan], for teaching me another word for sneezing! (in the article’s tags)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491487",
"author": "The... | 1,760,372,635.892856 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/09/when-is-one-pixel-cooler-than-millions/ | When Is One Pixel Cooler Than Millions? | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"laser",
"laser show",
"newsletter"
] | On vacation, we went to see a laser show – one of the old school variety that combines multiple different lasers of many different colors together into a single beam, modulates them to create different colors, and sends it bouncing off galvos to the roof of a planetarium. To a musical score, naturally.
When I was a kid, I had no idea how they worked, but laser shows were awesome. As a younger grownup hacker, and after some friends introduced me
to the dark arts
, I built my own setup. I now know how they work
from the deepest innards out
, and they are no less awesome. Nowadays, you can get a capable set of galvos and drivers for around a hundred bucks from the far east, it’s fair to say that there’s no magic left, but the awesome still remains.
“laser show”
by Ilmicrofono Oggiono
At the same time, lasers, and laser shows, are supremely retro. The most stunning example of this hit me while tearing apart
a Casio projector
ages ago to extract the otherwise unobtainable brand new 455 nm blue laser diodes. There I was pulling one diode out of an array of 24 from inside the projector, and throwing away the incredibly powerful DSP processor, hacking apart the precision optical path, and pulling out the MEMS DLP mirror array with nearly a
million
little mirrors, to replace it with
two mirrors
, driven around by big old coil-of-wire electromagnets. Like a caveman.
But still, there’s something about a laser show that I’ve never seen replicated – the insane color gamut that they can produce. It is, or can be,
a lot more than just the RGB
that you get out of your monitor. Some of the colors you can get out of a laser (or a prism) are simply beautiful in a way that I can’t explain. I
can
tell you that you can get them from combining red, blue, green, cyan, and maybe even a deep purple laser.
What you get with a laser show pales in comparison to the multi-megapixel projectors in even a normal movie theater. Heck, you’ve really got
one
pixel. But if you move it around fast enough, and accompany it with a decent soundtrack, you’ve still got an experience that’s worth having while you still can.
[Banner image from
a positively ancient RGB laser hack
. We need more! Send us yours!]
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! | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491175",
"author": "Brian Jorgensen",
"timestamp": "2022-07-09T18:27:55",
"content": "I have to admit that I’ve been to the Floyd too.hello, hello… are coherent photons in here? Please answer interfering. Is your spin that way, or are you just a wave?There is no Higgs boson, I’m ma... | 1,760,372,636.041087 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/09/your-console-your-cartridge-you-choose-nintendo-faces-a-challenge/ | Your Console, Your Cartridge, You Choose? Nintendo Faces A Challenge | Jenny List | [
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"intellectual property",
"ip",
"nintendo"
] | If you read our articles, you’ll notice that we will usually feature images related to the subjects we talk about. If they came from another source and they’re not CC-licensed or similar then they are the property of someone else but we are using them under a doctrine known as
fair use
. Excerpts of copyrighted material may be used under fair use for the purposes of such things as journalistic reporting, so for example we can use a copyrighted picture of Captain America were we to write about Marvel superheroes. Some content owners still try to stop this, and it’s one of them that [Linus Tech Tips] has in their sights as
they have published a guide to running Nintendo Switch games on a Steam Deck
without they believe giving any justifiable cause for the notoriously litigious game giant to take action. It’s full of carefully blurred Nintendo IP, and there is no coverage of pirate software downloads.
On one hand it’s about a heavy-handed console developer taking down small online content producers, but there’s another angle which is far more relevant to the hardware community who read Hackaday. It also has application in the field of software emulation, because while the console manufacturer would prefer to stop all but their own unmodified hardware running a game there should be nothing to stop a legally owned piece of software or hardware being run in any way its owner chooses. This is the central thesis explored at the end of the video, and the gimmick of trying to draw Nintendo into the open on the matter is their way of bringing publicity to it.
Even though [Linus Tech Tips] is probably one of the most viewed technology YouTube channels, it’s clear that Nintendo will have the deeper pockets should they choose to rise to the bait. So we’re sure their lawyers are all over this as we write, but we’d be interested to see whether the claims made in the video are enough to see it stay up. It would be nice to think that it might cause Nintendo to reconsider some of their policies, but we’re not holding our breath.
Our header image is definitely not owned by Nintendo, it’s from Blogtrepreneur,
CC BY 2.0
. | 30 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491121",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-07-09T13:17:04",
"content": "Writing revolves around IP, theirs or someone else’s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6491129",
"author": "neamerjell",
"timestamp": "2022-0... | 1,760,372,636.210229 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/09/when-your-logic-analyzer-cant-tell-good-and-bad-signals-apart/ | When Your Logic Analyzer Can’t Tell Good And Bad Signals Apart | Arya Voronova | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"fpga",
"LA104",
"logic analyser",
"logic analyzer",
"miniware",
"proprietary"
] | [Avian] has picked up a Miniware LA104 – a small battery-powered logic analyzer with builtin protocol decoders. Such analyzers are handy tools for when you quickly need to see what really is happening with a certain signal, and they’re cheap enough to be sacrificial when it comes to risky repairs. Sadly,
he stumbled upon a peculiar problem
– the analyzer would show the signal glitching every now and then, even at very low bitrates. Even more surprisingly, the glitches didn’t occur in the signal traces when exported and viewed on a laptop.
He dug into the problem,
as [Avian] does.
Going through the problem-ridden capture files helped him realize that the glitch would always happen when one of the signal edges would be delayed by a few microseconds relative to other signal edges — a regular occurrence when it comes to digital logic. This seems to stem from compression being used by the FPGA-powered “capture samples and send them” part of the analyzer. This bug only relates to the signal as it’s being displayed on the analyzer’s screen, and turned out that while most of this analyzer’s interface is drawn by the STM32 CPU, the trace drawing part specifically was done by the FPGA using a separate LCD interface.
It would appear Miniware didn’t do enough testing, and it’s impossible to distinguish a good signal from a faulty one when using a LA104 – arguably, the primary function of a logic analyzer. In the best of Miniware traditions, going as far as being hostile to open-source firmware at times, the FPGA bistream source code is proprietary. Thus, this bug is not something we can easily fix ourselves, unless Miniware steps up and releases a gateware update. Until then, if you bought a LA104, you can’t rely on the signal it shows on the screen.
When it comes to Miniware problems, we’ve recently covered
a Miniware tweezer repair,
requiring a redesign of the shell originally held together with copious amount of glue. At times, it feels like
there’s something in common
between glue-filled unrepairable gadgets and faulty proprietary firmware. If this bug ruins the LA104 for you, hey, at least you can reflash it to
work as an electronics interfacing multitool. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491016",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2022-07-09T08:12:43",
"content": "“and they’re cheap enough to be sacrificial when it comes to risky repairs”Ehmm…. what does that mean. I can see what you mean if this article was about a chisel, used a a screwdriver.But an electronic tool, ... | 1,760,372,636.792737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/badges-of-2022-emf-tidal/ | Badges Of 2022: EMF TiDAL | Jenny List | [
"cons"
] | [
"badgelife",
"electromagnetic field",
"emf"
] | As we slowly return to a summer of getting together in fields for our festivals of hackery, it’s time to look at another of this year’s crop of badges. The UK’s Electromagnetic Field, or EMF, is normally a two-yearly event, but its return this year comes after a four year absence due to the pandemic.
The EMF 2022 badge
is a departure from previous outings, gone is the handheld game console form factor and in its place is a svelte USB-C stick with a nod to the first generation of EMF badges in its wave shape.
The text is a little small on the tiny screen.
On the rear is this pattern.
Physically the badge is formed of two PCBs that plug together with the LiPo battery sandwiched between them, the upper one carrying the display and battery while the lower holds the ESP32-S3 MCU and the various peripherals. These include a QMA7981 accelerometer, a QMC7983 magnetometer, and perhaps most intriguingly, an ATECC108A cryptographic accelerator. This last component gives it the potential to be a 2-factor authentication key, which we think is probably a first for a badge.
In use, the TFT display and joystick interface is usable, but hard to read for a Hackaday scribe whose eyes maybe aren’t as sharp as they used to be. Programming is via MicroPython, using an app format through the same
online hatchery system
that will be familiar to owners of other European badges. There are already quite a few apps, which we hope will help this badge have some longevity.
This is just the latest of a long line of EMF badges, of which
the 2016 version
is probably our favourite. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6491005",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2022-07-09T07:49:54",
"content": "Is it my screen, or is the PCB curved rather than flat? Since when was that possible??!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491074",
"author": "Sv... | 1,760,372,636.25957 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/lift-the-veil-on-rsa-with-this-rsa-calculator/ | Lift The Veil On RSA With This RSA Calculator | Arya Voronova | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"calculator",
"cryptography",
"rsa",
"RSA encryption"
] | Encryption algorithms can be intimidating to approach, what’s with all the math involved. However, once you start digging into them, you can break the math apart into smaller steps, and get a feel of what goes into encryption being the modern-day magic we take for granted. Today, [Henry Schmale] writes to us about his small contribution to making cryptography easier to understand – lifting the veil on the RSA asymmetric encryption technique through
an RSA calculator.
With [Henry]’s calculator, you can only encrypt and decrypt a single integer, but you’re able to view each individual step of an RSA calculation as you do so. If you want to understand what makes RSA and other similar algorithms tick, this site is an excellent starting point. Now, this is not something you should use when roll your crypto implementations – as cryptographers say in unison, writing your own crypto from scratch is extremely inadvisable. [Henry] does say that this calculator could be useful for CTF players, for instance, but it’s also undeniably an accessible learning tool for any hacker out there wishing to understand what goes on under the wraps of the libraries we use.
In modern day, cryptography is instrumental to protecting our freedoms, and it’s a joy to see people work towards explaining the algorithms used. The cryptography tools we use day-to-day are also
highly valuable targets for governments
and intelligence agencies, willing to
go to great lengths
to subvert our communication security – so it’s even more important that we
get acquianted with the tools that protect us.
After all, it
only takes a piece of paper
to encrypt your communications with someone. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490844",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-07-09T02:25:17",
"content": "Just in time for the quantum-resistant algorithms to hit the market.https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2022/07/nist-announces-first-four-quantum-resistant-cryptographic-algorithms",
"parent_id": n... | 1,760,372,636.29944 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/pulling-a-chainsaw-with-gravity/ | Pulling A Chainsaw With Gravity | Matthew Carlson | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"chainsaw mill",
"log cutting",
"milling",
"woodworking"
] | [Flowering Elbow] had a large ash log that needed to be milled. He had his chainsaw and shared an excellent technique
for an easier cut
. After cutting down a tree, letting it dry for a season, and then hauling it to your saw site, you’re ready to cut. However, cutting a humongous tree with a chainsaw is an enormous task. A few hacks make it better, like tilting your log slightly downhill, so the chainsaw flows downhill or using a jig to keep the cut straight. Some use a winch system to drag the jig along to assist, so it’s not just pure manpower. The problem is that a winch will exert more force if the saw hits a knot or challenging section. So you would want to slow down and let the saw work through the area.
[Flowering Elbow] uses a pulley and offcut from the log and hangs it from a tree. The log drops as the cut progresses and exerts a constant force. This means that the saw can slow down during challenging sections and take the time it needs, extending the blade’s life. There are other excellent tips in the video, and combined with his
earlier chainsaw mill jig
, you’ll be set to mill up logs with nothing but a chainsaw and some ingenuity.
Video after the break. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490804",
"author": "Arjan Wiegel",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T23:28:55",
"content": "I wouldn’t dare cutting down a tree without blocking the road like a Dutch farmer…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491562",
"author":... | 1,760,372,636.401361 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/a-new-javascript-runtime-fresh-out-of-the-oven/ | A New Javascript Runtime Fresh Out Of The Oven | Matthew Carlson | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"javascript",
"zig",
"ziglang"
] | A sizable portion of the Hackaday audience groans and runs their eyes when some new-fangled Javascript thing comes out. So what makes Bun different?
Bun is a runtime (like Node or Deno)
t that offers a performant all-in-one approach. Much to the Spice Girl’s delight, it is
written in Zig
. It offers bundling, transpiling, module resolution, and a fantastic foreign-function interface.
Node.js and Deno run on the V8 Javascript engine and provide the Node-API to access different features, such as filesystems, that don’t apply to web browsers. However, vast amounts of tooling have built up around Node.js and NPM (node package manager). Many Javascript projects have a bundling and transpiling step that takes the source and packages it together in a more standard format. Typescript needs to be packaged into javascript, and modules need to be resolved.
Bun bakes all this in. Typescript and JSX “just work.” This dramatically simplifies many projects as much of the build infrastructure is part of Bun itself, lowering cognitive load when trying to understand a project. A SQL client and a Jest-like unit test runner are both built-in. Rather than V8, it uses JavaScriptCore, which starts a little faster. But the incredible speedups that Bun offers come mainly from it being written in Zig and the sheer amount of effort dedicated to benchmarking, profiling, and optimizing. We’re What’s even wilder is that Bun is written by one person, [Jared Sumner].
Since Bun implemented most Node APIs (with more to come), many modules are drop-in compatible. Some web-specific APIs, such as fetch and Websockets, is also built-in. It’s an early project, and we’re suspicious of any claims made by the project developers, but we’re cautiously optimistic. Even if you aren’t big on Javascript things, you’re likely
bound to learn WebAssembly eventually
. A short video by [Fireship] gives a good overview.
All the code for Bun is on Github
under an MIT license if you’d like to look at it yourself.
Thanks to [Michael Carlson] for the terrible Spice Girl joke. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490766",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T21:01:06",
"content": "Can the gluten sensitive use Bun?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6490771",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T21:08:56... | 1,760,372,636.347209 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/the-sf1-mini-is-a-homebrew-version-of-an-obscure-nintendo-console/ | The SF1 Mini Is A Homebrew Version Of An Obscure Nintendo Console | Robin Kearey | [
"classic hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"replica",
"Sharp SF1",
"snes"
] | The Super NES is arguably the best known console of the 16-bit era. It typically came in the form of a grey box with either grey or purple buttons, and an angular or streamlined design, depending on whether you lived in North America, Europe or Asia. Compact and mini versions followed later, but there were also a few lesser-known models released during the SNES’s heyday in the early 1990s. One of these was the Sharp SF1: a CRT television with a built-in Super Nintendo. The cartridge slot was located at the top, with the controllers connecting at the front. The internal video connection even provided better image quality than a typical SNES setup.
Some light soldering required.
The SF1 was never sold outside Japan and is quite rare nowadays. But even if you can find one, the bulky CRT will take up a lot of space in your home. [Limone] therefore decided
to build himself a smaller replica instead
. His “SF1 mini” comes in a 3D printed case that holds a 5.5″ TFT screen, stereo speakers, and connections for game paks and game pads.
Thankfully, [Limone] didn’t sacrifice an original SNES to make this project: instead, he used a DIY Super Nintendo kit developed by a company called Columbus Circle. This kit contains a modern replica of a SNES motherboard and is intended for custom builds like this. However, the layout of the motherboard didn’t match [Limone]’s intended design, so he desoldered several components and re-attached them using a huge web of magnet wire. An RGB-to-HDMI converter connects the SNES’s video output to the TFT screen and provides for remarkably sharp graphics.
[Limone] explains the build process in detail in the video embedded below (in Korean, with English subs available). We’ve seen a couple of neat SNES replicas,
some small
and
some particularly tiny
, but this has to be the first SF1 replica.
Thanks to [CatfaceMcMeowMeow] from the
Hackaday Discord Server
for the tip! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490719",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T19:40:48",
"content": "The amazing Spiderman isn’t a superhero… But an electrical engineer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6490769",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
... | 1,760,372,636.44605 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/same-taste-with-less-energy-optimizing-the-way-we-cook-food/ | Same Taste With Less Energy: Optimizing The Way We Cook Food | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"green hacks",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"cooking",
"energy efficiency",
"induction heating"
] | Preparing food is the
fourth most energy-intensive activity in a household
. While there has been a lot of effort on the first three — space heating, water heating, and electrical appliances — most houses still use stoves and ovens that are not too dissimilar to those from half a century ago.
More recent technologies that make cooking more efficient and pleasant have been developed, such as induction heating. Other well-known and common appliances are secretly power savers: microwaves and electric kettles. In addition, pressure cookers enable the shortening of cooking times, and for those who like dishes that take hours to simmer, vacuum-insulated pans can be a real energy-saver.
Not Just About Energy
One aspect that is often neglected in discussions about saving energy is that many more power-efficient methods are simply more convenient and require less cleaning. Speaking as someone who has had to do things like heating milk on a gas stove, using a microwave saves one from having to scrub the pan clean afterwards. Similarly, an electric kettle beats a stovetop tea kettle any day of the week for its speed and convenience.
Not having to keep an eye on whatever will be boiling soon, and never coming upon a boiled over pan of milk is convenient, and an induction stove is very easy to clean as it’s only ever indirectly heated. Heating something up in a microwave directly on the plate is much more convenient than having to clean a dirty a frying pan afterwards.
All of which is to say that not only are many of these approaches energy-efficient, they’re also excellent for lazy people and everyone else who doesn’t want to spend more time on cooking, boiling, and cleaning each day than strictly necessary.
Running The Numbers
In an
article by the BBC
on why you should stop using your oven, they cite a study by
Frankowska et al. (2020)
, in which the energy consumption of a few different heating methods are compared. Of these two the boiling of water and reheating of a casserole are good examples:
Boiling water (1 cup of tea)
0.05 kWh, 4 minutes in a microwave
0.07 kWh, 2 minutes in an electric kettle
0.14 kWh, 2 minutes in covered pan or kettle on induction stove
0.18 kWh, 5 minutes on standard electric stove
Reheating casserole
0.11 kWh, 8 minutes in microwave
0.35 kWh, 5 minutes on induction stove
0.43 kWh, 12 minutes on standard electric stove
2.27 kWh, 45 minutes in the oven
Porridge
0.07 kWh, 5 minutes in microwave
0.35 kWh, 5 minutes on induction stove
0.36 kWh, 10 minutes on standard electric stove
Of note here is of course that when an electric kettle is mentioned, it refers to a European-style electric kettle. These tend to be rated for 2 kW – 3 kW, which enables them to boil water very quickly. So it’s no surprise that they’re boiling water twice as fast as a microwave with a 1,000 W setting. Depending on the use case, more energy input can make things boil and cook significantly faster, while saving energy and one’s time as well in the process. Which leads us to the other options, such as optimized heat transfers and lids.
Putting A Lid On It
A general idea behind efficient cooking is to get as much of the energy into the item that is being heated, without having it be converted to waste heat and escape into the environment. This is an obvious issue with gas stoves: a significant part of the heat produced by the combustion flows out the side and never heats up the cookware.
With an electric stove where the pan is placed directly on the surface that is being heated by the heating element, there is significantly less heat escaping into the environment, though here we still have the inefficiencies of heating the stove surface, transferring that heat into the pan’s material and from there into the contents of the pan.
This is where the idea behind induction stoves is so very attractive and simple: rather than putting the cookware on something hot, with induction an induction coil induces inductive coupling in the ferromagnetic material of the cookware, which causes it to heat up. This way the cookware itself becomes the hot surface that heats the food, which skips all of the previously mentioned intermediate steps, and thus losses.
This then leaves the other loss of heat: from the pan contents itself, which is where lids come in. By turning the pan into a closed vessel, the only effective way for heat to escape from the pan is through heating up the pan and lid and radiating into the environment that way. As a simple comparison can show here, the use of a pan lid can significantly shorten the amount of time needed to boil water, and the power needed to keep the contents on temperature.
From this we can thus deduce that an even more efficient way to cook on a stove would be if we could prevent the heat from radiating through the pan’s material. This is where double-walled cookware comes into play, with some level of vacuum between both walls much like in a thermos, which are great at keeping drinks hot or cold for long periods. In these pans, food stays warm for hours even without externally applied heat.
Putting On Pressure
The only major disadvantage of double-walled cookware (like
Kuhn Rikon
) is that they are very pricey, with a simple pan often costing upwards of a few hundred dollars. Outside of finding a used one for cheap, this is probably the kind of expense that’d be hard to justify. So on the other end of the budget scale, consider
pressure cookers
, which are somewhat like the extreme version of pan lids.
The basic idea behind a pressure cooker is that the high pressure inhibits boiling, so the cooking temperature can be increased above 100 °C. This significantly shortens the time it takes to cook the food, although it obviously is limited to damp cooking because of the steam that enables the increased pressure levels.
Unlike vacuum-insulated cookware, pressure cookers can be found for relatively cheap, and provide energy and time savings. Perhaps the biggest disadvantages are not being able to look inside the pan while cooking – requiring cooking times to be determined beforehand – and them being unsuitable for cooking noodles, pasta and similar foods which would expand too much.
Keeping It Fun
As noted earlier, the best part of saving energy is when it also makes life easier at the same time. The good news is thus that using the microwave to (re)heat food is both easy and efficient, and an easy to clean induction stove more efficient than a gas or electric stove. This was fortunately also my finding when switching from a ceramic stove to an induction one. While the former required some scrubbing and scraping after ‘accidents’, the latter just takes a simple wipe-down with a moist kitchen towel.
I’m also fortunate enough to living in a country where I’m able to plug my 3 kW electric kettle into a kitchen outlet and efficiently boil water that way, and was able to get a 3.5 kW induction stove that I could plug into an outlet next to the kettle’s. With it being obviously so much more efficient to use electricity to cook and heat food, perhaps having a kitchen fully wired for 240 VAC is the winning move for fun, efficient cooking?
With how much of a personal topic cooking is, please feel free to sound off in the comments about your own experiences and approaches when it comes to making cooking more fun and efficient. | 159 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490621",
"author": "aleksclark",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T17:26:48",
"content": "I was initially typing up a rant about gas stoves being far superior for actual cooking, but it looks like they do a better job at thermal transfer, and you don’t have to have special cookware. Really ... | 1,760,372,636.730609 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/hackaday-podcast-176-freezing-warm-water-hacking-lenses-hearing-data-and-watching-youtube-on-a-pet/ | Hackaday Podcast 176: Freezing Warm Water, Hacking Lenses, Hearing Data, And Watching YouTube On A PET | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | It’s podcast time again, and this week Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams sat down with Staff Writer Dan Maloney to review the best hacks on the planet, and a few from off. We’ll find out how best to capture lightning, debate the merits of freezing water — or ice cream — when it’s warm, and see if we can find out what R2D2 was
really
talking about with all those bleeps and bloops. Once we decode that, it’ll be time to find out what Tom Nardi was up to while the boss was away with his hidden message in episode 174, and how analog-encoded digital data survives the podcast production and publication chain. But surely you can’t watch a YouTube video on a Commodore PET, can you? As it turns out, that’s not a problem, and neither apparently is 3D printing a new ear.
The meat of Elliot’s “super secret mastering script”? Use it on your videos too!
ffmpeg -i $infile.wav -c:v copy -af loudnorm=I=-17:LRA=5:tp=-1.5 -ar 44100 $outfile.flac
Direct download
, record it to tape, and play it on your boombox.
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 176 Show Notes:
News
NASA reestablishes communications with its wayward CAPSTONE satellite
Cruise robotaxis blocked traffic for hours on this San Francisco street – TechCrunch
What’s that Sound?
Congrats to [Seth] and everyone else who is a fan of Blade Runner!
Need a random number?
RANDOM.ORG – Integer Generator
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Does Hot Water Freeze Faster Than Cold? Debate Continues Over The Mpemba Effect
Converting A Sigma Lens To Canon, Digital Functionality Included
Lenses: From Fire Starters To Smart Phones And VR
Think You Know How Mario Kart Works?
Computer Vision Extracts Lightning From Footage
Extracting Lightning Strikes From HD Video
Habitable Exoplanets Hack Chat
GGWave Sings The Songs Of Your Data
BlixTerm Brings Full-Speed YouTube Video To The Commodore PET
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
LCD Screen Windows Are This Summer’s Hottest Case Mod
UART Can’t? Arduino CANSerial Can!
Dual Power Supply In A Pinch
Dan’s Picks:
A GPS Frequency Standard For When The Timing Has To Be Right
Testing A Tube Without A Tube Tester
Modern Tube Tester Uses Arduino
Never Miss An Email With This 1970s Style Desktop Notifier
Can’t-Miss Articles:
3D Printed Cartilage Ushers in Ear-a of Custom Body Parts
Unraveling The Hackaday Podcast Hidden Message
How To Receive Pictures From Spaaace | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490722",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T19:44:07",
"content": "For the Mpemba effect, the problem is in the premise: what is your definition for “freezing”?If freezing means forming ice crystals, then the non-equilibrium answers may have a point. If it means having a so... | 1,760,372,636.535069 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/use-apriltags-to-let-guests-open-your-front-gate/ | Use AprilTags To Let Guests Open Your Front Gate | Arya Voronova | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"access control",
"AprilTag",
"Electric gate",
"micropython",
"OpenMV"
] | [Herb Peyerl] is part of a robotics team, and in his robotics endeavours, learned about AprilTags; small QR-code-like printable patterns that are easily recognizable by even primitive machine vision. Later on, when thinking about good ways to let his guests through his property’s front gate,
the AprilTags turned out to be a wonderful solution.
Now all he needs to do is send his guest a picture of the appropriate AprilTag, which they can present to the camera at his front gate using their smartphone.
He used an OpenMV board for this – thanks to its wide variety of available libraries, the AprilTag recognition is already baked in, and the entire script is merely a hundred lines of MicroPython. An old surveillance camera gave up its dome-shaped housing, and now the OpenMV board is doing guest access duty on a post in front of his property’s front gate. He’s shared the code with us, and says he’s personally running a slightly modified version for security reasons — not that a random burglar is likely to stumble upon this post anyway. Besides it looks like the gate would be easy for a burglar to jump over without any need for security bypass, and the convenience benefits of this hack are undeniable.
In the unlikely chance a burglar is reading this, however, don’t be sad. We do happen to have a bunch of hacks for you, too. There’s far less secure systems out there, from
building RFID keyfobs
to
gated community access control systems
, sometimes
all you need is a 12 V battery.
If you’re not into burglary, that’s okay too — we’ve covered other guest access hacks before, for instance,
this ESP8266-powered one. | 18 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490584",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T15:37:22",
"content": "Similar to my gate. I have a WiFi router at my front gate that i sniff the mac addresses off of. Whenever my phone connects it opens the gate. I setup an easy way to onboard new phones and all of my friend... | 1,760,372,638.737193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/this-week-in-securitybreaking-cacs-to-fix-ntlm-the-biggest-leak-ever-and-fixing-firefox-by-breaking-it/ | This Week In Security:Breaking CACs To Fix NTLM, The Biggest Leak Ever, And Fixing Firefox By Breaking It | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"CAC",
"firefox",
"ntlm",
"This Week in Security"
] | To start with, Microsoft’s June Security Patch has a fix for
CVE-2022-26925
, a Man-In-The-Middle attack against NTLM. According to NIST,
this attack is actively being exploited in the wild
, so it landed on the KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) Catalog. That list tracks the most important vulnerabilities to address, and triggers a mandated patch install no later than July 22nd. The quirk here is that the Microsoft Patch that fixes CVE-2022-26925 also includes a fix for a couple certificate vulnerabilities including CVE-2022-2693,
Certifried
. That vulnerability was one where a machine certificate could be renamed to the same as a domain controller, leading to organization-wide compromise.
The
fix that rolled out in June
now requires that a “strong certificate mapping” be in place to tie a user to a certificate. Having the same common name is no longer sufficient, and a secure value like the Security IDentifier (SID) must be mapped from certificate to user in Active Directory. The patch puts AD in a compatibility mode, which accepts the insecure mapping, so long as the user account predates the security certificate. This has an unintended consequence of
breaking how the US Government uses CACs (Common Access Cards)
to authenticate their users. Government agencies typically start their onboarding by issuing a CAC, and then establishing an AD account for that user. That makes the certificate older, which means the newest patch rejects it. Thankfully there’s a registry key that can be set, allowing the older mapping to still work, though likely with a bit of a security weakness opened up as a result.
Decryptor Released Because of Copycat?
One of the stranger things we’ve seen out of the ransomware plague is the release of decryptors when a criminal group closes up shop. In this case, AstraLocker has
closed its doors
, and released a set of decryption routines. While those decryption programs have been demonstrated to work, if you happen to be one of the unfortunate victims, wait until a reputable group like
Emsisoft takes those shady tools and packages them into a known-good solution
.
Why does a group close down and release the keys to their kingdom? In some cases it’s because law enforcement is getting uncomfortably close and the jig is simply up. Here, it appears that
a copycat group has started distributing
their own iteration on Astralocker. The problem with AstraLocker 2.0 is that it’s a “smash and grab”, a low effort campaign that appears to never actually provide decryption keys. One possible explanation is that this copycat campaign is spoiling the “good name” of the original actor, and makes it much harder to convince victims to pay for decryption, leading to the retirement.
Chinese Police Leaks Database
We’ve covered some database breaches in the past, where entire countries are exposed, but this one seems to take the cake. Over a billion users have been exposed in what appears to be a leak of a Chinese police database — likely the result of credentials unintentionally leaked in a blog post. The database was
offered for sale for 10 bitcoins
, less than the price of a pizza. That thread has since been deleted from the forum where it was being offered. This is likely the biggest database leak ever seen, and at this scale, it’s going to be hard to top.
Firefox Sanitizer
Mozilla is developing a new JavaScript feature in Firefox,
Sanitizer
. It’s an effort to defeat Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks, by adding a standardized way to sanitize data. Part of the thought is that the browser itself can be a very reliable source of “truth” when it comes to how HTML will be understood.
It’s an experimental feature that’s still being built, but it’s available for testing, and researchers are already starting to work to make it better. [Gareth Heyes] took a crack at it, and
discovered a potential problem with SVG handling
. SVGs are images generated by XML code, and one of the valid elements is a
use
statement, essentially including SVG code from somewhere else. That somewhere else could potentially be malicious, and some very clever work can result in arbitrary JavaScript execution as a result. The flaw was fixed in Firefox 102, and ideally when this feature leaves expiremental, all those bugs will be worked out. If it proves useful, Chrome will pick it up, and it may even get on a track for inclusion as a web standard.
Bits and Bytes
Project Zero has
an overview of the in-the-wild bugs they’ve tracked so far this year
. There 18 total bugs, but nine of those were variants of previous bugs, instances when the patch to fix a known problem was insufficient to actually fix the root problem. In a couple cases, it wasn’t even a variant, but the exact same bug that was fixed and then made vulnerable again. If nothing else, it’s a powerful testament to the value of regression tests.
The British Army’s official Twitter and YouTube accounts
were accessed by a malicious third party this week
. With this access, all that was posted was links to crypto scam site — hardly living up to the potential of having access to such valuable accounts. Appears to decidedly not have been a state-sponsored actor.
And finally, in the long tradition of security software introducing security vulnerabilities, Trend Micro has patched a vulnerability that allowed privilege escalation via mount point manipulation on Windows. The issue was found and reported privately, and the fix was rolled out in version 17.7. There’s no sign this one was ever exploited, so chalk one up for the good guys! | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490538",
"author": "Huh?",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T14:04:59",
"content": "Wow. Pizza must be expensive where you live…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491320",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-07-10T0... | 1,760,372,638.51457 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/turns-out-you-can-just-unlock-any-honda-car/ | Unlock Any (Honda) Car | Arya Voronova | [
"car hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"Honda",
"key fob",
"keyfob",
"replay attack",
"rolling code",
"sdr"
] | Honda cars have been found to be severely vulnerable to a newly published
Rolling PWN attack
, letting you remotely open the car doors or even start the engine. So far it’s only been proven on Hondas, but ten out of ten models that [kevin2600] tested were vulnerable, leading him to conclude that all Honda vehicles on the market can probably be opened in this way. We simply don’t know yet if it affects other vendors, but in principle it could. This vulnerability has been assigned the
CVE-2021-46145.
[kevin2600] goes in depth on the implications of the attack but doesn’t publish many details. [Wesley Li], who discovered the same flaw independently,
goes into more technical detail
. The hack appears to replay a series of previously valid codes that resets the internal PRNG counter to an older state, allowing the attacker to reuse the known prior keys. Thus, it requires some eavesdropping on previous keyfob-car communication, but this should be easy to set up with a cheap SDR and an SBC of your choice.
If you have one of the models affected, that’s bad news, because Honda probably won’t respond anyway. The researcher contacted Honda customer support weeks ago, and hasn’t received a reply yet. Why customer support? Because Honda doesn’t have a security department to submit such an issue to. And even if they did, just a few months ago, Honda has said
they will not be doing any kind of mitigation
for “car unlock” vulnerabilities.
As it stands, all these Honda cars affected might just be out there for the taking. This is
not the first time
Honda is found botching a rolling code implementation – in fact,
it’s the second time this year.
Perhaps, this string of vulnerabilities is just karma for
Honda striking down all those replacement part 3D models,
but one thing is for sure – they had better create a proper department for handling security issues. | 76 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490495",
"author": "kuro68k",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T11:29:17",
"content": "I wonder how practical this attack is. The sliding window of codes means that an attacker needs to gather multiple sequential codes, not just unrelated ones over a long period.If the attacker say lives ne... | 1,760,372,638.846351 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/08/badges-of-2022-bornhack/ | Badges Of 2022: BornHack | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"badgelife",
"BornHack",
"rp2040"
] | While the rest of the world’s hacker camps shut their doors through the pandemic there was one which managed through a combination of careful planning and strict observation of social distancing to keep going. The Danish hacker community gather every August for BornHack, a small and laid-back event in a forest on the isle of Fyn that has us coming back for more every year. They always have an interesting badge thanks to the designs of [Thomas Flummer], and this year looks to be no exception as
they’ve dropped some details of the upcoming badge
.
In short, it’s a beautifully designed hand-held games console with a colour screen, powered by the ubiquitous-in-the-chip-shortage RP2040 microcontroller. On board are the usual interfaces and a prototyping area plus CircuitPython for easy coding, and we expect it to sprout some addictive and playable gaming action. It’s the sort of PCB that we could imagine coming as a product from the likes of Pimoroni, but for now the only way to get your hands on one is to
go to the event
. We’ll being you a review when we have one. Meanwhile
you can take a look at a previous year’s badge
. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490465",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T08:15:33",
"content": "That is sooooo beautiful. Nice one!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6490611",
"author": "JARM",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T16:58:30",
... | 1,760,372,638.553722 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/lora-helps-with-remote-water-tank-level-sensing/ | LoRa Helps With Remote Water Tank Level Sensing | Arya Voronova | [
"home hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"home automation",
"LoRa",
"water level",
"water pump"
] | [Renzo Mischianti]’s friend has to keep a water tank topped up. Problem is, the tank itself is 1.5 km away, so its water level isn’t typically known. There’s no electricity available there either — whichever monitoring solution is to be used, it has to be low-power and self-sufficient. To help with that, [Renzo] is
working on a self-contained automation project,
with a solar-powered sensor that communicates over LoRa, and a controller that receives the water level readings and powers the water pump when needed.
[Renzo] makes sure to prototype every part using shields and modules before committing to a design, and has already wrote and tested code for both the sensor and the controller, as well as created the PCBs. He’s also making sure to document everything as he goes – in fact, there’s whole
seven blog posts
on this project, covering the already completed
software
,
PCB
and
3D design
stages of this project.
These worklogs have plenty of explanations and pictures, and [Renzo] shows a variety of different manufacturing techniques and tricks for beginners along the way. The last blog post on 3D designing and printing the sensor enclosure was recently released, and that likely means we’ll soon see a post about this system being installed and tested!
[Renzo] has been in the “intricately documented worklogs” business for a while. We’ve covered his
3D printed PCB mill
and
DIY soldermask process
before, and recently he was seen
adding a web interface
to a 3D printer missing one. As for LoRa, there’s plenty of sensors you can build – be it
mailbox sensors,
burglar alarms,
or
handheld messengers;
and now you have one more project to draw inspiration and knowledge from. [Renzo] has previously done
a LoRa tutorial
to get you started, and we’ve made
one about LoRaWAN! | 9 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490510",
"author": "steve rice",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T12:40:09",
"content": "so no power ? but there is a pump to fill the tank ? pumps require power.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6490516",
"author": "xxreef",
... | 1,760,372,638.461828 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/a-mostly-fair-deal-for-all-with-a-raspberry-pi/ | A Mostly Fair Deal For All With A Raspberry Pi | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"cards",
"playing cards",
"raspberry pi",
"robot"
] | To be a professional card dealer takes considerable skill, something that not everybody might even have the dexterity to acquire. Fortunately even for the most ham-fisted of dealers there’s a solution, in the form of
the Dave-O-matic
, [David Stern]’s automated card dealer using a Raspberry Pi 4 with a camera and pattern recognition.
It takes the form of a servo-controlled arm with a sucker on the end, which is able to pick up the cards and present them to the camera. They can then be recognized by value, and pre-determined hands can be dealt or alternatively a random hand. It seems that the predetermined hands aren’t an aid in poker cheating, but a part of the bridge player’s art. You can see it in action in the video below the break.
We like the project, but sadly at this point we must take [Dave] to task, because while tantalizing us with enough detail to get us interested he’s slammed the door in our faces by failing to show us the code. it would be nice to think that the clamor from disaffected Hackaday readers might spur him into throwing us a crumb or two.
It probably won’t surprise you to find that
this isn’t the first Raspberry Pi to find itself dealing cards
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490520",
"author": "BitMage",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T13:02:27",
"content": "He should proudly display that Programming for Dummies book.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6491177",
"author": "Nudli Wiggins",
"... | 1,760,372,638.589371 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/trying-out-a-3d-printed-microscope-lens-adapter/ | Trying Out A 3D Printed Microscope Lens Adapter | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"macro photography",
"microscope",
"photography"
] | If you want to take pictures of tiny things close up, you need a macro lens. Or a microscope. [Nicholas Sherlock] thought “Why not both?” He designed a
3D-printed microscope lens adapter
that you can find on
Thingiverse
. Recently, [Micael Widell]
tried it out with a microscope lens
and you can see the results in the video below.
A $20 microscope lens allows for some amazing shots. There are two designs that fit different cropped-image and full-frame cameras. As you might expect, the depth of field is razor-thin, probably sub-millimeter. Additionally, with a 4X lens on a 35 mm sensor, the field of view is about 9 mm so you have to have a steady hand just to keep everything in frame.
[Micael] also bracketed the focus to get several shots that could be postprocessed to provide a deeper apparent depth of field. He has a different video that covers the process he uses. You also need a lot of light since the lens is effectively f/20.
Using this by hand probably requires more patience than most of us have. However, we could see a use for this if you had the camera mounted in a studio. Then again, you could use a camera mount for an actual microscope, but maybe not at this price.
The results are impressive. We also noticed that printing in PETG caused some problems because it is shiny. You can either paint the interior of the tube or use ABS which is not very shiny.
Of course, you could always just
build a microscope
. You can even start
with Lego
. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490408",
"author": "Nicholas Sherlock",
"timestamp": "2022-07-08T01:10:01",
"content": "Here’s my image gallery of photos taken using my adapter:https://imgur.com/a/2rUz2U8",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6490475",
"a... | 1,760,372,638.415601 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/esp32-powers-fresh-take-on-an-iot-geiger-counter/ | ESP32 Powers Fresh Take On An IoT Geiger Counter | Tom Nardi | [
"High Voltage",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"environmental sensor",
"ESP32",
"geiger counter",
"Geiger tube",
"mqtt",
"SBM-20"
] | Over the years we’ve covered many projects aimed at detecting elevated radiation levels, and a fair number of them have been Internet connected in some way. But as they are often built around the Soviet-era SBM-20 Geiger–Müller tube, these devices have generally adhered to a fairly conservative design. With the current situation in Europe heightening concerns over potential radiation exposure, [g3gg0] thought it was a good a time as any to
revisit the idea of an Internet-connected Geiger counter using more modern components
.
Now to be clear, even this modernized approach still makes use of that same SBM-20 tube. There’s such an incredible wealth of information floating around out there about how to work with them that you’d almost put yourself at a disadvantage to chose something else to base your design on. Put simply, it’s hard to go wrong with a classic.
An unfortunate bug was discovered in the HV circuit.
That said, [g3gg0] decided early on that the design would use as many SMD components as possible,
a considerable departure
from
many of the SBM-20 counters we’ve seen
. That meant coming up with a new high-voltage power supply capable of providing the tube with the necessary 400 V, which from the sound of things, took a few attempts to complete. The final result is perhaps the smallest and cleanest looking board we’ve ever seen play host to this particular tube.
To run the show, [g3gg0] selected the ESP32-PICO-D4. You certainly don’t need such a powerful microcontroller to read the impulses from the SBM-20 tube and publish them via MQTT, but to be fair, the chip has a number of other duties. It’s handling the WS2812 RGB LEDs that go off in response to detected particles, running the (apparently optional) 2.9 inch WaveShare electronic paper display, and also pulling data from a BME280 environmental sensor as well as a CCS811 VOC sensor — so it’s keeping fairly busy.
As impressive as this build is, we do hate that it had to be built. From certain world leaders dropping casual comments about the strength of their nuclear arsenal to foolhardy attempts to capture the
Chernobyl power station
, having access to a reliable Geiger counter isn’t an unreasonable precaution right now. For everyone’s sake, let’s hope the fancy RGB LEDs on this particular build remain as dark as possible. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490330",
"author": "Andre Bryx",
"timestamp": "2022-07-07T20:14:33",
"content": "These Russian based “Tubes” are decades old and no one takes care to the degradation of the “quenching gas” inside, causing many double and false counting of radiation levels.All these based “Geiger C... | 1,760,372,638.906309 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/retrotechtacular-1990s-cd-mastering-fit-for-a-king/ | Retrotechtacular: 1990s CD Mastering Fit For A King | Dan Maloney | [
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"cd",
"Compact Disc",
"digital audio",
"Michael Jackson",
"production",
"retrotechtacular"
] | Before it was transformed into an ephemeral stream of ones and zeroes, music used to have a physical form of some kind. From wax cylinders to vinyl discs to tapes of various sizes in different housings and eventually to compact discs, each new medium was marketed as a technological leap over the previous formats, each of which justified incrementally more money to acquire.
But that’s the thing — each purchase resulted in you obtaining a physical item, which had an extensive manufacturing and distribution process behind it. And few artists demanded more manufacturing effort than Michael Jackson in his heyday, as revealed by
this in-depth look at the CD manufacturing process for The King of Pop’s release of the
HIStory
double-disc set in 1995
.
The video was produced as sort of a love letter to Michael from the staff and management of the Sony Music disc manufacturing plant in Pittman, New Jersey. The process is shown starting with the arrival of masters to the plant, strangely in the form of U-matic videocassettes; the 3/4″ continuous loop tape was normally used for analog video, but could also be used for
recording digital audio
. The digital audio is then sent for glass mastering, which is where the actual pits are created on a large glass disc under cleanroom conditions. In fact, much of the production process bears a strong similarity to semiconductor manufacturing, from the need for cleanrooms — although under less stringent conditions than in a fab — to the use of plasma etching, vapor deposition, and metal plating operations.
Once the master stampers are made, things really ramp up in replication. There the stamper discs go into injection molding machines, where hot polycarbonate is forced against the surface under pressure. The copies are aluminized, spin-coated with UV-cure lacquer, and sent on down the line to testing, screen printing, and packaging. Sony hired 40 extra full-time workers, who appear to have handled all the tedious manual tasks like assembling the jewel cases, to handle the extra load of this release.
As cheesy as this thank-you video may be, it was likely produced with good reason. This was a time when a Michael Jackson release was essentially a guarantee of full employment for a large team of workers. The team was able to produce something like 50,000 copies a day, and given that
HIStory
sold over 20 million copies, that’s a lot of workdays for the good folks at Pittman. | 48 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490307",
"author": "Howard",
"timestamp": "2022-07-07T18:45:18",
"content": "I did a lot of work with both u-matic and 1” tape, and the audio quality of the Sony u-Magic’s was amazingly good. I didn’t know they used it as the analog mastering medium- that’s cool.It was not endless ... | 1,760,372,638.987247 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/the-benefits-of-displacement-ventilation/ | The Benefits Of Displacement Ventilation | Lewin Day | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"ac",
"air",
"air conditioning",
"cooling",
"displacement ventilation",
"heating",
"hvac",
"pandemic",
"ventilation"
] | The world has been shaken to its core by a respiratory virus pandemic. Humanity has been raiding the toolbox for every possible weapon in the fight, whether that be masks, vaccinations, or advanced antiviral treatments.
As far as medicine has come in tackling COVID-19 in the past two years, the ultimate solution would be to cut the number of people exposed to the pathogen in the first place. Improving our ventilation methods may just be a great way to cut down on the spread. After all, it’s what they did in the wake of the Spanish Flu.
Up, Up and Away
The trick to displacement ventilation is supplying air at ground level at low velocity. Buoyancy forces it to the top of the room where it can be extracted. This creates a one-way flow in the space that carries nasty stuff up and away.
“Floor Vent”
by Daniel Morrison
When most of us think of Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning, or HVAC, our mind probably wanders to ducted heating and cooling systems and those typical vents in the ceiling. Whether it’s at home, in the office, or in retail settings, this is one of the most typical kinds of ventilation used in modern buildings.
Some systems run in a recirculating manner, while others bring in additional fresh air from outside. Either way, they essentially spray conditioned air into the top of a room. They rely on the velocity of the air to mix the conditioned air throughout the entire space.
This is referred to as “mixing ventilation” for the way it ends with a relatively homogenous mixture of air throughout a given space. When dealing with a virulent airborne pathogen, the problems with this method are obvious. It’s a great way to ensure viral particles get evenly distributed in a room, where they can infect many people.
Displacement ventilation works differently
, by taking advantage of the buoyancy of warmer air. When ventilating in this manner, low velocity air is fed to the lower levels of a space. This air then picks up warmth from occupants of the space, lighting, and such, and then gradually rises to where it is extracted at the ceiling.
The air can be cooled or simply fresh air of ambient temperature, or the system can be used to deliver warm air for heating a space. In the latter case, it may not be the most efficient heating method, as the warm air quickly rises upon entering the space. However, it still works, and maintains the fundamental principle of ventilating a space from bottom to top.
This method has powerful benefits for human-occupied spaces. The flow generated from the ground to the ceiling helps carry away undesirable elements in the atmosphere, immediately removing them from the occupied zone. In contrast, mixing air systems tend to churn all these up in a room, distributing them homogenously. All the bad stuff, from viral particles to carbon dioxide, gets sucked up and out. All one need do is supply fresh (and ideally filtered air) at the lower level and the room is nicely ventilated with a healthy atmosphere.
Studies have shown
that displacement ventilation can cut CO2 levels in classrooms by 17-27%, with potentially beneficial knock on effects to health and cognition.
It’s not actually a new idea; displacement ventilation has been around for a long time. Such a system was famously implemented
in the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, BC,
when it was built in 1927 in the wake of the Spanish Flu epidemic. Fresh air was brought in from outside, and dust and contaminants were removed by passing it through a water spray system. It was then heated as desired, and delivered to the theatre via mushroom-like vents placed under the seats. The air delivered would then rise through the space, exiting through various openings in the porous ceiling. This was notably a great way to remove cigarette smoke from the theatre during a performance, and came with benefits to carbon dioxide levels and pathogen spread, too.
Displacement ventilation isn’t the norm, particularly in residential applications. Those that don’t work in the world of HVAC may not have even heard of it. However, buildings from Carnegie Hall to lecture theatres at the Norweigian Institute of Technology all rely on this method of ventilation.
However, the fundamental equipment and principles involved are simple. Any properly qualified HVAC technician could apply these principles to a given space. It’s straightforward to implement, and it’s not cost prohibitive. For spaces in which it’s desired to cut down on pathogen transmission, the benefits are there for the reaping!
[Banner photo: “
Orpheum Theatre Vancouver View Of Stage
” by MichaelThoeny] | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490286",
"author": "Perry",
"timestamp": "2022-07-07T17:20:05",
"content": "Displacement ventilation is pretty common in residential construction when a house is built on a crawl space. In areas where slab construction is prevalent, I doubt displacement ventilation is used.",
... | 1,760,372,638.36659 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/diy-low-cost-lora-satellite-ground-station/ | DIY Low-Cost LoRa Satellite Ground Station | Chris Lott | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"FossSat",
"Ground Station",
"LoRa",
"satellite",
"telemetry",
"TinyGS"
] | Embedded engineer [Alberto Nunez] has put together
a compact LoRa satellite telemetry ground station
that fits in your hand and can be built for around $40 USD.
The station receives signals from any of several satellites which use LoRa for telemetry, like the
FossaSat
series of
PocketQube
satellites. Even with a sub-optimal setup consisting of a magnetic mount antenna stuck outside a window, [Alberto] is able to receive telemetry from satellites over 2,000 kilometers distant. He also built a smaller variant which is battery powered for portable use.
The construction of this ground station makes use of standard off-the-shelf items with a Heltec ESP32-based LoRa / WiFi module as the heart. This module is one of several supported by the
TinyGS project
, which provides receiver firmware and a worldwide telemetry network consisting of 1,002 stations as of this writing. The firmware has a lot of features, including OTA updates and auto-tuning of your receiver to catch each satellite as it passes overhead.
The TinyGS project started out as a weekend project back in 2019 to use an ESP32 to receive LoRa telemetry from the
FossaSat-1
satellite, and has expanded to encompass all satellites, and other flying objects, using LoRa-based telemetry. It uses Telegram to distribute data, with a message being sent to the channel anytime any station in the network receives a telemetry packet from a satellite.
If you’re interested in getting your feet wet receiving satellite signals, this is an easy project to start with that won’t break the bank. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490273",
"author": "ScriptGiddy",
"timestamp": "2022-07-07T16:17:55",
"content": "Oh yay! Another satellite project to dig into….and the parts are already in my junk drawer :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6490369",
"auth... | 1,760,372,639.051834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/big-chemistry-ultrapure-water/ | Big Chemistry: Ultrapure Water | Dan Maloney | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [] | My first job out of grad school was with a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a small outfit, and everyone had a “lab job” in addition to whatever science they were hired to do — a task to maintain the common areas of the lab. My job was to maintain the water purification systems that made sure everyone had an ample supply of pure, deionized water to work with. The job consisted of mainly changing the filter and ion-exchange cartridges of the final polishing units, which cleaned up the tap water enough for science.
When I changed the filter packs, I was always amazed and revolted by the layers of slime and sediment in them. A glimpse out the window at the banks of the river Charles — love that dirty water — was enough to explain what I was seeing, and it was a lesson in just how much other stuff is mixed in with the water you drink and cook with and bathe in.
While we humans can generally do pretty well with water that rates as only reasonably pure, our industrial processes are quite another thing. Everything from power plants to pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities needs water of much, much higher purity, but nothing requires purer water than the specialized, nanometer-scale operations of a semiconductor fab. But how does ordinary tap water get transformed into a chemical of such purity that contaminants are measured in parts per trillion? And how do fabs produce enough of this ultrapure water to meet their needs? With some big chemistry.
Just the Water, Please
Although standards vary by industry, in general the level of purity reached by ultrapure water (UPW) is almost beyond belief, and suffers by comparison to something like drinking water. Even the purest drinking water is really a complex mixture of minerals and gasses dissolved in water, with a fair number of particulates suspended in it as well. As an example of how different UPW is from drinking water, the US Environmental Protection Agency sets the limit of chromium in drinking water to a mere 0.1 parts per million. But for semiconductor-grade UPW, the limit is 2 parts per
trillion
— 50,000 times less!
When you think about the scales involved in semiconductor manufacturing, the stringent UPW standards make perfect sense. The size of the features being etched onto silicon wafers varies by process node, but current processes can easily be killed by a particle only a few nanometers in diameter. For scale, a coronavirus particle is on the order of 100 nm. Control of particulates in UPW can be vexing, mainly because particles can come from just about anywhere in the piping, tanks, pumps, and vats of chemicals used in the purification process.
Particles aren’t the only contaminants that have to be dealt with. While the smooth, clean surfaces of a fab plant’s UPW equipment might seem like a poor place for life to flourish, bacteria have a proven ability to colonize even the most unlikely ecological niches. Biofilms can present a huge problem to UPW systems, and they can form anywhere that water is allowed to pool. Biofilms can contribute to both particulate contamination as well as total oxidizable carbon (TOC, aka total organic carbon), which is essentially the remains of dead bacteria.
Aside from particulates and TOC, the other main contributors to UPW contamination tend to be water-soluble substances, like minerals and gasses. Sodium is a big concern, mainly because it tends to be a leading indicator of trouble in ion exchange resins used to process UPW — more on that below. Silicates are a concern, too, as are dissolved gasses — oxygen is highly reactive and can easily oxidize the metal layers needed to build a chip, and carbon dioxide easily dissociates in water to form carbonic acid, which increases the conductivity of water and is detrimental to wafer processes.
Putting on the Polish
In a nutshell, water that’s going to be used to build chips needs to be as close to “just water” as possible. Getting it that way, though, requires a remarkable amount of effort. And it’s not just the purity — it’s the volume, too. A semiconductor fab uses a mind-boggling amount of UPW — two to three million gallons (7 – 12 million liters) per day. Building processes that can purify that much water to such stringent requirements, keep it at that purity until it’s needed, and recycle it where possible is a huge challenge.
UPW production begins with bulk treatment of the raw feed water. Steps here include processes that appear in most municipal wastewater treatment plants — the addition of flocculant and coagulant compounds to clump any suspended solids together, sedimentation to let the clumps settle out, and bulk filtration to remove the rest. These steps serve to remove the biggest, nastiest chunks — relatively speaking; the feed water for most fabs is municipal water that would be fine for human consumption — and prepare the water for the processes that will remove sequentially finer contaminants.
The next step is usually one or two stages of reverse osmosis, or RO. As the name suggests, reverse osmosis is the opposite of the natural process of osmosis, which occurs when an imbalance exists between the concentration of two solutes across a semipermeable membrane. The solvent tends to migrate from the side with low solute concentration to the more concentrated side, to even out the imbalance. In RO, the osmotic pressure is overcome by putting energy into the system with a pump, which forces the solvent (water) to migrate across a membrane to the side with lower solute concentration, leaving the solutes behind. The semipermeable membrane is engineered from a non-woven fabric support layer topped with layers of polymers such as polysulfone and polyamide, which form a barrier through which water can pass, but larger solutes cannot.
Ultraviolet light is used in several stages of UPW production. UV of the correct wavelength not only kills any bacteria left after the pretreatment steps, but also tends to degrade the biopolymers, like proteins, DNA, and RNA, in the bacterial remains. The more these macromolecules are chopped up at this stage, the easier they’ll be to remove during later stages of processing.
Cutaway view of a UV water treatment system. Source: Adobe Stock
In order to remove electrically charged contaminants from the process water, ion exchange treatment is used. Ion exchange uses special polymer resin beads that have binding sites on their surfaces. The binding sites are either positively charged (cation exchanger) or negatively charged (anion exchanger). When process water flows over a vat of ion exchange resin, the charged ions that are in solution tend to bind to the sites in the resin with the opposite charge, effectively cleaning them out of the process water.
A variation on ion exchange, called electro deionization (EDI), is sometimes used as well. EDI basically combines ion exchange with reverse osmosis and electrolysis, using an electric current passing through multiple resin beds separated by semipermeable membranes to remove ions from the process water.
Measuring the Unmeasurable
After some final degassing step, the UPW is finally pure enough to enter fab processes. Or is it? That’s hard know, since UPW that’s clean enough to meet the fabrication process requirements is too clean to measure with any current technology. That puts engineers in a difficult position, as often the only reliable way to know if the UPW process is defective is by seeing a decrease in chip yields, and expensive and wasteful assay to say the least.
Despite that fact, there are some metrology methods that are employed to monitor the UPW process. The primary measurement is the conductivity of the water, which can be used to judge the presence of a number of contaminants. For practical reasons, the reciprocal of conductivity, resistivity, is usually measured, with pure water reading 18.18 MΩ⋅cm at 25°C. Resistivity can be exquisitely sensitive — the addition of sodium to just 0.1 parts per billion will drop the resistivity to 18.11 MΩ⋅cm, and such a drop may indicate that an upstream ion exchange bed is in need of attention. And as mentioned before, air leaks in the system can be detected by the resistivity change caused by CO
2
dissolving into the system.
But when it comes to measuring particulates, there aren’t many methods available that can detect such dilute and minute particles as are required for fab-grade UPW. One technology that’s coming close is dynamic light scattering (DLS), which bounces polarized laser light off a water sample. The scattered light passes through another polarizer on its way to a detector, where a snapshot of the scattered light is taken. The process is repeated a short time later, on the order of microseconds to nanoseconds, and the images are compared. The difference between the two images can be attributed to the Brownian motion of whatever particles are in the sample, and the constructive or destructive interference caused by the particles’ movements. This results in a measurement of the particle count and size distribution, potentially down into the sub-nanometer range.
There’s a lot more to UPW systems for fabs, including incredibly complex recycling systems that take the waste-laden water after it’s used in fab processes and reclaims it for further use. And UPW standards are very much a moving target, too. Contaminants that would have gone unnoticed in the larger process nodes of the past are now considered killer particles for 5 nm nodes, so it stands to reason that UPW standards will have to become even more stringent as process nodes advance. And engineers will have to keep up, somehow building systems that can turn out oceans of water that’s purer than can be measured. | 53 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490263",
"author": "mayhem",
"timestamp": "2022-07-07T15:05:30",
"content": "I used to work for a company that made slurries for polishing the wafers used in semiconductor fab. Your article is very well written and paints a great picture of what it takes to get water that pure. The... | 1,760,372,639.554574 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/berlin-clock-takes-inspiration-from-sci-fi-sources-looks-incredible/ | Berlin Clock Takes Inspiration From Sci-Fi Sources, Looks Incredible | Ryan Flowers | [
"clock hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"berlin",
"burlinuhr",
"KiCAD",
"led",
"pcb",
"USB C"
] | What would a HAL9000 look like if it eye were yellow and sat atop a front panel inspired by an Altair 8800? You’d have today’s feature,
[Stephan]’s BerlinUhr
, a gorgeous little take on a Berlin Clock.
At Hackaday, we have a soft spot for clock builds. They’ve graced our pages from early times. When we saw this ultra cool Berlin Clock, we couldn’t resist the urge to share it with all of our readers. For those of you not familiar with a Berlin Clock, it’s a clock that consists of 24 lights, and
was the first of its kind back in 1975
.
[Stephan]’s build is notable because not only is it a beautiful design, but the work that went into the design and build. At several inches tall, the BerlinUhr is supported solely by a USB-C connection, although it can also be hung on a wall. The RTC is backed up by a CR1216, and an ATtiny167 provides the brains for the operation.
A neat part of the build comes with the KPS-3227 light sensor, used to adjust the LED brightness according to ambient lighting. Rather than being a straightforward part to insert into the PCB, KiCad’s footprint had some pins reversed, causing [Stephan] to learn how to correct it and contribute the fix to KiCad. Well done!
We weren’t kidding about clocks, by the way- check out the link to the
Atomic Wrist Watch on this post from 2005
, and this
Russian VFD based clock from 2006- with video
!
Do you have your own favorite clock build you’d love to see grace our pages? Be sure to
submit a tip
! | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490218",
"author": "Then",
"timestamp": "2022-07-07T11:06:37",
"content": "After having hotpot i stumbled into this guy in Berlin:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_Flowing_Timeblew my mind",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": ... | 1,760,372,639.597944 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/07/pico-makes-capable-logic-analyzer/ | Pico Makes Capable Logic Analyzer | Al Williams | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"logic analyzer",
"pico"
] | A common enough microcontroller project is to create some form of logic analyzer. In theory, it should be pretty easy: grab some digital inputs, store them, and display them. But, of course, the devil is in the details. First, you want to grab data fast, but you also need to examine the trigger in real time — hard to do in software. You may also need input conditioning circuitry unless you are satisfied with the microcontroller’s input characteristics. Finally, you need a way to dump the data for analysis. [Gusmanb] has tackled all of these problems with a simple analyzer
built around the Raspberry Pi Pico
.
On the front and back ends, there is an optional board that does fast level conversion. If you don’t mind measuring 3.3 V inputs, you can forego the board. On the output side, there is custom software for displaying the results. What’s really interesting, though, is what is in between.
The simple PCB is completely optional.
The Pico grabs 24 bits of data at 100 MHz and provides edge and pattern triggers. This is impressive because you need to look at the data as you store it and that eats up a few instruction cycles if you try to do it in software, dropping your maximum clock rate. So how does this project manage it?
It uses the Pico’s PIO units are auxiliary dedicated processors that aren’t very powerful, but they are very fast and deterministic. Two PIO instructions are enough to handle the work for simple cases. However, there are two PIOs and each has four separate state machines. It still takes some work, but it is easier than trying to run a CPU at a few gigahertz to get the same effect. The fast trigger mode, in particular, abuses the PIO to get maximum speed and can even work up to 200 MHz with some limitations.
If you want to try it, you can use nothing more than a Pico and a jumper wire as long as you don’t need the level conversion. The project page mentions that custom software avoids using OpenBench software, which we get, but we might have gone for Sigrok drivers to prevent having to reinvent too many wheels. The author mentions that it was easier to roll your own code than conform to a driver protocol and we get that, too. Still, the software looks nice and even has an SPI protocol analyzer. It is all open source, so if you want other protocols before the author gets to them, you could always do it yourself.
If you do want a Pico and Sigrok, we’ve covered
a project that does just that
. Most of the logic analyzers we use these days we build into
our FPGA designs
. | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490202",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2022-07-07T08:58:08",
"content": "RLE compression could help make the best use out of the limited sample memory.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6490208",
"author": "no",
... | 1,760,372,639.663391 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/diy-chicken-mcmansion-is-a-real-hen-house/ | DIY Chicken McMansion Is A Real Hen House | Ryan Flowers | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"chicken",
"chicken coop door",
"farm",
"turkey"
] | You might recognize [Robert Dunn] from his YouTube channel Aging Wheels, where he hacks on all sorts of automotive delights. On his other channel, Under Dunn, [Robert] tends to focus on building things. In this case, his nine chickens grew a bit, and
he needs a new coop for his twenty chickens, three turkeys, and two geese
. The build, the video, and the outcome are all typical of [Robert Dunn]’s videos- that is to say fun, informative, and easy to follow along with.
Rather than building on to his existing coop that was designed for less than a dozen chickens, [Robert] decided to start from scratch. Using CAD to overcomplicate matters at every possible step, the build flies together with impressive speed- but never quite takes off until the very last moment.
The video highlights all the things we want to see: The CNC’ing, the fails (including one very large fall-flat-on-your-face moment), the recovery from the fails, routed butt joints, and screen door handles. It’s also got all of the overengineered goodness we’ve all come to love. You’ll also enjoy his solution to moving, then fixing, then finally installing the coop.
If you enjoyed this, and watching people fail, check out [Robert]’s
Fail Of The Week
that we featured a while back.
Thank you [hackbyte] for the tip! | 9 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490182",
"author": "darkspr1te",
"timestamp": "2022-07-07T05:35:46",
"content": "I enjoy his silly approach to his builds but i bet site safety guys would freak. he was also dang lucky not to break any windows in the move.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []... | 1,760,372,639.352106 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/3d-printed-splint-goes-toe-to-toe-with-medical-grade-equipment/ | 3D Printed Splint Goes Toe To Toe With Medical Grade Equipment | Ryan Flowers | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"medical",
"medical devices",
"medical hacks"
] | When you think of medical devices, the idea of high end, well, pretty much
everything
, comes to mind. This is definitely the case when it comes to prosthetics, or in this similar case, custom fit splints. A hacker by the name of [sammyizimmy] wasn’t put off by the complexity of a custom splint for his fractured big toe, and a great hack made it all possible.
InVesalius reconstructs the CT Scan imagery
The story starts with a fractured toe, and an open source project called
InVesalius
. Instead of doing an X-Ray on his toe, [sammyizimmy]’s doctor decided to do a Computed Tomography scan (aka CT Scan) to get a look at the damage. For being as ubiquitous as they are, it’s easy to forget that a CT scan is an extremely detailed look at both internal and external parts.
The hack really began when [sammyizimmy] asked his radiologist for a copy of the CT Scan. This is something most radiologists will provide upon request, although many people don’t know you can even ask. [sammyizimmy] took his CT scan and opened it up in
InVesalius
, and then reconstructed the skin layer only, and then… head over to the “
3d printed Toe Splint” page at Hackaday.io
for the rest!
If medical hacks are are your kind of medicine, you might appreciate this
HDD-Turned-Centrifuge
too! | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489964",
"author": "Ant",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T12:16:22",
"content": "I printed a wrist brace from Thingiverse to manage carpal tunnel syndrome issues until I was able to have surgery. I went from severe pain and sleepless nights to being able to sleep without pain the night I... | 1,760,372,639.407292 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/3d-print-your-own-multi-color-filament/ | 3D Print Your Own Multi-Color Filament | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3d printing",
"bi-color",
"diy",
"filament"
] | Interested in experimenting with your own multi-color filament? [Turbo_SunShine] says to
just print your own, and experiment away!
Now, if you’re thinking that 3D printing some filament sounds inefficient at best (and a gimmick at worst) you’re not alone. But there’s at least one use case that it makes sense for, and maybe others as well.
Printing with bi-color filament results in an object whose color depends on viewing angle, and part geometry.
There is such a thing as bi-color filament (like MatterHackers Quantum PLA) which can be thought of as filament that is split down the center into two different colors. Printing with such filament can result in some trippy visuals, like
objects whose color depends in part on the angle from which they are viewed
. Of course, for best results it makes sense to purchase a factory-made spool, but for light experimenting, it’s entirely possible to 3D print your own bi-color filament. Back when [Turbo_SunShine] first shared his results, this kind of stuff wasn’t available off the shelf like it is today, but the technique can still make sense in cases where buying a whole spool isn’t called for.
Here is how it works: the 3D model for filament is a spiral that is the right diameter for filament, printed as a solid object. The cross-section of this printed “filament” is a hexagon rather than a circle, which helps get consistent results. To make bi-color filament, one simply prints the first half of the object in one color, then performs a color change, and finishes the print with a second color. End result? A short coil of printed “filament”, in two colors, that is similar enough to the normal thing to be fed right back into the printer that created it.
This gallery of photos from [_Icarus]
showcases the kind of results that are possible.
What do you think? Is 3D printing filament mainly an exercise in inefficiency, or is it a clever leveraging of a printer’s capabilities? You be the judge, but it’s pretty clear that some interesting results can be had from the process. Take a few minutes to check out the video (embedded below) for some additional background. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489924",
"author": "Andrzej",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T08:17:29",
"content": "It seems just wrong to use a 3d printer to print a spool of wire. But hey, it works ! :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6489949",
"author"... | 1,760,372,639.458916 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/scratch-built-electric-buggy-tears-up-the-dunes/ | Scratch-Built Electric Buggy Tears Up The Dunes | Dan Maloney | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"dune buggy",
"electric vehicle",
"ev",
"fabrication"
] | It’s a fair bet to say that the future of personal transportation will probably be electric. In support of that, every major car manufacturer either has an electric drivetrain option available now, or they’re working furiously on developing one. And while it’s good that your suburban grocery grabber will someday be powered by the sun, what about the pressing need for EVs that are just plain fun to drive?
To fill the fun gap, at least for now, [James Biggar] built what you can’t buy:
an all-electric dune buggy
. And lest you think this was a kit build, be assured that the summary video below shows this little sand rail was 100% scratch-built. The chassis is fabricated from bent tubing, and welded up using a clever plywood template to get the angles just right. The buggy has four-wheel independent suspension and a wide, aggressive stance to handle rough terrain. The body panels are sheet aluminum bent on a custom-built brake, which was also used to form the Plexiglas windshield with a little help from a heat gun.
While the bodywork makes the buggy pretty sick looking, the drivetrain is just as impressive. [James] used an ME1616, a liquid-cooled 55-kW beast. A chain drive couples the motor to a differential from a Honda CR-V which has a limited-slip modification installed. The batteries are impressive, too — 32 custom-made lithium-iron-phosphate batteries made from 32650 cells in vacuum-formed ABS plastic shells that nest together compactly. It all adds up to a lot of fun in the dirt; skip to 23:37 in the video to see what this thing can do.
Honestly, the level of craftsmanship here is top-notch, and is all the more impressive in that it’s not fancy — just good, solid methods and lots of hard work. We’d love to have the time and resources to put into something like this — although
a drop-in crate motor EV
might be a satisfying build too.
Thanks to [Zane Atkins] for the tip! | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489896",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T06:26:23",
"content": "‘Tears up’ not so sure.I’m very sure it is capable of said tearing, possibly needs a lower gear, which is easy to obtain with his chain drive.He hit 75 (mph or kph) way too easily, with a lower gear he coul... | 1,760,372,639.762595 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/classic-amp-revived-with-a-pi/ | Classic Amp Revived With A Pi | Jenny List | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"effects pedal",
"guitar",
"guitar amp"
] | Guitar amplifiers have a hard life, and as anyone who’s run a venue can tell you, they often have significant electrical issues after a life on the road. [Dsagman] had a Vox amplifier with fried internals, and rather than repair the original he rebuilt it with a Raspberry Pi inside to provide a
fully-loaded array of effects
.
Though the subject is the Vox, it’s best to see this as more a tale of how to create a guitar effect array in a Pi than specifically put it in an amplifier. The Pi has an audio board and an MCP3008 ADC added to it, and using those two it takes its inputs from a series of potentiometers and process the audio passing through the audio board. In addition there are a series of LED indicators and an LED bar graph to keep the user in touch with what’s going on.
The whole lot is nicely integrated in the VOX case with all the potentiometers on an aluminium panel. He discusses amplifier choice, but as you might expect the final choice is a Class D module. All in all an amp many readers would probably go for.
As long-time readers will remember,
guitar effects have made quite a few appearances around here
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489966",
"author": "mikeb",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T12:31:23",
"content": "Really appreciate the slide deck! I had something like this on my TODO list for the summer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6489979",
"autho... | 1,760,372,639.858988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/never-miss-an-email-with-this-1970s-style-desktop-notifier/ | Never Miss An Email With This 1970s Style Desktop Notifier | Robin Kearey | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"1970s design",
"notifier",
"vfd display"
] | If you like the 1970s aesthetic but think bell-bottoms, big hair and psychedelic wallpaper are a bit too much in this day and age, you might want to have a look at
[Pierre Muth]’s latest build,
The Absurd Notifier
. It’s a useful desk accessory that adds just a little bit of ’70s flair to your office: housed inside what looks like an orange TV standing on shiny metal feet is a little gadget that can tell you if you’ve got important email messages waiting or an appointment coming up.
[Pierre] built the system around a Garmin Vivosmart 3 smartwatch that he bought very cheaply because it had a broken display. The display’s pinout and protocol were of course undocumented, so [Pierre] hooked up his logic analyzer to try and figure out how it worked. It turned out to be a simple SPI setup, and with a bit of trial and error he was able to extract the images that the watch was sending out.
To replace the broken screen, [Pierre] turned to some 128×64 pixel VFD displays that he had left over from an earlier project. Their resolution was exactly the same as the Garmin’s original OLED display, but their interface wasn’t: the VFDs expected 115k2 serial data. Programming a PIC microcontroller with an SPI port on one side and a UART port on the other made for a simple bridge between the two.
[Pierre] then designed and 3D printed a case reminiscent of a 1970s TV, with matching bright orange color. The end result is a funky little retro clock that shows notifications on a vintage green display. If you like desktop notifiers, we seen several neat ones alerting their owners about things ranging from
new YouTube subscribers
to
the ISS passing by
.
Thanks for the tip, [Adrian]! | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489832",
"author": "Joel B",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T02:05:02",
"content": "Nicely done. There’s many of us that would have been content to throw the parts on a breadboard and call it a day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "648... | 1,760,372,639.712066 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/new-gear-saves-old-printer/ | New Gear Saves Old Printer | Jenny List | [
"cnc hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"gear",
"printer"
] | As the digital photographic revolution took off, and everyone bought a shiny new film-less camera, there was a brief fad for photo printers. The idea was you’d have the same prints you’d always had from film, but the media for these printers would invariably cost a fortune so consumers moved on pretty quickly.
Now the pop up in second-hand stores and the like,
which is how [Amen] acquired a Canon Selphy 740
. It didn’t work, and on investigation it was found that a particularly tiny plastic gear had failed. Most people would have tossed the printer in the trash, but they instead opted to CNC-machine a new gear. It’s not everyday you tackle a job this small, so it makes for an interesting tale.
While the first instinct might be to reach reach for a CAD package, [Amen] instead wrote a script to create the raw GCode. The machining is done with a 0.2 mm bit ground to the desired profile. The result: a gear that gets the printer working again. It’s a dye-sublimation printer that leaves a negative image in the cartridge, allowing negative prints to be made with a bit of cartridge rewinding. And for those who might have ended up with a Selphy of their own, there’s
a further post about using cheaper aftermarket cartridges
. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489701",
"author": "John Arbuckle",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T20:36:18",
"content": "Oh man, it hurts that he plunged in and then translated along the part – that deflection could have been partially avoided if he just did that motion in reverse",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,372,639.818876 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/the-warm-glow-of-a-luminous-clock/ | The Warm Glow Of A Luminous Clock | Jenny List | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"luminous",
"Micro:bit",
"uv"
] | It seems there will never be an end to the number of ways to show the time. The latest is
the LumiClock
from [UK4dshouse], and it uses the seldom-seen approach of a sheet of luminous paper excited by a strip of UV LEDs that pass over it guided by a lead screw.
At its heart is a micro:bit, which generates the time in dot-matrix digital form as the LEDs are moved across the sheet. It in turn has a real-time-clock module to keep it on time, and it drives a little DC motor via a robotics driver board. The appearance of the whole devices is similar to an X-Y plotter without the Y axis, as a 3D-printed carrier is moved by the lead screw and slides along a pair of stainless steel tubes. The result is an unusual and eye-catching timepiece, whose retro dot-matrix numerals fade away and are refreshed with the new time.
We’ve had a bit of a play ourselves with UV luminous materials, and we can confirm they make an interesting alternative to some other display ideas in dimmer environments.
This isn’t the first such clock we’ve shown you
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489704",
"author": "tetsuoii",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T20:42:05",
"content": "Gotta love that eerie glow 🌟",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6489740",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T21:44:54",
"content": ... | 1,760,372,640.021836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/hacker-camps-post-pandemic-electromagnetic-field-2022/ | Hacker Camps Post-Pandemic, Electromagnetic Field 2022 | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"electromagnetic field",
"EMF camp",
"hacker camp"
] | After a four-year hiatus and a cancelled event, it was time earlier this month for British and European hackers to return to their field in Herefordshire. A special field, Eastnor Castle Deer Park, venue for the Electromagnetic Field 2022 hacker camp. I packed up an oversized rucksack and my folding bike, and set off to enjoy a few days in the company of my fellow geeks.
As the first of the large European hacker camps since 2019 there was both an excitement and a slight trepidation in finally hanging out with several thousand people, even if mostly outdoors. The UK has a good COVID vaccine uptake and the camp organisers requested that attendees test themselves before travelling to Eastnor, but after two years of precautions and the pandemic still being with us there’s still some risk to take into account. Happily they were able to strike a decent balance between precautions and event progress, and we were able to proceed with a fairly normal hacker camp.
Plenty Of Talks, But They’re Not Online Yet
Sadly the extensive programme of talks has yet to make it onto
YouTube
or
media.ccc.de
at the time of writing, so the section I’d normally devote to them may have to wait for another time. Thus this write-up is more about the social aspect than the action.
Eastnor Castle Deer Park lies in a secluded Herefordshire valley, and the entry is vla a small estate road that treats you to an unfolding vista as you approach, of the marquees and other structures nestled among the trees. The usual queue for a wristband and you’re in, with the minor inconvenience of a trek trough the site to wherever your village lies. This year I was with my hackerspace in the Milton Keynes Makerspace village, next to one of the estate roads at the side of the valley and clustered round a tent with the commendable purpose of distributing free cups of very high quality tea. My tent up, I was ready to tour the site, and renew some friendships after so long apart.
Noisy Ducks, Electronic Junk, And Tonic Wine
The site is quite a long one running north-south and has a gentle east-to-west downhill slope. Most of the public structures were arranged along the bottom of the slope along its length, with the various camping zones and villages spread out along the slope and to the far end. Back in 2018, the quiet camping had been alongside a set of picturesque ponds which turned out to be inhabited by
particularly noisy ducks
— this year the quiet campers would be moved, and the noisiest part of the camp would take their place.
The EMF hardware swap, all the good stuff to pick over!
The weekend fell prey to some of the more annoying British weather, thus with a few bright spots it was mostly damp. If you heard the Hackaday Podcast interviews I made on the field you’ll have gained a flavour of the event as I ran around with my laptop and microphone.
The effect of the pandemic was visible in a slightly more subdued air around the villages, it appeared that the action was less spread around the field than it had been in previous years. I visited the copper telephone network, the radio amateurs, and the Hacky Racers, but the vibe in the villages was definitely more social than technical. I shared an early-morning coffee with South London Makerspace as they continued their tradition of providing free breakfast, learned the difference between the Scottish and Irish versions of Buckfast tonic wine with the Scottish Consulate, and hung out with my friends from across the UK hackerspace scene. There was no
spam
from Fizzpop! in Birmingham this year, but their fire pit made for a great place to warm up on a damp night in early June.
A particular highlight for me was a hardware swap table, nestled under a gazebo in the centre of the camp. The idea was simple, bring your surplus hardware and leave it there for others to pick over and take away. Take something away and leave a donation to the British Red Cross. The result was a compelling opportunity to root through a pile of awesome junk, and yes, to take some of it home with me. I acquired a pile of early Raspberry Pi boards, a Psion handheld computer, an original Beagleboard, a Sega Game Gear, and a few more choice items, and I wasn’t the only one to have such luck. I hope this makes a return at future camps.
More Polished Than Post-Apocalyptic
The laser show kicked ass, but Null Sector seemed too polished for me.
If you read our 2018 report you’d have seen me waxing lyrical about Null Sector, a post-apocalyptic night-spot-meets-tech-bazaar-on-the-outer-planets made from a load of freight containers and a lot imaginative prop making that was probably one of the coolest places on earth. Null Sector returned in 2022 with a larger more ambitious space, in which gone was the post-apocalyptic dank, and in came an almost clinical industrial laboratory look. There was plenty of old industrial switchgear on the walls and clever use of those flat-screen monochrome CRTs that have been all over AliExpress for a while, alongside a selection of appropriately avant-garde immersive artworks and games. It was beautifully done and made probably one of the most polished of pop-up nightclubs ever to grace a festival field, but for me the polish went some way to obliterate what made it so cool the first time around. Sadly I was no longer a cyborg holo-scribe from Hack-a-stardate stuck on a partially terraformed asteroid waiting for the next space tug to take me off-world, instead I was a middle-aged geek standing in a flash nightclub in a field. At least it seemed to be spot on for EMF’s party animals though, which is I guess the whole point.
Where Do Hacker Camps Go Next?
So that was EMF, more subdued than previous ones but a well-deserved respite in a Herefordshire field after a few years away. Not the same as previous EMFs — was it the pandemic or was I witnessing a move away from the more raw edge of the past? It was left to a friend to deliver a verdict that I think sums it up best: they made the observation that it seemed as though there were more people there to be attendees than participants. At various times the event has been described in the press as the UK’s version of Burning Man, and while I don’t think that is the case I do think that hacker camps can all find themselves at a crossroads. Do they want to be a gathering of hackers, or a spectacle? | 21 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489566",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T17:18:15",
"content": "is there an easily accessible and regularly updated list of said hacker camps in the UK?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6489944",
"author": "... | 1,760,372,640.127576 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/tiny-berlin-clock-replica-also-counts-seconds/ | Tiny Berlin Clock Replica Also Counts Seconds | Robin Kearey | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"Berlin clock",
"wemos d1 mini",
"wristwatch"
] | If you’re a clock aficionado and have ever visited Berlin, you’re probably familiar with the Berlin Clock on Budapester Straße: a minimalist design of yellow and orange lights that displays the time in a base-5 number system. This clock has been telling the time to the few that can read it since 1975, and is but one of several unusual clocks that can be found in the city.
Berlin resident [jjoeff] decided to make
a miniature replica, appropriately called the Berlin Uhr Nano
, in order to watch the unusual display at any time of day. Built around a Wemos D1 Mini, it connects to WiFi in order to synchronize its internal clock to an NTP time server. It then drives a custom PCB that holds 39 WS2812 LEDs to display the time in its proper format. Unlike the original though, it also includes a full counter to tell the number of seconds; the bigger clock just flashes a single lamp to show the seconds passing.
Powered by a 500 mAh lithium battery, it can be converted into a wristwatch by simply threading a strap through slots in the PCB. With no buttons for adjustment or any functionality other than displaying the time, it serves the same purpose as the original, just in a portable format. We’ve seen
a slightly larger Berlin Clock replica made of wood
before, as well as
a round one
that uses the same base-5 encoding scheme. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489552",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T17:03:59",
"content": "For more information on the clock:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mengenlehreuhr",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6489670",
"author": "Dennis",
"ti... | 1,760,372,640.068696 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/companies-rumored-to-harvest-washing-machines-for-ics/ | Companies Rumored To Harvest Washing Machines For ICs | Arya Voronova | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Slider"
] | [
"chip shortage",
"parts shortage",
"shortages",
"washing machine"
] | Wired
and
SCMP
are reporting on interesting trivia from the realm of chip shortages. Apparently, some large conglomerate out there is buying new washing machines and scavenging the chips they can’t obtain otherwise. My imagination pictures skilled engineers in a production room, heavy-duty electric screwdrivers and desoldering toolkits on the floor next to them, and a half-torn-down washing machine about to reveal its control board with an STM32 right in the middle. This might not be the most skilled job, but it’s a change of pace, and hey, as long as the rate stays the same?
Whichever company is doing this, they’re in a conundrum for sure. One of the articles offers an example of a $350,000 spectrometer manufacturing being stalled by lack of a $0.50 part – while this feels exaggerated, it’s within the realm of possibility. For car manufacturers, the difference isn’t as dire, but still severe enough, and not meeting the production targets has ramifications other than the financial ones. It might indeed make sense to buy a $150 washing machine in order to finally be able to move a $30,000 car off the assembly line.
Shipping Anyway – Barely
Companies have devised a slew of tricks to keep getting product out of the door. From good old code optimizations, to shipping cars with features partially excluded, and of course, buying severely marked up chips even if their origin is shady. At least, if your car doesn’t come with some rudimentary feature, there might’ve been a good reason for it – beats the
Features As A Service
thing. Nevertheless, even entities like Volkswagen, Tesla and Toyota are sustaining casualties, not meeting their targets, with all that entails financially and PR-wise.
There’s always high hopes about solving IC shortage problems. Chips appear and disappear, toolkits get made, cool new substitute parts get found. However, if you’re managing a company’s production process, at some point you’ll have to break out of the limbo between “this might be over tomorrow” and “we aren’t doing enough yet”. You either reach for desperate measures, or you might find yourself out of business.
You’d think the situation would’ve gotten sorted out by now – it did start almost two years ago already, after all! Of course, there’s always new complications piling on. The war being waged on Ukraine by Russia has interrupted some supply chains, making select products more expensive. There’s periodic COVID-19 lockdowns in China, an earthquake
has brought some Japanese factories to a halt
in March, and TSMC’s capacity is sold out through 2023 too – not leaving much hope for those not lucky enough to be in the schedule.
The Opposite Of Recycling
This situation reminds me of last year’s
Remoticon presentation,
by [Maurits Fennits] from [Unbinare] – creating a toolkit for reverse-engineering in order to be able to reuse parts, except without the benefit of being able to obtain proprietary information through business relationships. Unbinare’s toolkit is impressive and I hope that at least some of the tools are being put to good use when it comes to chip shortage problem solutions.
On the other hand, tearing apart brand new equipment for a single chip creates more e-waste, even when it makes financial sense. We can’t realistically expect that the company in question is going to restore these washing machines back to working condition and release them back into the market; the whole disassembly and desoldering operation is probably quite destructive, too.
Surely, the washing machine thing can’t be common occurrence, and there’s no indication that it’s anything but an isolated incident. However, if such methods are used, I’d hope they at least cause some reflection. One would dream that Apple, for instance, is being forced to face its affinity towards shredding the devices they’re meant to recycle – as opposed to actually meaningful forms of recycling. I’m afraid this isn’t about to happen.
We’ve torn down many a prototype in the past year or two, from STM32- to Raspberry Pi-containing ones. Do tell us about your own “salvaging parts to bring new projects to life” journeys of recent times! | 162 | 32 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489495",
"author": "Val",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T14:37:32",
"content": "Is this like… an engineering urban myth? I’ve been hearing this thrown around in my company and never expected to see it on hackaday. Does anyone have actual names or sources? I had been looking into it and c... | 1,760,372,640.719747 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/raspberry-pi-pico-modchip-unlocks-the-gamecube/ | Raspberry Pi Pico “Modchip” Unlocks The GameCube | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"flash cart",
"gamecube",
"homebrew",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | In terms of units sold, it’s no secret that the GameCube was one of Nintendo’s poorest performing home consoles. You could argue increased competition meant sales of the quirky little machine were destined to fall short of the system’s legendary predecessors, but that didn’t keep the Wii from outselling it by a factor of five a few years later. Still, enough incredible games were released for the GameCube that the system still enjoys a considerable fanbase.
Now,
with the release of PicoBoot by [webhdx]
, we suspect the GameCube is about to gain a whole new generation of fans. With just a Raspberry Pi Pico, some jumper wires, and a widely available third-party SD card adapter, this open source project bypasses the console’s original BIOS so it can boot directly into whatever homebrew application the user selects. With how cheap and easy to perform this modification is, we wouldn’t be surprised if it kicked off something of a renaissance for GameCube homebrew development.
Installation takes just five wires.
In the video after the break, [Tito] of
Macho Nacho Productions
provides a rundown of this new project
, including a fantastic step-by-step installation guide that covers everything from soldering the jumper wires to the console’s motherboard to getting the firmware installed on the Pico. He then demonstrates booting the console into various community developed front-ends and tools, showing just how versatile the modification is. While some will see this as little more than an easier way to run bootleg games, we can’t help but be excited about what the future holds now that getting your own code to run on the system is so easy.
Alright, maybe it’s not
so
easy. To solder on the five wires that will eventually snake their way to the GPIO pins of the Pi Pico, you’ll need to strip the console all the way down to the main board. That wouldn’t be too bad itself, but unfortunately to reach two of the connections you’ll need to remove the system’s massive heatsink — which means you’ll need to clean up the old sticky thermal pads and apply new ones if you don’t want your GameCube to turn into a GameCrisp. It’s nothing that would scare off the average Hackaday reader, but it might give pause to those less handy with an iron.
The release of PicoBoot comes hot on the heels of the revelation that the Raspberry Pi Pico can be
used not only as an N64 flash cart
but as a
supercharged PlayStation Memory Card
. These projects would all be significantly improved with a custom RP2040 board, and no doubt that’s the direction they’ll eventually head, but it’s hard not to be impressed by what the low-cost microcontroller development board is capable of in its native form. Especially now that
it comes in WiFi flavor
. | 30 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489443",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T11:24:26",
"content": "Can the Rpi Pico be used to replace a Sega Dreamcast GD-ROM drive?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6489454",
"author": "Joshua",
... | 1,760,372,640.338904 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/05/viewing-atoms-with-electrons/ | Viewing Atoms With Electrons | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"electron microscope",
"scanning electron microscope"
] | When we were in school, they always told us we can’t see atoms. If you have an electron microscope, then they were wrong. [AlphaPhoenix] has access to a
scanning
tunneling
transmission electron microscope
and he shows us some atoms in a very thin slice of a crystal.
Of course, you aren’t directly imaging the atoms. You are looking at the shadows of the atoms, but still. If you’ve never worked with a SEM or STEM before, there are plenty of little details that are interesting like the sample holders and the vacuum system.
One thing that struck us is that compared to the SEMs we used to use is that computers have, indeed, changed everything. In the 1980s our SEMs looked like someone’s idea of a 25th-century space shuttle with knobs, dials, meters, levers, and even pedals. Now, it looks like a computer with a bunch of monitors.
Even better than the images, we really enjoyed the explanation and macro-scale demonstration of how the microscope works. If you haven’t worked with this technology before, it is amazing and he didn’t even cover things like energy dispersive spectroscopy and other useful techniques.
It isn’t easy
building your own electron microscope
, but some people do try. And
try
. You might be better off trying to snag one surplus. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489437",
"author": "0xCOFFEE",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T10:41:19",
"content": "Please correct: This is not measured by a “scanning tunneling electron microscope” but a scanning *transmission* electron microscope!STM (Scanning tunneling microscopy) is a completely different techniqu... | 1,760,372,640.213187 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/04/uart-cant-arduino-canserial-can/ | UART Can’t? Arduino CANSerial Can! | Elliot Williams | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"arduino",
"canbus"
] | [Jacob Geigle] had a problem. A GPS unit and a Bluetooth-to-serial were tying up all the hardware UARTs on an AVR Arduino project. “Software serial”, I hear you say. But what if I told you [Jacob] already had the board in question sending out data over CAN bus?
[Jacob]’s sweet hack
creates an arbitrary number of CAN “devices” inside the Arduino code
, and can treat each one of them as its own serial data channel. The “N” in CAN stands for network, after all. The trick is to create a device ID for each desired CANSerial interface, which is done in his library using the usual Arduino setup step. A buffer takes care of storing all the different channels until they can be pushed out over the hardware CAN peripheral. On the big-computer side of things, some software listens for the different “device” enumeration IDs and assigns each a virtual serial port.
While this was a hack born of necessity, we can see it as a clever opportunity to segregate information coming from the microcontroller into different streams. Maybe a debug channel, a command channel, and a data channel? They’re virtual devices, so go nuts!
While we usually see CANbus in its native habitat – inside your car – it’s also cool to think of the uses we could put it to. For instance,
controlling a 3D printer
. Need
a CAN refresher
? We’ve got just the ticket.
[Bus photo:
Malta Bus; The terminus, Valletta
by John Haslam. Can photo:
Paint Cans
by Daniel R. Blume. Horrible visual pun: I’m afraid that’s on us. You try finding images for CANbus code!] | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489370",
"author": "J_B",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T05:30:43",
"content": "One of the big advantages of using a mictrocontroller with a hardware CAN controller instead of emulating it in software is that required retransmissions, buffering, error corrections, filtering unwanted mess... | 1,760,372,640.524037 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/04/photovoltaic-cells-in-ltspice/ | Photovoltaic Cells In LTSpice | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"LTSpice",
"photovoltaic",
"SPICE"
] | We like to build things using real parts. But we do think the more you can model using tools like LTSpice, the less time you can spend going down dead ends. If you need to model a common component like a resistor or even an active device, most simulators have great models and you can tweak them to have realistic parasitic effects. But what if the component you want isn’t in the library or doesn’t have the fidelity you want? [FesZ] wanted to
model photovoltaic cells
and had to build his own model. The resulting two videos are well worth watching.
Building your own models in Spice isn’t necessarily very difficult. However, knowing exactly what to add to model different real-world effects can be challenging. The videos do a good job of showing how to mutate a simple diode into one that produces current when exposed to light.
The key, it seems to us, is to not fall too far down the rabbit hole. The default models, for example, do a good job of modeling major effects but not getting bogged down with subtle details that don’t make much practical difference. You usually want to capture major effects in normal operating regimes. The fact that your resistor will blow open if you draw 30 amps through it isn’t really important for most simulations.
We’ve looked at building transformers in
Spice before
. We also enjoy modeling
test setups with LTSpice
. | 19 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489367",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T05:07:17",
"content": "Headed down the renewable power electronics rabbit hole? There are buckets of educational resources, though one course I’m finding ‘just right’, hails from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore:https://w... | 1,760,372,640.476192 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/03/ajax-command-radio-is-an-oldie-but-goodie/ | AJAX COMMAND Radio Is An Oldie But Goodie | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"transistor radio",
"vintage radio"
] | If you are a certain age, it is hard to wrap your head around the fact that an old radio might have transistors — the old ones all had tubes, right? But a radio from the 1960s or 1970s is reaching the 60+ year mark and people are restoring old transistor sets. [Adam] picked up his first old radio, a
1970s vintage Ajax Command S-74
.
He was fortunate. The only repair needed was to replace a corroded battery holder and clean up the mess from the batteries. You can hear the radio doing its thing in the video below.
As repairs go, it wasn’t very difficult, of course. But seeing the inside of this radio si bound to bring back some nostalgia if you are at the right age. The PCB looks like a typical mass-produced board of the era. You’ll quickly recognize the IF transformers and the loopstick antenna.
It was almost a shame that the radio worked so readily. These old sets were actually fun to troubleshoot using a signal injector or signal tracer. We recently covered a modern take on a
signal tracer
, in fact. Back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon to have one of these or even a
premium one from Heathkit
. | 32 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489122",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.1",
"timestamp": "2022-07-04T04:00:50",
"content": "Radios like this were primary tinker training for scamps with a screwdriver of my age. What can the kids take apart these days that will learn them something?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,372,640.789042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/03/hackaday-links-july-3-2022/ | Hackaday Links: July 3, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"5g",
"amd",
"crypto",
"downlink",
"flare",
"geomagnetic",
"gpu",
"hackaday links",
"ku-band",
"MakerGear",
"NVIDIA",
"Solar Cycle",
"solar storm",
"Starlink",
"sunspots"
] | Looks like we might have been a bit premature in
our dismissal last week
of the Sun’s potential for throwing a temper tantrum, as that’s exactly what happened when
a G1 geomagnetic storm
hit the planet early last week. To be fair, the storm was very minor — aurora visible down to the latitude of Calgary isn’t terribly unusual — but the odd thing about this storm was that it sort of snuck up on us. Solar scientists first thought it was a coronal mass ejection (CME), possibly related to the “monster sunspot” that had rapidly tripled in size and was being hyped up as some kind of planet killer. But it appears this sneak attack came from another, less-studied phenomenon, a co-rotating interaction region, or CIR. These sound a bit like eddy currents in the solar wind, which can bunch up plasma that can suddenly burst forth from the sun, all without showing the usually telltale sunspots.
Then again, even people who study the Sun for a living
don’t always seem to agree
on what’s going on up there. Back at
the beginning of Solar Cycle 25
, NASA and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were calling for a relatively weak showing during our star’s eleven-year cycle, as recorded by the number of sunspots observed. But
another model
, developed by heliophysicists at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, predicted that Solar Cycle 25 could be among the strongest ever recorded. And so far, it looks like the latter group might be right. Where the NASA/NOAA model called for 37 sunspots in May of 2022, for example, the Sun actually threw up 97 — much more in line with what the NCAR model predicted. If the trend holds, the peak of the eleven-year cycle in April of 2025 might see over 200 sunspots a month.
So, good news and bad news from the cryptocurrency world lately. The bad news is that cryptocurrency markets are crashing, with the flagship Bitcoin falling from its high of around $67,000 down to $20,000 or so, and looking like it might fall even further. But the good news is that’s put
a bit of a crimp in the demand for NVIDIA graphics cards
, as the economics of turning electricity into hashes starts to look a little less attractive. So if you’re trying to upgrade your gaming rig, that means there’ll soon be a glut of GPUs, right? Not so fast, maybe: at least one analyst has
a different view
, based mainly on the distribution of AMD and NVIDIA GPU chips in the market as well as how much revenue they each draw from crypto rather than from traditional uses of the chips. It’s important mainly for investors, so it doesn’t really matter to you if you’re just looking for a graphics card on the cheap.
Speaking of businesses, things are not looking too good for MakerGear. According to
a banner announcement
on their website, the supplier of 3D printers, parts, and accessories is scaling back operations, to the point where everything is being sold on an “as-is” basis with no returns. In a long post on
“The Future of MakerGear,”
founder and CEO Rick Pollack says the problem basically boils down to supply chain and COVID issues — they can’t get the parts they need to make printers. And so the company is looking for a buyer. We find this sad but understandable, and wish Rick and everyone at MakerGear the best of luck as they try to keep the lights on.
And finally, if there’s one thing Elon Musk is good at, it’s keeping his many businesses in the public eye. And so it is this week with SpaceX, which
is recruiting Starlink customers
to write nasty-grams to the Federal Communications Commission regarding Dish Network’s plan to gobble up a bunch of spectrum in the 12-GHz band for their 5G expansion plans. The 3,000 or so newly minted experts on spectrum allocation wrote to tell FCC commissioners how much Dish sucks, and how much they love and depend on Starlink. It looks like they may have a point — Starlink uses the lowest part of the Ku band (12 GHz – 18 GHz) for data downlinks to user terminals, along with big chunks of about half a dozen other bands. It’ll be interesting to watch this one play out. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489080",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2022-07-03T23:11:17",
"content": "I propose we dim our albedo with a few megatons of coal dust and project a holographic image of earth a few hundred thousand miles in our orbital wake, so even if the Sun brushes up on it’s deflectio... | 1,760,372,640.418314 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/03/testing-a-tube-without-a-tube-tester/ | Testing A Tube Without A Tube Tester | Al Williams | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"tube tester"
] | [M Caldeira] needed to test a tube and didn’t have a spare to do the old swap test. He also didn’t have a tube tester handy. Drawing inspiration from a 2015 video, he managed to cobble up an
ad hoc
tube tester using stuff around the
workbench
. You can see a video of the process below.
To duplicate his effort, you are going to need a few meters. Good thing they are relatively cheap these days. Usually, a tube tester has a way to adjust all the different parameters for the tube, but there’s no reason you can’t just set those parameters using your testbench power supplies.
Of course, that’s going to require high voltage power supplies. You won’t be able to use a USB port to power most tubes. A simple test board provides the right bias and convenient ways to connect the power supplies. One supply powers the heater, while other power supplies drive the other voltages. A small DC to DC converter provides the high voltage B+ line from 12V input.
Watching the tube in operation is certainly one way to test it. The days when tube testers were everywhere are long gone. But you can still find
some interesting ones
on the used market if you really need to test a lot of tubes. If you are really motivated, you can even
make your own tubes
. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489023",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-07-03T20:23:22",
"content": "Most people didn’t have tube testers. They went to the radio store or the drugstore, or maybe the local repairman would let them use theirs.But since tubes are mostly obsolete, the used testers are ... | 1,760,372,640.837539 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/03/ai-image-generation-sharpens-your-bad-photos-and-kills-photography/ | AI Image Generation Sharpens Your Bad Photos And Kills Photography? | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence"
] | [
"ai",
"artificial intellegence",
"DALL-E",
"photography"
] | We don’t fully understand the appeal of asking an AI for a picture of a gorilla eating a waffle while wearing headphones. However, [Micael Widell] shows something in a recent video that might be the
best use we’ve seen yet of DALL-E 2
. Instead of concocting new photos, you can apparently use the same technology for cleaning up your own rotten pictures. You can see his video, below. The part about DALL-E 2 editing is at about the 4:45 mark.
[Nicholas Sherlock] fed the AI a picture of a fuzzy ladybug and asked it to focus the subject. It did. He also fed in some other pictures and asked it to make subtle variations of them. It did a pretty good job of that, too.
As [Micael] points out, right now the results are not perfect, but they are really not bad. What do you think systems like this will be able to do in a few years?
We might not totally agree with [Micael’s] thesis, though. He thinks photography will be dead when you can just ask the AI to mangle your smartphone pictures or just ask it to create whatever picture you want out of whole cloth. Sure, it will change things. But people still ride horses. People even still take black and white photos on film even though we don’t have to anymore.
Of course, if you made your living making horseshoes or selling black and white film, you probably had to adapt to changing times. Some did and — of course — some didn’t. But this is probably no different than that. It may be that “unaugmented” photography becomes more of a niche. On the other hand, certified unaug photos (remember, you heard that phrase here first) might become more valuable as art in the same way that a handcrafted vase is worth more than one pushed off a factory line. Who knows?
What do you think? Is photography dying? Or just changing? If AI takes over photographers, what will they go after next?
We think our Hackaday jobs are
safe for a little longer.
We wonder if DALL-E could learn to do
photographic time travel
? | 66 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6488945",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2022-07-03T17:16:39",
"content": "Digital hasn’t even killed fim, so no.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6488946",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2022-... | 1,760,372,641.092796 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/03/ride-diy-or-die-this-badge-less-suzuki/ | RideDIY Or Die This Badge-Less Suzuki | Kristina Panos | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"badge",
"emblem",
"motorcycle",
"vinyl cutter"
] | A few years ago, [Charles] picked up a sweet Suzuki motorcycle that checked all the boxen: it was in good shape, bore a few useful upgrades and a box of spare parts, plus the price was right. Though he assumed that he had pored over every picture on the classified site before buying, it wasn’t until later that [Charles] realized that something was indeed missing from the bike — a piece of chrome that does little more than to cover the tee in the brake line and bear the Suzuki brand. Once he saw the problem, he couldn’t
un-
see it, you know? And at that point,
he just had to have that little piece, even if he had to make it himself
.
That wasn’t the original plan, of course, but bike parts are expensive to begin with and only get worse as size, condition, and rarity increase. [Charles]’ quest to find this piece was halfway successful; he found a reasonable-but-rusty facsimile of the right part, although the emblem portion was long gone. Then he remembered the wife’s vinyl cutter.
Now, let’s stop right there. If you know anything at all about these vinyl cutters, you know that they are basically glorified 2D plotters with a knife attached where a pen would be. Send it any 2D file and you’re good? No, no; of course not. These things are locked down by the manufacturers.
Fortunately, [Charles] found
inkscape-silhouette
, which makes light work of sending SVGs to the machine. After much back and forth and maybe a bit of coin-flipping, [Charles] settled on the classy, stylized ‘S’ version rather than the full-on Suzuki badge. We think it looks great, and we’ll never tell anyone.
While this isn’t quite the
type of badge we’d normally talk about
, it’s a great project nonetheless, and it’s always nice to hear about projects that open up otherwise closed-source hardware. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6488900",
"author": "QBFreak",
"timestamp": "2022-07-03T15:04:05",
"content": "My work-around for the inability to use SVGs in the free version of Silhouette Studio, is to write a quick one-line OpenSCAD script that imports the SVG. Then I render and export that 2D design as a DXF. ... | 1,760,372,640.897586 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/03/pulling-out-burger-flavor-with-a-magnet/ | Pulling Out Burger Flavor With A Magnet | Matthew Carlson | [
"cooking hacks"
] | [
"burger",
"burgers",
"lehemoglobin",
"vegan"
] | If you’re vegetarian or don’t eat beef, you are probably already familiar with Impossible. Impossible meat tastes like beef and cooks like beef while being plant-based. They achieved this with significant R&D and a few special patents. But if you don’t want to pay Impossible prices, [Sauce Stash] has been
trying to recreate some of the tricks that Impossible uses
. (Video, embedded below.)
[Sauce Stash] starts with the ingredients list and tries to reason what would be suitable substitutes. However, even following the ingredients list, adding iron is one crucial trick that takes your vegetarian beef much closer to tasting like proper beef. Impossible has a special patent process for creating leghemoglobin (or heme), the iron molecule we associate with red meat’s taste. It makes the meat seem to bleed as it cooks and dramatically changes the flavor. Impossible genetically engineered yeast to produce the compound to get heme on an industrial scale. But they state on their website that the molecule can be found in many plants, including soy. With a magnet and soy in hand, he tried to pull the iron out overnight but didn’t get anything substantial. Unfortunately, the heme is in the root of the soy plant, not in the milk, so it was back to the drawing board.
There are a few other sources: breakfast cereals, black olives (often treated with iron gluconate), and the roots of other legumes. However, [Sauce Stash] took a more leisurely route and crushed a soy-based iron tablet. However, being a supplement, there were other ingredients that he didn’t want in his burger. So he used the magnet to extract the iron to include. After that, it was easy sailing, and he was very proud of the vegan burger he had created.
Creating something that tastes and feels like something else is a complex and tricky endeavor, and hacks like these are always interesting to think about. We’d take t
exture pea protein over an insect burger
, but perhaps that is just something we need to get over. Video after the break. | 91 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6488854",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2022-07-03T12:17:58",
"content": "Not all oxidation states of iron are ferromagnetic. As a quick search will show, hemoglobin is diamagnetic.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6488979",
... | 1,760,372,641.222886 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/03/bluetooth-8-track-adapters-are-a-thing/ | Bluetooth 8-Track Adapters Are A Thing | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"8-track",
"bluetooth",
"car audio",
"corvette"
] | When it comes to classic cars, the entertainment options can be limited. You’re often stuck with an old cassette deck and AM/FM radio, or you can swap it out for some hideous flashy modern head unit. [Jim] had a working 8-track deck in his Corvette, and didn’t want to swap it out. Thus, he set about building himself
a simple Bluetooth to 8-track adapter.
The hack is straightforward, with [Jim] grabbing a Bluetooth-to-cassette adapter off the shelf. These simply take in audio over Bluetooth, and pipe the analog audio out to a magnetic head, which is largely similar to the head that reads the cassette. Pumping the audio to the magnetic coils in the adapter’s head creates a changing magnetic field essentially the same as the audio tape moving past the cassette reader head. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re working with an 8-track player or a regular cassette. Get the magnetic field in the right spot, and it’ll work.
The electronics from the cassette adapter are simply placed inside an old 8-track tape, with holes cut in the chassis for the charge port and on switch. Then, all you need to do is pop the adapter into the 8-track deck, pair with it over Bluetooth, and you can get the tunes pumping.
Others have had success with hilarious Rube Goldberg methods, too. [Techmoan] took a classic cassette-to-8-track adapter, which is actually self-powered by the deck,
and simply popped a Bluetooth cassette inside
. That worked surprisingly well, and it was interesting to see how it all worked on the inside.
We even saw a 3D-printed device on TikTok.
Thus, if you’ve got an old Corvette, particularly of that era with the Doug Nash 4+3 transmission, this might just be the hack for you. Alternatively, you can hack Bluetooth in to just about any classic stereo;
we’ve got a guide on how to do just that
. Video after the break. | 33 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6488822",
"author": "olaf",
"timestamp": "2022-07-03T08:14:23",
"content": "Are these devices only sold in the USA? I have never seen one in Europe.Olaf",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6488832",
"author": "Stuart Longl... | 1,760,372,641.298709 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/04/fighting-all-that-can-go-wrong-with-resin/ | Fighting All That Can Go Wrong With Resin | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"3D resin printer",
"resin"
] | [Jan Mrázek] is on a quest to make your resin 3D prints more accurate, more functional, and less failure prone. Let’s start off with his recent post on
combating resin shrinkage
.
When you want a part to have a 35 mm inner diameter, you probably have pretty good reasons, and when you draw a circle in your CAD software, you want a circle to come out in the real world. Resin shrinkage can put a kink in both of these plans. [Jan] identifies three culprits: resin squeezing, resin shrinkage, and exposure bleeding. And these three factors can add up in unexpected ways, so that you’ll get a small reference cube when you print it on its own, but large reference cubes when printed as a group. [Jan]’s article comes with a test piece that’ll help you diagnose what’s going on.
And then it gets complicated! Exposure bleeding depends on your printer and the exposure, but also on the color and UV opacity of the resin. Shrinkage obviously depends on the resin chemistry, but also takes a few days to reach its final state as the print fully cures. Of course, that curing rate depends on temperature as well. [Jan] is just starting to document all the variables, but you can print out his test piece and do your own work as well – you’ll probably have to anyway because of resin-to-resin variation.
While you’re down this rabbit hole, check out [Jan]’s post on
viscosity effects and elephant’s foot
. If you’re plagued by odd first layers, this is a tremendous resource with one simple takehome lesson: wait longer in the beginning to allow the resin to flow in.
Whether you’re just diving into resin printing, or a seasoned pro, we have a ton of interesting resources. From this article on
picking the right resin
, to this on whether to
use resin or FDM
, you have a lot of reading to do. And that’s not even mentioning
the gooey Hack Chat last fall
with [Andrew Sink], where both he and the crowd dispensed much wisdom. | 6 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489341",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-07-05T00:12:49",
"content": "“…you’ll probably have to anyway because of resin-to-resin variation.”Is there any kind of industry standardization? How about quality control? Sensors and software to reduce the variability.",
"pare... | 1,760,372,641.348451 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/04/think-you-know-how-mario-kart-works/ | Think You Know How Mario Kart Works? | Elliot Williams | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"mariokart",
"software",
"video"
] | In what looks like the kickoff of a fun video series, [MrL314] takes us on a
quick but deep tour of how the AI in Mario Kart works
. (Video, embedded below.) Don’t play much Mario Kart anymore? Well, have a look anyway because some of the very simple tricks that make Bowser pass Princess Peach without running into her might be useful in any manner of pre-programmed navigation scenarios.
Quick spoilers. The CPU players move through different zones, each with a desired speed and a vector direction field that changes the direction they should point in. Only when they run off course do they actually compute headings to their target. Setting this desired direction and speed beforehand greatly reduces the on-the-fly computation needed.
Then you throw other players into the mix, and a very simple distance-dependant turning algorithm makes for clean overtaking. This effect is hand-tweaked for the particular racecourse, though, because you don’t want Luigi driving off the thin stretches on Rainbow Road. For
more technical details
, you can check out [MrL314]’s notes.
If anything, this video gives us a further appreciation of the clever little hacks that create apparently complex interactions from tremendously simple rules. Remember Mario Kart when you’re programming in that next multi-gigabyte neural network model, OK? | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489333",
"author": "come2",
"timestamp": "2022-07-04T23:19:35",
"content": "Linking a video that could have probably the same title, but on Trackmania and using MLhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8Bo2DHrrow",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"co... | 1,760,372,641.384385 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/04/dithering-makes-everything-cooler-now-even-animated/ | Dithering Makes Everything Cooler: Now Even Animated | Elliot Williams | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"algorithms",
"dithering",
"games",
"graphics"
] | [dukope] was writing a game, Return of the Obra Dinn, with a fantastic visual style. One of the choices was to make everything in glorious one-bit color, otherwise known as black and white, and then dither it back to monochrome. You know, like they used to do on the Mac Plus.
If dithering is your aesthetic, then it makes a ton of sense to take it seriously. And it’s absolutely beautiful – check out the video below.
But what’s even more amazing is [dukope]’s attention to detail on the dithering. For instance,
this post on the TIG forums
details the problems and solutions when you have a dithered image that needs to also be animated. You want the dots to stay relatively constant on the object as the virtual camera pans across the scene, and that’s going to necessitate a custom algorithm. And if you think that’s cool,
have a look at how the book at the center of the game is animated
.
What can we say. We loved dithering before, but this post has made our love even deeper.
Thanks [JohnU] for the tip! | 37 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489262",
"author": "Arthur Mezins",
"timestamp": "2022-07-04T17:19:22",
"content": "I’m unsure what to call those invasive visual artefacts when there’s motion (aliasing?), but one word pops into my head: annoying!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,641.456227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/04/moteus-open-source-bldc-controller-gets-major-upgrade/ | Moteus Open Source BLDC Controller Gets Major Upgrade | Chris Lott | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"BLDC controller",
"mjbots quad A0",
"moteus"
] | [Josh Pieper] of mjbots Robotic Systems just released a major revision to his
moteus
open sourced brushless DC (BLDC) electric motor controller. The update adds a flexible I/O subsystem which significantly expands the kinds of feedback encoders and peripherals the controller can accept. In the video below the break, [Josh] walks through eleven different example configurations. If you prefer, these examples are also presented in
article form on his blog
.
The
moteus
controller originally came about when [Josh] was developing the
quad A0
, an open source dynamic quadruped robot, along the lines of the MIT Mini Cheetah or Boston Dynamics robotic dogs, and wasn’t satisfied that existing controllers could do the trick. It’s a compact 50 mm square board based on an STM32G4, has an integrated magnetic encoder, and accepts external sensor connections. Interfacing with the board is via CAN-FD using a register-based scheme. A Python GUI tool provides name-based register access via a logical tree structure as well as real-time telemetry plotting capabilities for diagnostic and configuration tasks.
If you are using BLDC motors in your projects, definitely check this out. Even if you’re not using a
moteus
controller, [Josh]’s demonstrations of the various encoder feedback technologies is very interesting and educational. The entire project is open source, and both the hardware and software design files can be found on the project’s
GitHub repository
. For some users, this may be a major factor, considering that the latest ODrive BLDC controller offering
has become closed source
.
We wrote about the
mjbots quad A0 in 2019
, and you can follow the
moteus
project over on Hackaday.io
. We also found this interesting video by [Skyentific] comparing three popular open source BLCD controllers including the
moteus
(second video below the break). There’s also the
SimpleFOC project
we covered last year if you want to dig in and learn more about field-oriented control of BLDC motors. Thanks to [Androiddrew] for the tip. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489297",
"author": "Ghent The Slicer",
"timestamp": "2022-07-04T19:10:29",
"content": "Josh is very knowledgeable and eager to share his findings with everyone. He has put a huge amount of research into this project. I want to say huge thank you for that.Yes the world of open sourc... | 1,760,372,641.505779 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/04/a-3d-printer-big-enough-to-print-a-kayak/ | A 3D Printer Big Enough To Print A Kayak | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"CoreXY",
"kayak",
"large format"
] | When one of your design goals for a 3D printer is “fits through standard doors,” you know you’re going to be able to print some pretty big stuff. And given that the
TAUT ONE printer
by [Nathan Brüchner] could easily be mistaken for a phone booth, we’d say it’ll be turning out some interesting prints.
The genesis for this beast of a printer came from the Before Times, with the idea of printing a kayak. [Nathan] leveraged his lowdown time to make it happen, going through three prototypes. Each featured a print bed of 1,000 mm x 550 mm with 1,100 mm of Z-height, and the overall footprint fits a standard Euro-pallet. It uses a
CoreXY
design to move the dual-filament hot end, which has ducting for taking cooling air from outside the cabinet. And the machine has all the bells and whistles — WiFi, an internal camera, filament sensors, and a range of environmental controls.
In a nod to making it easier to build, [Nathan] kept all the custom parts either laser cut or 3D-printed — no mill or lathe required. He also points out that he used only quality components, which shows in the price — about 3,000€. That seems like a lot to be able to print kayaks that you can buy for fraction of that amount, but we certainly appreciate the potential of this printer, and the effort that went into making it work. | 43 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489195",
"author": "bstriggo",
"timestamp": "2022-07-04T11:48:26",
"content": "<>Designers used to build cedar strip boats to prototype designs. This would be way faster.I’m curious how much abuse he was able to heap onto the prototypes:https://www.pinterest.com/pin/55028364819319... | 1,760,372,641.580987 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/04/need-a-linux-kernel-module-scratch-that/ | Need A Linux Kernel Module? Scratch That | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"linux kernel modules",
"MIT scratch",
"scratch"
] | If you have been for (or against) Rust in the Linux kernel, get ready for a
Linux kernel module written in… Scratch
. That’s right. Scratch, the MIT-developed language with blocks popular for teaching kids to code. We didn’t mean “from scratch.” We meant IN Scratch. The bootstrap code and Makefile is out there on
GitHub
.
Of course, it is a simple module and the reason it is possible is because of the
scratchnative
system that lets you compile Scratch into C code. If you want to look at the decidedly simple code, you can
open it in your browser
.
We don’t t think anyone is seriously suggesting you start doing this kind of development in Scratch, but it is sort of amazing that you can do it at all.
Not really more practical, but we’ve also seen what claims to be an entire operating system
written in Scratch
. Honestly, we aren’t fluent enough with Scratch to understand what it really does but
the cod
e looks like it is just throwing some characters on the screen using memory access.
We wondered what sort of things people would
build with Scratch 3.0
. Now we know. Of course, our favorite Scratch application was flying
our cheap drone
. | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489172",
"author": "Stappers",
"timestamp": "2022-07-04T09:28:26",
"content": "It was already documentedhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_lawAnd there was no need for triggering polarization withIf you have been for (or against) Rust in the Linux kernel,",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,372,641.632105 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/03/when-is-an-led-a-lamp-when-its-50mm-wide/ | When Is An LED A Lamp? When It’s 50mm Wide | Kristina Panos | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"giant led",
"led"
] | Call us childlike, but we sure do get a kick out of both larger-than-life and miniature things, especially when they work as their “normal-sized” counterparts do. So you can imagine our glee when we saw
[JGJMatt]’s 50mm LED lamp
, which looks like a giant version of something you might have wired up on your bench at any given moment — a bent-legged LED, wired up and ready to blink.
[JGJMatt] started by designing a mold in Fusion360 to make the lens, which he then printed in PLA. However, due to the heat generated by curing resin (especially all enclosed like that), he recommends using PETG or ABS instead to avoid any potential warping issues.
This is where things get a bit dangerous. For the internals, [JGJMatt] went all out, hand forming a reflector cup out of brass pipe, and the anode and cathode plates from flat 1 mm brass stock, plated to a silvery gray finish. The light source itself is a 1 W cool white LED that sits in the reflector cup, safe under a layer of epoxy mixed with a bit of yellow paint that represent the phosphor layer in a standard 5 mm white LED.
Once the innards were ready, it was time to cast the huge lens with them tucked safely inside. After the resin cured, [JGJMatt] sanded away the layer lines and airbrushed it with clear lacquer to clear up the lens and protect it from yellowing down the road. Then it was just a matter of bending the legs to form a stand, and wiring it up. What an awesome way to light up your workbench! Or anywhere, really.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a giant, working LED, though it’s probably only the second one since
[Mike Szczys] saw some in the flesh at Maker Faire: Rome
way back in 2019.
Those are for sale on Tindie, BTW
, though the shop is on holiday for the foreseeable, so you’ll have to make your own for now. | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489144",
"author": "Erik Johnson",
"timestamp": "2022-07-04T06:31:43",
"content": "Nice! I exhibited a ~130mm RGB LED at maker faire bay are for a few years around 2012http://lightbright.net/images/IMG_3815r.JPGcomplete with cement block “protoboard” base",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,641.721789 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/tensorflow-lite-on-a-commodore-64/ | TensorFlow Lite – On A Commodore 64 | Jenny List | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"c64",
"commodore 64",
"tensorflow",
"Tensorflow Lite"
] | TensorFlow is a machine learning and AI library that has enabled so much and brought AI within the reach of most developers. But it’s fair to say that it’s not for the less powerful computers. For them there’s TensorFlow Lite, in which a model is created on a larger machine and exported to a microcontroller or similarly resource-constrained one. [Nick Bild] has probably taken this to its extreme though, by achieving this feat on a Commodore 64. Not just that, but
he’s also done it using Commodore BASIC
.
TensorFlow Lite works by the model being created as a C array which is then parsed and run by an interpreter on the microcontroller. This is a little beyond the capabilities of the mighty 64, so he has instead created a Python script that does the job of the interpreter and produces Commodore BASIC code that can run on the 64. The trusty Commodore was one of the more powerful home computers of its day, but we’re fairly certain that its designers never in their wildest dreams expected it to be capable of this!
If you’re interested to know more about TensorFlow Lite,
we’ve covered it in the past
.
Header: MOS6502,
CC BY-SA 3.0
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490329",
"author": "Bryantherobotman",
"timestamp": "2022-07-07T20:10:48",
"content": "Those usb inference accelerators are all int8 anyways, time for the 6502 to shine bright again!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6490765",
... | 1,760,372,641.669704 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/headphone-cable-trouble-inspires-bluetooth-conversion/ | Headphone Cable Trouble Inspires Bluetooth Conversion | Arya Voronova | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"csr",
"csr8645",
"headphones"
] | [adblu] encountered the ever-present headphone problem with their Sennheiser Urbanite headphones – the cable broke. These headphones are decent, and despite the cable troubles, worth giving a new life to. Cable replacement is always an option, but [adblu] decided to see – what would it take to
make these headphones wireless?
And while they’re at it, just how much battery life could they get?
Armed with a CSR8635 Bluetooth audio receiver breakout module and a TP4056 charger, [adblu] went on rewiring the headphone internals. The CSR8635 already has a speaker amplifier inside, so connecting the headphones’ speakers didn’t require much effort – apart from general soldering difficulties, as [adblu]’s soldering iron was too large for the small pads on the BT module. They also found a 2400mAh battery, and fit it inside the headphone body after generous amounts of dremel work.
The result didn’t disappoint – not only does everything fit inside the headphone body, the headphones also provided 165 hours of music playback at varying volume. Electronics-wise,
it really is that easy
to retrofit your headphones with Bluetooth, but you can always go the extra mile and
design an intricate set of custom PCBs!
If firmware hacks are more to your liking, you can use a CSR8645 module for your build and then
mod its firmware. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490133",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T23:43:40",
"content": "I’ve been doing some stuff like this with headphones too – but the big trouble here in Aus is the battery. Those small lipo batteries are often ‘fake’ – ie will only be usable for about 10 charges, or at b... | 1,760,372,642.147882 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/pocket-radio-powered-by-tiny-microcontroller/ | Pocket Radio Powered By Tiny Microcontroller | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"attiny",
"audio",
"code",
"fm",
"oled",
"radio",
"schematics",
"speaker"
] | Before the days of MP3 players and smartphones, and even before portable CD players, those of us of a certain age remember that our cassette players were about the only way to take music on-the-go. If we were lucky, they also had a built-in radio for when the single tape exhausted both of its sides. Compared to then, it’s much easier to build a portable radio even though cassettes are largely forgotten, as [wagiminator]
shows us with this radio design based on an ATtiny
.
The build is about as compact as possible, with the aforementioned ATtiny 402/412 as its core, it also makes use of an integrated circuit FM tuner, an integrated audio amplifier with its own single speaker, and a small OLED display. The unit also boasts its own lithium-polymer battery charger and its user interface consists of only three buttons, plenty for browsing radio stations and controlling volume.
The entire build fits easily in the palm of a hand and is quite capable for a mobile radio, plus all of the schematics and code is available on the project page. While it doesn’t include AM capability, just the fact that FM is this accessible nowadays
when a few decades ago it was cutting-edge technology
is quite remarkable. If you’re looking for an even smaller FM receiver without some of the bells and whistles of this one,
take a look at this project too
. | 33 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490099",
"author": "Bruce Perens K6BP",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T20:45:06",
"content": "This is confused. FM has not been a cutting edge technology since about 1940, closer to a century ago than “just a few decades”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,372,642.358259 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/ggwave-sings-the-songs-of-your-data/ | GGWave Sings The Songs Of Your Data | Elliot Williams | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"arduino",
"audio",
"cellphone",
"data",
"modem"
] | We’re suckers for alternative data transmission methods, and [Georgi Gerganov]’s
ggwave
made us smile. At its core, it’s doing what the phone modems of old used to do – sending data encoded as different audio tones. But GGwave does this with sophistication!
It splits the data into four-bit chunks, and uses 16 different frequency offsets to represent each possible value. But for each chunk, these offsets are added to one of six different base frequencies, which allows the receiving computer to tell which chunk it’s in. It’s like a simple framing concept, and it makes the resulting data sound charmingly like R2-D2. (It also uses begin and end markers to be double-sure of the framing.) The data is also sent with error correction, so small hiccups can get repaired automatically.
What really makes ggwave shine is that it’s ported to every platform you care about: ESP32, Arduino, Linux, Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and anything that’ll run Python or JavaScript. So it’ll run in a browser. There’s even a GUI for playing around with alternative modulation schemes. Pshwew! This makes it easy for a minimalist microcontroller-based beeper button to control your desktop, or vice-versa. An ESP32 makes for an IoT-style WiFi-to-audio bridge. Write code on your cell phone, and you can broadcast it to any listening microcontroller. Whatever your use case, it’s probably covered.
Now the downside. The data rate is slow, around 64-160 bits per second, and the transmission is necessarily beepy-booopy, unless you pitch it up in to the ultrasound or use the radio-frequency HackRF demo. But maybe you want to hear when your devices are talking to each other? Or maybe you just think it’s cute? We do, but we wouldn’t want to have to transmit megabytes this way. But for a simple notification, a few bytes of data, a URL, or some configuration parameters, we can see this being a great software addition to any device that has a speaker and/or microphone.
Oh my god, check out this link from pre-history:
a bootloader for the Arduino
that runs on the line-in. | 12 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490076",
"author": "RickB",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T18:47:05",
"content": "Oh good, yet another way to exfiltrate the corporate crown jewels without plugging an unapproved device into the tightly controlled corporate laptop or the tightly controlled corporate network. I thought I ... | 1,760,372,642.192374 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/linux-fu-the-browser-emacs-fusion/ | Linux Fu: The Browser Emacs Fusion | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"autokey",
"Emacs",
"linux"
] | It is no secret that I have a few things permanently burned into my neurons: the 1802 instruction set, the commands for WordStar, and the commands for emacs. There was a time when emacs was almost my operating system. With no X11, emacs gave you a way to have a shell in one window, check your mail, and keep your work open.
I still use emacs a lot (although I’ve been getting more and more pleased with vscode with an emacs keybinding extension). But I also spend a lot of time — like right now — writing in a Web browser. Especially if I’m writing about code, it gets hard to remember which set of keys you have to use and I’ve wanted to do something about it for a long time. The answer is a very cool program called Autokey. (You can
download my files
for it, but you probably want to read more first.) It probably doesn’t work if you have switched to Wayland, but it can do a lot for you ranging from saving you some typing to reprogramming your favorite program to have different keystrokes. However, it isn’t without its problems, and I’ll tell you what I know about it.
The Value Proposition
Autokey sits in your system tray and it watches what you type. In its most simple usage, you can set up different phrases to substitute what you type.
For example, I might reprogram HaD to show up as Hackaday to save myself some typing. I usually use some odd character at the start or end so I don’t accidentally trigger things. So maybe I’m tired of typing or mistyping
http://www.hackaday.com
. I could set up
~had
to automatically type the correct URL for me.
Scripts vs Phrases
If that’s all AutoKey did, it would be pretty handy. But it does a lot more than that. On the other hand, if that’s all you want, it is easy to set up using phrases. A phrase has two parts: a trigger and some text. The trigger can be a hotkey (like Alt+Shift+F6) or it can be text you type like
~had
. It is possible to add multiple abbreviations, so I could have extra triggers of
had~
and
http://www.hakday.com
if I wanted the program to automatically correct my bad spelling.
Autokey is easy to set up for simple text replacement, but can also accommodate complex Python scripts
A phrase can only have one hotkey, but you can have a hotkey and abbreviations; either will trigger the phrase. Of course, you can also support multiple hotkeys with multiple identical entries. Finally, you can limit the match to a particular window class matched with a regular expression. So it is possible to have one set of shortcuts for your word processor and another set for your web browser.
The real power, though, is that you can create scripts
instead
of phrases. These are exactly the same except instead of typing a phrase, a piece of Python code runs. There are some
classes
to help you do things like control the keyboard and mouse from a script. You can even create GUI dialogs using QT or GTK. However, I found out there is a slight downside to using scripts, but for many things, they work great. You’ll see what I mean in a bit.
In addition to scripts, phrases can have certain dynamic content like the date, a file, or even the output of a program. There are also provisions for positioning the cursor at a certain spot after the text entry is done which is useful for creating code snippets.
Power Abbreviations
There are many options for processing triggers for abbreviations
There are a few useful options you can apply to abbreviations. For one thing, you can control how they send text to the target program. I usually use the keyboard method to simulate typing because I will use special characters, but you can also paste the text in using one of several common shortcuts. That is, the program can load the clipboard with your phrase and then paste it with a Control+V.
The real power comes when you set up the abbreviations. A dialog lets you select a list of trigger words and you can set options. By default, the abbreviation won’t expand until you type some non-word character. You can also require a space or tab. However, there are other options. For example, you can have Autokey trigger immediately or even if the text is part of another word. There are options to ignore or respect case, among others.
Window Classes
The final thing you can use to control the triggering logic is to restrict a script or phrase to a window class that matches a regular expression. This is great because you probably don’t want to map strange things to all windows. Sure, it is handy to have
!address
enter your mailing address in every program, but if you want to make
main
expand to a boilerplate main function, you might not like that happening in LibreOffice.
In my case, the window class feature was pretty important because I didn’t want to remap things like control+s in every program, just the browser.
All Together
So, how do you put all this together to emulate emacs? Most of the commands are very simple. For example, in emacs, control+s starts a search, so it is sufficient to create a phase with that hotkey that types: <ctrl>+f which the browser knows is a search. Obviously, you can’t easily do things the browser doesn’t already know how to do. Control+r for reverse search, for example, is not feasible. I wound up mapping a little more than a dozen basic emacs commands that way. I did disable the control+w hotkey to do a clipboard copy because the browser uses that to close a tab, and I didn’t want to block that.
I used the built-in tool to find the class for the Vivaldi browser I use. I would find out later that I needed to make a change in this area, as you will see.
For now, that took care of the one key commands. However, there are also the two-character commands. I had a plan, but that plan didn’t work very well. For now, I’m just living without them, but I did leave a disabled example in the code for your review.
Since you can execute a script and there is a global variable storage mechanism for scripts, my plan was simple. Consider control+xu which is emacsese for undo. You can’t use a non-printing character in an abbreviation, so you have to handle the situation with a single hotkey. My plan was to set control+x to turn on a prefix flag in the script global storage. Then I could use Autokey to treat u as a hotkey — just the letter u — and either send a u or a control+z, depending on the state of the flag. Coincidentally, the code would also reset the flag.
Problems
There are problems with this even if it all worked well, which it didn’t. For example, if you pressed control+x and then an unexpected key, the flag stays set and the next time Autokey sees a u, you’ll get an undo. That would surprise you! It seems like the right thing to do would be to enable a catch-all rule that disables itself or have the script read a key. However, it doesn’t seem possible to do this, at least, not easily.
I was, however, willing to accept that limitation. I wrote a little Python code for control+x:
store.set_global_value("vmacs-prefix-x","true");
Then, just to test one thing at a time, I did the following for the letter u:
state=store.get_global_value("vmacs-prefix-x");
if state == "true":
keyboard.send_keys("<ctrl>+z");
store.set_global_value("vmacs-prefix-x","false");
else:
keyboard.send_key("U"); # note send key will respect shift, etc.
I was pleased that it worked. Sort of. When I was typing, I noticed that something was off. I type rather fast but something kept distracting me and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I finally realized that when any Autokey script or phrase runs, the browser loses focus for just a tick. When you are pressing some cursor command you don’t notice, but when you are typing at speed, look out! I left the scripts, but turned them off just like I did with control+w. You may not be as sensitive to the brief disconnects and, if so, you might want to implement other two-key combinations in a similar way.
Disappointment Averted
The other problem I had was a big disappointment. The macros didn’t work in multiline editors or WordPress, where I spend way too much time. A quick check shows that the edit boxes have a different Window class. I wound up turning the filters into a regular expression:
.*Vivalid-stable
. Of course, if you are using a different browser, you’ll need to adjust.
AutoKey can probe Window properties for you.
I am still a little disappointed that while the two-key combinations are feasible, they aren’t practical for me. I suspect this would bite you if you were trying to simulate vi, as well, since you would have to catch nearly every normal key.
Still, I wrote this whole post using emacs semantics, and other than occasionally forgetting to paste using control+y, it went great. I may yet turn control+w back no because I have accidentally closed the window a few times when I was trying to paste.
There are browser extensions that purport to let you edit text fields in your chosen editor. They do work, but they are little more than just copying text back and forth to the editor. That’s great for small things, but trying to work up a large post with WordPress features is not really practical. With this system, you can have emacs semantics while editing text and in the URL bar. It would be trivial to adapt the system to nearly any program.
You may not care about emacs, but there are plenty of timesaving things you can do with a program like Autokey. From shortcuts for URLs, to bash one-liners, to things you type over and over again, Autokey is both simple to set up for simple things and complex enough to handle big jobs. I just wish it worked on Wayland. | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490048",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T17:15:55",
"content": "“It probably doesn’t work if you have switched to Wayland”This warning right here is how you know something is good.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comme... | 1,760,372,642.098925 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/hacking-the-rf-protocol-of-an-obscure-handheld-game/ | Hacking The RF Protocol Of An Obscure Handheld Game | Tom Nardi | [
"Games",
"Radio Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"gnu radio",
"reverse engineering",
"RTL-SDR",
"wireless protocol"
] | When you think old school handheld games, you probably imagine something like Nintendo’s Game Boy line or the Sega Game Gear. But outside of those now iconic systems, there was a vast subculture of oddball handheld games vying for a chunk of an adolescent’s weekly allowance. Many of these were legitimately terrible and frankly aren’t worth remembering, but a few offered unique features that were arguably ahead of their time.
One such game was Hasbro’s short-lived P-O-X.
As explained by [Zachary Ennenga]
, the game didn’t spend much time on store shelves as its core concept of defeating undetectable alien invaders hell-bent on destroying our way of life proved to be more than a little problematic when it launched in September of 2001. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t have some cool ideas, such as a wireless ad-hoc multiplayer capability that let your game autonomously battle it out with other units that got close by.
Fascinated by this feature since his youth, [Zach] set out to study how this relatively cheap kid’s toy was able to pull this off back when even the flagship handheld consoles were still using physical link cables for multiplayer. He was aided in his quest by a
particularly helpful patent
, which not only gave him clues as to the frequency, data rate, modulation, and encoding of the RF signal, but even explained the game’s logic and overall structure. A lot of what was in the document seemed wishful thinking on the part of Hasbro, but reading through the marketing speak still uncovered some salient technical details.
A decoded P-O-X packet.
Armed with an RTL-SDR, GNU Radio, Inspectrum, and a bit of Python, [Zach] was able to identify the signal and begin the process of decoding it. This is where things get really interesting, as the details of his reverse engineering process are
widely applicable for all sorts of unknown RF signals
. Even if you’re like most people and have nearly zero interest in failed handheld games of the early 2000s, it’s well worth a read. The same techniques he uses to figure out the name and physical characteristics of the invisible foe his game is transmitting could one day help you figure out how to
manipulate the data from that wireless weather station
you’ve got in the backyard.
Once he figured out the major parts of the protocol, [Zach] moves on to creating his own packets and broadcasting them out in such a way that the real hardware will recognize it. He even comes up with some code that will automatically battle games which wander within range of his Yardstick One, which may come in handy during the inevitable P-O-X Renaissance.
While this might seem like a lot of effort to put into a game that most people have never even heard of, we’ll remind you that
some of the greatest hacks to ever grace these pages
have been born of similar pursuits. Even if you’re the only person in the world to directly benefit from your current line of research and experimentation, there’s still plenty of like-minded folks in this community that are all to happy to cheer you on from the sidelines. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6490052",
"author": "Jacob W",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T17:27:22",
"content": "The stars must have just aligned, because not even a week ago i went to ebay to find one of these. I remembered loving them as a kid and wanted to see if i could somehow dump the ROMs and emulated it. Cra... | 1,760,372,642.027322 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/06/windows-98-for-spaceships-not-quite/ | Windows 98 For Spaceships? Not Quite! | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"Mars Express",
"windows",
"Windows 98"
] | One of the news items that generated the most chatter among Hackaday editors this week was that
ESA’s Mars Express mission is receiving a software update
. And they’re updating the operating system to…Windows 98.
Microsoft’s late-90s consumer desktop operating system wouldn’t have been the first to come to mind as appropriate for a spacecraft, but ESA were quick to remind us that
it was the development toolchain,
not the craft itself, that depended upon it. It’s still quite a surprise to find Windows 98 being dusted off for such an unexpected purpose, and it’s led us to consider those now-almost-forgotten operating systems once more, and to question where else it might still be found.
Win, or Lose?
This CD stood on the shoulders of 16-bit giants. Mark Morgan,
CC BY 2.0
.
For those of you who never used an earlier Windows version, perhaps it’s time for a short and sketchy history lesson. The original IBM PCs and clones shipped with DOS, PC-DOS or MS-DOS, Microsoft’s 16-bit single tasking operating system with a command line interface.
By the late 1980s they had developed the first few versions of Windows, a 16-bit GUI that sat over and further extended DOS with an extra set of APIs. To run these early Windows versions you had first to boot into DOS, and then type
win
at the command line to start Windows.
Meanwhile in the early 1990s they produced the first in a separate line of operating systems to be called Windows New Technology, or NT. These were native 32-bit operating systems that contained the full set of Windows APIs including 32-bit support natively, and were designed to compete with lower-end UNIX machines at the enterprise level. Alongside this the DOS-based Windows versions gained a set of 32-bit API extensions and eventually evolved into the more modern GUI of Windows 95, 98, and then ME. It was still possible to boot Windows 98 into a DOS prompt and type
win
to start the desktop, but by this point the underlying technology had been stretched to the limit and the result was often buggy and unreliable. In the early 2000s they were discontinued, and the next Windows NT version dubbed Windows XP was also aimed at the consumer market.
Peering Into The Mind Of A 1990s Scientist
Is that single project in fact a crusty old beige-box Pentium running some ASP? XKCD 2347(
CC BY-NC 2.5
).
So we return to Mars Express. By the time the craft was being designed it’s fair to say that Windows NT and its successors were a stable product, more stable by far than the consumer operating systems. Did the fruits of a desktop operating system eventually make it to space because whoever controlled a researcher’s IT budget skimped a bit on the software and PC purchasing? We may never know, but given that it seems to have delivered the goods, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad choice after all.
All of this brings us to the question of where else there might be a copy of WIndows 98 lurking. Sure, some of you will have retro gaming PCs and no doubt there will be tales of elderly relatives still using it, not to mention that some pieces of 1990s test equipment ran it. Even the McLaren F1 supercar famously
could only be serviced with a particular model of 1990s Compaq laptop
. But those aren’t exactly mission critical. Instead we want you to tell us about Windows 98 in the wild where it’s a surprise, or even where it definitely shouldn’t be. Is a nearly quarter century old OS that’s been out of support since 2006 propping up an unwieldy tower of services somewhere? We’re honestly not sure whether we want to know or not.
Header: Javi1977,
CC0
, and Federico Beccari,
CC0
. | 78 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6489990",
"author": "Pio",
"timestamp": "2022-07-06T14:08:28",
"content": "“32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can’t stand 1 bit of competition.”was mak... | 1,760,372,642.476582 |
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