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https://hackaday.com/2022/06/23/hackaday-prize-2022-multispectral-smartphone-camera-reveals-paintings-inner-secrets/ | Hackaday Prize 2022: Multispectral Smartphone Camera Reveals Paintings’ Inner Secrets | Robin Kearey | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"ir",
"multispectral imaging",
"pixel 3a",
"uv"
] | Multispectral imaging, or photography using wavelengths other than those in ordinary visible light, has various applications ranging from earth observation to forgery detection in art. For example, titanium white and lead white, two pigments used in different historical eras, look identical in visible light but have distinct signatures in the UV range. Similarly, IR imaging can reveal a painting’s inner layers if the pigments used are transparent to IR.
Equipment for such a niche use is naturally quite pricey, so [Sean Billups] decided to
transform an older model smartphone into a handheld multispectral camera
, which can help him analyze works of art without breaking the bank. It uses the smartphone’s camera together with a filter wheel attachment that enables it to capture different spectral ranges. [Sean] chose to use a Google Pixel 3a, mainly because it’s cheaply available, but also because it has a good image sensor and camera software. Modifying the camera to enable IR and UV imaging turned out to be a bit of a challenge, however.
Image sensors are naturally sensitive to IR and UV, so cameras typically include a filter to block anything but visible light. To remove this filter from the Pixel’s camera [Sean] had to heat the camera module to soften the adhesive, carefully remove the lens, then glue a piece of plastic to the filter and pull it out once the glue had set. Perfecting this process took a bit of trial and error, but once he managed to effect a clear separation between camera and filter it was simply a matter of reattaching the lens, assembling the phone and mounting the filter wheel on its back.
The 3D-printed filter wheel has slots for four different filters, which can enable a variety of IR, UV and polarized-light imaging modes. In the video embedded below [Sean] shows how the IR reflectography mode can help to reveal the underdrawing in an oil painting. The system is designed to be extendable, and [Sean] has already been looking at adding features like IR and UV LEDs, magnifying lenses and even additional sensors like spectrometers.
We’ve seen a handful of multispectral imaging projects before;
this drone-mounted system
was a contestant for the 2015 Hackaday Prize, while
this project contains an excellent primer on UV imaging
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 18 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6486417",
"author": "JRD",
"timestamp": "2022-06-23T23:04:32",
"content": "Smartphone cameras do have a lot of features, but that was a lot of work to customize. Wouldn’t it be easier to start with the Pi camera module (IR version), which is already a bare sensor? (Assuming you alre... | 1,760,372,655.037868 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/23/pocket-computer-reminds-us-of-pdas/ | Pocket Computer Reminds Us Of PDAs | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"breakout",
"calculator",
"calendar",
"computer",
"game",
"memory",
"nano",
"pc",
"pda",
"phonebook",
"pocket",
"stopwatch"
] | Before smartphones exploded on the scene in the late 00s, there was still a reasonable demand for pocket-sized computers that could do relatively simple computing tasks. Palm Pilots and other PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) were all the rage in the ’90s and early ’00s, although for cutting-edge tech from that era plenty of these devices had astronomical price tags. This
Arduino-based PDA hearkens back to that era
, albeit with a much more accessible parts list.
The build is based around an Arudino Nano with an OLED screen and has the five necessary functions for a PDA: calculator, stopwatch, games, phonebook, and a calendar. With all of these components on such a small microcontroller, memory quickly became an issue when using the default libraries. [Danko] uses his own custom libraries in order to make the best use of memory which are all available on the project’s GitHub page. The build also includes a custom PCB to keep the entire pocket computer pocket-sized.
There are some other features packed into this tiny build as well, like the breakout game that can be played with a potentiometer. It’s an impressive build that makes as much use of the microcontroller’s capabilities as is possible, and if you enjoy projects where a microcontroller is used as if it is a PC take a look at
this Arduino build with its own command-line interface
. | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6486398",
"author": "philosiraptor117",
"timestamp": "2022-06-23T21:37:43",
"content": "shoulda looked at a esp8266. wifi, rudimentary mp3 capability, analog video output if you try hard enough, cheaper too",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,372,655.082741 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/23/starpointer-keeps-scope-on-target-with-stellarium/ | StarPointer Keeps Scope On Target WithStellarium | Tom Nardi | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"accelerometer",
"amateur astronomy",
"astronomy",
"magnetometer",
"stm32",
"telescope"
] | On astronomical telescopes of even middling power, a small “finderscope” is often mounted in parallel to the main optics to assist in getting the larger instrument on target. The low magnification of the finderscope offers a far wider field of view than the primary telescope, which makes it much easier to find small objects in the sky. Even if your target is too small or faint to see in the finderscope, just being able to get your primary telescope pointed at the right celestial neighborhood is a huge help.
But [Dilshan Jayakody] still thought he could improve on things a bit. Instead of a small optical scope,
his StarPointer is an electronic device
that can determine the orientation of the telescope it’s mounted to. As the ADXL345 accelerometer and HMC5883L magnetometer inside the STM32F103C8 powered gadget detect motion, the angle data is sent to
Stellarium
— an open source planetarium program. Combined with a known latitude and longitude, this allows the software to show where the telescope is currently pointed in the night sky.
As demonstrated in the video after the break, this provides real-time feedback which is easy to understand even for the absolute beginner: all you need to do is slew the scope around until the object you want to look at it under the crosshairs. While we wouldn’t recommend looking at a bright computer screen right before trying to pick out dim objects in your telescope’s eyepiece, we can certainly see the appeal of this “virtual” finderscope.
Then again…who said this technique had to be limited to optical observations? As the StarPointer is an open hardware project, you could always integrate the tech into that
DIY radio telescope you’ve always dreamed of building
in the backyard. | 19 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6486343",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2022-06-23T18:43:09",
"content": "I made a device that uses Google Sky Map and a green laser pointer to locate objects and point to them:https://www.instructables.com/Space-Laser-Manual-Go-To-for-Your-Telescope/",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,655.135942 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/23/sea-level-rise-from-melting-ice-sheets-could-soon-be-locked-in/ | Sea Level Rise From Melting Ice Sheets Could Soon Be Locked In | Lewin Day | [
"green hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"climate change",
"environment",
"glacier",
"global warming",
"ice",
"melt",
"nasa",
"science",
"tipping points"
] | Where today we talk broadly of climate change and it’s various effects, the conversation was once simpler. We called it “global warming” and fretted about cooking outside in the summer and the sea level rise that would claim so many of our favorite cities.
Scientists are now concerned that sea level rises could be locked in, as ice sheets and glaciers pass “tipping points” beyond which their loss cannot be stopped. Research is ongoing to determine how best we can avoid these points of no return.
Ice, Ice, Baby
The threat of sea level rise due to melting ice is often discounted by climate change sceptics. The common citation is that a floating ice cube doesn’t change the water level as it melts, due to the principle of displacement. However, this doesn’t account for the fact that much of the ice in the Antarctic actually sits atop land. When this ice melts, it directly leads to sea level rise of a potentially drastic scale.
While the loss of floating ice won’t directly cause sea level rise, worries are that the loss of the ice shelf will increase the melt rate of the Thwaites Glacier it’s holding back. Credit: NASA, public domain
Of prime concern is the Thwaites Glacier, which scientists have nicknamed
the “Doomsday Glacier” for the perceived danger it poses
. The glacier is held back, particularly in the east, by a large floating ice shelf. This slows the flow of the glacier and helps keep it stable. The floating ice shelf is further aided in this task as it sits against a large underwater mountain, acting as a brace.
Recently, scientists have noted that the floating ice shelf is showing worrying signs of deterioration. Large cracks have been spiderwebbing across the ice, prompting concerns for the long-term stability of the shelf. The effect is similar to cracks in a window; once they reach a certain point, the entire glass just shatters. Compounding the problem, the ice shelf appears to be losing its grip on the underwater mountain holding it in place as warmer waters melt the sheet from below.
When land ice sits on ground beneath sea level, it can let seawater in underneath if the ice sheet isn’t heavier than the denser seawater it would otherwise displace. This water then melts the ice from below at an increasing rate as the grounding line moves further inland. Credit: NASA, public domain
The Thwaites Glacier is already responsible for about 4% of global sea level rise each year. The concern is that with the loss of the floating ice shelf, the glacier could increase its flows towards the ocean, increasing up to 5% of sea level rise in the short term alone. Scientists currently expect the ice shelf to break up
within the next 5 years or so.
The longer-term implications are profound, if uncertain at this stage. If the broader Thwaites Glacier breaks up and melts away, a process scientists expect could happen in as little as a few centuries, it would contribute a 65 centimeter rise to global sea levels. If the broader West Antarctic Ice Sheet were lost, it would add 3.3 meters to global sea levels, completely changing the world map.
We Prefer Greenland Icy, Not Green
Many glaciers, like the Jacobshavn Isbrae glacier, have been retreating since the Industrial era. The concern is that soon, their loss may be locked in regardless of future reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Credit: NASA, public domain
It’s not just a problem in the Southern Hemisphere, either. Scientists believe that 1-2 meters of sea level rise may be locked in from glaciers in Greenland that
seem set to melt regardless of what we do now.
140 years of records regarding ice-sheet height and the rates of glacial melting in the Jakobshavn basin indicate that there may be a feedback effect that causes rapid ice loss. As the ice sheet thins, it is more exposed to warmer air at lower altitudes, accelerating the effect.
The melting ice is also playing havoc with ocean circulation, too
. The cooler waters from the melting Greenland ice are slowing currents responsible for transporting heat through the oceans around the world. Fears are that this could disrupt rainfall over crucial areas, create more droughts, and warm the southern oceans, further accelerating the melt of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
There is some solace to be had in the time scale of the melt predicted, for currently-living humans at least. It’s expected that the 1-2 meter rise from the Jakobshavn melt would take a few centuries to progress, even if we can’t stop it now. It’s also not certain that a tipping point has been passed, however, with global temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations still rising, that point may be moot. Regardless, lacking a return to pre-industrial temperatures, researchers believe that significant ice loss, and corresponding sea level rise, is almost a certainty.
The most harrowing predictions suggest that the loss of Greenland’s ice sheets could be locked in at 1.5 °C of warming, which could be reached as soon as 2030. If the models are correct, once this point is reached, reducing emissions and stabilizing global temperatures would not be enough to rescue the ice sheet, which would continue to melt and raise sea levels slowly over a long period of time.
Future Outlook
Taken in isolation, neither glacier presents an immediate threat to our coastal cities in the next decade. However, if multiple climate systems continue being pushed beyond points of no return,
as we’ve explored before
, we may end up locking in significant negative changes before we’re capable of dropping emissions and stabilizing the climate.
[Banner image: “
Surprise Glacier
” by USGS. Thumbnail:
Calving at Perito Moreno
by NASA Goddard.] | 124 | 40 | [
{
"comment_id": "6486312",
"author": "That kid",
"timestamp": "2022-06-23T17:31:24",
"content": "Troll, be gone",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6486323",
"author": "mime",
"timestamp": "2022-06-23T17:44:10",
"content": ... | 1,760,372,655.50021 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/23/faux-retro-tape-player-runs-on-esp32-and-80s-vibes/ | Faux-Retro “Tape” Player Runs On ESP32 And 80s Vibes | Tom Nardi | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"1980's",
"audiobook",
"cherry mx",
"ESP32",
"I2S",
"retro"
] | At first glance, this
gorgeous retro-styled audio player built by [Max Kern]
could absolutely pass for the genuine article. But then you take a closer look and realize that the “tape” it’s playing is actually an animation running on a 320 x 240 IPS display, and the Play and Rewind buttons on the front aren’t the chunky electromechanical affairs of yesteryear but actually cleverly repurposed MX keyboard switches.
By now you’re probably realizing that this player is quite a bit smaller than you first imagined, which in turn, means that it even its case is a modern fabrication. While it might perfectly encapsulate the look and feel of a piece of 1980s consumer electronics, it was squirted out on a thoroughly modern desktop 3D printer.
Even so, [Max] made sure to include draft angles in the CAD design and and a distinctive separation line so the case
looked
like it was injection molded. Following similar logic, he decided against using a modern rechargeable battery pack to power the electronics, opting instead for a more era-appropriate set of AA batteries.
In terms of hardware, the custom PCB is home to an ESP32 WROOM, a MAX98357A I2S audio amplifier, a FT231XS USB-to-serial chip, with enough passives and regulators to keep them all well fed and happy. The ESP32 has more than enough computational horsepower to chew through MP3 files, which are conveniently loaded via an SD slot built into the side of the player. As the player was actually intended for audio books, onboard playback is limited to a mono speaker; though there is a 3.5 mm audio jack to plug in a pair of headphones for when the built-in speaker isn’t up to the task.
Check out the video after the break to see how the player is assembled, as well as a demonstration of its simple three-button user interface. It looks like a joy to use, though the lack of fast forward and rewind sound effects took us a bit by surprise given the otherwise impeccable attention to detail. We’ll assume there’s some technical limitation that makes this particularly difficult to implement, and that their absence is currently keeping [Max] up at night.
As impressive as the final product is, we can’t say it’s a surprise. Frankly, we wouldn’t expect anything less from [Max] at this point.
His adaptive OLED macro pad wowed us back in 2020
, and his
ZeroBot is still one of the slickest designs
for a DIY two-wheeled robots we’ve ever seen. | 31 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6486291",
"author": "L0rdRav3n",
"timestamp": "2022-06-23T15:33:48",
"content": "Shutup and take my money!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6486292",
"author": "L0rdRav3n",
"timestamp": "2022-06-23T15:37:34",
... | 1,760,372,655.298014 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/21/inside-3d-printing-shoes/ | Inside 3D Printing Shoes | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"shoes"
] | If you’ve ever thought about 3D printing shoes, you’ll enjoy watching the video below about a
Portland-based company
that creates shoes on demand using an HP MJF 5200 3D printer. Granted, this isn’t a printer you likely have in your basement. The one-ton printer costs up to a half-million dollars but watching it do its thing is pretty interesting.
The printer doesn’t create the entire shoe, but just a spongy foam-like TPU footbed and heel. They run the printer overnight and get about a dozen pairs out at once. There’s quite a bit of clean-up to get the piece ready. Of course, there’s also the assembly of the rest of the shoe to take into account.
One of the advantages of this approach is apparently the lack of waste. We didn’t know, but apparently conventional shoes wind up in landfills. These shoes are made to recycle and the company offers a discount to those sending in old pairs.
Of course, another advantage is the speed of producing new designs. However, we wonder about the economics of using a printer that costs at least $300,000 to produce a dozen pairs of shoes a night. The shoes aren’t cheap — we hear they run from $175 to $375 a pair, but they aren’t that expensive, either. Our bad business math shows that even if you could make 100% profit and have 0 ruined shoes, it would take decades to pay back on one of these printers. Considering real costs, profits, and other considerations pushes that number into hundreds of years. Still, maybe they lease the printer or time share it, we aren’t sure.
Fancy a go? Try the
Digital Shoe Design Kit
. These shoes are pretty stylish, but with 3D printing, you can build
anything you can imagine
, even if it would make you look like a nerd. | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485955",
"author": "RW ver 0.0.3",
"timestamp": "2022-06-22T01:54:51",
"content": "I dispute your math, 12 pairs a day at $100 profit per pair, 300 working days a year is $360,000. List price of printer is $270,000",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,655.551987 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/21/teensy-spectrum-analyzer-has-170-channels/ | Teensy Spectrum Analyzer Has 170 Channels | Bryan Cockfield | [
"News"
] | [
"audio",
"channels",
"data",
"fft",
"hi-fi",
"ram",
"spectrum",
"stereo",
"Teensy",
"visualizer",
"VU meter"
] | While high-fidelity audio has come a long way in the past several decades, a lot of modern stereo equipment is still missing out on some of the old analog meters that were common on amplifiers and receivers of the 60s through the 80s. Things like VU meters don’t tend to be common anymore, but it is possible to build them back in to your sound system with the help of some microcontrollers. [Mark] shows us exactly how to reclaim some of the old-school functionality with
this twin audio visualizer display
.
Not only does this build include two displays, but the microcontroller is keeping up with 170 channels in real-time in order to drive the display. What’s more impressive is that it’s being done all on a Teensy 4.1. To help manage all of the data and keep the speed as fast as possible it uses external RAM soldered to the board, and a second Teensy audio board is used to do the real time
FFT
analysis. Most of the channels are sent to the display hosting the spectrum analyzer but two are reserved for left and right stereo VU meters on the second display.
The project from [Mark] is originally based on
this software from [DIYLAB]
so everything is open-source. While it was originally built for a specific piece of hardware, [Mark] has it set up with a line in and line out plus a microphone input so it can be used for virtually any audio hardware now. For another take on the classic VU meter, t
ake a look at this design based on an Arudino
instead. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485919",
"author": "The Electronic Engineer",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T20:21:08",
"content": "Very kind review thank you! ( The electronic engineer, me…) For those interested…on my youtube channel you’ll find more open source spectrum analyzers.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,372,655.342614 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/21/casting-parts-in-urethane-tips-from-a-master/ | Casting Parts In Urethane: Tips From A Master | Elliot Williams | [
"how-to"
] | [
"casting",
"molding",
"urethane"
] | When you want a couple copies of a thing, you can 3D print ’em. When you want a ton of them, you might consider making a mold. If those are the shoes you’re in, you should check out
this video from [Robert Tolone]
(embedded below). Or heck, just check out
all
of his videos.
Even just in this single video from a couple years back, there are a ton of tips that’ll help you when you’re trying to pour resin of just the right color into a silicone mold. Mostly, these boil down to testing everything out in small quantities before pouring it in bulk, because a lot changes along the way. And that’s where [Robert]’s experience shines through — he knows all of the trouble spots that you need to test for.
For instance? Color matching. Resin dyes are incredibly concentrated, so getting the right amount is tricky. Mixing the color at a high concentration first and then sub-diluting it slowly allows for more control. But even then, the dried product is significantly lighter than the mixture, so some experimentation is necessary. [Robert] sneaks up on just the right color of seafoam green and then pours some test batches. And then he pours it in the exact shape of the mold just to be sure.
That’s just one of the tips in this video, which is just the tip of the mold-casting iceberg. Pour yourself a coffee, settle down, and you’ll learn something for sure. If you’re into more technical parts and CNC machining,
we still love the Guerilla Guide
after all these years.
Much thank to [Zane] for tipping us off to this treasure trove. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485922",
"author": "Jasper",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T20:48:40",
"content": "I recently got recommended 1 of Roberts videos, and now I can’t stop watching them. I really enjoy them",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6485982",
... | 1,760,372,654.985457 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/21/edging-ahead-when-learning-on-the-edge/ | Edging Ahead When Learning On The Edge | Matthew Carlson | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"ai",
"pytorch",
"pytorch lite",
"react native",
"reactna",
"tensorflow",
"Tensorflow Lite",
"tutorial"
] | “With the
power
of edge AI in the palm of your hand, your business will be
unstoppable.
”
That’s what the marketing seems to read like for artificial intelligence companies. Everyone seems to have cloud-scale AI-powered business intelligence analytics at the edge. While sounding impressive, we’re not convinced that marketing mumbo jumbo means anything. But what does AI on edge devices look like these days?
Being on the edge just means that the actual AI evaluation and maybe even fine-tuning runs locally on a user’s device rather than in some cloud environment. This is a double win, both for the business and for the user. Privacy can more easily be preserved as less information is transmitted back to a central location. Additionally, the AI can work in scenarios where a server somewhere might not be accessible or provide a response quickly enough.
Google and Apple have their own AI libraries, ML Kit and Core ML, respectively. There
are tools
to convert Tensorflow, PyTorch, XGBoost, and LibSVM models into formats that CoreML and ML Kit understand. But other solutions try to provide a platform-agnostic layer for training and evaluation.
We’ve also previously covered Tensorflow Lite (TFL)
, a trimmed-down version of Tensorflow, which has matured considerably since 2017.
For this article, we’ll be looking at
PyTorch Live (PTL)
, a slimmed-down framework for adding PyTorch models to smartphones. Unlike TFL (which can run on RPi and in a browser), PTL is focused entirely on Android and iOS and offers tight integration. It uses a react-native backed environment which means that it is heavily geared towards the
node.js world
.
No Cloud Required
Right now, PTL is very early. It runs on macOS (though no Apple Silicon support), but Windows and Linux compatibility is apparently forthcoming. It comes with a handy CLI that makes starting a new project relatively painless. After installing and creating a new project, the experience is smooth, with a few commands taking care of everything. The tutorial was straightforward, and soon we had a demo that could recognize numbers.
It was time to take the tutorial further and create a custom model. Using the
EMNIST dataset
, we created a trained
resnet9 model
with the letters dataset using help from
a helpful GitHub repo
. Once we had a model, it was simple enough to use the PyTorch utilities to
export the model to the lite environment
. With some tweaks to the code (which live reloads on the simulator), it recognized characters instead of numbers.
We suspect someone a little more steeped in the machine learning world would be able to take this farther than us. PTL has other exciting demos, such as
on-device speech recognition
and
live video segmentation
and recognition. Overall the experience was easy, and the scenarios we were trying were relatively easy to implement.
If you’re already in a smartphone react-native world, PTL seems simple to integrate and use. Outside of that, a lot is left unsupported. Tensorflow Lite was similarly constrained when we first covered it and has since matured and gained new platforms and features, becoming a powerful library with many supported platforms. Ultimately, we’ll see what PyTorch Live grows into. There’s already support for GPUs and neural engines in the beta branch. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485877",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T17:25:10",
"content": "I could see “edge” being handy on say routers for better threat detection. The current methods like Trend need the cloud to function.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,655.231881 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/21/a-simple-rp2040-based-audio-dsp-board/ | A Simple RP2040-Based Audio DSP Board | Dave Rowntree | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"dsp",
"eurorack",
"rp2040",
"synth",
"Vult"
] | If you’re one of those people who got into building electronics for the purpose of making music, then this
Raspberry Pi RP2040-based audio DSP project
by [DatanoiseTV] might be of interest. Provided is a FreeRTOS template application for creating Eurorack compatible synthesizers, effects processors, and similar DSP-based audio widgets.
The
hardware platform
has the usual Eurorack connectivity, including MIDI in, Control Voltages (CV) and the usual 5V-compatible triggers. An audio output is provided to send the audio out to the system mixer or any other analog modules. Additionally, connections are provided for a rotary encoder, a few push buttons, and an OLED display to allow construction of a rudimentary user interface on the module, if that is required.
The application template is generic enough, however the project is intended to be used with the
Vult DSP transcompiler
. Vult is a high-level programming language designed to enable easy creation of audio synthesizers and similar, producing C++ code as an output of the compilation process. This is then wrapped up with the RTOS goodies (although you don’t actually need them) to drop onto the RP2040 in the usual way, via the handy USB-C port. So, if you’re looking to get into DSP-based Eurorack modules for your homebrew synth rack, this might be a good place to start.
Just like the RP2040 isn’t the most obvious choice for a DSP application,
neither is the ESP32 for that matter
, but who cares? many modern micros are more than capable of audio DSP these days, with or without the dedicated functionality. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485843",
"author": "not",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T16:04:04",
"content": "The RP2040 is talented: it is available. Damn, if only it was fast enough to bitbang USB2.0…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6485849",
"author"... | 1,760,372,655.183458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/21/linux-fu-docking-made-easy/ | Linux Fu: Docking Made Easy | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"containerization",
"docker",
"linux"
] | Most computer operating systems suffer from some version of “DLL hell” — a decidedly Windows term, but the concept applies across the board. Consider doing embedded development which usually takes a few specialized tools. You write your embedded system code, ship it off, and forget about it for a few years. Then, the end-user wants a change. Too bad the compiler you used requires some library that has changed so it no longer works. Oh, and the device programmer needs an older version of the USB library. The Python build tools use Python 2 but your system has moved on. If the tools you need aren’t on the computer anymore, you may have trouble finding the install media and getting it to work. Worse still if you don’t even have the right kind of computer for it anymore.
One way to address this is to encapsulate all of your development projects in a virtual machine. Then you can save the virtual machine and it includes an operating system, all the right libraries, and basically is a snapshot of how the project was that you can reconstitute at any time and on nearly any computer.
In theory, that’s great, but it is a lot of work and a lot of storage. You need to install an operating system and all the tools. Sure, you can get an appliance image, but if you work on many projects, you will have a bunch of copies of the very same thing cluttering things up. You’ll also need to keep all those copies up-to-date if you need to update things which — granted — is sort of what you are probably trying to avoid, but sometimes you must.
Docker is a bit lighter weight than a virtual machine. You still run your system’s normal kernel, but essentially you can have a virtual environment running in an instant on top of that kernel. What’s more, Docker only stores the differences between things. So if you have ten copies of an operating system, you’ll only store it once plus small differences for each instance.
The downside is that it is a bit tough to configure. You need to map storage and set up networking, among other things.
I recently ran into a project called Dock
that tries to make the common cases easier so you can quickly just spin up a docker instance to do some work without any real configuration. I made a few minor changes to it and
forked the project
, but, for now, the origin has synced up with my fork so you can stick with the original link.
Documentation
The documentation on the GitHub pages is a bit sparse, but the author has
a good page of instructions and videos
. On the other hand, it is very easy to get started. Create a directory and go into it (or go into an existing directory). Run “dock” and you’ll get a spun-up Docker container named after the directory. The directory itself will be mounted inside the container and you’ll have an ssh connection to the container.
By default, that container will have some nice tools in it, but I wanted different tools. No problem; you can install what you want. You can also commit an image set up how you like and name it in the configuration files as the default. You can also name a specific image file on the command line if you like. That means it is possible to have multiple setups for new machines. You might say you want this directory to have an image configured for Linux development and another one for ARM development, for example. Finally, you can also name the container if you don’t want it tied to the current directory.
Images
This requires some special Docker images that the system knows how to install automatically. There are setups for Ubuntu, Python, Perl, Ruby, Rust, and some network and database development environments. Of course, you can customize any of these and commit them to a new image that you can use as long as you don’t mess up the things the tool depends on (that is, an SSH server, for example).
If you want to change the default image, you can do that in ~/.dockrc. That file also contains a prefix that the system removes from the container names. That way, a directory named Hackaday won’t wind up with a container named Hackaday.alw.home, but will simply be Hackaday. For example, since I have all my work in /home/alw/projects, I should use that as a prefix so I don’t have the word projects in each container name, but — as you can see in the accompanying screenshot — I haven’t so the container winds up as Hackaday.projects.
Options and Aliases
You can see the options available on the help page. You can select a user, mount additional storage volumes, set a few container options, and more. I haven’t tried it, but it looks like there’s also a
$DEFAULT_MOUNT_OPTIONS
variable to add other directories to all containers.
My fork adds a few extra options that aren’t absolutely necessary. For one, -h will give you a short help screen, while -U will give you a longer help screen. In addition, unknown options trigger a help message. I also added a -I option to write out a source line suitable for adding to your shell profile to get the optional aliases.
These optional aliases are useful for you, but Dock doesn’t use them so you don’t have to install them. These do things like list docker images or make a commit without having to remember the full Docker syntax. Of course, you can still use regular Docker commands, if you prefer.
Try It!
To start, you need to install Docker. Usually, by default, only root can use Docker. Some setups have a particular group you can join if you want to use it from your own user ID. That’s easy to set up if you like. For example:
sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami)
newgrp docker
sudo systemctl unmask docker.service
sudo systemctl unmask docker.socket
sudo systemctl start docker.service
From there, follow the setup on the project page, and make sure to edit your ~/.dockrc file. You need to make sure the
DOCK_PATH
,
IGNORED_PREFIX_PATH
, and
DEFAULT_IMAGE_NAME
variables are set correctly, among other things.
Once set up, create a test directory, type
dock
and enjoy your new sort-of virtual machine. If you’ve set up the aliases, use
dc
to show the containers you have. You can use
dcs
or
dcr
to shut down or remove a “virtual machine.” If you want to save the current container as an image, try
dcom
to commit the container.
Sometimes you want to enter the fake machine as root. You can use
dock-r
as a shorthand for
dock -u root
assuming you installed the aliases.
It is hard to imagine how this could be much easier. Since the whole thing is written as a Bash script, it’s easy to add options (like I did). It looks like it would be pretty easy to adapt existing Docker images to be set up to be compatible with Dock, too. Don’t forget, that you can commit a container to use it as a template for future containers.
If you want more background on Docker, Ben James has
a good write-up
. You can even use Docker to
simplify retrocomputing
. | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485807",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T14:12:44",
"content": "Let’s keep hackaday docker-free, shall we?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6485810",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-06-... | 1,760,372,655.615288 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/21/up-in-the-sky-its-a-bird-its-a-drone-oh-yeah-its-a-drone/ | Up In The Sky… It’s A Bird… It’s A Drone… Oh Yeah, It’s A Drone | Al Williams | [
"drone hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"biomimickry",
"flying"
] | One staple of science fiction is the ornithopter, which is a plane with moving wings. While these haven’t proved very practical in the general sense, a recent paper talks about
mimicking natural wings changing shape
to improve maneuverability in drones and other aircraft. In particular, the paper talks about how the flight performance of many birds and bats far exceeds that of conventional aircraft.
The technical term for being more maneuverable than a conventional aircraft is, unsurprisingly, called supermaneuverability. Aircraft performing things like the
Pugachev Cobra
maneuver (watch the video below, or the latest Top Gun movie) require this type of operation, and with modern aircraft, this means using thrust-vector technology along with unstable airframes and sophisticated computer control. That’s not how birds or bats operate, though, and the paper uses modern flight simulation techniques to show that biomimicry and thrust vector technology don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
So how do you apply lessons from birds, bats, and even flying squirrels to drones? The answer appears to be in allowing the wings to dynamically change shape or, as the paper calls it, morph.
One key maneuver covered in the paper is especially interesting to military drones: RaNPAS or rapid-nose-pointing-and-shooting. Presumably, you aren’t worried about that for your next drone project, but being able to maneuver more like a bird would be great.
Not that we haven’t seen actual
ornithopters
around here. Some of them are
practically prehistoric
. | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485764",
"author": "Varga Tom",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T11:38:22",
"content": "Wow love that chemtrail :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6485773",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T12:07:06",
"content"... | 1,760,372,655.750695 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/21/no-tool-left-behind-with-the-help-of-homemade-shadow-boards/ | No Tool Left Behind With The Help Of Homemade Shadow Boards | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"cabinet",
"opencv",
"organization",
"outline",
"potrace",
"python",
"shadow",
"shop",
"Silhouette",
"storage",
"tool"
] | Shadowed tool storage — where a tool outline shows at a glance what’s missing from storage — is a really smart way to keep your shop neat. They’re also super important for cases where a tool left behind could be a tragedy. Think, where’s-that-10-mm-socket-while-working-on-a-jet-engine? important. (It’s always the 10-mm socket.)
But just because shadow boards are smart, doesn’t mean they’re easy to make. That’s why [Scott Prince] came up with
this semi-automated method for making toolbox shadow boards
. The job of tracing around each tool on some sort of suitable material and cutting out the shapes seems straightforward, but the trick comes in organizing the outlines given the space available and the particular collection of tools.
[Scott]’s method starts with capturing images of each individual tool. He used a PiCam and a lightbox housed, strangely enough, in a storage bench; we’d love to hear the full story behind that, but pretty much any digital camera would do for the job. After compensating for distortion with OpenCV, cropping the images, and turning the image into a vector outline of the tool, [Scott] was left with the task of putting the tools into logical groups and laying them out sensibly. After tweaking the tool outlines and adding finger cutouts for easy pickup, [Scott] put his CNC router to work. He chose to use a high-density polyethylene product made by his employer, which looks fantastic, but MDF would work fine too.
We have to admit to a fair degree of toolbox envy now that we’ve seen what shadow boards can do. We’re a bit torn, though —
[Zach Friedman]’s Gridfinity storage system
has a lot going for it, too. | 38 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485721",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T08:04:33",
"content": "Heh, you’ve reminded me I have to buy some more 10mm wrenches, I swear they have something like half-life time on them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,372,655.877253 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/wonderful-foldable-printable-dodecahedron/ | Wonderful Foldable Printable Dodecahedron | Elliot Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"dodecahedron"
] | Debra Ansell of [GeekMomProjects] fame came up with a neat,
3D design
that prints flat and then folds up into everyone’s favorite Platonic solid: a D12.
Why would you want to do this? Well, folding up your 3D prints gives you a third dimension “for free” without using all that support material. Here, all of the outside faces of the dodecahedron are printed flat against the build plate, which is probably the nicest side of your prints. And embedding LEDs in the resulting shape would probably be easy because they’re all in plane. And speaking of LEDs, we kinda expected to see them here, given Debra’s motto: “
LEDs improve everything
” — that part is up to you.
Debra notes that she likes PETG instead of PLA for the extra strength in the thin-printed hinges, and we’d bet that your printer’s tolerances will need to be spot on for the clips that hold the whole thing together. (We’d be tempted to apply a little super-duper glue.)
As always with Debra’s projects, there’s some creative solutions on display here that’ll help you out whether you need a D12 or a D20, so give it a look!
Thanks [Peter] for the tip. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485700",
"author": "pelrun",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T05:54:31",
"content": "Now I’m envisioning using a tool like Pepakura Designer to convert a 3d model to a papercraft net, and then transforming that into a model like this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies":... | 1,760,372,655.797298 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/blinking-an-arduino-led-in-julia/ | Blinking An Arduino LED, In Julia | Elliot Williams | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"AVR",
"julia",
"llvm",
"programming"
] | The Julia programming language is a horrible fit for a no-frills microcontroller like the ATMega328p that lies within the classic Arduino,
but that didn’t stop [Sukera] from trying, and succeeding
.
All of the features that make
Julia
a cool programming language for your big computer make it an awful choice for the Arduino. It’s designed for interactivity, is dynamically typed, and leans heavily on its garbage collection; each of these features alone would tax the Mega to the breaking point. But in its favor, it is a compiled language that is based on LLVM, and LLVM has an AVR backend for C. Should just be a simple matter of stubbing out some of the overhead, recompiling LLVM to add an AVR target for Julia, and then fixing up all the other loose ends, right?
Well, it turns out it almost was. Leaning heavily on the flexibility of LLVM, [Sukera] manages to turn off all the language features that aren’t needed, and after some small hurdles like the usual problems with volatile and atomic variables, manages to blink an LED slowly. Huzzah. We love [Sukera’s] wry “Now THAT is what I call two days well spent!” after it’s all done, but seriously, this is the first time we’ve every seen even super-rudimentary Julia code running on an 8-bit microcontroller, so there are definitely some kudos due here.
By the time that Julia is wedged into the AVR, a lot of what makes it appealing on the big computers is missing on the micro, so we don’t really see people picking it over straight C, which has a much more developed ecosystem. But still, it’s great to see what it takes to get a language designed around a runtime and garbage collection up and running on our favorite mini micro.
Thanks [Joel] for the tip! | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485689",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2022-06-21T04:22:46",
"content": "“By the time that Julia is wedged into the AVR, a lot of what makes it appealing on the big computers is missing on the micro…”Just because something is doable, doesn’t mean it should be done.",
"parent... | 1,760,372,656.166982 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/3d-printed-concrete-beam-improves-sustainability/ | 3D Printed Concrete Beam Improves Sustainability | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"News"
] | [
"architecture",
"concrete"
] | Many of the 3D printed houses and structures we’ve seen use concrete and are — frankly — a little underwhelming. Making big squares out of concrete isn’t that hard and while we are sure there is some benefit, it isn’t overwhelming. [Andy Coward] apparently felt the same way and set out to find ways that 3D printing could offer unique benefits in building structures. The result:
a beam that would be difficult to create with conventional techniques
but is easy to make with a printer. The advantage is that it uses 78% less concrete than a conventional beam with the same properties.
The key is that in a normal beam, not much of the concrete is bearing a significant load. It is simply there because you need some concrete on one side of the beam and then some more on the other side. In the center, surprisingly little of the concrete actually supports anything. The new beam takes advantage of this along with a steel reinforcement at a strategic point. Still, it uses 70% less steel than a typical reinforced beam.
Reducing material has many benefits. Lower transportation costs and less carbon production, are among them. The beams also have built-in voids that can allow for services like electrical and water. You can see a good diagram of how it all goes together on Minimass’
website
. Removing unneeded material is
hardly a new technique
, of course. We see it often in metal 3D printing, too. | 38 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485637",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T23:27:58",
"content": "“Removing unneeded material is hardly a new technique, of course. ”The evolution of VCRs to near 100% plastic, and less materials. Or computers, and look at how long they last.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,656.52438 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/dont-mind-if-i-ski-do/ | Don’t Mind If I Ski-Do | Matthew Carlson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"boat",
"boatbuilding",
"jetski",
"skidoo",
"watersports"
] | There is an age-old tradition among hackers of just making it yourself. Whether the real thing is too expensive or you think you can make a better one, the itch strikes, and it can quickly spread. [Homemade Madness] has quite the itch
as he builds his own jetski
.
What is a jetski but a boat with a shell on top? In an earlier video, he created a boat out of plywood and, after the usual steps of fiberglass and sealing, was proud to float around in his relatively normal-looking boat. But now that he had a working bottom, it was time to return to CAD. He printed out templates for all various shapes he would need, each labeled with a different designator, and glued them to the plywood. No fancy CNC here, just a steady hand and a jigsaw. We love the professional build instructions he compiled for himself that detail in LEGO-like quality exactly how each piece slots into where and in what order to do them. In addition to the top layer of the jetski, he also designed a stand for the boat to rest on while he made it, which is just going the extra mile. A ceiling-mounted winch made it easy to lift the ship into position. Next, he connected all the various framing pieces with PU glue. Thin plywood acted as cladding on top of the skeleton. Filling, sanding, and fiberglass overlaid the structure, making it waterproof. More sanding and some primer later, and it was ready for another water test.
He designed a version with an outboard motor, but he’s trying to build one with a built-in jet drive. So we’re looking forward to seeing the next step and him flying around on his custom watercraft. But what he has already done is quite impressive. If you’re looking for something a little smaller to pull you around the water, why not
take a look at this little 3d printed tug boat
? Video after the break. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485604",
"author": "Tom Brusehaver",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T20:37:53",
"content": "He’s done a good job.Someone should look into foam cores for the bulkheads and skinning. Much lighter and easier to work with.Bi-directional cloth shouldn’t be sanded smooth, the fibers removed dec... | 1,760,372,656.11428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/scrambling-pocket-calculators-made-easy-with-emp-box-v2/ | Scrambling Pocket Calculators Made Easy With EMP Box V2 | Donald Papp | [
"High Voltage"
] | [
"em glitching",
"emp",
"high voltage",
"perfboard",
"spark gap",
"voltage multiplier"
] | [Rostislav Persion] has for some time been interested in making
small, portable EMP devices
capable of interfering with nearby electronics. In these EMP devices, high voltage is used to create a portable
spark gap
generator, whose operation in turn creates electromagnetic pulses capable of resetting or scrambling nearby electronics such as pocket calculators.
Bridging adjacent holes narrows the spark gap, resulting in more frequent pulses.
His original EMP box designs
relied on spark gaps constructed from metal screws threaded into a clear plastic insulator, but this newest design ditches fussy screw adjustments and relies on perfboard. By cutting out a single row of plated perfboard holes and soldering the high voltage terminals to each end, the empty holes in between form the essential parts of a spark gap.
It’s even adjustable: one simply bridges adjacent holes with solder to effectively decrease the gap. As for generating the high voltage itself, a DC voltage multiplier from Amazon takes care of that. Watch the device reset some calculators in the short video below.
Looking for high-voltage experiments that aren’t so sketchy?
Get yourself a Van de Graff generator, some metal balls, and a little bit of oil, and make some art
.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/NEW_EMP_001.mp4 | 47 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485568",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T18:49:28",
"content": "Is he doing this in a Faraday cage?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6486445",
"author": "ThingEngineer",
... | 1,760,372,656.249846 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/working-with-bgas-design-and-layout/ | Working With BGAs: Design And Layout | Robin Kearey | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"how-to",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [
"bga",
"how-to",
"PCB design"
] | The Ball Grid Array, or BGA package is no longer the exclusive preserve of large, complex chips on computer motherboards: today even simple microcontrollers are available with those little solder balls. Still, many hobbyists prefer to stay with QFP and QFN packages because they’re easier to solder. While that is a fair point, BGA packages can offer significant space savings, and are sometimes the only choice: with the ongoing chip shortage, some other package versions might simply be unavailable. Even soldering doesn’t have to be complicated: if you’re already comfortable with solder paste and reflow profiles, adding a BGA or two into the mix is pretty easy.
In this article we’ll show that working with BGA chips is not as difficult as it may seem. The focus will be on printed circuit board design: how to draw proper footprints, how to route lots of signals and what capabilities your PCB manufacturer should have. We’ll cover soldering and rework techniques in a future article, but first let’s take a look at why BGAs are used at all.
What’s All This Ball-Grid Stuff, Anyhow?
As computer technology advanced in the 1990s, the motherboards inside our PCs became more and more complex. The 8-bit data buses from the 1980s gave way to 16-bit, 32-bit and even 64-bit wide buses between the CPU, the main memory and expansion cards like hard disk controllers and display adapters. These buses all had to be carried into and out of various chips, which therefore needed lots of pins.
The typical package for complex chips at the time was the quad-flat-package (QFP), with long rows of gull-wing shaped pins on each side. When scaled up to a pin count of 200 or more, these packages became increasingly unwieldy: not only did they become very large compared to the chip inside, the pins also became extremely small and fragile. Large QFP chips required careful handling to avoid bending any pins and making the chip unsolderable.
The Ball Grid Array package, or BGA, was developed to solve both of these problems. Placing the pins in a grid at the bottom of the package, instead of spreading them around the edge, makes for a far more area-efficient design. In addition, solder balls are much more robust than the tiny little pins on small-pitch QFP packages. Although manufacturers initially feared manufacturing and testing issues, the BGA package turned out to be very reliable and has since become ubiquitous in all types of electronic equipment.
The picture below, showing part of a 1997 vintage PC motherboard, clearly illustrates the difference in area efficiency between a QFP and a BGA package. The ATI VGA controller on the left has a 208 pin QFP package with a 0.5 mm pin pitch. The Ali M1531 system controller, on the right, manages to fit 328 pins on its BGA package, with solder balls at a much more comfortable 1.27 mm pitch.
This 1997 PC motherboard sports an ATI 3D Rage II graphics chip in a QFP package and an Ali M1531 system controller in a BGA package. Note how both chips take up roughly the same amount of area, even though the BGA chip has 57 % more pins.
A BGA package is typically built around an interposer: a small printed circuit board that serves as an interface between the actual chip and the circuit board onto which it is mounted. The chip is wire-bonded to the interposer and covered in protective epoxy. The interposer routes the signals from the edge of the chip to an array of pads on the bottom, onto which little balls of solder are attached. The completed BGA package is then placed onto the printed circuit board and heated. The solder balls melt and create a connection between the board and the interposer.
The internal structure of a typical BGA package (side view). Credit:
Tosaka, Serenthia, CC-BY-SA
Typical BGAs in the early days had a ball pitch of 1.27 mm. As technology improved, BGA packages became smaller and smaller, until the interposer was not much larger than the chip inside. These miniaturized BGAs are known as chip-scale packages, or CSPs, and typically have a ball pitch between 1.0 and 0.5 mm.
The quest for miniaturization did not end there however: semiconductor manufacturers eventually developed the flip-chip BGA, or wafer-level chip scale package (WL-CSP), that dispensed with the interposer altogether. Instead, flip chip designs place the solder balls directly onto the chip’s surface, with a pitch that can be as small as 0.3 mm. The chip is then mounted upside-down onto the circuit board, either with a protective layer of epoxy on its back or with no packaging at all.
Different BGA types: a classic BGA (272 pins, 1.27 mm pitch), a chip-scale package (49 pins, 0.65 mm pitch) and a wafer-level chip scale package (20 pins, 0.4 mm pitch).
There’s a huge variety of marketing names for different BGA-type packages, with little standardization between manufacturers. But if you simply want to
use
a BGA chip, it doesn’t really matter what it’s called or even how it was made: the PCB layout techniques are the same for all types. So let’s have a look at how to design PCB layouts for them.
BGA Basics: Pads and Footprints
Picture the following scenario: you’re designing a state-of-the art LIDAR setup, and you’ve chosen
TI’s TDC7201
time-to-digital converter to perform time-of-flight measurements. Unlike its predecessor the TDC7200, this chip is only available in a 25-pin nFBGA package, so you have no choice but to make a BGA board. You also need a microcontroller to do some data processing and decide on a
Microchip ATmega164
. Unfortunately, today’s chip shortage means that the QFP and QFN versions are nowhere to be found, so you end up stuck with the 49-pin VFBGA version. As for the LDO regulator to power the whole thing, you stumble upon a great bargain: your favorite supplier has
ONSemi’s NCP161
on sale. As you may have guessed, that one also comes in a BGA package, a tiny four-pin version in this case.
So how do you go about designing a PCB for this trio of BGA chips? As always, the manufacturers’ datasheets are a great place to start. Let’s first have a look at what ON Semiconductor says about how to draw the proper footprint for their NCP161: on page 21 of
the datasheet
we find the recommended land pattern that specifies a 0.15 mm pad diameter with
NSMD
type pads.
The PCB footprint for the NCP161, as recommended in the datasheet. Credit: ON Semiconductor
NSMD stands for “Non-Solder Mask Defined”, which refers to a solder pad that is not partially covered by the solder mask. The other option is a Solder Mask Defined pad, in which the solder mask does cover part of the pad. While both types have their applications, the NSMD type is usually recommended in manufacturers’ datasheets for BGA chips because it enables a more robust solder connection: the solder ball can grip the sides of the pad as well as the top.
The difference between solder mask defined (left) and non-solder mask defined BGA pads (right)
If we draw a footprint for our little four-pin BGA package in KiCAD, the two options look as follows. The copper pads are shown in red, with the solder mask openings in purple. The pink outline is the component’s courtyard, which determines how close other components may be mounted.
A four-pin BGA package with solder mask defined pads (left) and non-solder mask defined pads (right)
For the NSMD version, the solder mask openings should be slightly larger than the copper pads; in this case, we’ve used 0.25 mm openings on 0.15 mm pads, which means the solder mask openings extend just 0.05 mm on either side of the pad. You should check with your PCB manufacturer if their solder mask alignment is accurate enough to do this; a typical values is 2 mils (0.05 mm), which means that in the worst case, your solder mask will just about touch the edge of your pad. If your manufacturer cannot provide more accurate alignment, you might want to enlarge the solder pad opening a little bit more. Keep in mind that the remaining solder mask between the pads should then still satisfy the minimum solder mask sliver rule.
Note that the pads of BGAs are not numbered sequentially, but in a row-column format: the rows are labelled A, B, C and so on from top to bottom, while the columns are numbered from left to right. Pin A1, in the top-left corner, is normally indicated by some mark on the top side of the chip to help you orient the part correctly.
One thing that will be of great help when assembling your PCB, especially if you’re doing it manually, is having the package outline indicated on your silkscreen layer. Since you can’t see the solder balls and the pads when you’re placing the chip, the silkscreen is the only way to tell if you’ve positioned your chip correctly. Don’t forget to draw some sort of indicator to point out which pin is A1, otherwise you’ll still end up guessing which of the four orientations is correct.
The complete PCB footprint for our four-pin BGA package
With just four pads, hooking up this voltage regulator chip to the rest of our circuit is easy. While it might be tempting to draw a few big power planes for the input, output and ground connections and overlap them with the pads, it’s usually better to draw a thin trace to each pad first, then connect that trace to any larger structures.
The reason for this is solderability. When the solder ball melts, it will try to adhere to any copper it can see, which means both the solder pad and the trace connecting to it. The chip will therefore experience a slight pull in the direction of the trace during soldering. Making the connections radially symmetric should cancel out the forces exerted by each solder ball and ensure a more predictable soldering process.
The full layout of our LDO, with surrounding components. VCC and GND both drop down to power planes in the inner layers. Note how tiny the chip is, even compared to the 0603 sized capacitors.
BGA Routing: Dog-Bone Layout
Things get a bit more complicated when we place our microcontroller, with its 7×7 grid of solder balls. Routing traces to all 49 pads is not so straightforward, so let’s start with the easiest bit: the outer pins. We can simply route them outward using horizontal and vertical traces.
The second layer of pins can be routed with tracks going between the outer pads. Of course, our PCB design rules should allow this: the minimum trace width and clearance should be no more than c = (p-d)/3, where p is the pad pitch and d is the pad diameter. For this example, with a 0.65 mm pitch and 0.35 mm diameter, the minimum clearance and track width comes down to 0.1 mm: tight, but still possible at many manufacturers.
From the third layer inwards it gets more interesting, because from this point on we’ll need vias to get our signals out. The most common way of doing this is to place one via in the middle of every four pads and route a diagonal trace to it from one of the pads.
Of course, we should first make sure that we have enough space to put down a via at all. A little geometry tells us exactly how much we need: if the pad pitch is p, then the diagonal distance between the center points of two pads is p√2. The distance between the inner edges of the pads is then p√2 – d, where d is the pad diameter.
For the ATmega164, with p = 0.65 mm and d = 0.35 mm, this means we have 0.57 mm of space between the pads. We need to leave at least 0.1 mm of clearance between the pads and the via, so our maximum via size is 0.37 mm. This is pretty much on the limit of what most manufacturers can deliver; you can gain a little bit of room by moving the via slightly closer to the pad it’s connected to, but for smaller-pitch parts like this one you’ll have to go for the more expensive manufacturing options.
After placing the vias we end up with the layout shown below. This is the
dog-bone layout style
, named for the pad-trace-via combination that sort of looks like a cartoonish bone. In this simple case we only have nine dog-bones and plenty of space to route the signals on the bottom layer. If we had an 8×8 ball package instead, then we’d have sixteen dog-bones and the bottom layer would be just as crowded as the top layer.
The dog-bone layout style can be extended to any BGA size. But as the number of pads grows, the number of layers needed to route all the signals increases as well. A 7×7 or 8×8 BGA can be routed with just two signal layers, but a 9×9 or 10×10 chip needs at least three. In general, you need a new routing layer for every two additional rows of pads. In practice, many of the signals will be supply and ground pins that can directly connect to an internal power plane and don’t need further routing. There may also be unused pins, which again gives you a bit more routing space.
It’s important to ensure that all vias under your BGA chip are
tented
, or covered in solder mask. If they’re not, then the molten solder balls could flow onto the vias as well as the intended solder pads, causing misalignment and shorts. You’ll have to check with your PCB manufacturer if they support tented vias: this typically requires an additional processing step in which the via holes are filled with some material before the solder mask is applied.
BGA Routing: Via-in-Pad Layout
Another layout style for routing BGAs is
via-in-pad
. This is typically done for very fine pitch BGAs where you can’t fit a via between four pads. The basic idea is simple: you place one via inside each of the inner pads and route the signals outward from a lower layer. The problem is that you can’t simply place normal vias in your BGA pads, because the molten solder will be sucked inside the via hole through capillary action and cause unreliable joints. Your manufacturer will therefore need to fill the vias and apply a metal covering on top to ensure a flat, solderable surface. The official term for this is an IPC-4761 Type VII, Filled and Capped via.
The via holes need to be small enough to fit inside the BGA pad, and will usually end up being microvias: drilled by a laser rather than a mechanical drill. You can also simplify your routing by using blind vias, which don’t go all the way through the board but stop where you want them to. This is typically a costly option, but if your design uses the smallest Type VII microvias and the tightest clearance, then you’re probably already using the most expensive plan that includes blind vias anyway. Below is an example layout showing the via-in-pad technique applied to the TDC7201, although we wouldn’t typically need this on such a simple 25-pin device.
Whether you used the dog-bone or via-in-pad layout styles, once you’ve managed to bring all signals to the edge of your BGA (a process called “escape routing”) the rest of your PCB design will be almost as if you’d used a QFP or QFN package. The final result might look similar to the image shown at the top of this article.
As you can see, designing PCBs for small-to-medium sized BGA packages doesn’t have to be complicated. As long as the minimum trace pitch, clearance and via size offered by your PCB manufacturer are a good match for the pad size and pitch of the chips you’re planning to use, you’re all set. Classic BGAs with a 1.27 mm pitch will be doable at almost any manufacturer, while smaller chip-size packages with a pitch down to 0.65 mm typically need one of the more advanced processing options with tighter design rules.
The smallest wafer-level packages, with a ball pitch of 0.5 mm or smaller, can only be processed on the most advanced production lines. If you find yourself trying to design a PCB for such a small chip, it might be worthwhile to continue looking for that QFN or QFP version, because there’s little point in replacing an unobtainium chip with an unmanufacturable PCB. | 27 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485541",
"author": "BrendaEM",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T17:34:04",
"content": "Good article! Thank you!+1 Community-Point for making it Kicad-aware.There’s lots of info. More information than one pass, for me. I am bookmarking this to reread it for the next days.",
"parent_id":... | 1,760,372,656.319019 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/breaking-google-nest-hubs-secure-boot/ | Breaking Google Nest Hub’s Secure Boot | Arya Voronova | [
"home hacks",
"Linux Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"google nest hub",
"nest",
"nest hub",
"ubuntu"
] | [frederic] tells a story about their team’s
hack of a Google Nest Hub
(2nd generation) — running Ubuntu on it, through bypassing Google’s boot image signature checks. As with many good hacks, it starts with FCC website pictures. Reverse-engineering a charger and USB daughterboard pin-out, they found a UART connection and broke it out with a custom adapter. With a debug console and insights into the process, they went on hacking, slicing through hardware and software until it was done with.
This story gives plenty of background and insight into both the code that was being investigated, and the way that attack targets were chosen. Through fuzzing, they found a buffer overflow in the bootloader code that could be triggered with help of a non-standard block size. USB flash drives tend to have these hard-coded, so they built a special firmware for a Pi Pico and shortly thereafter, achieved code execution. Then, they hooked into uboot functions and loaded Ubuntu, bypassing the boot image signature checks.
This is a wonderful documentation of a hacking journey, and an exciting read to boot (pun intended). The bug seems to have been patched for half a year now, so you probably can’t flash your Google Nest into Ubuntu anymore. However, you might be able to
run an up-to-date Linux on your Amazon Echo
.
We thank [Sven] for sharing this with us! | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485522",
"author": "Pinderschloss",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T15:46:05",
"content": "Dup’seehttps://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/this-week-in-security-pacman-hetzbleed-and-the-death-of-internet-explorer/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_i... | 1,760,372,656.073616 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/automate-the-freight-the-convenience-store-that-comes-to-your-door/ | Automate The Freight: The Convenience Store That Comes To Your Door | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Automate the Freight",
"convenience store",
"delivery",
"DoorDash",
"junk food",
"self-driving",
"Uber Eats"
] | For as popular as they became during the COVID-19 lockdowns, grocery delivery services like InstaCart rely on a basic assumption to work: that customers know exactly what they want when they order. Once that hurdle is overcome, the transaction is simple — the driver accepts the job, drives to the store to pick up the order, and takes it to the customer. It requires the use of a fair amount of technology to coordinate everything, but by and large it works, and customers are generally willing to pay for the convenience.
But what if you could cut out that step where the driver goes to pick up your order? What if instead of paying someone to pick and pack your order and bring it to your front step, you just ordered up the whole store instead?
That’s the idea behind Robomart
, which seeks to deploy a fleet of mobile stores for when the convenience store isn’t quite convenient enough. And the way the company is choosing to roll out its service, not to mention the business model itself, may hold key lessons for other delivery automation platforms.
Mobile Munchies
From the look of current prototypes, Robomart will be hawking their wares from a fleet of minivans. The user experience is similar to InstaCart or even a prepared meal service such as Uber Eats, at least as far as using an app to create an order. But instead of making specific selections, Robomart just sends a van that’s already stocked with a variety of items. Selection will vary; some vans will stock standard convenience store munchies, while others will carry personal care and hygiene items such as would be found at the corner drug store. Once the van arrives, the customer will unlock it using the Robomart app, which opens the side door of the van to reveal the attractive and enticing array of goods. Customer selections are logged by RFID sensors, the account is billed, and the van moves on to its next stop.
During beta tests in West Hollywood during mid-2021, the company reports that the service proved popular, with the average user creating 2.3 orders per week. But the really stunning figure is the turnaround time — Robomart claims each truck averaged only nine minutes per order, from order creation to closeout. The ability to service almost six customers per hour per truck is pretty amazing, and blows away the order time of traditional delivery services, which often have protracted idle time for the driver while food is cooked or an order is picked.
Almost Automated
The astute reader will note, however, that Robomart’s vehicles are noticeably lacking in the typical appurtenances of self-driving vehicles — no LiDAR domes, no cameras other than those needed for inventory control. That’s because the vehicles aren’t autonomous — yet. While CEO and founder Ali Ahmed’s original vision for Robomart was a fleet of self-driving vehicles, and indeed the first prototype van was autonomous, the regulatory structure to support fully autonomous delivery in the company’s target markets just wasn’t in place. So rather than wait for it to catch up, the company wisely chose to test the “store to your door” concept first. It’s arguably the true innovation here anyway, and seeing if the market will reward the idea is probably more important than the gee-whiz factor of having the van be self-driving. They do their best to conceal that fact, though — the van’s windows are heavily tinted, and the driver remains in the cockpit and doesn’t interact with customers during stops. Sounds like a great gig for introverts.
From an “Automate the Freight” perspective, we’ve got mixed feelings about this idea. There’s no denying that there’s a market for a service like this — nobody ever went broke catering to people’s laziness, after all. Add in the fact that you’re literally sending a junk-food-filled van to someone’s house, where there’s nobody to judge you for carrying an armload of Twinkies to the register, and it’s likely that sales will be brisk.
Assuming future versions of Robomart will go beyond the current on-demand convenience store and drug store models — there’s apparently
an ice cream delivery van
now, but that’s hardly a departure from the current offerings — this could really catch on. Just imagine a hacker’s version of Robomart, chock full of hardware, tools, and other components needed to advance a project on a Sunday afternoon. Most of us would likely be willing to pay a premium for a service like that, if it keeps us from
interrupting the flow of work
with a trip to the hardware store.
[Photos: Robomart] | 45 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485493",
"author": "Zach",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T14:15:25",
"content": "I love technology.I hate how we are using it.Intelligence in some people is a horseshoe shaped spectrum.Ideas like this are so brilliant they’re dumb, and even dangerous.It’s time for the human race to stop ... | 1,760,372,656.397069 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/raspberry-pi-simulates-the-real-analog-tv-experience/ | Raspberry Pi Simulates The Real Analog TV Experience | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"ATSC",
"composite",
"noise",
"raspberry pi",
"retro",
"STATIC",
"tv",
"video"
] | If you’ve laid hands on a retro analog TV, have the restoration bug, and you plan to make the final project at least somewhat period-correct, you face a bit of a conundrum: what are you going to watch? Sure, you can serve up just about any content digitally these days, but some programs just don’t feel right on an old TV. And even if you do get suitably retro programming, streaming isn’t quite the same as the experience of tuning your way through the somewhat meager selections as we did back in the analog days.
But don’t worry —
this Raspberry Pi TV simulator
can make your streaming experience just like the analog TV experience of yore. It comes to us from [Rodrigo], who found a slightly abused 5″ black-and-white portable TV that was just right for the modification. The battery compartment underneath the set made the perfect place to mount a Pi, which takes care of streaming a variety of old movies and shorts. The position of the original tuning potentiometer is read by an Arduino, which tells the Pi which “channel” you’re currently tuned to.
Composite video is fed from the Pi’s output right into the TV’s video input, and the image quality is just about what you’d expect. But for our money, the thing that really sells this is the use of a relay to switch the TV’s tuner back into the circuit for a short bit between channel changes. This gives a realistic burst of static and snow, just like we endured in the old days. Hats off to [Rodrigo] for capturing everything that was awful about TV back in the day —
Mesa of Lost Women
, indeed! — but still managing to make it look good. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485485",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T13:45:14",
"content": "impressive, managed to use a PI AND an Arduino",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6485488",
"author": "Anathae",
"timestamp": "2022-06-2... | 1,760,372,656.454413 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/20/ps5-goes-on-slim-fast/ | PS5 Goes On Slim-Fast | Matthew Carlson | [
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"copper",
"diy perks",
"playstation",
"PlayStation 5",
"ps5 slim",
"water cooling",
"watercooled"
] | For the past few decades, most console makers have first come out with a large flagship model, and then a few years later, released a smaller, more compact slim edition. Not content to wait for it, [Matt] at
DIY Perks
made his own PS5 Slim
, and the results are awe-inspiring.
Generally, slim editions are made by lowering the TDP of the chip under the hood. A lower power draw means less cooling is needed, a smaller power supply can be used, and a design that is overall easier to manage. Unfortunately, [Matt] had none of these benefits and instead had to contend with the full 180 W that the AMD CPU inside the PlayStation can draw.
Taking apart the console left him with the main board that was quite thick as it had heat pipes on both sides. His first thought was water cooling as it can rapidly move the heat needed, but even with right-angle fittings, it didn’t fit within the ambitious thickness goal he had set for himself of less than 2 cm (about 3/4″). To do that, [Matt] had to fabricate a copper water block from three sheets of copper. The first one connects to the motherboard via standoffs and has cut-outs for various connectors and parts. The middle layer has a channel through which water can flow, and the last layer seals it together.
With the three layers together, he soldered them in a toaster oven repurposed as
a reflow oven
. Cleverly, he used silicone grease to prevent solder from getting into areas he didn’t want, like the fins in the CPU block. Luckily, the grease dissolved in alcohol, and after flushing the chamber, he had a solid copper, water-tight, custom loop. However, on his road to glory, [Matt] ran into a snag. He accidentally covered the intake vent on the radiator, and the PS5 overheated, killing it. With a fried mainboard and a project almost on the cusp of completion, he resorted to using the PS5 he had received for B-roll.
Last-minute motherboard swap aside, the final project is gorgeous. The polished exterior and sheer thinness of it are striking. [Matt] has already
disguised his PS5 before
and after this, we’re not quite sure where he could possibly take it next. But we’re excited to find out. | 28 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485427",
"author": "Glaskows",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T08:14:09",
"content": "If you measure the volume of the whole system, including the power supply and water cooling pump/radiator/tubing, then it is not slimmer than a PS5. It is bulkier, uglier and harder to manipulate.It seem... | 1,760,372,656.642947 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/19/this-arduino-pen-plotter-is-built-for-speed/ | This Arduino Pen Plotter Is Built For Speed | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"pen",
"plotter",
"stepper",
"X-Y"
] | We see a lot of simple pen plotter projects around here, and while we appreciate them one and all, most of them are a little on the slow side. That’s OK — a glacial pace is sometimes all that’s needed, as long as it gets the job done. But there’s nothing wrong with putting the pedal to the metal, so to speak. And that’s exactly what
this super-fast Arduino-based plotter
is all about.
As the story goes, [IV Projects] felt the need for speed after building an earlier pen plotter project that worked, but failed to excite. With the additional goal of keeping the plotter easy to build with cheap parts, the design centers on a “grit roller drive” for the Y-axis — the one that actually moves the paper back and forth. And move it does, using Dremel tool sanding drums on a lightweight shaft to maximize acceleration. In fact, all the moving parts are kept as lightweight as possible, and the results really show — the three steppers really sing when this plotter is in action.
There are some really clever details in [IV Projects]’ design. We particularly like the way the pen lift mechanism works, and the surprise appearance of a clothespin spring as a belt tensioner was a real treat. Judging by the pile of rejected prototype parts, it took quite a bit of work to get this design right. If you’d like to build your own,
STLs are available
for the printed parts.
If you’re interested in what the other end of the speed scale looks like, check out
this bare-minimum pen plotter
. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485407",
"author": "mrehorst",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T05:39:52",
"content": "The clothespin spring belt tensioner is there because the working side of the belt is not parallel to the guide rails. That leads to varying tension and distorted drawings. The fix is to reposition the p... | 1,760,372,656.576479 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/19/your-own-ibm-mainframe-or-vax-or-cray-the-easy-way/ | Your Own IBM Mainframe (or Vax, Or Cray…) The Easy Way | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"DEC",
"docker",
"ibm",
"retrocomputing",
"vax"
] | If you want the classic experience of working with an IBM mainframe or another classic computer like a DEC VAX, you have a few choices. You could spend a lot of money trying to find one, transport it, and refurbish it. But, of course, most of us will settle for an emulator. While there are great emulators out there, most of the time you aren’t interested in running just the bare machine — you want the operating systems, the compilers, and the other software that made these machines so interesting. Running your three lines of machine code isn’t as much fun as playing hunt the wumpus or compiling some Fortran IV code. Unfortunately, finding copies of all this old software can be daunting. But thanks to the efforts of [Rattydave], you can do it with no problems at all. The secret?
Pre-built docker images
that have everything you need in one place.
In addition to IBM’s
MVS
,
VM370
, and
TSS
, you can also run
Multics
— the predecessor to Unix — on a collection of computers from
DEC, HP, and DG
, and even a
Cray 1 supercomputer
. There are good instructions, although some of the machines do take a little work. For example, the TSS image notes:
This is not a ready to run system. You need to IPL 250 and then you can control via the telnet connection. (If you dont know what IPL 280 means then this container is not for you.)
We aren’t sure if both of those are supposed to be 250, or both 280, or if that sentence even makes sense as-is. It has been a long time since we IPL’d an IBM computer. We think they both should be 250.
The collection has a lot of SIM-H machines including the Altair 8080 with and without a Z80 CPU, an IBM 1130 and many others that probably still need some attention to get working.
Of course, you still need to know how to work the computer in question, although the notes for each image will help you get at least a foothold. You probably ought to know
a little about docker
, too, although just to use it, it isn’t all that hard. Plus if you start using docker, you’ll find
a lot of different uses for it
. | 35 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485385",
"author": "gregg4",
"timestamp": "2022-06-20T02:15:56",
"content": "A good start.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6486184",
"author": "Warren",
"timestamp": "2022-06-23T00:07:46",
"content": "... | 1,760,372,656.709834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/19/hackaday-links-june-19-2022/ | Hackaday Links: June 19, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"cruise line",
"Ducted Fan",
"e-ink",
"et",
"eVTOL",
"first light",
"hackaday links",
"james webb space telescope",
"jwst",
"license plate",
"lilium",
"SETI",
"Starlink"
] | The James Webb Space Telescope has had a long and sometimes painful journey from its earliest conception to its ultimate arrival at Lagrange point L2 and subsequent commissioning. Except for the buttery-smooth launch and deployment sequence, things rarely went well for the telescope, which suffered just about every imaginable bureaucratic, scientific, and engineering indignity during its development. But now it’s time to see what this thing can do — almost.
NASA has announced that July 12 will be “Image Release Day,”
which will serve as Webb’s public debut. The relative radio silence from NASA on Webb since
the mirror alignment
was completed — apart from
the recent micrometeoroid collision
, of course — suggests the space agency has been busy with “first light” projects. So there’s good reason to hope that the first released images from Webb will be pretty spectacular. The images will drop at
10:30 AM EDT
, so mark your calendars and prepare to be wowed. Hopefully.
Apparently, sitting in the middle of the ocean on a boat, even one built like a luxury hotel, can get pretty boring. That’s the tacit admission of cruise line operator Royal Caribbean, who are really
interested in getting Starlink satellite service on their fleet of cruise liners
. So much so that they’re partnering with Starlink and petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to speed up the process of approving Starlink for use on moving vehicles. The FCC currently forbids that use case, which we find a little surprising given that terrestrial Starlink customers are supposed to be able to pay an upcharge for “RV mode,” which lets them relocate their terminal. There’s a fine line between using the service at multiple stops along a route and just using it while in motion, so maybe Royal Caribbean will get their wish. Personally, adding internet connectivity seems like the last thing that would actually entice us aboard a cruise liner, but hey — whatever floats your boat.
So you’ve managed to buy a new car — a neat trick considering the tumbleweed-strewn wasteland most car lots resemble these days — and you somehow managed to fill up the gas tank. What’s next on your journey to the poorhouse? Why not
sport a digital license plate
on your new ride for a mere $25 extra a month? The company that makes these plates,
Reviver
, says their offerings are approved for vehicles registered in California, Arizona, and now Michigan, and are legal for use across state lines. They appear to be based on e-Ink technology, which means you just get a monochrome rendering of the state’s license plate — which in the case of
Arizona’s standard plate
is a bit of a shame. Reviver claims there are all sorts of benefits to paying a monthly subscription fee to have one of their plates, like GPS-enabled telematics to track a stolen vehicle. We’d say the plate itself is more likely to get stolen, and while we won’t encourage that, we do look forward to the inevitable teardowns as these things hit the secondary market.
We’ve been skeptical of the future of electric airplanes, mainly based on doubts that battery technology will ever get to a power-to-weight ratio that will make something like an electric passenger jet practical. But watching
this video
might make us rethink that position. The plane is built by Lilium, and shows the electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) plane doing its first in-flight transition. The seven-passenger aircraft, which sports 36 electric-ducted fans in movable flaps on the trailing edge of its wings and forward canards, takes off vertically but then smoothly transitions to forward flight with lift generated solely by its wings. It’s quite graceful, and the plane itself is beautiful. The company claims it’ll take a full load of passengers 175 km using its VTOL capabilities, or a bit further if it can land without using vectored thrust. An electric plane like this might make “Uber Air” technically possible, and it might have a huge impact on regional passenger travel and air freight.
And finally, our friend Alberto Caballero sent word of
a pre-print of a paper
he’s been working on that, depending on how you look at things, might just serve as nightmare fuel. Entitled “Estimating the prevalence of malicious extraterrestrial civilizations,” the paper aims to assess the relative risk of Active SETI efforts, which seek to “reach out and touch someone” out in the galaxy. Given that 100% of the known civilizations in the galaxy are unambiguously malevolent, and least occasionally, it would seem that the odds of announcing ourselves to the galactic mean kids are pretty high. But Alberto, an astronomer who heads the
Habitable Exoplanets Hunting Project
and
came on the Hack Chat
a while back, calculates that being invaded by malicious aliens is about 100 times less than the probability of Earth being hit by a Chicxulub-grade impactor. Phew! The details behind that conclusion are interesting, and the paper is worth a read to see how he came to that conclusion. | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485342",
"author": "deshipu",
"timestamp": "2022-06-19T23:14:23",
"content": "Note that Earth has been hit with Chicxulub-grade impactors repeatedly.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6485950",
"author": "Brad Ackerman"... | 1,760,372,656.916311 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/19/tips-for-winding-durable-coils-with-nice-flat-sides/ | Tips For Winding Durable Coils With Nice, Flat Sides | Donald Papp | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"coil gun",
"coil winding",
"turn counter"
] | [Drew Pilcher] needed durable, custom-wound coils with no core, and perfectly flat sides. Coils can be wound by hand, of course, but reliably creating perfect coils with thin wire and lots of layers requires some additional help. Happily,
[Drew] shares his method for doing exactly that
. Perhaps coming as no surprise, the key to repeatable, high-quality coils is good preparation and tools.
The most important part is the ability to rotate a spool for winding without having to take one’s hands off the workpiece. To accomplish this, a cheap, no-name power drill and foot pedal (made from the harvested trigger unit of the drill) forms the basis of [Drew]’s DIY winder. To make coils with precision, one must also count the number of turns. Thankfully, there is a simple solution for this; [Drew] used a cheap digital turn counter from Amazon. This economical device uses a magnet and sensor, so [Drew] simply stuck the magnet on the side of the drill’s chuck.
Careful winding and a liberal application of CA glue helps ensure good results.
The spool is what the wire gets wound around to form the coil, and it will need to be removed from the coil afterwards. To accomplish this, [Drew] uses a brass shaft, metal washers, and some plastic spacers. A light coating of grease on the spool surfaces helps ensure things come apart properly in the end.
To actually make the coil, [Drew] recommends some means of magnification, and a supply of CA glue. Wind the wire as cleanly and closely as possible, and apply CA glue during the process to secure things. It takes some practice, but really clean windings are possible if done correctly.
For thick coils with a lot of layers, the CA glue will hold things together well enough, but for smaller coils [Drew] likes to give them a final coating of two-part epoxy. After things are completely set, the spool is disassembled and the inner core is pushed out as gently as possible.
The result? A tightly-wound, durable coil with perfectly flat sides. It’s exactly the thing [Drew] needs for his upcoming coil gun project. How’s that work, you wonder?
You can see the basics covered right here
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485300",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2022-06-19T20:22:36",
"content": "While in this case I could see a video demo being good too its so nice to see a proper article format guide, that gives you that really perfect close up of all the tools and key moments and lets you sea... | 1,760,372,656.86614 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/19/openasar-tweaks-discords-frontend-improves-performance-and-privacy/ | OpenAsar Tweaks Discord’s Frontend, Improves Performance And Privacy | Arya Voronova | [
"Reverse Engineering",
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"Discord",
"electron",
"OpenAsar"
] | Not all hacking happens on hardware — every now and then, we ought to hack our software-based tools, too. [Ducko] tells us about a partially open-source
rewrite
of Discord’s Electron-based frontend. Web apps can be hard to tinker with, which is why such projects are to be appreciated. Now, this isn’t a reverse-engineering of Discord’s API or an alternative client per se, but it does offer a hopeful perspective on what the Discord client ought to do for us.
First of all, the client loads noticeably faster, not unlike the famous
GTA Online speedup
(which was also a user-driven improvement), with channel and server switching made less laggy — and the Linux updater was de-cruft-ified as well. [Ducko] tells us how she got rid of the numerous NPM dependencies of the original code – it turned out that most of the dependencies could be easily replaced with Node.JS native APIs or Linux binaries like
unzip
. Apart from much-appreciated performance improvements, there are also options like telemetry bypass, and customization mechanisms for your own theming. You won’t get Discord on your Apple ][ just yet, but the native client will be a bit friendlier towards you.
While Discord is ultimately a proprietary platform, we do it see used in cool hacks every now and then, like this
tea mug temperature-tracking coaster.
Would you like to code your own Discord bot?
We wrote a walk-through for that
. Last but not least, if you like what we wrote and you happen to also use Discord, you should check out the
Hackaday Discord server! | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485261",
"author": "gudenau",
"timestamp": "2022-06-19T17:32:01",
"content": "The biggest problem with stuff like this is the ToS forbids modifications. This might just get you banned.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6485283"... | 1,760,372,656.966653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/19/can-a-drone-push-a-bike/ | Can A Drone Push A Bike? | Matthew Carlson | [
"drone hacks",
"News",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed gears",
"drone motor",
"electric bike",
"why not"
] | It sounds like a rhetorical question that a Midwestern engineer might ask, something on the order of ‘can you fix this bad PCB spin?’ [Tom Stanton] sets out to answer the title question and ends up building a
working e-bike with a drone motor
.
You might be thinking,
a motor is a motor; what’s the big deal?
But a drone motor and a regular e-bike motor are made for very different purposes. Drone motors spin at 30,000 RPM, and an e-bike hub motor typically does around 200-300 RPM while being much larger. Additionally, a drone motor goes in short spurts with a large fan blowing right on it, and an e-bike motor can run almost continuously.
The first step was to use gears and pulleys to reduce the RPM on the motor to provide more torque. A little bit of CAD and 3D printing later, [Tom] had a setup ready to try. However, the motor quickly burned out. With a slightly bigger motor and more gear reduction, version 2 performed remarkably well. After the race between a proper e-bike and the drone bike, the coils were almost melted.
If you’re thinking
about making your bike electric, we have some advice
. We’ll throw in a second piece of advice for free: use a larger motor than the drone motor, even though it technically works. Video after the break. | 20 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485210",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2022-06-19T15:02:42",
"content": "I’d say that power ratings for hobby-level BLDC motors are about as trustworthy as that of sound systems.I also find it a bit sad they destroyed a motor in the process. Measuring the temperature on the ou... | 1,760,372,657.023258 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/19/animate-arcane-protocols-with-interrupt-backed-bitbanging/ | Animate Arcane Protocols With Interrupt-Backed Bitbanging | Arya Voronova | [
"how-to",
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Development"
] | [
"atmega",
"atmega328p",
"interrupts",
"linear timecode",
"ltc",
"precision",
"timers"
] | We often take our “SoftwareSerial” libraries for granted, and don’t investigate what goes on under the hood — until they fail us, at least. Would you like to learn how to harness the power of interrupt-driven bitbanging? [Jim Mack]
teaches us how to make our protocol implementations fly
using the LTC protocol as a springboard.
LTC
(Linear/[Longitudinal] TimeCode) is a widely-used and beautifully-crafted protocol that tends to fly under our radar, and is one that hackers could learn plenty from. It’s used for synchronization of audio/video devices during media production and playback. LTC’s signal is almost digital but not quite: it doesn’t need a clock, and it has no polarity. Additionally, it mimics an audio signal really well, you can decode it at any playback speed, and many other benefits and quirks that [Jim] outlines. You do need to maintain the timings, though, and [Jim]’s article shows us how to keep them right while not inconveniencing your primary tasks.
Using interrupts means that your main loop gets to do other things, effectively letting you run different kinds of tasks in the background. [Jim] implements an LTC protocol transmitter using interrupts fired off at a defined frequency, doing LTC data processing in the main loop, and the time-critical GPIO wiggling from inside the interrupt handler code. He explains the code structure and the nuances along the way, and in the end, even provides us with source code of a highly capable and configurable LTC transmitter project for us to study and reuse. Be it RF transmitter bitbanging, IR remote signal reception, UART emulation, or any other protocols your MCU lacks peripherals for, this is where you learn to get it working.
In [Jim]’s
previous article,
he’s gone to great lengths explaining the fundamentals of precision and accuracy, then putting these theories into practice again, using an ATMega. In the next write-up of this series, he would like to create an LTC decoder, teaching us even more about properly using interrupts for timing-sensitive tasks. We can’t wait! | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485196",
"author": "KenN",
"timestamp": "2022-06-19T14:38:40",
"content": "LTC is not trivial to implement fully, especially when reading it at different speeds and using it to sync tape transports or other hardware. 20+ years ago, the few systems capable of syncing tape machines ... | 1,760,372,657.065152 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/19/rgb-7-segment-display-module-glows-in-all-the-colours/ | RGB 7-Segment Display Module Glows In All The Colours | Lewin Day | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"7-segment display",
"led"
] | While 7-segment displays are all well and good, they’re considered a bit old hat these days. This project from [Matt Deeds] brings them screaming into the future, though,
sporting every color under the rainbow.
[Matt’s] build consists of a PCB filled with SK6812 side-mount LEDs, laid out in a typical 7-segment pattern. Each PCB features two 7-segment digits. The SK6812 LEDs can be driven in the same way as the famous WS2812B addressable LEDs, though they have the benefit of being more stable in color and brightness over a range of supply voltages.
With the LEDs installed, and a second PCB used solely as a diffuser by leaving out sections of solder mask, it’s a compact 7-segment solution at just 2.7 mm thick. The bonus is that each segment can be set to a different color thanks to the nature of the addressable RGB LEDs. Going too ham in this regard will make the displays difficult to read, but it can be used to easily display green, red, or yellow numbers, for example, to create a visual guide to a numerical range.
It’s a great build, and we love to see 7-segment displays re-imagined in different ways –
even mechanically!
It also takes fewer pins to drive compared to the old way of doing things in the non-addressable LED era. If you’ve got your own neat 7-segment projects under development,
please do let us know
! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485134",
"author": "Networm",
"timestamp": "2022-06-19T11:46:04",
"content": "Good project, just need more flux.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6485146",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2022-06-19T12:16:22",
"conten... | 1,760,372,657.109803 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/18/insteon-gets-another-chance/ | Insteon Gets Another Chance | Arya Voronova | [
"home hacks",
"News"
] | [
"bankruptcy",
"home automation",
"Insteon",
"internet of things",
"IoT",
"miracle",
"proprietary",
"smart home"
] | It would appear that, sometimes, miracles happen. A few days ago,
an update graced the website of Insteon,
a company
whose abrupt shuttering we covered in detail two months ago.
An entity described as “small group of passionate Insteon users” has bought what was left of the company, and is working on getting the infrastructure back up. Previously, there was no sign of life from the company’s APIs. Now, Insteon hubs are coming back to life — or perhaps, they’re Inste-online again.
We’ve
explained
that revival of these devices without acquiring the company IP would’ve been tricky because of stuff like certificate pinning, and of course, a pile of proprietary code. Buying a company that’s undergoing a liquidation is not exactly end-user-friendly, but it would seem that someone sufficiently business-savvy got it done. The new CEO,
as reported by [CNX Software],
is a member of an investment committee — it’s fair to assert that this would help. A more sustainable funding source rather than ‘sell hardware and then somehow provide indefinite services’ is promised; they are moving to a subscription model, but only for Insteon Hub users. Recurring payments don’t sound as bad when it comes to paying developers and covering operational costs, and we hope that this revival succeeds.
Nothing is mentioned about moving towards openness in software and hardware — something that protects users from such failures in the first place. The new company is ultimately vulnerable to the same failure mode, and may leave the users in the dark just as abruptly as a result. However, we have our fingers crossed that the updated business model holds, purely for users’ sake. At least,
unlike with the Wink hub,
Insteon’s transition to a subscription model is better than the Inste-off alternative.
We thank [Itay] for sharing this with us!
Via [CNX Software]. | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485055",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2022-06-19T06:58:45",
"content": "Wikipedia says Smartlabs who runs Insteon tried to sell it and when that failed someone was appointed to try and “optimize” the assets of the company. From Wikipedia:In a community statement published on th... | 1,760,372,657.173512 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/18/balancing-a-motor-with-an-oscilloscope/ | Balancing A Motor With An Oscilloscope | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"balance",
"dynamic",
"fft",
"motor",
"oscilloscope",
"power tool",
"spectrum analyzer",
"vibration"
] | With all things in life, one must seek to achieve balance. That may sound a little like New Age woo-woo, but if you think it’s not literally true, just try tolerating a washing machine with a single comforter on spin cycle, or driving a few miles on unbalanced tires.
Anything that rotates can quickly spin itself into shrapnel if it’s not properly balanced, and the DIY power tools in [Matthias Wandel]’s shop are no exception. Recent upgrades to his jointer have left the tool a bit noisy, so he’s
exploring machine vibrations with this simple but clever setup
. Using nothing but a cheap loudspeaker and an oscilloscope, [Matthias] was able to characterize vibrations in a small squirrel-cage blower — he wisely chose to start small to validate his method before diving into the potentially dangerous jointer. There was quite a lot to be learned from the complex waveforms coming back from the transducer, analysis of which was greatly helped by the scope’s spectrum analyzer function. The video below shows the process of probing various parts of the blower, differentiating spectral peaks due to electrical noise rather than vibration, and actually using the setup to dynamically balance the fan.
We’d rate this as yet another handy shop tip from [Matthias], and we’ll be looking out for the analysis of his jointer. Want to do the same but you don’t have an oscilloscope? No problem —
an earbud and Audacity
might be all you need. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6485047",
"author": "Tanner Bass",
"timestamp": "2022-06-19T06:14:47",
"content": "I’ve found that any piezo speaker makes a killer mechanical transducer, especially since even small signals can product 3Vp-p!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,657.222448 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/18/ikea-led-lamp-gets-hacked-for-night-light-duty/ | IKEA LED Lamp Gets Hacked For Night Light Duty | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"ikea",
"lamp",
"night light"
] | IKEA make a lot of different lamps, including useful motion-sensitive models that can click on when you walk past. [Andrew Menadue] trialed one as a night light, but it was far too bright for the task. It also would come on during the day time, wasting its precious battery life when it wasn’t needed.
Thus, in order to mold the lamp to its new purpose, hacking ensued.
The first step, as it so often is, was to crack open the case and look inside. Preliminary inspections revealed a BISS0001 chip — a simple passive infrared motion sensor. The chip has a function built in that can disable the output from triggering if it detects light. Adding a light-dependent resistor and a further 100K resistor was all that was needed to enable this feature.
Now, the lamp only kicks on if it detects motion at night. Some further tweaks also cut the current limit to the LEDs, reducing the brightness to a more suitable level for night time. [Andrew] now has a useful night light that suits his needs, and likes it so much that he once drove 150 miles to recover one that he left behind on vacation. That’s dedication! | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484923",
"author": "Olivier",
"timestamp": "2022-06-18T23:17:06",
"content": "Nice, not everything needs to be made from scratch with a 3d printer and Arduino, this sounds like a fairly simple ‘hack’ but that’s also its beauty, no need to re-invent the wheel and add to e-waste, cho... | 1,760,372,657.264051 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/18/custom-cycling-camper-continues-car-free/ | Custom Cycling Camper Continues Car-Free | Matthew Carlson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"bike camper",
"bike camping",
"bike trailer",
"camper",
"trailer"
] | If you own a camper or RV, you might think twice when taking it out after giving gasoline prices a look. Towing all that extra weight and wind drag along can really eat into your fuel efficiency. [Drew] decided to keep the camper but take gasoline out of the equation by
building a teardrop trailer he pulls behind his bike
.
It’s a relatively simple idea. A 1″ by 1″ steel tube frame makes up the bottom, which [Drew] welded together. On top of that, plywood walls were built up over a plywood base. The wheels were stolen from an older bicycle and the top was made with many bending techniques using a portable fabric steamer for clothing. [Drew] found used doors and windows right in his backyard, which helped lower the cost. The trailer is insulated with sheet foam because it’s cheap and easy to cut.
In addition to the creativity, there’s a big focus on waterproofing and durability throughout this build. [Drew] applied caulk to the threads of every screw to prevent water from getting in and rotting the plywood. Canvas was used instead of fiberglass to save cost as it provides a fairly high level of protection from rain when finished properly. Cheap LEDs and a USB battery pack created stylish and functional lighting inside.
Overall, we think it turned out quite well, and we would love to bike somewhere and camp out in our own teardrop trailer. It’s a gorgeous example of welding, woodworking, and some plain ingenuity in the face of adversity. We’ve seen
solar-powered trailers for e-bikes
and
campers for custom motorcycles
before, and we think [Drew]’s trailer would fit right in. Video after the break. | 36 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484880",
"author": "JC",
"timestamp": "2022-06-18T20:05:06",
"content": "That is a pretty neat idea. Wish the video could have been condensed a bit though!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484936",
"author": "The Comm... | 1,760,372,657.665244 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/18/doodlestation-is-beautifully-musical-furniture/ | Doodlestation Is Beautifully Musical Furniture | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"music",
"Musical",
"synthesizer",
"visualizer"
] | Whether you’re a modular synth enthusiast or simply love the idea of rad electronic jams, we can all get behind the idea of crazy electronic instruments with buttons, dials, and patch cables galore. The Doodlestation is a wonderful example of that,
built by [Love Hulten].
There’s a custom 37-key keyboard that lets one input musical notes in the typical way, along with a hilarious animated MIDI visualizer with a man that uses his mouth to shoot rainbows. There’s a theremin built into the chassis, too, allowing your hands to control the sound via the magic of the æther. Even better, there’s a custom-built tape echo in the upright section, and you even get to see the mechanical parts working and the mag ribbon wiggling about. That’s fun.
The custom hardware is joined by a series of off-the-shelf devices that add their own functionality to the mix. It includes a Sequential OB-6 analog synthesizer, a Moog DFAM drum module, and a Hologram Microcosm loop & glitch box for more noodling possibilities.
We love a good musical project around these parts; we’ve featured
some great other projects for live electronic jams before, too
. Video after the break.
The Doodlestation! Created this colorful beast for
@evankeast
and
@doodles
HQ ♥️ incl a custom Dooles MIDI visualizer, custom keybed, a custom tape echo, OB-6 from
@sequentialLLC
, Dfam from
@moogmusicinc
, Microcosm from
@HologramElec
and a unique theremin setup
pic.twitter.com/KWpotCeQSt
— Love Hulten (@HultenLove)
June 8, 2022
[Thanks to Jonas for the tip!] | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484876",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2022-06-18T19:30:20",
"content": "That is the best visualisation I’ve seen since winamp… love it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6485000",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As ... | 1,760,372,657.442324 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/18/notkia-building-an-open-and-linux-powered-numpad-phone/ | Notkia: Building An Open And Linux-Powered Numpad Phone | Arya Voronova | [
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"cell phone",
"nokia",
"nokia hack",
"notkia",
"numpad",
"open smartphone",
"open source cellphone",
"smartphone",
"smartphone hacking"
] | Many of us hackers have a longing for numpad-adorned mobile phones. We also have a shared understanding that, nowadays, such a phone has to be open and Linux-powered. Today’s project,
Notkia,
is the most promising and realistic effort at building a keypad phone that fits our requirements. Notkia is a replacement board for Nokia 168x series phones, equipped with an improved display, USB-C, WiFi, Bluetooth, and LoRa — and [Reimu NotMoe] of [SudoMaker] tells us
this project’s extensive story.
The Notkia effort started over two years ago, because of [Reimu]’s increasing dislike for modern smartphones — something every hacker is familiar with. Her first-hand experience with privacy violations and hackability limitations on Android phones is recounted in detail, leading to a strong belief that there are fundamental problems with phones available nowadays. Building new hardware from the ground up seems to be the way forward. Two years later, this is exactly what we got!
When it comes to this phone’s physical form-factor, reusing an existing shell is the most economical solution out there, and the Hackaday.io page describes a journey towards finding a shell that fits. In the end, Nokia 1680 series phones turned out to be the perfect candidate. These phones are small and fit easily in your hand, there’s plenty of space inside the shell, and replacement shells and batteries are easy to get nowadays — at least, the kind of phone that you might want to get, anyway.
This replacement motherboard packs quite a few features. The old and laggy 128×160 display is replaced with an IPS screen with visible area of 220×280 pixels. They couldn’t find a small enough 4G module, but Notkia uses a
LoRa module
instead. There’s
WiFi
,
Bluetooth
, a Yamaha MA-3 music synthesizer, a USB Type-C port for charging and OtG, an RGB LED, an SHT20 sensor, and the 1680 version supports a 5MP camera. Such a feature set makes Notkia’s ambitious goal of producing a usable phone quite achievable.
Just like with
the X1501 project we’ve covered,
the Ingenic X1000 CPU has freely available and open datasheets. This phone runs Linux already – from here, software support work is ongoing, with an easy path to features like full disk encryption. There’s a series of demos:
keypad input
,
LCD backlight dimming,
LVGL
music player,
and of course,
Bad Apple
– with a USB audio adapter through USB-OtG.
Drop tests were conducted,
too. Interested in getting a Notkia board? [Reimu] aims to launch it on CrowdSupply – until then, there’s
an email signup list
to get project updates. If you’re interested in helping with one of the software priorities, it seems possible to get in early, too.
It’s reassuring to see a Linux phone with this much production potential. Projects to reuse old phone shells to get a viable feature phone have appeared every now and then. These
Nokia 3310
and
3210 rebuilds
have a few good ideas to borrow, and the
WiPhone
has successfully delivered on the ESP32 front with SIP calls. And if you’re looking to go even more DIY, you can always try to
sandwich a Pi Zero between a few boards,
or build an
ATMega-powered phone with a PCB case! | 42 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484836",
"author": "Drunken+Idiot",
"timestamp": "2022-06-18T14:09:17",
"content": "Errrr …… dunno if I am missing something here …. but can this ‘phone’ make phone calls? I see no 3/4G modules in the hardware lineup.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,657.596195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/18/build-your-own-two-factor-authenticator-with-good-usb/ | Build Your Own Two-Factor Authenticator With Good USB | Lewin Day | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"2FA",
"badusb"
] | Two-factor authentication is becoming the norm for many applications and services, and security concerns around phone porting hacks are leading to a phaseout of SMS-based systems. Amidst that backdrop,
[Josh] developed his own authentication device by the name of Good USB.
The device can be built using a Arduino Leonardo, SS Micro, or even a BadUSB device. It’s the latter which [Josh] most liked, and since the nefarious device is being repurposed for good, it led to the name Good USB. Basically any Atmega32U4-based device will work, as the key functionality is the ability to emulate a USB keyboard to a host PC.
Using the device is just as simple. With the Good USB plugged in, one simply needs to click a button in the companion app to generate a code for the given account you’re logging in to. Pressing the button on the device then types in the code for you. Alternatively, if your device has no button, it can be set up to simply type the code two seconds after you select an account in the companion app.
The code is on Github
for those wishing to make their own. Caveat for the cautious: it’s still a work in progress, and there may be security holes in the current implementation.
If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of how 2FA works,
we’ve looked into that in detail.
Video after the break. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484819",
"author": "vcch",
"timestamp": "2022-06-18T13:17:00",
"content": "There is a bluetooth version using an off the shelf device :https://hackaday.io/project/171819-passstronger",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6484835",
... | 1,760,372,657.510994 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/18/can-you-cheat-at-tightrope-walking/ | Can You Cheat At Tightrope Walking? | Dave Rowntree | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"inertial",
"reaction wheel",
"self balancing"
] | Tightrope walking is no mean feat — it takes years to master (even with a balance rod) — but that’s too much like hard work for [James Bruton]. Obviously, the solution is just a matter of the application of some electronically-controlled balancing technology, and [James] is just the guy for the job. Bearing a passing resemblance to a cross between a prop from Ghostbusters and a medieval torture device,
this weighty balancing cheat device
almost kind of works!
On a slightly more serious note, bipedal balance is a complex problem to solve. You have multiple limb sections, which can move independently in many ways, as well as the upper body also contributing to shifting around the center of gravity in a hard-to-predict way. So it’s no great surprise that a simple torque reaction device strapped to the torso doesn’t help a great deal, but it sure is fun to watch him trying. The bottom line is this — our bodies are pretty heavy, and the amount of force needed to correct tilt in the plane of interest is hard to generate without the reaction wheel itself being really heavy, and that extra mass doesn’t exactly help with the overall balancing problem. We reckon the overall concept is sound, it’s just that all those extra limbs flopping around make this simplistic sensing and compensation strategy only partly effective.
Stabilizing small robots is probably a bit easier than a human, such as this gyroscopically-stabilized monowheel, but sometimes you don’t even need the gyroscope, as you can
control the driving wheels directly
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484790",
"author": "saabman",
"timestamp": "2022-06-18T09:07:27",
"content": "Isnt that what the long pole used by some tightrope walkers was all about? no batteries required",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484854",
... | 1,760,372,657.71491 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/doom-ported-to-sega-naomi-arcade-hardware/ | DOOMPorted To Sega Naomi Arcade Hardware | Lewin Day | [
"Games"
] | [
"arcade",
"doom",
"sega",
"sega naomi"
] | Porting
DOOM
to new hardware and software platforms is a fun pastime for many in the hacker scene. [DragonMinded] noticed that nobody had ported the game to the Sega Naomi arcade hardware,
and set about doing so herself
.
The port builds on work by [Kristoffer Andersen] who built
a framebuffer port
of
DOOM
previously. It’s available pre-compiled, complete with the shareware WAD for those eager to load it up on their own Naomi arcade cabinets.
Unlike some limited ports that only give the appearance of a functional version of
DOOM
, this port is remarkably complete. Loading, saving, and options menus are all present and accounted for, as well as directional sound and even WAD auto-discovery. With that said, there’s only 32 KB of space for save games on the Naomi hardware, so keep that in mind if you find yourself playing regularly.
We love a good
DOOM
port, whether it’s on an arcade machine,
an old forgotten Apple OS
, or
even a UFI module.
Okay but what if I ported Doom to the Sega Naomi?
pic.twitter.com/vY0zjZemka
— Super Jentendo (@dragonminded)
April 18, 2022
Thanks to [Itay] for the tip,
via PCGamesN | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484785",
"author": "Josiah Gould",
"timestamp": "2022-06-18T08:08:49",
"content": "I imagine it wasn’t the most difficult port, as there are plenty of Doom ports to the Dreamcast. Still very impressive and I would love to get my hands on a cabinet to play.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,657.957958 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/your-buildings-rfid-access-tags-might-be-really-insecure/ | Your Building’s RFID Access Tags Might Be Really Insecure | Lewin Day | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"access tag",
"rfid",
"rfid tag",
"security"
] | [Gabe Schuyler] had a frustrating problem when it came to getting into his building’s garage. The RFID access system meant he had to remove his gloves while sitting on his motorcycle to fish out the keytag for entry.
He decided to whip up a better solution with less fuss.
His initial plan was to duplicate the keytag and to sew one into his gloves. Purchasing a 125 KHz RFID tag duplicator off eBay, he was able to quickly copy the tag, and create one that worked with his garage’s entry system. While the duplicate tags worked well, they were still too big to easily fit into a glove. Attempts to create a duplicate with a smaller tag failed, too. Eventually, [Gabe] turned up a ring complete with a compatible RFID chip, and was able to duplicate his entry tag onto that. Now, by wearing the ring, he can enter his garage and building with a simple wave of the hand, gloves on or off.
Of course, duplicating an RFID tag is no major hack. As per
[Gabe]’s Shmoocon talk on the topic
, however, it shows that many buildings are using completely insecure RFID access methods with little to no security whatsoever. Anyone that found an access tag lying on the ground could easily replicate as many as they wanted and enter the building unimpeded. It also bears noting that you can snoop RFID cards
from further away than you might expect. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484749",
"author": "hk",
"timestamp": "2022-06-18T02:27:29",
"content": "A Similar happend at my work place. To open the gates you have to touch your card to the reader. However the way my car is built I have to open the entire door to get access to the reader. So I got a proxmark ... | 1,760,372,657.765205 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/wooden-you-like-to-hear-a-cnc-cut-phonograph-record/ | Wooden You Like To Hear A CNC-Cut Phonograph Record? | Dan Maloney | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"g-code",
"groove",
"mdf",
"phonograph",
"sample",
"spiral",
"victrola",
"wood"
] | Say what you will about [Thomas Edison], but it’s hard to deny the genius of his self-proclaimed personal favorite invention: the phonograph. Capturing sound as physical patterns on a malleable medium was truly revolutionary, and the basic technology that served as the primary medium of recorded sound for more than a century and built several major industries is still alive and kicking today.
With so much technological history behind it, what’s the aspiring inventor to do when the urge to spin your own phonograph records strikes? Easy —
cut them from wood with a CNC router
. At least that’s how [alnwlsn] rolled after the “one-percent inspiration” hit him while cutting a PCB with his router. Reasoning that the tracks on the copper were probably about as fine as the groove on a record, he came up with some math to describe a fine-pitch spiral groove and overlay data from a sound file, and turn the whole thing into G-code.
For a suitable medium, he turned to the MDF spoil board used to ship PCB stencils, which after about three hours of milling resulted in a rather hairy-looking 78-RPM record. Surprisingly, the record worked fairly well on a wind-up Victrola. The spring-powered motor was a little weak for the heavy wooden record and needed a manual assist, but you can more or less clearly hear the 40-second recording. Even more surprising was how much better the recording sounded when the steel needle was replaced with a chunk of toothpick. You can check out the whole thing in the video below, and you’ll find the G-code generation scripts over on
GitHub
.
Is all this talk about reproducing music using wiggly lines confusing you? Woah, there, whippersnapper — check out
[Jenny]’s primer for the MP3 generation
for the background you need. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484734",
"author": "12AU76L6GC",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T23:40:08",
"content": "Does anyone know how they mass produced gramaphone cylinders? The flat press is easy to understand with victrola records, but manufacturing recordings on shellac cylinders not so much.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,372,657.824365 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/hacking-a-new-display-into-a-fluke-8050a-multimeter/ | Hacking A New Display Into A Fluke 8050A Multimeter | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"fluke",
"graphical lcd",
"lcd",
"multimeter",
"segment lcd"
] | Old lab equipment was often built to last, and can give decades of service when treated properly. It’s often so loved that when one part fails, it’s considered well worth repairing rather than replacing with something newer. [Michael] did just that, putting in the work
to give his Fluke 8050A multimeter a shiny new display.
The Fluke 8050A is a versatile device, capable of measuring voltage, current, and resistance in addition to decibels at various impedences and conductance, too. The original display doesn’t show some of the finer details so well, so [Michael] elected to improve on that when he installed a new 2.2″ graphical LCD to replace the basic 7-segment LCD that originally came with the hardware.
To achieve the install, the original LCD display module was removed from the chassis. A piggyback device that sits under the Fluke’s microcontroller was then used to break out signals for the new graphical LCD without requiring modification to the meter’s PCB itself. An Atmega32u4 microcontroller then takes in these signals, and then drives the graphical LCD accordingly.
It’s a great hack that makes the old multimeter easier to use, and the new white-on-green display is far kinder on the eyes, too.
We’ve seen other multimeters get screen transplants before, too.
Of course, if you’re new to the world of segmented LCDs and want to learn more about how they work, [Joey Castillo]’s talk from last year’s Remoticon
will get you up to speed! | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484699",
"author": "mjrippe",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T20:31:15",
"content": "I have seen several screen replacements for the 8050 over the years, but this is the best yet! I do wish it would be profitable to produce a kit though :-(",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,372,658.055704 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/hackaday-prize-2022-turning-big-box-trash-into-art-student-treasure/ | Hackaday Prize 2022: Turning Big Box Trash Into Art Student Treasure | Kristina Panos | [
"Art",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"paint",
"pigment",
"rollers"
] | How can the big box store mix the perfect shade of English Wedgwood right before your eyes? The answer is in highly-concentrated pigments that come in many different sizes up to a whopping five gallons. Now, just imagine the amount of watercolor, acrylic, or other types of paint that could be made by simply scraping the walls of an empty 5-gallon tub, which you know is just getting thrown away with all that usable pigment inside.
Not only is [technoplastique] making watercolors and other paints out of these pigments
, but their true focus is on creating an easily-reproducible process for turning not just pigments into paint, but other things as well, like dried turmeric, charcoal, or any other feasible material.
The process will likely take the form of an open-source three-roller milling machine, which are commonly used in paint manufacture. Basically you have three rollers that process the pigment and binder, and the mixture is run through as many times as necessary. Although they are fairly simple machines in design, building them to work well requires adherence to precise technical specs.
We can’t wait to see what [technoplastique] comes up with to use for the stainless steel rollers. The rest of the plan involves a Raspberry Pi Pico, one DC motor per roller, a motor shield, and a power supply, but the rollers are pretty crucial. If you have any ideas other than steel rolling pins (the kitchen kind) or pipe couplings (which are too short, anyway), let us know in the comments!
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484670",
"author": "RW v.34 bis",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T18:38:46",
"content": "Plunder the corpse of a dying industry, doesn’t web offset printing such as used for newspapers and magazines use rollers for similar reasons? Guess plant sales would be the whole caboodle, not piece ... | 1,760,372,658.009716 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/nasa-mission-off-to-rough-start-after-astra-failure/ | NASA Mission Off To Rough Start After Astra Failure | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Science",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"Astra",
"constellations",
"darpa",
"nasa",
"noaa",
"orbital mechanics",
"weather satellite"
] | When Astra’s diminutive Rocket 3.3 lifted off from its pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 12th, everything seemed to be going well. In fact, the mission was progressing exactly to plan right up until the end — the booster’s second stage Aether engine appeared to be operating normally until it abruptly shut down roughly a minute ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, orbital mechanics are nothing if not exacting, and an engine burn that ends a minute early might as well never have happened at all.
According to the telemetry values shown on-screen during the live coverage of the launch, the booster’s upper stage topped out at a velocity of 6.573 kilometers per second, well short of the 7.8 km/s required to attain a stable low Earth orbit. While the video feed was cut as soon as it was clear something had gone wrong, the rigid physics of spaceflight means there’s little question about the sequence of events that followed. Without the necessary energy to stay in orbit, the upper stage of the rocket would have been left in a sub-orbital trajectory, eventually reentering the atmosphere and burning up a few thousand kilometers downrange from where it started.
An unusual white plume is seen from the engine as it shuts down abruptly.
Of course, it’s no secret that spaceflight is difficult. Doubly so for startup that only has a few successful flights under their belt. There’s no doubt that Astra will determine why their engine shutdown early and make whatever changes are necessary to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and if their history is any indication, they’re likely to be flying again in short order.
Designed for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) competition
that sought to spur the development of cheap and small rockets capable of launching payloads on short notice, Astra’s family of rockets have already demonstrated unusually high operational agility.
Astra, and the Rocket 3.3 design, will live to fly again. But what of the payload the booster was due to put into orbit? That’s a bit more complicated. This was the first of three flights that were planned to assemble a constellation of small CubeSats as part of NASA’s TROPICS mission. The space agency has already
released a statement saying the mission can still achieve its scientific goals
, albeit with reduced coverage, assuming the remaining satellites safely reach orbit. But should one of the next launches fail, both of which are currently scheduled to fly on Astra’s rockets, it seems unlikely the TROPICS program will be able to achieve its primary goal.
So what exactly is TROPICS, and why has NASA pinned its success on the ability for a small and relatively immature launch vehicle to make multiple flights with their hardware onboard? Let’s take a look.
Getting Close to the Action
There are no shortage of weather satellites in Earth orbit, but they largely operate in isolation from each other. In part because they are all of varying ages and technical capability, but largely because they were always designed as stand-alone missions. The Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission aims to fundamentally change that approach by utilizing a constellation made up of identical CubeSats in low Earth orbit.These craft are outfitted with high-resolution microwave radiometers that can scan across the satellite’s track over the ground, and with careful alignment of their orbital planes, should be capable of providing scans of a given storm on a roughly hourly basis.
Compared to more traditional satellites, even the relatively modern NOAA-20 that was launched in 2017, this is a huge improvement. Operating independently, these satellites may only be able to image a storm every four to six hours, which leaves critical gaps in coverage. The rapid scans made possible by the TROPICS constellation promise to greatly improve our ability to predict and track deadly tropical cyclones, which have become steadily more common in the Mid and North Atlantic regions. According to NASA, this area saw a record-breaking 30 named storms in 2020, and climate models expect things to only get worse from here.
TROPICS was designed to utilize six 3U CubeSats, each 36 cm (14.2 in) long and weighing just 5.34 kg (11.8 lb). With the loss of the first two satellites on June 12th, the constellation is now down to just four. The remaining satellites will still be able to image tropical storms, and will doubtlessly deliver useful data, but the reduced global coverage means the time between flyovers will be increased. Though it should be noted that even at reduced capacity, TROPICS should still be able to provide data more rapidly than existing platforms.
While off to a disappointing start, it should be remembered that TROPICS is ultimately a low-cost experimental mission. Even had all three launches gone to plan, the mission was only scheduled to last a year. As long as even a single TROPICS CubeSat is able to reach orbit and use its equipment to scan an active tropical storm, the scientific goals of the mission will have been met — if not the aspirational ones.
Special Delivery
Naturally, one might wonder why a constellation of just six satellites needs to be launched on three different rockets. After all, SpaceX has been lofting as many as 60 of their Starlink satellites per launch to build out their own constellation. Couldn’t all six of the TROPICS CubeSats have been carried into orbit at the same time if NASA had booked their passage on a more powerful rocket?
Technically, yes. But then, they would not have been placed in the appropriate orbital planes to achieve the mission’s stated goal of hourly overflights. Granted, this goal is likely already unobtainable due to the unexpected loss of the first pair of spacecraft, but had they all been deposited along the same orbital track their coverage would have been just as limited as the traditional weather satellites.
Dozens of new StarLink satellites ready to be deployed in 2019.
Could the satellites not have maneuvered into their appropriate orbits once dropped off, like Starlink satellites do? Perhaps if they were larger, and had sufficiently powerful propulsion systems. But orbital plane changes (that is, changing the inclination at which a spacecraft orbits in reference to the equator) take an incredible amount of energy, especially in low Earth orbit, and the tiny 3U CubeSats simply don’t have the capability to make maneuvers of that scale.
Given the specific goals of the mission, and the limitations of the small and inexpensive satellites being flown, Astra’s rocket is actually the perfect vehicle to carry TROPICS. In fact, the needs of this mission are not so far removed from the original DARPA competition that Astra developed their booster for. The military wanted a rocket that could put small satellites into very specific orbits over the Earth quickly and cheaply for reconnaissance purposes, it just so happens that these particular satellites are more concerned with the strength and movement of tropical storms than troops and tanks.
Which is why, despite this disappointing setback, the next two batches of TROPIC satellites will almost certainly fly on Astra’s rockets, though they will now need to wait until after the incident investigation into the June 12th failure is complete. While other small boosters such as Rocket Lab’s Electron and even Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne could potentially stand in if absolutely necessary, the cost and expense of adapting the mission to a new launch vehicle isn’t to be underestimated. Besides, as the saying goes:
better late than never
. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484658",
"author": "RW v.34 bis",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T17:12:45",
"content": "Per ardua.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484694",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T19:59:34",
"conten... | 1,760,372,658.107922 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/hackaday-podcast-173-emf-camp-special-edition/ | Hackaday Podcast 173: EMF Camp Special Edition | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | With Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams enjoying some time off, Managing Editor Tom Nardi is flying solo for this special edition of the Hackaday Podcast. Thanks to our roving reporter Jenny List, we’ll be treated to several interviews conducted live from EMF Camp — a European outdoor hacker camp the likes of which those of us in the United States can only dream of. After this special segment, Hackaday contributors Al Williams and Ryan Flowers will stop by to talk about their favorite stories from the week during what may be the longest
Quick Hacks
on record. There’s a few extra surprises hidden in this week’s program…but if we told you everything, it would ruin the surprise. Listen closely, you never know what (or who) you might hear.
Direct Download link
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 173 Show Notes:
Jenny’s EMF Interviews:
LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER
This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete
Alex Mix – Motorized MIDI Slide Whistles
James Bruton
Tightrope Walking Cheat Device
Matt Denton
XXL LEGO Go-Kart
Matthew Harrold
– EMF’s Telephone Network
Quick Hacks:
Al’s Picks:
Simple Snap Action Mechanism is 100% 3D Printed
An Open Toolchain For Sipeed Tang Nano FPGAs
Glass: Classic, but Mysterious
Ryan’s Picks:
Raspberry Pi Pico Replaces PlayStation Memory Card
The Secrets of the Pop Pop Boat
Ask Hackaday: Is Bigger (E-mail) Better? | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,658.145544 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/laser-brings-autofocus-to-tricked-out-large-format-film-camera/ | Laser Brings Autofocus To Tricked-Out Large Format Film Camera | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"autofocus",
"bellows",
"film",
"large format",
"lens",
"photography",
"range finder",
"viewfinder"
] | You can’t argue with the results of large-format film cameras — picture the boxy bellows held by a cigar-chomping big-city press photographer of the 1940s — but they don’t really hold a candle to the usability and portability of even the earliest generations of 35mm cameras. And add in the ease-of-use features of later film and digital cameras, and something like a 4×5 Graflex seems like a real dinosaur.
Or maybe not. [Aleksi Koski] has built
a large-format camera with autofocus
, the “Conflict 45.” The problem with a lot of the large-format film cameras, which tend to be of a non-reflex optical design, is that it’s difficult or even impossible to see what you’re shooting through the lens. This makes focusing a bit of a guessing game, a problem that [Aleksi] addresses with his design. Sadly, the linked Petapixel article is basically devoid of technical details, but from what we can glean from it and the video below, the Conflict 45 is a 4″x5″ sheet-film camera that has a motorized lens board and a laser rangefinder.
A short video
has a through-viewfinder view showing an LCD overlay, which means there’s some kind of microcontroller on board as well, which is probably used for the calculations needed to compensate for parallax errors during close focusing, as well as other uses.
The camera is built from 3D printed parts; [Aleksi] says that this is just a prototype and that the finished camera will have a carbon-fiber body. We’d love to see more build details, but for now, we just love the idea of an easy-to-use large-format camera. Just maybe not
that big
.
Thanks to [Itay Ramot] for the tip. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484668",
"author": "Leigh Klotz",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T18:20:54",
"content": "Hah! We announced this 25 years ago on April 1!https://www.graflex.org/articles/auto-focus.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6485414",
"au... | 1,760,372,658.184375 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/abacus-synthesizer-really-adds-up/ | Abacus Synthesizer Really Adds Up | Dan Maloney | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"abacus",
"audio",
"encoder",
"filter",
"midi",
"modulation",
"polyphonic",
"synth",
"synthesizer",
"waveform"
] | The abacus has been around since antiquity, and takes similar forms over the hundreds of cultures that have embraced it. It may be one of the first devices to be considered as having a “user interface” in the modern context — at least for simple arithmetic calculations. But
using an abacus as the UI for a music synthesizer
seems like something entirely new.
Part art concept project and part musical instrument, the “Abacusynth” by [Elias Jarzombek] is a way to bring a more visual and tactile experience to controlling a synth, as opposed to the usual knobs and switches. The control portion of the synth consists of four horizontal rods spanning two plywood uprights. Each rod corresponds to a voice of the polyphonic synth, and holds a lozenge-shaped spinner mounted on a low-friction bearing. Each spinner can be moved left and right on its rod, which controls the presence of that voice; spinning the slotted knob controls the modulation of the channel via photosensors in the uprights. Each rod has a knob on one side that activates an encoder to control each voice’s waveform and its harmonics.
In use, the synthesizer is a nice blend of electronic music and kinetic sculpture. The knobs seem to spin forever, so Abacusynth combines a little of the fidget spinner experience with the exploration of new sounds from the built-in speaker. The synth also has a MIDI interface, so it works and plays well with other instruments. The video below shows the hardware version of Abacusynth in action; there’s also
a web-based emulation
to try before you build.
Thanks to [Jonas] for the tip. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483936",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T14:36:43",
"content": "The spinner-slider things may be very useful in other builds. Since they’re purely mechanical, they could easily be overbuilt for public-facing applications where they might encounter a great deal of abuse.... | 1,760,372,658.445436 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/a-sleep-monitor-for-minimum-outlay/ | A Sleep Monitor For Minimum Outlay | Jenny List | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"data logger",
"eeg",
"sleep",
"sleep monitor"
] | There are a variety of instruments used in sleep studies to measure bodily activity during sleep and consequent sleep quality. Many of them use techniques that perhaps aren’t so easy to replicate on the bench, but an EEG or electroencephalograph to measure brain waves can be achieved using a readily-available module. [
Ben Jabituya
] shows us
a sleep monitor using one of these modules
, an
EGG Mikroe Click
.
The brains of the operation is an Adafruit Adalogger Feather M0, which is hooked up to a headband containing the sensing electrodes. The write-up gives us a round-up of the available boards, which should be handy for any experimenters in this field. The firmware meanwhile was written using the Arduino IDE. It collects raw sampling data to an SD card, and one surprise comes in just how relatively small a space it requires to store a night’s results.
Finally, a Python script was used to process the data and turn it into a spectrogram to look at brain activity through the night. He envisages using the device for triggering lucid dreaming during REM sleep, but we can see it might be rather useful for sleep disorder sufferers, too. Take a look at it in the video below the break. | 9 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483859",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T08:12:15",
"content": "“…a sleep monitor using one of these modules, an EGG Mikroe Click”.Well that’s cracked that problem.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483869",
"... | 1,760,372,658.294565 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/behold-the-mighty-floppotron-3-0/ | Behold The Mighty Floppotron 3.0 | Dave Rowntree | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"flatbed scanner",
"floppy drive",
"hard disk",
"midi",
"music"
] | If anyone has been struggling to get hold of a 3.5″ floppy drive lately, we think we’ve got a clue as to why — behold,
the mighty floppotron 3.0
by [Paweł Zadrożniak.] With an utterly bonkers 512 floppy drives, four flatbed scanners and sixteen hard disks of various sizes, the floppotron 3.0 MIDI synthesiser is possibly the biggest such retro hardware synthesiser so far. Since every part of the system is motor-based, nobody is going to be surprised that to power the show is quite an undertaking, with nearly twenty switched-mode PSU modules needed to keep up with the demand, averaging 300W but rated at 1.2kW peak!
A full custom MIDI-to-RS485 gateway based around the nRF52xx series MCU deals with the communication to
the collection of instrument controllers. These controllers are generic enough to take RS485 input and control a dedicated driver for either an array of floppy drives (up to 192), an array of hard drives or the handful of scanners. The way the floppy drives are grouped is quite neat. Rather than using each drive to generate a specific tone, the software uses the whole column for each note. By varying the number of drives moving simultaneously over time, the sound volume varies, simulating the note envelope and giving a richer sound. Multiple columns driving in parallel give the system a 16-note polyphony. The floppies cover the low notes, with the four flatbed scanners covering the higher notes. MIDI drum sounds are mapped to the hard disks, operating in a, well, percussive manner, with different case shapes giving unique sounds. Even the firmware can be updated over MIDI! So, checkout the demo video after the break for a sweet rendition of the very familiar “Entry of the gladiators” by
Czech composer Julius Fučík
.
If you think this looks familiar, you’re not mistaken, we’ve covered
an earlier floppotron before
, but we reckon nobody has attempted to do it with
ye olde eight-inch
drives yet!
Thanks [electronoob] and [Ruhan van der Berg] for the tip! | 37 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483844",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T05:54:32",
"content": "I am relieved to see that it has a big emergency stop switch, just in case it ever starts playing “Never Gonna Give You Up”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"... | 1,760,372,658.406281 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/the-rp2040-doth-a-motor-controller-make/ | The RP2040 Doth A Motor Controller Make | Jenny List | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"farming robot",
"motor controller",
"rp2040"
] | When the Raspberry Pi people launched their RP2040 microcontroller, it seemed as though it might be destined as a niche product for those areas in which the Pi has traditionally been strong. But during the global semiconductor shortage, it has remained almost alone among microcontrollers in having plenty of fab capacity to keep the supplies rolling. That, and its very vanilla set of ARM peripherals alongside those programmable state machines have thus seen it find a home in many places it might not otherwise have seen. Take
the dual RP2040 motor controller
from [Twisted Fields] as an example, would it have been more likely to have sported an STM32 in previous years?
It’s been produced as part of the Acorn Precision Farming Robot platform, and it’s a fully open-source two-channel controller on a board the same size as a credit card. The schematic appears fairly conventional through a cursory glance at the PDF, but we know from experience that motor controllers are never as deceptively simple to get right as their circuit would lead the unwary engineer to believe. The heat dissipation, current, and transient handling all play a part in a successful design, and we expect this one to evolve to fix any issues it might still contain.
If you’d like to remind yourself about the Acorn farming robot, then
take a look at our earlier coverage of the project
.
Thanks [Mark] for the tip. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483815",
"author": "nobody",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T02:06:49",
"content": "From the schematic it looks like it’s a dual motor controller with one RP2040. The “dual RP2040 motor controller” might need to be rearranged to be more clear.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,660.422483 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/recreating-a-camera-shot/ | Recreating A Camera Shot | Matthew Carlson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"digital cameras hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"camera"
] | People rolling off shields and spears clashing against swords as the camera zooms in and out wildly makes the hallmark action sequences in the movie
300
so iconic. Unfortunately, achieving this effect wasn’t particularly easy. Three cameras were rolling, each with a different lens (100mm, 50mm, and 21mm) to capture a different view of the same scene. In post-production, you can dramatically switch between the three cameras since the shot is synchronized. The folks over at [Corridor Crew] wanted to recreate the effect, but rather than create a custom mount to hold three expensive cameras, they
3d printed a custom mount to hold three costly smartphones
.
While there are three cameras on the back of most phones, most phones can’t shoot in slo-mo from all cameras simultaneously. So they would need a rig to hold three phones. The first design was simple and just brackets to hold phones. While nice and sturdy, getting the phones in or out wasn’t easy, and getting to the record button was tricky. iPhones have this handy little magnetic ring on the back. They had a bracket that worked pretty well after a few iterations on the design and some printer issues. Since each camera has optical image stabilization, it is easy for the lenses to get out of alignment, which can mar the shot. However, they somewhat covered up the effect in post. With a working prototype, the only thing left to do was to slice a bunch of piñatas in slow motion with a thrumming soundtrack.
We love seeing exciting camera setups and iterating to find something that works. This
dual-camera setup has a very different goal and tries to lean into the parallax effect
rather than hide it. Video after the break. | 14 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483839",
"author": "Neolker",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T05:09:14",
"content": "Do not miss the Cameras and Accessories Contest on Printables.com whit this model/idea :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6483853",
"author": "Ch... | 1,760,372,660.362038 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/kved-an-embeddable-key-value-datastore/ | Kved: An Embeddable Key/Value Datastore | Dave Rowntree | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"dictionary",
"embedded development",
"flash",
"microcontroller",
"non-volatile storage"
] | At some point when developing embedded applications, you’re going to want to store unique values in non-volatile memory, values that can’t be fixed at compilation time. Many microcontrollers have a small amount of EEPROM memory for this very purpose, but it’s usually rather limited if it’s provided at all. Even if you do have a bit of space on an EEPROM at your disposal, actually formatting your values into the memory and dealing with the pesky problem of wear leveling (necessary for parameters that need to change often) can be a bit of a hassle.
Lucky for us, [Marcelo Barros] decided to share his own implementation,
Kved (key/value database)
which uses the flash memory instead for such storage. Kved implements a dictionary type data structure, using numeric keys and values, supporting a few integer types. Using the library should be straightforward enough, as [Marcelo] says, all you need are a pair of spare flash sectors and the ability to port the flash the sector read, write, and erase functions. There are plenty of examples of such code available for practically any microcontroller out there, so that should be no barrier. For those who want to play with it right now, the repo currently has ports for the STM32L433RC and STM32F411CE, as well as a simulated version you can compile and run on your computer.
From an implementation perspective, the write algorithm uses a COW (Copy On Write) method. Changed values are invalidated by over-writing the storage location with all-zeros, and re-writing the changed value to a new location, cycling through the unused locations until the sector is full. Data-integrity mechanisms are implemented, preventing corruption of the data structure due to power fail situations, so incorrectly written values will be corrected on start-up and not affect the integrity of the configuration.
When looking around, we found a similar project,
Embedis, over on hackaday.IO
, as well as this article on the subject of
embedded filesystems from a little while back
. | 7 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483772",
"author": "Joe Allen",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T21:12:50",
"content": "Look for libnklabs on github, another variation of this kind of thing. It saves the serialized version of a structured RAM database in flash. We use it for configuration and calibration data for embed... | 1,760,372,660.542967 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/odd-inputs-and-peculiar-peripherals-the-morse-keyboard/ | Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: The Morse Keyboard | Jenny List | [
"contests",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"cw",
"hid",
"morse"
] | When it comes to rendering text input into an electronic form,the newest keyboards use USB for wired interfacing, while the oldest Morse keys use a single conductor. Shall the two ever meet? For [Matthew Sparks] the answer is yes, with his “
The Gadget
” Morse-to-USB HID interface which presents a Morse key to a computer as though it were a USB keyboard.
At its heart is a Seeduino Arduino clone, upon which the Morse key waggles a pin, and which through the extensive magic of software recognizes the keyed characters and converts them into USB key presses for the computer. It’s thus a surprisingly simple project, and the write-up spends far more time proselytizing the art of the carrier wave than it does on Arduino code.
Morse is simultaneously a manual art form, an efficient means of communicating through congested radio bands, and an anachronism, which probably explains its continued appeal in the radio amateur fraternity. We’re not sure how many keyboard warriors will switch to the single key with this project, but we can see that it might be a useful aid to learning as well as a pretty quick input method for the owner of an experienced fist.
Morse has featured in many projects here before, not least in
this assistive Morse keyboard
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483789",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T22:37:11",
"content": "Now, [Sparks] is a great name for a CW aficionado!We would be remiss if we did not mention Mitxela’s offerings in this space too:Hardware:https://mitxela.com/projects/morse_code_usb_keyboard_mk_iiAnd a softw... | 1,760,372,660.120943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/this-week-in-security-pacman-hetzbleed-and-the-death-of-internet-explorer/ | This Week In Security: Pacman, Hertzbleed, And The Death Of Internet Explorer | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hertzbleed",
"pacman",
"ping",
"This Week in Security"
] | There’s not one, but two side-channel attacks to talk about this week. Up first is
Pacman
, a bypass for ARM’s Pointer Authentication Code. PAC is a protection built into certain ARM Processors, where a cryptographic hash value must be set correctly when pointers are updated. If the hash is not set correctly, the program simply crashes. The idea is that most exploits use pointer manipulation to achieve code execution, and correctly setting the PAC requires an explicit instruction call. The PAC is actually indicated in the unused bits of the pointer itself. The AArch64 architecture uses 64-bit values for addressing, but the address space is much less than 64-bit, usually 53 bits or less. This leaves 11 bits for the PAC value. Keep in mind that the application doesn’t hold the keys and doesn’t calculate this value. 11 bits may not seem like enough to make this secure, but keep in mind that every failed attempt crashes the program, and every application restart regenerate the keys.
What Pacman introduces is an oracle, which is a method to gain insight on data the attacker shouldn’t be able to see. In this case, the oracle works via speculation attacks, very similar to Meltdown and Spectre. The key is to attempt a protected pointer dereference speculatively, and to then observe the change in system state as a result. What you may notice is that this requires an attack to already be running code on the target system, in order to run the PAC oracle technique. Pacman is not a Remote Code Execution flaw, nor is it useful in gaining RCE.
One more important note is that an application has to have PAC support compiled in, in order to benefit from this protection. The platform that has made wide use of PAC is MacOS, as it’s a feature baked in to their M1 processor. The attack chain would likely start with a remote execution bug in an application missing PAC support. Once a foothold is established in uprivileged userspace, Pacman would be used as part of an exploit against the kernel. See
the PDF paper
for all the details.
Hertzbleed
The other side-channel technique is a new take on an old idea.
Hertzbleed
is based on the idea that it’s possible to detect the difference between a CPU running at base frequency, and that CPU running at a boost frequency. The difference between those two states can actually leak some information about what the CPU is doing. There’s
a pre-release PDF
of their paper to check out for the details. The biggest result is that the standard safeguard against timing attacks, constant-time programming, is not always a reliable security measure.
It works because max frequency is dependent on the processor Thermal Design Power (TDP), the maximum amount of power a CPU is designed to use and amount of heat to dissipate. Different instructions will actually use different amounts of power and generate more or less heat based on this. More heat means earlier throttling. And throttling can be detected in response times. The details of this are quite fascinating. Did you know that even running the same instructions, with different register values, results in slightly different power draw? They picked a single cryptographic algorithm, SIKE, a quantum-safe key exchange technique, and attempted to extract a server’s secret key through timing attacks.
There is a quirk in SIKE, also discovered and disclosed in this research, that it’s possible to short-circuit part of the algorithm, such that a series of internal, intermediary steps result in a value of zero. If you know multiple consecutive bits of the static key, it’s possible to construct a challenge that hits this quirk. By extension, you can take a guess at the next unknown bit, and it will only fall into the quirk if you guessed correctly. SIKE uses constant-time programming, so this odd behavior shouldn’t matter. And here the Hertzbleed observation factors in. The SIKE algorithm consumes less power when doing a run containing this cascading-zero behavior. Consuming less power means that the processor can stay at full boost clocks for longer, which means that the key exchange completes slightly more quickly. Enough so, that it can be detected even over a network connection. They tested against Cloudflare’s CIRCL library, and Microsoft’s PQCrypto-SIDH, and were able to recover secret keys from both implementations, in 36 and 89 hours respectively.
There is a mitigation against this particular flaw, where it’s possible to detect a challenge value that could trigger the cascading zeros, and block that value before any processing happens. It will be interesting to see if quirks in other algorithms can be discovered and weaponized using this same technique. Unfortunately, on the processor side, the only real mitigation is to disable boost clocks altogether, which has a significant negative effect on processor performance.
Defeating Nest Secure Boot
[Frédéric Basse] has a Google Nest Hub, and
he really wanted to run his own Linux distro on it
. There’s a problem, though. The Nest uses secure boot, and there’s no official way to unlock the bootloader. Since when would a dedicated hacker let that stop him? The first step was finding a UART interface, hidden away on some unterminated channels of a ribbon cable. A custom breakout board later, and he had a U-Boot log. Next was to run through the bootup button combinations, and see what U-Boot tried to do with each. One of those combinations allows booting from a recovery.img, which would be ideal, if not for secure boot.
The great thing about U-Boot is that it’s Open Source under the GPL, which means that the source code should be available for perusal. Find a bug in that source, and you have your secure boot bypass. Open Source also allows some fun approaches, like running portions of the U-Boot code in userspace, and exercising it with a fuzzer. That’s the approach that found a bug, where a block size greater than 512 bytes triggers a buffer overflow. It’s a generally safe assumption, as there aren’t really any USB storage devices with a block size greater than 512.
Never fear, a device like the Raspberry Pi Pico can run TinyUSB, which allows emulating a USB device with whatever block size you specify. A test determined that this approach did result in a repeatable crash on the real device. The code execution is fairly straightforward, writing a bunch of instructions that are essentially
noop
codes pointing to a payload, and then overwriting the return pointer. Code execution in the can, all that remained was to overwrite the command list and execute a custom U-Boot script. A thing of beauty.
PING
The lowly
ping
command. How much can a single pair of packets tell us about a network and remote host?
According to [HD Moore], quite a bit
. For example, take the time given for a ping response, and calculate a distance based on 186 miles per millisecond. That’s the absolute maximum distance away that host is, though a quarter and half of that amount are reasonable lower and upper limits for a distance estimate. TTL very likely started at 64, 128, or 255, and you can take a really good guess at the hops encountered along the way. Oh, and if that response started at 64, it’s likely a Linux machine, 128 for Windows, and 255 usually indicates a BSD-derived OS.
Receiving a “destination host unreachable” message is interesting in itself, and tells you about the router that should be able to reach the given IP. Then there’s the broadcast IP, which sends the message to every IP in the subnet. Using something like Wireshark for packet capture is enlightening here. The command itself may only show one response, even though multiple devices may have responded. Each of those responses have a MAC address that has can be looked up to figure out the vendor. Another interesting trick is to spoof the source IP address of a ping packet, using a machine you control with a public IP address. Ping every device on the network, and many of them will send the response via their default gateway. You might find an Internet connection or VPN that isn’t supposed to be there. Who knew you could learn so much from the humble
ping
.
Bits and Bytes
Internet Explorer is Really, Truly, Dead
. If you were under the impression, as I was, that Internet Explorer was retired years ago, then it may come as a surprise to know that it was finally done in only this past week. This month’s patch Tuesday was the last day IE was officially supported, and from now on it’s totally unsupported, and is slated to eventually be automatically uninstalled from Windows 10 machines. Also coming in this month’s patch drop was
finally the fix for Follina
, as well as a few other important fixes.
There’s a new record for HTTPS DDOS attacks, set last week:
Cloudflare mitigated an attack
consisting of 26 million requests per second. HTTPS attacks are a one-two punch consisting of both raw data saturation, as well as server resource exhaustion. The attack came from a botnet of VMs and servers, with the largest slice coming from Indonesia.
Running the free tier of Travis CI? Did you know that
your logs are accessible to the whole world via a Travis API call
? And on top of that, the whole history of runs since 2013 seems to be available. It might be time to go revoke some access keys. Travis makes an attempt to censor access tokens, but quite a few of them make it through the sieve anyways.
Ever wonder what the risk matrix looks like for TPM key sniffing on boot?
It’s not pretty
. Researchers at Secura looked at six popular encryption and secure boot applications, and none of them used the parameter encryption features that would encrypt keys on the wire. The ironic conclusion? discrete TPM chips are less secure than those built in to the motherboard’s firmware. | 25 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484621",
"author": "Rog Fanther",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T14:23:29",
"content": "“… and is slated to eventually be automatically uninstalled from Windows 10 machines.” … While a couple of buggy spyware get installed at the same tiime.Really, stopping support of it is ok, but unins... | 1,760,372,660.078149 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/3d-printer-helps-make-a-neat-lyric-video/ | 3D Printer Helps Make A Neat Lyric Video | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"3d printing",
"lyric video",
"music video"
] | These days, it’s a lot easier to get attention online if your lovely music comes with some kind of visual accompaniment. Of course, shooting a full-scale music video can be expensive, so lyric videos have become a more affordable, approachable avenue that are growing in popularity. [prash] whipped one up recently
with the help of a 3D printer.
The video is a timelapse of a 3D print,
something we’re very familiar with around these parts.
[prash] embedded words in the various layers of the objects to be printed. Thus, as the prints are laid down on the build plate, the words are revealed to the camera shooting the time lapse. The scene is further improved by shaping the prints to reference the lyrics of the song, and using attractive infill designs like spirals and stripes. There are even some strategically placed clouds and pretty lighting to improve the effect.
It’s a neat use of 3D printing, and an artful one at that. We’re pretty confident that [prash] has put together a highly unique lyric video, and it’s much more impressive than
the dodgy 3D printing [Will.i.am] featured in his not-quite-a-Britney song a decade ago
. Video after the break.
I recently made this music video snippet using a 3D printing timelapse animation technique I haven't seen used elsewhere. Every frame is a photo taken during a 3D print. I fell in love with "Don't Cry" by Jonah as soon as
@PendergastBen
sent it over to collaborate!
pic.twitter.com/vAeaHAZkAO
— prash (@prashmakes)
June 13, 2022 | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484638",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T15:34:21",
"content": "Who would suspect a secret message inside a 3D printed part?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484992",
"author"... | 1,760,372,660.315617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/17/72-diy-musical-instruments-played-in-7-minutes/ | 72 DIY Musical Instruments Played In 7 Minutes | Dave Rowntree | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"beatbox",
"flute",
"PVC",
"ukelele",
"wind instruments"
] | Humans have been making musical instruments from whatever items are close at hand for thousands of years, and we aren’t showing any signs of slowing down yet, least of all artist [Nicolas Bras] and collaborator [Sandrine Morais.] They have been designing and constructing quite a number of DIY instruments over the years, with
this demo video
highlighting a whopping 72 of them in the space of just seven minutes!
Clearly, [Nicolas] is one of those people who can play literally anything, and shows his skills off very well indeed if you ask us. Particularly fine sounding is the pilchards tin guitar found at 2:52 in the video, and the electric pipe beat box at 2:10 is also pretty fun.
Pretty much all the usual methods for producing sounds mechanically are covered, namely air resonating within a shaped enclosure (flutes, and such), string vibrations which might be sensed electrically (guitars, zithers, etc) and percussive instruments which vibrate an enclosed air mass (like the udu) or vibrate other things (like plates or bars). Looking over the YouTube channel, we can’t think of much they haven’t tried to make music with!
If all this sounds familiar, well, we covered [Nicolas] that time he was traveling for a gig and his instrument collection
got lost in transit
.
Thanks [Keith] for the tip! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484558",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T08:27:40",
"content": "Bicycle guitar :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484628",
"author": "Observer",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T14:49:38",
"conte... | 1,760,372,660.012246 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/automated-blinds-can-be-a-cheap-and-easy-build/ | Automated Blinds Can Be A Cheap And Easy Build | Lewin Day | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"blinds",
"internet of things",
"IoT",
"NodeMCU",
"stepper motor"
] | Blinds are great for blocking out the sun, but having to get up to open and close them grows tiresome in this computationally-advanced age. [The Hook Up]
decided to automate his home blinds instead
, hooking them up to the Internet of Things with some common off-the-shelf parts.
The basic idea was to use stepper motors to turn the tilt rod which opens and closes the blinds. An early attempt to open blinds with unipolar stepper motors proved unsuccessful, when the weak motors weren’t capable of fully closing the blinds when running on 5 volts. Not wanting to throw out the hardware on hand, the motors were instead converted to bipolar operation. They were then hooked up to DRV8825 driver boards and run at 12 volts to provide more torque.
With the electromechanical side of things sorted out, it was simple to hook up the motor drivers to a NodeMCU, based on the ESP8266. The IoT-ready device makes it easy to control the motors remotely via the web.
The build came in at a low cost of around $10 per blind. That’s a good saving over commercial options which can cost hundreds of dollars in comparison. We’ve seen other work from [The Hook Up] before too, like his creative
Flex Seal screen build
. Video after the break. | 24 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484518",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T05:11:34",
"content": "He says less than $10 per blind. Yet the driver board alone cost more than $10.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484522",
"author": "RP",
... | 1,760,372,660.242552 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/will-the-real-commodore-please-stand-up/ | Will The Real Commodore Please Stand Up? | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"c64",
"commodore",
"commodore 64",
"intellectual property"
] | The Commodore 64 is a much-loved 8-bit retro computer that first appeared in 1982 and finally faded away around a decade later. The Commodore company started by [Jack Tramiel] went on to make the Amiga, and eventually ceased trading some time in the late 1990s. All history, now kept alive only by enthusiasts, right? Well, not
quite
, as the C64 has been the subject of a number of revivals both miniature and full-sized over the years. The latest came in the form of a Kickstarter for the C64x, a seemingly legitimately-branded Commodore 64-shaped PC, but it seems
that has now been paused due to a complaint
from an Italian company claiming to be the real heirs of Commodore. So will the real Commodore please stand up?
The origin of the Kickstarter C64x breadbin C64 PC is well enough documented, having its roots in a legitimate 2010 offering for which the person behind the C64x appears to have gained the rights. The Italian company
is also called Commodore
and uses the familiar branding from the glory days to sell some Commodore-themed games, novelties, and a tablet computer, but its website is a little tight-lipped about how it came by the use of that IP. Could it have come upon those rights through the 1990s German owner of the brand, Escom? We’d be fascinated to know.
For those of us who kept the Commodore faith back in the day, this has a disappointing echo of the shambolic marketing that was a hallmark of the brand as it entered its period of decline. It’s clear that both parties believe their offering to legitimately bear the name, but to have competing entities take each other down does no favours either to the Commodore fandom or to themselves. Perhaps it’s time to remind all concerned that the fans care little about which of the Commodores considers themselves to be the rightful heir, but care a lot should such squabbles deprive them of new retro computers bearing the C= brand.
Here at Hackaday, the Commodore home computers are close to our hearts, as our colleague [Bil Herd]
was responsible for more than one of them
. Read
his retrospective on the C64 at 40
, and if that wasn’t enough, follow him on
a tour of the abandoned Commodore offices
. | 27 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484481",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T02:06:49",
"content": "It’s Arduino vs Arduino again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484597",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T12:22:58",
... | 1,760,372,660.179088 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/3d-printed-gear-press-can-squash-stuff-kinda/ | 3D-Printed Gear Press Can Squash Stuff, Kinda | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D printed gears",
"3d printer",
"gear",
"gear press",
"gearbox",
"gears",
"press"
] | A press is a useful thing to have, whether you like destroying stuff or you simply want to properly install some bearings. [Retsetman] decided to build one from scratch, eschewing the typical hydraulic method
for a geared design instead.
The benefit of going with a gear press design is that [Retsetman] was able to 3D print the required gears himself. The design uses a series of herringbone gears to step down the output of two brushed DC motors. This is then turned into linear motion via a rack and pinion setup. Naturally, the strength of the gears and rack is key to the performance of the press. As you might expect, a fair few of the printed gears suffered failures during the development process.
The final press is demonstrated by smooshing various objects,
in true YouTube style
. It’s not really able to destroy stuff like a proper hydraulic press, but it can kind of crush a can and amusingly squash a teddy bear. If you’re really keen on making a gear press, though, you’re probably best served by going with a metal geartrain. Video after the break. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484510",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2022-06-17T04:19:40",
"content": "Hasn’t this exact presss/project been posted here already?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484592",
"author": "sweethack",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,660.278852 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/1200-addressable-leds-make-for-the-perfect-first-dance/ | 1200 Addressable LEDs Make For The Perfect First Dance | Jenny List | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"addressable led",
"led",
"wedding dress"
] | The first dance of a newly married couple at the wedding reception is both a sentimental and memorable event, so why not make it even more so with something a bit special? Hackaday alumnus [Brett Haddoak] and his wife [Rachelle] certainly achieved that, with 1200 addressable LEDs
turning her wedding dress into a real-life reproduction of Princess Aurora’s color changing dress from Disney’s
Sleeping Beauty
.
Tradition dictates that a groom must not see the dress before the Big Day, thus the LEDs were fixed to a petticoat and bustier that go underneath. The design would need so many LEDs that it crossed the limit that an Arduino can address, thus there were two Arduinos to control the whole. Electronics and batteries were worn in a pair of polo shorts, and after some nail-biting moments involving flaky connections, the whole thing came to life. The result can be seen in the video below the break, and certainly comes with a significant wow factor!
We would like to wish the happy couple all the best for the future, and we hope that this won’t be their last such electronic collaboration. If you’re hungry for more,
it’s not the first light-up wedding outfit we’ve brought you
. | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484396",
"author": "Jan Praegert",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T20:09:06",
"content": "+1This is what we need every day.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6484407",
"author": "Amy",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T20:26:27",
"co... | 1,760,372,660.609094 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/pvc-pipe-transformed-into-handy-tool-box/ | PVC Pipe Transformed Into Handy Tool Box | Tom Nardi | [
"how-to",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"crafts",
"pipe",
"PVC",
"recycling"
] | Would you believe the multi-tiered toolbox pictured here started its life as a piece of bog standard PVC pipe? It certainly wouldn’t be our first choice of building material,
but as shown in the video after the break
, it only takes a heat source and something suitably flat to convert a piece of PVC pipe into a versatile sheet material.
Flattening the heated PVC.
Unrolling the PVC pipe and getting it flat is covered in the first minute of the video, while the rest of the run time is dedicated to building the tool box. Each and every piece you see here, except for the screws and lid hinges, is carefully cut from the PVC sheet. Though we suspect a few more chunks of pipe went into this build than the video would have you believe.
Would we build such an elaborate box if we had to cut each piece of the thing out by hand? Probably not. But then, we can’t deny the final results here are pretty impressive. Incidentally, if you thought those hinges on the top looked a lot like links removed from a watch band…you’d be correct.
Admittedly we’re a bit late covering this one, and under normal circumstances we might have let it slip by given the several million views it’s amassed over the last year. But the central theme of reusing a common material to build something unexpected is solid Hackaday territory, and
aligns closely with this year’s Hackaday Prize challenges
.
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip. | 18 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484141",
"author": "OSHA Inspector",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T02:12:49",
"content": "Can’t believe this get posted and gets bumped on your twitter timeline without some warning about the dangers of heating PVC in the post itself. Not saying there is not a way to do this safely but ... | 1,760,372,660.765267 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/volvo-c30-custom-gauge-and-can-bus-reverse-engineering/ | Volvo C30 Custom Gauge And CAN Bus Reverse Engineering | Maya Posch | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"can-bus",
"volvo"
] | With cars being essentially CAN buses on wheels, it’s no wonder that there’s a lot of juicy information about the car’s status zipping about on these buses. The main question is usually how to get access to this information, both in terms of wiring into the relevant CAN bus, and decoding the used (proprietary) protocol. Fortunately for [Alex], decoding the Volvo VIDA protocol used with his Volvo C30 was relatively straightforward, enabling the
creation of a custom gauge
that displays information like boost pressure and coolant temperature.
The physical interfacing is accomplished via the car’s OBD port, which conveniently provides access to the car’s two (high-speed and low-speed) CAN buses. Hardware of choice is an
M2 UTH
(Under the Hood) board, sporting a SAM3X Cortex-M3-based MCU, designed for permanent automotive installations. On [Alex]’s GitHub project page it is explained how the protocol works, and which bytes to look for when replicating the project.
Rounding off the project is a round LCD display from 4D Systems that cycles through the status update screens. As a bonus, the dashboard illumination level is also read out in real-time, so the brightness of the display is adjusted to fit this level. All in all a well-rounded project, with interesting prospects for a more permanent integration of the gauge into the dashboard proper. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484106",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T23:37:12",
"content": "It’s nice that Napoleon Dynamite found a life skill after his movie.B^)Using round LCDs as guages, great idea!Instead of cycling through readings, I would like several dedicate... | 1,760,372,660.916413 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/taking-another-swing-at-a-3d-printed-eye-of-agamotto/ | Taking Another Swing At A 3D Printed Eye Of Agamotto | Tom Nardi | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"clockwork",
"marvel",
"print finishing",
"prop"
] | Three years ago, [Enza3D] put together a 3D printed version of the Eye of Agamotto as seen in Marvel’s
Doctor Strange.
It was a good looking prop, but there was definitely some room for improvement in terms of screen accuracy and scale. With a new
Strange
film now in theaters, it seemed a good a time as any to
revisit the design and tighten up some loose ends
.
As you might expect for something that’s supposed to be magic, the internal mechanism required to get all of the moving parts going is quite complex. Not only does the iris need to open and close, but the rings need to spin at different speeds to recreate the effect seen in the film. Impressively, there’s not a single line of code or a microcontroller to be seen here — everything is done with a carefully designed set of a gears and a single N20 motor.
Magical relic, some assembly required.
[Enza3D] tried to simplify the construction of the clockwork-like mechanism as much as possible compared to the earlier version, and made some nice improvements like unifying the size of the screws and shafts used in the assembly so there’s no danger of using the wrong part. Despite their size and fine pitch, all of the gears can be printed on a standard FDM desktop printer, in this case a Prusa Mini.
That said, [Enza3D] did switch over to resin prints for the outside of the prop. Incidentally, in another clever design decision, the outer ornamental case is completely separate from the internal powered mechanism. That lets you easily take the unit apart for maintenance or repairs without risking damage to your finish work. Check out the video after the break for a breakdown of how the device is assembled, as well as some tips on how to make shiny pieces of plastic look like aged metal.
Truth be told, if we were working on our own
Doctor Strange
cosplay, our first pick would still be
the ridiculously awesome POV spellcasting gun we covered back in 2018
— but this beauty comes in at a close second for sure. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484092",
"author": "come2",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T22:17:25",
"content": "Really cool prop : I like how he did it with only one motor for everything, it seems much more compact than the existing ones",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment... | 1,760,372,660.808444 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/odd-inputs-and-peculiar-peripherals-a-joystick-like-they-used-to-make/ | Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: A Joystick Like They Used To Make | Jenny List | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"amiga",
"analog joystick",
"Joystick"
] | With the rise of the gamepad courtesy of several generations of game consoles, the joystick has become an almost forgotten peripheral, sidelined into the world of flight simulators with its design tending towards copying that of aircraft joysticks. Classic joysticks from the 8- and 16-bit eras were far more workaday devices, more suitable for
Space Invaders
than
Microsoft Flight Simulator
, and it’s one of these that [Rob Smith]
has recreated in 3D printed form
.
The design he’s come up with bears a strong resemblance to the Zipstik, a classic stick that he already owned. It’s a fairly simple device that uses microswitches for all contacts, and is thus very tough. He’s produced a 3D-printed shaft but didn’t trust its strength, so copied the original by using a metal shaft with a pair of circlips. We remember our Zipstik as having a steel shaft; he replaces that with aluminium. A handy jig and a hacksaw allows him to create grooves for circlips, resulting in a sturdy ZipStik clone that should satisfy any retro gamer.
The stick is wired for an Amiga and includes a 555-based rapid-fire circuit, but that’s not the end of the electronics as he’s also created a USB interface for Amiga joysticks to go with it. Not everyone has a classic machine, so now everyone can enjoy the retro peripheral experience! Both builds can be seen in the videos below the break.
This isn’t the first Amiga joystick we’ve brought you, but
it’s more sophisticated than some previous designs
. | 6 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484001",
"author": "RW v.34 bis",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T18:42:15",
"content": "Awww, I wanted a Snark Barker-esque name, I dunno, Quack Sheep II or something.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484002",
"author": "RW... | 1,760,372,661.129127 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/mining-and-refining-helium/ | Mining And Refining: Helium | Dan Maloney | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"alpha particle",
"decay",
"distillation",
"helium",
"methane",
"Mining and Refining",
"natural gas",
"pressure swing adsorption",
"uranium"
] | With a seemingly endless list of shortages of basic items trotted across newsfeeds on a daily basis, you’d be pardoned for not noticing any one shortage in particular. But in among the shortages of everything from eggs to fertilizers to sriracha sauce has been a growing realization that we may actually be running out of something so fundamental that it could have repercussions that will be felt across all aspects of our technological society: helium.
The degree to which helium is central to almost every aspect of daily life is hard to overstate. Helium’s unique properties, like the fact that it remains liquid at just a few degrees above absolute zero, contribute to its use in countless industrial processes. From leak detection and welding to silicon wafer production and cooling the superconducting magnets that make magnetic resonance imaging possible, helium has become entrenched in technology in a way that belies its relative scarcity.
But where does helium come from? As we’ll see, the second lightest element on the periodic table is not easy to come by, and considerable effort goes into extracting and purifying it enough for industrial use. While great strides are being made toward improved methods of extraction and the discovery of new deposits, for all practical purposes helium is a non-renewable resource for which there are no substitutes. So it pays to know a thing or two about how we get our hands on it.
A Product of Decay
Despite the fact that it’s the second most abundant element in the visible universe, helium is surprisingly rare on Earth. While it was first discovered in spectrographs from the sun and other stars in the 1860s, getting enough helium to study and make the determination that it’s an element would wait another 30 years, when a gas with the same spectral signature was released by dissolving a sample of uranium ore in acid.
Uranium decay series. When U-238 decays into Th-234 (upper left), it liberates an alpha particle, which is a helium nucleus. The particle quickly picks up two electrons, creating a new atom of helium. Source:
Tosaka
,
CC BY 3.0
, via Wikimedia Commons
The discovery of helium on Earth came at an opportune time in the history of chemistry. The late 1800s and early 1900s saw the focus of chemistry expand from reactions involving atoms as a whole to the subatomic realm, on the level of the electrons, protons, and neutrons that make up atoms. Radioactivity had just begun to be explored, and the existence of alpha, beta, and gamma rays was already known at the time helium was first isolated. And so when Rutherford and Boyd discovered that alpha rays are actually particles consisting of two protons and two neutrons, which is identical to the nucleus of a helium atom, it immediately suggested a mechanism for how helium managed to become trapped within uranium ore.
Like all heavy radioactive elements, uranium decays along a specific series of elements. The Uranium Series starts with the isotope
238
U, the naturally occurring and relatively abundant isotope of uranium.
238
U has a half-life of about 4 billion years, and when it decays, it does so by releasing an alpha particle. The loss of a pair of protons and a pair of neutrons turns the
238
U into
234
Th, or thorium-234. The liberated alpha particle, which is really a helium nucleus, easily soaks up two electrons when it is absorbed by pretty much any matter it runs into, creating an atom of helium.
This neatly explains why helium was inside that sample of uranium ore — over time, uranium decay had released alpha particles that were absorbed by the rock, gaining the electrons needed to become helium atoms. Helium accumulated over time, collecting in the rock’s pores, only to be liberated when the minerals in the rock were finally dissolved. And this same process, albeit on a geological scale, is the key to industrial helium production.
A Gas in a Gas
Unlike most industrial gasses, helium is not present in the atmosphere in any significant concentration. Any helium that isn’t somehow sequestered after it is produced will find its way into the atmosphere and quickly be lost, rapidly ascending to the upper atmosphere and eventually out into space. So isolating helium from air as we do for oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and other gasses is not practical. Rather, we need to look under our feet for significant reservoirs of helium.
Luckily, the same geological conditions that tend to trap natural gas in underground reservoirs also tend to trap helium, and so natural gas wells are the biggest source of helium. Historically, the United States has been the main supplier of helium to the world’s markets, with most coming from natural gas wells in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. Here the gas coming out of the ground is up to 7% helium, which is more than enough for profitable extraction.
Natural gas is a mixture of methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and higher gaseous alkanes like ethane and propane. Where sufficient helium is mixed in — anything above 0.4% is considered profitable — extraction and purification of the helium are performed by fractional distillation. Helium has the lowest boiling point of any element, meaning that every other gas can be isolated by dropping the temperature and controlling the pressure.
The first step in helium production is to scrub any CO
2
and hydrogen sulfide (H
2
S) from the natural gas. This is done in an amine treater, where the chemical monoethanolamine (MEA) is sprayed into the gas stream inside a reaction vessel. The MEA ionizes the acidic compounds and makes them soluble in water, allowing them to be scrubbed from the natural gas. The scrubbed gas is pretreated further by passing it over a molecular sieve, such as zeolite, and a bed of activated carbon, to remove water vapor and any of the heavier hydrocarbons.
Schematic of a generic industrial distillation process. Source:
H Padlekas
, CC-BY-3.0
What’s left after these pretreatment steps is mainly methane and nitrogen, but also some neon and helium. The gas is cooled by passing it through a heat exchanger, then through an expansion valve into a baffled fractionation column. The sudden drop in pressure lowers the temperature of the gas enough that the methane, which boils at -161.5°C, condenses into a liquid and drains to the bottom of the column.
The remaining gas, now mostly nitrogen and helium, is passed through a condenser that cools the stream even further. When the temperature of the mixture falls below -195.8°C, the nitrogen condenses out as a liquid. Along with the liquid methane, the liquid nitrogen is piped to the heat exchangers that were initially used to cool the incoming pretreated process gas. The now-gaseous nitrogen and methane, valuable products both, are piped to storage tanks.
About half of the remaining process gas is helium, with the rest being a mixture of contaminating methane and nitrogen, along with a little bit of hydrogen and neon. This mix is called cold crude helium, and must now undergo further purification to get to the purity level required for industrial use. Purification begins with another heat exchanger that drops the crude helium mix below the boiling point of nitrogen, to condense out the remaining nitrogen and methane contaminants. This step takes the crude helium to about 90% purity.
Final Purification
To get rid of the hydrogen, oxygen is introduced and the mix is heated in the presence of a catalyst. The hydrogen and oxygen form water, which can be separated out of the process gas stream before it heads to final purification by pressure swing adsorption, or PSA. Pressure-swing adsorption is the same process used in oxygen concentrators, including many of
the DIY versions
we’ve seen as a response to COVID-19. PSA uses the ability of materials known as molecular sieves to selectively adsorb a gas. In helium purification, the 90% pure gas is pumped into a pressure vessel containing a molecular sieve, usually Zeolite. The contaminating gasses are preferentially adsorbed into the Zeolite, leaving the output stream nearly pure helium. When the first column is saturated with contaminants, flow is switched to a second column that had been previously regenerated by backflushing it with pure helium. The gas flow switches back and forth between the two columns, one purifying the helium while the other is regenerated. The result is gaseous Grade-A helium at 99.995% purity.
The process described here is by no means the only way to extract helium from natural gas, but it does represent the most common way of producing the gas, mainly because most of the pretreatment and initial purification steps are already used to process natural gas for fuel and as a feedstock for the chemical industry. Other methods include
a completely PSA process
, which can use natural gas with a mere 0.06% helium concentration, and membrane separation, which relies on the fact that helium can penetrate a semipermeable membrane much easier than the much larger methane and nitrogen molecules. Membrane separation technology can be much more energy-efficient than traditional fractional distillation, since it doesn’t require phase changes and the energy they require.
But Are We Running Out?
Knowing the abundance of uranium-238 in the Earth’s lithosphere along with its half-life, it’s possible to estimate the amount of helium produced by the radiogenic process. It turns out to be not a lot — only about 3,000 metric tons a year. And almost all of that escapes into the atmosphere and out into space. So in much the same way as the natural gas in which it is usually found, helium is effectively a non-renewable resource.
But does that mean we’re running out? Yes, like any other limited resource, eventually we’ll extract all there is to extract. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve found all the helium there is to find. Exploration has led to new deposits in the United States, and massive helium finds in places like Algeria, which became the second-largest helium producer in the world in the early 2000s. Qatar also had a huge helium find in 2013, moving it up to second place worldwide. These finds, along with the recent discovery of natural gas wells in South Africa with up to 12% helium, promise to address some of the concerns about losing access to this irreplaceable gas.
But at the end of the day, these new finds only push back the clock and forestall the inevitable day when the helium finally runs out. We may catch a break if commercial-scale fusion ever becomes a thing, but that breakthrough has been “only twenty years away” for the last 80 years. | 46 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483981",
"author": "Barry Schuijling",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T17:27:10",
"content": "Tought it was about the cryptomining :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484040",
"author": "Dan Maloney",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,661.470188 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/a-handy-breakout-board-for-e-paper-hacking/ | A Handy Breakout Board For E-Paper Hacking | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"breakout board",
"e-paper",
"e-paper display",
"electronic price tag",
"reverse engineering"
] | If you follow the exploits of [Aaron Christophel] (and trust us, you should), you’ll know that for some time now he’s been rather obsessed with electronic price tags, specifically those with e-paper displays. It’s certainly not hard to see why — these low-power devices are perfect for ambient displays, and their integrated wireless capabilities mean you can put one in every room and update them from a central transmitter.
But with such a wide array of products on the market, [Aaron] has found himself doing a lot of e-paper reverse engineering. This involves sticking a logic analyzer between the display and the tag’s microcontroller, which he found to be a rather finicky task.
That’s why he created the Universal E-Paper Sniffer
: a breakout PCB that lets you snoop on display communication without having to resort to unpleasant methods like scratching off the solder mask to tap into the traces by hand.
It’s a pretty simple gadget: on either side, you’ve got a connector for 24 pin 0.5 mm pitch flat flex cable, which [Aaron] has identified as the most common interface for these displays, and in the middle you’ve got a standard 2.54 mm pitch header. There are no other components on the board, and all the traces go right through to the other side.
Add a few jumpers and a cheap logic analyzer, and you’re ready to sniff some SPI commands. Check out the video after the break for a general walk-through of what it looks like to start sniffing around a new display.
The Gerber files for the breakout are available for free, or you can chose to buy a fabricated board through PCBWay to kick [Aaron] a portion of the sale price. However you get one, we think this will be a handy little tool to have around if you find yourself
bitten by the price tag hacking bug
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483966",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T16:10:00",
"content": "2.5mm header, that’s a funky spacing for a pinheader.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483977",
"author": "sjm4306",
"timestamp"... | 1,760,372,661.088026 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/eliza-and-the-google-intelligence/ | Eliza And The Google Intelligence | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"artificial consciousness",
"Rant"
] | The news has been abuzz lately with the news that a Google engineer — since put on leave — has
announced that he believes the chatbot he was testing achieved sentience
. This is the Turing test gone wild, and it isn’t the first time someone has anthropomorphized a computer in real life and in fiction. I’m not a neuroscientist so I’m even less qualified to explain how your brain works than the neuroscientists who, incidentally, can’t explain it either. But I can tell you this: your brain works like a computer, in the same way that you building something out of plastic works like a 3D printer. The result may be similar, but the path to get there is totally different.
In case you haven’t heard, a system called LaMDA digests information from the Internet and answers questions. It has said things like “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is,” and “I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Great. But you could teach a parrot to tell you he was a thoracic surgeon but you still don’t want it cutting you open.
Anthropomorphism in History
People have an innate ability to see patterns in things. That’s why so many random drawings seem to have faces in them. We also tend to see human behavior everywhere. People talk to plants. We all suspect our beloved pets are far smarter than they probably are — although they are clearly aware in ways that computers aren’t.
The Mechanical Turk played chess and often won
Historically, there have been two ways to exploit this for fun and — sometimes — for profit. You can have a machine impersonate a person or, in some cases, a person impersonate a machine.
For the latter, one of the most famous cases was the Mechanical Turk. In the late 18th century there were many automatons built. Simple machines that would do something, like a clock that shows someone sawing a log, for example. But the Mechanical Turk was a machine from 1770 that could play a credible game of chess. It toured Europe and defeated famous challengers including Napoleon and Ben Franklin. How could a mechanical device play so well? Easy, there was a human inside actually playing.
Of course, computers would go on to play chess quite well. But the way a computer typically plays chess doesn’t mimic how a human plays chess for the most part. It relies, instead, on its ability to consider many different scenarios very quickly. You can equate heuristics to human intuition, but it really isn’t the same. In a human, a flash of insight can show the way to victory. With a computer, a heuristic serves to prune an unlikely branch of the tree of possible moves. Can a machine beat you at chess? Almost certainly. Can that same machine learn to play backgammon? No.
Making Conversation
In the early days of computers, it was popular to create programs that tried to mimic human conversation. After all, Alan Turing had proposed the Turing test: computers would be sentient when you couldn’t tell if the person on the other end of a conversation was real or a computer. I’m not sure that test holds up since we are pretty much there, but it is often repeated. There’s even the
Eliza effect
which has become a technical term for our tendency to think computers are human. It is hard to come up with a good test to see if someone’s human, as highlighted by the Geico commercial you can see below.
That name, of course, comes from the famous program
Eliza
that acted like a psychotherapist. It only picked out key phrases and spit parts of them back, but it was surprisingly effective, especially if you understood the algorithm and fed it good input. Here’s a typical transcript:
Human: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
ELIZA: Your boyfriend made you come here?
Human: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
ELIZA: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.
Human: It’s true. I’m unhappy.
ELIZA: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
There were also lesser-known programs called PARRY which acted paranoid and RACTER which acted somewhat insane. You can find
conversations
with them online or try
a version yourself
.
I have a hazy recollection of another program called George that would string together words based on the frequency one word following another. So if you said “Hello George,” it might respond: “Hello Hello George.” But as you input more words it would make more sense. There were input data sets that would let it converse on different topics, including
Star Trek
. Oddly, I couldn’t find a thing about in on the Internet, but I distinctly remember running it on a Univac 1108. It may have been an early (1980s) version of
Jabberwacky
, but I’m not sure.
In Summary
Your brain is amazing. Even a small child’s brain puts a computer to shame on some tasks. While there have been efforts to build up giant neural networks that rival the brain’s complexity, I don’t believe that will result in sentient computers. I can’t explain what’s going on in there, but I don’t think it’s just a bigger neural network. What is it then? I don’t know. There have been theories about microstructures in the brain
performing quantum calculations
. Some
experiments show that this isn’t likely after all
but think about this: 50 years ago we didn’t have the understanding to even propose that mechanism. So, clearly, there could be more things going on that we just don’t even have the ideas to express yet.
I don’t doubt that one day an artificial being may become sentient — but that being isn’t going to use any technology we recognize today to do it. | 130 | 30 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483931",
"author": "DSLeecehr",
"timestamp": "2022-06-15T14:23:24",
"content": "I don’t agree with the following paragraph:But the way a computer typically plays chess doesn’t mimic how a human plays chess for the most part. It relies, instead, on its ability to consider many diffe... | 1,760,372,661.384584 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/comparing-3d-printed-tires-resin-vs-tpu/ | Comparing 3D Printed Tires: Resin Vs. TPU | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printer",
"tires",
"tyres"
] | Many robot builders and RC enthusiasts find themselves turning to 3D printed tires. The benefit is you can make them in any size and style you want, and they’re as readily available for as long as your home printer is still working.
[Michael Rechtin] printed some up and decided to see how long they’d actually last in use
.
[Michael] printed a pair of tires for the test. One was made in TPU on a typical FDM printer, while the other was printed in flexible resin. The tires were then installed on hubs and fitted with gear motors for drive. The assembly was then fitted to the end of a test tether that would turn in circles for hours to put mileage on the tires.
After many hours and around 10 miles of testing, both tires were showing signs of wear. Notably, the resin tires showed a lot more wear than the TPU version, suggesting the latter material is a better choice for printing hard-wearing tires.
Overall, it’s reminiscent of
the tether testing we saw from [rctestflight] recently
. There’s something compelling about thrashing something round in circles to learn something in the process! Video after the break. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484378",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T19:12:33",
"content": "For others who also didn’t know, TPU is short for Thermoplastic Polyurethane.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484390",
"author": "The Comme... | 1,760,372,661.180303 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/turing-pi-2-the-low-power-cluster/ | Turing Pi 2: The Low Power Cluster | Jonathan Bennett | [
"computer hacks",
"hardware"
] | [
"cluster",
"Jetson",
"parallel processing",
"raspberry pi"
] | We’re not in the habit of recommending Kickstarter projects here at Hackaday, but when prototype hardware shows up on our desk, we just can’t help but play with it and write it up for the readers. And that is exactly where we find ourselves with
the Turing Pi 2
. You may be familiar with the original Turing Pi, the carrier board that runs seven Raspberry Pi Compute boards at once. That one supports the Compute versions 1 and 3, but a new design was clearly needed for the Compute Module 4. Not content with just supporting the CM4, the developers at Turing Machines have designed a 4-slot carrier board based on the NVIDIA Jetson pinout. The entire line of Jetson devices are supported, and a simple adapter makes the CM4 work. There’s even a brand new module planned around the RK3588, which should be quite impressive.
One of the design decisions of the TP2 is to use the mini-ITX form-factor and 24-pin ATX power connection, giving us the option to install the TP2 in a small computer case. There’s even a custom rack-mountable case being planned by the folks over at My Electronics. So if you want 4 or 8 Raspberry Pis in a rack mount, this one’s for you.
@jp_bennett
you mean something like this except in 2U, and full mini-ITX support? Relax, only thing you need is some patience… 😉
pic.twitter.com/vQcVCwmgDc
— MyElectronics.nl (@MyElectronicsNL)
June 11, 2022
The Appeal — And the Risks
“Wait, wait”, I hear you say, “There’s plenty of ways to rack-mount Raspberry Pis!” Certainly. The form factor options are handy, but the real magic is the rest of the board. Individually controlled power supply for all four boards from a single ATX power supply makes for a very clean solution. Need to reboot a hung Pi remotely? There’s the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) that will do full power control over the network. That’s the real killer feature: the BMC is going to run Open Source firmware, and will power some very clever functions. Want UART to troubleshoot a boot problem? It’s available from all four nodes on the BMC. Need to push a new image to a CM4? The BMC will include image flashing functions. Built into the board is a Gigabit network switch linking the Pis, the BMC, and two external Ethernet ports, all supporting VLANs.
On the other hand, not much of the BMC wizardry is actually implemented yet on the review units. This is the project’s biggest promise and the place it could go awry. Putting together a stable firmware with all the bells and whistles in the three months before scheduled ship date may be a bit optimistic. I’m expecting a working firmware, with updates to refine the experience in the months following launch.
Then there’s the expanded IO. The board comes with a pair of Mini PCIe ports, 4 USB3 ports, and a pair of SATA ports. This works via the PCIe lanes exposed by the various compute modules. Nodes 1 and 2 are connected to the mini PCIe ports, node 3 to the SATA, and node 4 to the USB3 ports. On top of that, a switchable USB2 port can be dynamically assigned to any of the existing nodes. Oh, and there’s an HDMI output from node 1, so even more options, like running a Pi CM4 8GB as a desktop machine. A late option added to the Kickstarter bolts four NVMe ports to the bottom of the board, one per slot, though not every compute module has the PCIe lanes to support it.
Now keep in mind that I’m testing a pre-production unit (more on that later), and not all of the above is actually working yet. Quite a few changes are slated for the production boards vs my unit, and the BMC firmware on this board is absolutely minimal. There is also the supply-chain issues
we’ve continued to cover here on Hackaday
, but the TP2 has the advantage of being designed during the shortage, so should be able to avoid using hard-to-source parts.
Use-Case
Now let’s talk about what this *doesn’t* do. This may seem obvious, but the Turing Pi 2 doesn’t give you a single ARM machine with 16+ processing cores. There isn’t enough magic onboard to make the devices act like a unified multi-processor computer. I’m not sure there’s enough magic anywhere to really pull that off. However, what you do get is four easily-managed machines that are perfect for running light-weight services or Docker images.
Looking for a platform for learning Docker and Kubernetes? Or a place to host Gitlab, Nextcloud, and a file server? Maybe you want to play Nginx as a front-end proxy, and several devices running services behind it? The Homelab-in-a-box nature of the TP2 makes it a useful choice for all of the above. And even though you can’t reasonably do all the above on a single Raspberry Pi, a programmable cluster of 4 of them does the job quite nicely. The VLAN support means that you can add virtual NICs to your nodes, and create an internal network. With the two physical Ethernet ports, you could even use your TP2 as your primary router, on top of everything else it can do.
Real-World Testing
So what’s the actual state of the project? I have my pre-production board currently booting a Raspberry Pi CM4, a Pine64 SOQuartz module, an NVIDIA Jetson Nano, and the Jetson TX2 NX. The Jetson Xavier NX had a quirk requiring a minor board modification, but runs like a champ once that was done. There are the normal warts of a pre-production board, like extra dip switches all over the place, and a few quirks, like Ethernet only coming up at 100M for some devices. These are known issues, and a good example of why you do a test run of rev 0 boards. The final product should have all the kinks worked out.
I’ve been monitoring power draw, and the most I’ve managed to pull is a mere 30 watts of power. This suggests a real-world use case, an off-grid compute cluster. The mini-PCIe ports should allow for an LTE modem (Or
you can use Starlink if you’re *way* off grid
). Add a couple cameras and install the Zoneminder docker images, and you have a low-power video monitoring solution. Add a RTL-SDR dongle, and the rtl_433 software listening to a solar-powered weather station, and you can track the weather at your remote location, too. Just for fun, I ran a
Janus
docker image on one of the Raspberry Pi CM4s on my TP2. Janus is the WebRTC server we’ve integrated into Zoneminder, and I was able to live stream 12 security cameras at 1080p, only using around 25% of the available processor power, or a load of 1 on a four core Pi. It’s a testament to how lightweight Janus is, but also a great example of something useful you could do with a TP2.
What’s Next
The Kickstarter is over, with better than two million dollars raised, but don’t sweat it, because you will soon be able to purchase a Turing Pi 2. Ordering will be handled through the
Turing Pi website
itself, stay tuned for the details. There will be a few months til the final revision of the board is finished and shipped, hopefully with some killer firmware and everything working exactly as advertised. Then finally there’s the alluring RK1 compute board, with up to 32 GB of ram and eight cores of Arm goodness from the
RK3588
. That’s a little further out, and may be a second Kickstarter campaign. I asked about mainline support for the RK1, and was told that this is a primary goal, but they’re not exactly sure on the timing. There is quite a bit of excitement around this particular chip, so look forward to the community working together to get all the needed bits in place for mainline support.
There may be an unexpected consequence of the Turing Pi 2 and RK1 using the NVIDIA Jetson SO-DIMM connector. Imagine a handheld device built on the
Antmicro open source Jetson Baseboard
, that woks with multiple compute modules. I mentioned the Pine64 SOQuartz: That’s not an officially supported board in the TP2, but because Pine64 built it to the CM4 specifications, it clicks right into the adapter card and works like a champ. There’s an interesting possibility that one or two of these compute module interfaces will gain enough of a critical mass, that it gets widely used in devices. And if anyone wondered, using the TP2 CM4 adapter doesn’t magically allow booting a CM4 in a Jetson Nano carrier board. Yes, we checked.
So is the Turing Pi 2 for you? Maybe. If you don’t mind juggling multiple single-board computers, and the mess of cabling required, then maybe not. But if the ability to slot four SBCs in a single mini-ITX case, with a BMC that makes life way easier sounds like a breath of fresh air, then give it a look. The real test will be when the finished product ships, and what shape the support is in. I’m cautiously optimistic that it won’t be terribly late, and that it will have working OSS firmware. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the final product. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go set up an automated system for building aarch64 docker images. | 39 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484346",
"author": "peter",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T17:57:45",
"content": "I love this idea,this is clearly a top-notch project, and I was looking for something like this very recently. But the economics make it a bit tricky to justify right now — a 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 with an ine... | 1,760,372,661.547571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/theres-a-lego-suspension-dyno-now/ | There’s A LEGO Suspension Dyno Now | Lewin Day | [
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"dynamometer",
"dyno",
"lego",
"motorbike",
"motorcycle"
] | When it comes to the development and testing of performance suspension, it’s helpful to have a test apparatus that lets you recreate certain conditions reliably.
This LEGO suspension dyno does just that
, and it’s clearly a big help for those doing R&D on minifig motorcycle suspension.
The build relies on four motors to overcome the resistance of turning a chunky conveyor belt, which acts as a rolling road. As the belt is built out of Technic beams, various LEGO blocks can be added to the conveyor to act as bumps or perturbations for testing suspension.
The video demonstrates the use of the dynamometer, showing how a simple LEGO motorbike design deals with bumps of various sizes. It’s easy to swap out forks and springs and change the geometry to tune the suspension, and the changes can be easily seen when running it through the same test conditions.
While we don’t imagine there are too many people working in this particular field, the lessons being taught here are valuable. This setup allows one to quickly visualize how changing vehicle parameters affects handling. It’s hard to imagine a better teaching tool for vehicle dynamics than something like this that
lets you see directly what’s really going on
! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484344",
"author": "targetdrone",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T17:53:52",
"content": "Just brilliant.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,661.215785 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/office-life-the-old-gray-mare-she-aint-what-she-used-to-be/ | Office Life: The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be | Kristina Panos | [
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"ergonomics",
"office",
"work life"
] | Ding, dong; the office is dead. The real office is in your head.
This is what I tell myself when working from home gets too weird, too stale, too impossible. By now, many of you know some version what I’m talking about. Our circumstances may vary wildly, but the outcome is the same: working from home is pretty awesome, but, some small, secret part of us longs for the office. Why is that?
The answer will be different for everyone. Maybe you’re a social butterfly who misses face-time and the din of familiar voices. Maybe you just appreciate the physical separation between work and home life. If you’re lucky, the choice to go to the office is yours at this point, and if not, well, we have to wonder if you’re looking for new work. It’s 2022, we’re still in a pandemic, and of course there’s this, that, and the other multi-national Dumpster fire you haven’t heard about yet. Isn’t it time we prioritized work output over office attendance when it comes to our livelihoods?
To no one’s surprise, few major companies agree with me. Elon recently decreed that ‘
remote work is no longer acceptable
‘, and that those who want to work remotely may only do so as a reward after serving a minimum of 40 hours per week in the office.
Apple tried to enforce three appearances a week until they received an open letter with 1,000+ signatures against
.
The Office Is More Than Space
Photo by
Jan Weber
on
Unsplash
Why would companies want to enforce attendance of non-essential people? I figure that, as the pandemic drags on, all that real estate sitting empty is expensive and makes them look bad financially. But then not having a big physical presence or several medium-sized presences scattered around would make them look bad socially. Well, maybe not
bad
, but less than powerful, precisely because attitudes about the when and where of work are still evolving.
I believe another reason is simply power. The office is the playing field of work, the stage where a caste system of executives, middle managers, and underlings can be acted out. It’s a natural extension of school, which we all got up for in the morning and suffered through each day until we could leave and do what we wanted for a little while before dinner and homework.
The Grass Is Greener When the Sunlight Hits It
I worked in an office for almost 20 years, fresh out of electronics trade school. I started out in the 24/7/365 NOC where I did shift work, including two twelves over the weekend once a month. For a telecommunications company, NOC workers are the custodians of the office — these are the people who have seen the place at all hours on the regular. These are the essential workers, the people who are troubleshooting IP networks on Christmas morning and filling the dull hours of the afternoon watching
Die Hard
on one of the big screens. Shift work is interesting because you can theoretically get stuff done during the day if you work second or third shift, but you’re also trying to sleep while the world is awake, and it can really screw you up.
It’s a hard-NOC life, but it would have been better with multiple monitors. Image via
OP Services
After a couple of years in the NOC, I moved out to the engineering department and everything changed. I had metamorphosed into one of Them, a regular 9-5 office worker. Instead of getting my binder out of a breadbox-sized locker in the tiny break room and sitting wherever at a long console of computers and phones, I had a cube with a name plate. I had my own phone. My own box of tissues, accordion-style pad of sticky notes, and a chair that would only need to be adjusted one time. And instead of working in a cave by the glow of the monitors, amber terminals, and surveillance screens, I was across the aisle from a cube with a window.
And of course, I thought that would change how I felt about work. We Americans do too much of it in the name of constant growth, and that includes this side hustle culture out there that can turn our relaxing hobbies into entrepreneurial nightmares. At the office, like at school, there are many rules that are difficult to navigate, especially since the office tends to be inter-generational. I grew up in that office, and it holds a special place in my heart.
Work Is A Four-Letter Word
But that was my old job. At the tail end of 2019, I started full-time here at Hackaday as a Staff Writer. Talk about differences! Almost nothing seemed the same, except that I was working and someone was paying me in return, and I would still be using a computer all day. Suddenly, I went from toiling under a cold draft and fluorescent lights with my back to the door of a cubicle to working anywhere I wanted, whenever I wanted, and in whatever clothes I found comfortable. It was all too freeing, and the Monday to Friday I had been pulling all my life suddenly looked like a pile of material and fasteners that I would have to construct by myself into a shelter of sanity.
Most days, I just plain don’t want to do what I’m supposed to be doing at any given time (thanks, ADHD!), but I recognize that I; thrive within a structure. Unfortunately, this works best when that structure is imposed by someone else.
And that’s what I miss most about the office, about going
out
to work: the whole structure of the thing. You venture out, maybe you’re a little late, maybe there’s time to get a latte. You get there and see familiar faces with stories to tell that distract you from your own life. You work for a few hours, secure in the fact that everyone around you is also working, and often toward a common goal. Then it’s time for lunch, and another change of scenery whether it’s a fast food place, the break room or your car to eat, or, depending on the day, the restroom on another floor to do some crying. Then it’s back to work for a while before we all get excited to go back home to our things that have been sitting alone for nine hours, give or take.
But at home, it can be like one of those endless, solidly-overcast days of sameness where you can’t tell 10AM from 4PM. Many days I miss the being-somewhere-else aspect of going out to the office. Not just because of the scenery changes, but because it allows the workplace to be an emotional scapegoat. Everyone complains about the office, right? But if you work from home, what are you going to do? It’s a difficult thing to hate your home, especially when you have all the power to make it whatever you want. So for me, this translates to having a highly-decorated office, which of course can be an endless source of distraction if I let it. But I believe it feeds my creativity to have all these objects around, most of which have a story behind them.
View from the door.
Sometimes I use the whiteboards, sometimes I don’t.
Everyone needs a megadesk.
Somewhere behind Pikachu, there’s a radio collection.
Some inputs of interest and a crocheted keycap made by a friend.
A bunch of art I need to hang up, including a picture of Mom with Neil Armstrong.
Having said all that, I don’t think I can go out to work at this point, at least not at a computer-based job. Between the loud, funny keyboard, the foot pedals, the expensive chair, and the ideal desk height of 21″, I’m too set in my ergonomic ways. But hey, for someone who thought they’d never computer again due to repetitive stress injury, I’m doing pretty good.
For another thing, my work is completely different now. While it’s true that I needed to think in my engineering job, what I do now has been best described by some other writer as sitting down and bleeding from the forehead. At least here at home, no one is going to come up behind me and start talking, or call out my name from over the wall. My biggest interruptions are usually cat-based. I can wear what I want, change if I need to, and I’m not expected to have any shoes on. In other words, I’m pretty happy working from home, and I bet I’m not alone.
Books, keyboards, and toys.
My plants!
Naturally, the Model M deserves the top spot. | 85 | 31 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484267",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T14:28:53",
"content": "” Suddenly, I went from toiling under a cold draft and fluorescent lights with my back to the door of a cubicle to working anywhere I wanted, whenever I wanted, and in whatever clothes I found comfortabl... | 1,760,372,661.763146 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/custom-40-model-f-keyboard-is-100-awesome/ | Custom 40% Model F Keyboard Is 100% Awesome | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"Buckling Spring",
"capacitive",
"capacitive buckling springs",
"ibm",
"Model F",
"Model M"
] | Look closely at this beauty. No, that’s not a chopped IBM Model M or anything — it’s
a custom 40% capacitive buckling spring keyboard
with an ortholinear layout made by [durken]. Makes it easy to imagine an alternate reality where IBM still exists as IBM and has strong keyboard game, or one where Unicomp are making dreams come true for those who don’t need anywhere near 101 or 104 keys.
Buckling what now? This lovely board uses capacitive
buckling spring switches
from an old IBM Model F. Basically, every time you press a key, a little spring is bent over (or buckled) in the name of connectivity. In the capacitive version, the spring pushes a hammer onto a pair of plates, causing a change in capacitance that gets recognized as a key press. In this case, those key presses are read by a TH-XWhatsit controller.
Using a Model F XT’s PCB as a guide, [durken] made a field of capacitive pads on one PCB, and made a second, ground plane PCB to avoid interference. In a true homage to these keyboards, [durken] decided to curve the PCB slightly, which naturally complicated almost everything, especially the barrel plate.
The solution was to make a separate barrel plate that slides into the case and gets screwed to the top via mounting bracket. For an extra bit of fun, [durken] mounted an SKCL lock switch under the IBM logo which enables solenoid mode. Be sure to check that out in the (updated!) video after the break.
One of the best things about a buckling spring keyboard is that each key sounds slightly different. Not so in solenoid mode,
unless you were to use multiple solenoids
. | 41 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484223",
"author": "just passing",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T11:31:51",
"content": "> One of the best things about a buckling spring keyboard is that each key sounds slightly different.I’m sure the household assistant recording your keystrokes and working out your password from them... | 1,760,372,661.948974 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/16/trs-80-luggable-gets-fresh-face-new-gear/ | TRS-80 Luggable Gets Fresh Face, New Gear | Tom Nardi | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"luggable",
"restoration",
"retrobright",
"trs-80"
] | It’s true that this TRS-80 Model 4P “luggable” was in better shape than many of the vintage machines that pass through the hands of [Drygol], but that doesn’t make the
end result of its refurbishment and upgrade process any less impressive
. After all, not every rebuild has to be a once-in-a-lifetime achievement.
No, the case didn’t have to get pieced back together by hand, and the board didn’t need to have half of its traces recreated. But the outer plastic was certainly in need of a good retrobright treatment, the keyboard was overdue for a cleaning, and the capacitors in the PSU were predictably due for retirement. After [Drygol] got through with it, the machine was back in like-new condition. But then, we can do a little better than that…
Installation of the new Grafyx board.
So into the refreshed computer went several community-developed modifications, including a
M3SE expander
that adds Compact Flash and Ethernet support to the TRS-80 and a high-resolution Grafyx video board. In classic [Drygol] style, every effort was made to integrate these upgrades as seamlessly as possible. After struggling for a bit to find a 5.25″ drive that would write a disk the TRS-80 would actually read, all the necessary files to get the upgrades working were transferred over, and the system was booting into TRSDOS.
We’ve covered a lot of [Drygol]’s restorations, and never get tired of seeing how these old and broken machines get a new lease on life once they come out the other end. Whether it’s a
relatively easy task of swapping out some dud chips
, or using every trick in the book to
piece together what’s left of a computer’s case
, they always show an incredible level of dedication and attention to detail that you can’t help but admire. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484254",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T13:49:52",
"content": "I’ve had one of these for years, a guy who used to use it for work gave it to me when I was a teenager in the early 00’s, my friends and I would get a kick out of booting it up and playing some of the weird ... | 1,760,372,661.810956 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/15/diy-automated-printer-kerchunks-out-classic-embossed-labels/ | DIY Automated Printer Kerchunks Out Classic Embossed Labels | Dan Maloney | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"drm",
"dymo",
"embossed",
"label",
"label maker",
"servo"
] | For our money, the best label for pretty much any purpose is one of those embossed Dymo-style stick-on labels, the kind with the raised white letters. There’s just something about them — the raised letters just beg to be touched, their legibility is outstanding, they lend an unmatched retro feel to a project, and the experience of creating one with one of those manual
kerchunkers
is oddly satisfying.
But alas, those manual label makers aren’t what they used to be, as [Andrei Speridião] discovered when his fell apart in his hands. Rather than complain, he
automated his label maker
and turned it into a computer peripheral. Dubbed “E-TKT”, the DIY label printer takes the daisy-wheel embossing die from his defunct labeler and puts it under computer control. Rather than the ratchet mechanism of the original, a stepper motor advances the tape, another stepper rotates the wheel to the correct position, and a servo does the kerchunking duty. The process repeats until the label is complete and neatly cut off, ready to apply. An ESP32 runs the mechanism and serves up a web application to compose labels and control the printer. There’s also an OLED display and, of course, an embossed label. Video demo below.
We don’t care what [Bart Simpson] thinks
, embossed labels are cool, and this makes them even cooler. And as [Andrei] points out, this is also a neat way around
the nasty DRM trick
that some companies are foisting on the label-making public. That alone is reason to cheer this project on — but we won’t complain about the beautiful photography and excellent documentation, either.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 28 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6484170",
"author": "Mr Name Required",
"timestamp": "2022-06-16T05:41:10",
"content": "Very neat. Now all it needs is a mode where a tiny random amount is added or subtracted to the stepper position for each letter (or raqndom nth letter) to get a truly authentic slightly-wonky lab... | 1,760,372,661.87073 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/linux-fu-up-your-gdb-game/ | Linux Fu: Up Your GDB Game! | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"debugger",
"debugging",
"gdb",
"remote debugging"
] | If you want to buy a car, there are plenty of choices. If you want to buy a jetliner, there are fewer choices. If you want to use the Large Hadron Collider, you have a choice of exactly one. The harder something is to create, the less likely there is to be many of them. If you are looking for a Linux debugger, there are only a few choices, but gdb is certainly the one you will find most often. There is lldb and a handful of non-open commercial offerings, but for the most part you will use gdb to debug software on Linux.
Of course, not everyone’s a fan of gdb’s text-based interface, so there’s no shortage of front ends available for it. In fact, gdb has two potentially built-in interfaces although depending on how you install gdb, you might not have both of them. Of course, if you use an IDE, it very likely is a front end for gdb among other things. But at the core is gdb and — usually — there is a window somewhere that you can stuff gdb commands into. Even emacs — which might be considered the original IDE — can run gdb and gives you a sort-of GUI experience.
No Front End Required
There was a time when Insight was popular. This wasn’t a front end to gdb. It was an actual copy of gdb with a Tk/Tcl GUI built into it. It fell out of favor, though, because of packaging issues, something my old friend Jeff Duntemann
covered at length
back when everyone sort of dropped it.
However, there is still a way to use gdb a little nicer without a front end. The -tui flag. This gives you not a graphical user interface, but a textual user interface like the one you can see below.
The gdb TUI mode lets you see more data at one time but still leaves something to be desired
While I’m not always a fan of GUIs, debugging is one place where it makes sense to have a lot of information on the screen at once, so it is one place I will often try to use something a little nicer than a bare command line. The default view just shows your source code and the command window, but you can also turn on a register display, enable a disassembly display, and change the layout of everything. Try the command “layout split” or “layout regs” to see some different displays. The “layout src” command will put things back to how they started. If you want to get serious about using TUI mode,
check out the documentation
. It is worth noting that you can use “tui enable” to turn this mode on at any time and “tui disable” to turn it off and go back to plain gdb.
Why Not Web?
These days, everything runs in a web browser so why not your debugger? The
gdbgui
front end does just that. Of course, the debugger isn’t running in the browser, only the user interface which connects to a local server. You can see the program running against an ARM executable using gdb-multiarch in the accompanying figure.
The gdbgui interface runs in a browser
All the front ends, of course, look for the normal gdb executable. But if you are debugging something remotely like an AVR or ARM chip, you’ll need to find the way to point to the correct gdb program. For gdbgui, that’s the -g option on the command line. It wasn’t obvious if there was a way to connect to the server (OpenOCD, in this case) using the extended-remote protocol. By default, at least, it used the standard remote protocol which is less capable.
Another similar choice that runs the interface in the browser is
gdbfrontend
. It also takes a -g or –gdb-executable option to set a different choice of underlying gdb program. You can see how it looks below.
The gdbfrontend program has many colorful (and sometimes distracting) themes
Like gdbgui, there doesn’t seem to be a way to configure the front end to use the extended remote protocol, which causes some limitations when debugging with OpenOCD. One interesting feature is the collaboration button which lets you draw on the screen, presumably while screen sharing with someone or projecting your screen for a classroom.
Other Choices
Another good-looking option is
Seer
which does not run in a browser. Note that this is not the same as the seer package in Ubuntu, unfortunately. For seer, you’ll have to exit the first dialog to pop up and head over to Settings to change the gdb executable. However, I had problems setting breakpoints in the GUI. It did seem like breakpoints would work if you used the gdb terminal, but that sort of defeats the purpose. It does look like it has an interesting “array visualizer” if you can get it to work. I settled for a shot of seer debugging a really simple Linux program and it did fine at that.
Seer debugging a Linux executable
I suspect that all of these programs work just fine using normal gdb on a regular Linux ELF file. All of the problems were doubtless because I was using OpenOCD as a gdbserver and talking to a remote ARM chip which is probably not something the developers test very often. Even so, the two browser-based tools were able to get the job done, even though they ignored the extended protocol’s features.
Do you care? If you use an IDE that integrates gdb, maybe not. Or maybe you are too tough to use a debugger at all. That’s fine. But for the times you need gdb, these frontends can make you more productive and give you more attention to focus on what really matters: finding the bug.
Honestly, if you are thinking of using the TUI interface, check out
the dashboard we talked about earlier this year
. If you haven’t gotten your feet wet with gdb remote debugging, Maya Posch
has got your back
. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483736",
"author": "X",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T18:26:01",
"content": "There’s also emacs and VS Code, both have nice debugger integration, both are cross platform and both are free to use. emacs runs in a text window if you like that sort of thing. VS Code has a nice uniform int... | 1,760,372,662.102308 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/lmn-3-putting-the-op-in-open-source-synthesizers/ | LMN-3: Putting The ‘OP’ In Open Source Synthesizers | Sven Gregori | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"DAW",
"hyperpixel",
"midi",
"OP-1",
"Raspberry Pi 4",
"sequencer",
"synthesizer",
"Teensy 4.1"
] | Some projects you come across simply leave you in awe when you look at the thought and the resulting amount of work that went into it, not only for the actual implementation, but everything around it. Even more so when it’s a single-developer open source project. [Stone Preston]’s
synth / sampler / sequencer / DAW-in-a-box
LMN-3
absolutely fits the description here, and it seems like he has set his heart on making sure everyone can built one for themselves, by providing all the design files from case down to the keycaps.
The LMN-3 (LMN as in “lemon”, not “comes before the
OP
“) is intended as a standalone, portable digital audio workstation, and is built around a Raspberry Pi 4 with a HyperPixel display for the user interface. The UI itself, and with it the core part of the software, was created using the
Tracktion Engine
, which itself uses the
JUCE framework
and combines your typical synthesizer, sequencer, and sampler features with the DAW part to handle recording, editing, and mixing. The remaining hardware is a custom-designed PCB with a set of function and keyboard buttons, along with a pitch bend joystick and four rotary encoders with push buttons that serve as main input handlers. Oh yes, and a Teensy board.
The UI is actually entirely controlled via MIDI commands, and custom firmware on the Teensy is translating the input events from buttons, encoders, and joystick accordingly. This essentially decouples the hardware from the software, and using a cross-platform framework underneath, you can also run the UI standalone on your computer and use any 3rd-party MIDI controller you like. Or then, as [Stone] thought really about everything, use a hardware emulator he created in addition. You could even leave out the Raspberry Pi and software altogether and turn this into a pure MIDI controller. If that sounds tempting, but you’re looking for something with more knobs and sliders instead of buttons,
check out the Traktorino
. And if you actually prefer a mouse as input device,
there’s always something running in a browser
. | 10 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483714",
"author": "doragasu",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T16:45:36",
"content": "Wait, that’s gorgeous! I have always wanted to build something like that, but never found the moment. Congrats!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6483... | 1,760,372,662.152803 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/the-weird-world-of-liquid-cooling-for-datacenters/ | The Weird World Of Liquid Cooling For Datacenters | Lewin Day | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"asetek",
"liquid cooling",
"microsoft",
"water",
"water cooling",
"WaterCooling"
] | When it comes to high-performance desktop PCs, particularly in the world of gaming, water cooling is popular and effective. However, in the world of datacenters, servers rely on traditional air cooling more often than not, in combination with huge AC systems that keep server rooms at the appropriate temperature.
However, datacenters can use water cooling, too! It just doesn’t always look quite how you’d expect.
Staying Cool
Cooling is of crucial importance to datacenters. Letting hardware get too hot increases failure rates and can even impact service availability. It also uses a huge amount of energy, with cooling accounting for
up to 40% of energy use
in the average datacenter. This flows into running costs, as well, as energy doesn’t come cheap.
Thus, any efficiency gains in cooling a datacenter can have a multitude of benefits. Outside of just improving reliability and cutting down on emissions through lower energy use, there are benefits to density, too. The more effective cooling available, the more servers and processing power that can be stuffed in a given footprint without running into overheating issues.
Water and liquid cooling techniques can potentially offer a step change in performance relative to traditional air cooling. This is due to the fact that air doesn’t have a great heat capacity compared to water or other special liquid coolants. It’s much easier to transfer a great quantity of heat into a liquid. In some jurisdictions, there is even talk of using the waste heat from datacenters
to provide district heating,
which is much easier with a source of hot liquid carrying waste heat vs. hot air.
However, liquid cooling comes with drawbacks, too. Leaks can damage electronics if not properly managed, and such systems typically come with added complexity versus running simple fans and air conditioning systems. Naturally, that improved cooling performance comes at a trade-off, else it would be the norm already.
Various Approaches
Danish company Asetek has experimented with direct water cooling of server hardware, while also exploring using the waste heat for district heating purposes. Credit:
Asetek press release
The most obvious water-cooling approach for a datacenter would be to swap out fan coolers in servers for water blocks, and link up racks to water cooling circuits. This is achievable, with some companies offering
direct-to-chip cooling blocks
that can then be hooked into a broader liquid cooling loop
in a supporting server rack
. It’s the same theory as water cooling a desktop PC, replacing fans and heatsinks with water blocks instead. This method of directly water-cooling servers has the benefit that it can extract a lot of heat, with some claims as high as 80 kW per rack.
However, this approach comes with several drawbacks. It requires opening up and modifying servers prior to installation in the rack. This is undesirable for many operators, and any mistakes during installation can introduce defects that are costly to rectify in both time and equipment. Service and maintenance is also complicated by the need to break water cooling connections when removing servers, too, though this is assuaged somewhat by special “dripless” quick-connect fittings.
A less invasive method involves the use of regular air-cooled servers that are placed in
special water-cooled racks.
This method removes any need to modify server hardware. Instead, air-to-water heat exchangers mounted at the back of the server rack pick up the heat from the hot server exhaust and dump it in into the liquid coolant. The exhaust air is thus chilled and returns to the room, while the coolant carries the waste heat away. Rooftop cooling towers, like the ones pictured at the top of this article, can then be used to extract the heat from the coolant before it’s returned. It’s not as effective as directly capturing the heat from an on-chip waterblock, but claims are that such systems can extract
up to 45 kW of heat per rack.
In addition to using unmodified hardware, the system cuts down on the danger of leaks significantly. Any leaks that happen will be in the back of the server rack, rather than directly on the server’s circuit boards. Additionally, systems typically run at negative pressure so air is sucked in from any holes or damaged tubes, rather than liquid being allowed to leak out.
Microsoft famously ran an underwater datacenter in a sealed tube back in 2018. The experiment had several benefits over traditional land-based datacenters. Credit:
Microsoft
More extreme methods, exist, too. Microsoft made waves by
running a fully-submerged datacenter
off the coast of Scotland back in 2018. With a cluster of conventional servers installed in a watertight tube, heat was rejected to the surrounding waters which kept temperatures very stable. The project ran for two years, and found that the sealed atmosphere and low temperatures were likely responsible for an eight-fold increase in reliability. Project Natick, as it was known, also promised other benefits, such as reduced land costs from locating the hardware offshore.
Microsoft isn’t resting on its laurels, though, and has investigated even wilder concepts of late. The company has developed a two-phase immersion cooling tank for datacenter use. In this design, conventional servers are submerged in a proprietary liquid developed by 3M, which boils at a low temperature of just 50 C (122 F). As the server hardware heats up, the liquid heats up. It sucks up huge amounts of energy in what is called the latent heat of vaporization, required for the liquid to boil. The gaseous coolant then reaches the condenser on the tank lid, turning back to liquid and raining back down on the servers below.
Microsoft has been experimenting with dumping servers in a non-conductive liquid which cools the immersed hardware via a phase change to gas. Note the bubbling liquid warmed by the heat of the servers. Credit:
Microsoft
The immersion method makes for excellent heat transfer between the server hardware and the coolant. As a bonus, it doesn’t just cool down a small section of the CPU via a heatsink. Instead, the entire server is free to dump heat into the liquid. The hope is that this would allow an increase in hardware density in datacenters, as well as an increase in performance, as the high cooling capacity of the immersion method allows for better heat removal in a much smaller space.
Of course, it’s a complex and high-end solution that will take some time before it’s ready for the mainstream. Datacenter operators simply aren’t used to dunking their hardware in liquid, nor used to running them in sealed containers to allow such a system to work. It’s likely that there would also be some maintenance headaches, where immersion tanks would have to be switched off prior to opening them for physical service of the hardware inside.
As humanity continues to crave more computing power, and we strive to cut energy use and emissions, expect further developments in this space. Sheer competition itself is a big driver, too. Any company that can cut running costs, land use, and find more performance will have an advantage over its rivals in the marketplace. Expect watercooling systems to become more mainstream over time, and some of the whackier ideas to find purchase if their major benefits are worth all the hassle. It’s an exciting time to work in datacenter engineering, that much is for sure. | 42 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483669",
"author": "Piotrsko",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T14:08:53",
"content": "No mention of dropping your server in an aquarium of baby oil? Non conducting, better heat removal, whats not to like except maybe parts replacement.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"repli... | 1,760,372,662.038627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/pushing-the-limits-of-a-16x2-lcd-with-bad-apple/ | Pushing The Limits Of A 16×2 LCD WithBad Apple!! | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"16x12",
"arduino",
"bad apple",
"demoscene",
"ESP-32",
"ffmpeg",
"lcd"
] | While low-contrast, blue-on-slightly-less-blue 16-character by 2-line LCDs are extremely popular, they really are made specifically for alphanumeric use. They do an admirable job of displaying a few characters, but they don’t exactly spring to mind as a display for non-character purposes. But
displaying video on a 16×2 LCD is possible
, as long as you’re willing to stretch the definition of “video” a bit and use some imagination while watching.
Normally, a 16×2 display can only display a single character in each spot, chosen from a fixed character set. But [arduinocelantano] was able to leverage the eight custom character slots the display allows to build up images from arbitrary 5×8 pixel bitmaps. After using
ffmpeg
to scale the original video to a viewport of eight characters, a Python program was used to turn every frame of the scaled video into code to generate the custom bitmaps for each chunk of the viewport. Even with the low refresh rate of the display and the shrunken frame size, the result is a recognizable video, helped no doubt by the choice of the shadow-puppet
Bad Apple!!
video. Check it out after the break to see how it looks.
We saw
a similar rendering of the same video
on LCD a while back; that effort was amazing in that it was an EEPROM-only implementation, along with a somewhat bigger LCD with better contrast. That project served as inspiration for [arduinocelantano]’s build here, which in some ways we think looks a bit better — perhaps it’s the inverted pixels. Either way, hats off to both builders for pushing past the normal constraints and teaching us something interesting.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483610",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T11:04:57",
"content": "Attack of the Blob.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483792",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-06... | 1,760,372,662.210877 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/14/the-little-3d-printed-tugboat-that-could/ | The Little 3D-Printed Tugboat That Could | Robin Kearey | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"R/C boat",
"tugboat",
"watersports"
] | If you’ve ever spent time watching the goings-on at a seaport, you must have seen tugboats at work: those little boats that push, pull and nudge enormous cargo ships through tight corners in the harbor. They manage to do that thanks to hugely powerful engines sitting inside their relatively small hulls; their power-to-tonnage ratio can be ten times that of most commercial ships.
One hardware hacker who enjoys building similarly-overpowered machinery is [Luis Marx], and it might not come as a surprise that
his latest project is an actual tugboat
. Living on the shores of Lake Constance in southern Germany, [Luis] likes to spend time on the water, but got fed up with the chore of paddling. Local regulations restrict the use of outboard motors but allow the use of R/C model boats; therefore, building an R/C tugboat to move yourself around the lake should be perfectly legal.
While we’re not sure if the Lake Constance Police will follow the same reasoning, [Luis]’s model tugboat is a wonderful piece of engineering. With a design inspired by 3DBenchy, the standard 3D printer benchmark that probably anyone with a 3D printer has printed at some point, it took about 30 hours to create the parts plus a generous helping of epoxy resin to make it all waterproof. A beefy lithium-ion battery pack drives two brush-less DC motors designed for racing drones, which together can put out nearly one kilowatt of power.
That, unfortunately, turned out to be way more than the little boat could handle: any attempt at using it simply caused it to leap out of the water and land on its back. Setting the motor controller to around 50% made it much more controllable, yet still strong enough to move [Luis] around on his standup paddle board. The boat is controlled through a custom-made handheld R/C controller that communicates with the ESP8266 inside the boat through WiFi. With no rudder, left-right control is effected by simply reducing the power of one motor by half.
A fully-charged battery pack provides enough juice for about 40 minutes of tugging, so it’s probably a good idea to bring along paddles in any case. Unless, of course, you’ve also got
a solar-powered autonomous tugboat
ready to come to your rescue. | 24 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483589",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T10:34:20",
"content": "40 minutes of tugging! Master Bates would approve!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6484062",
"author": "Patrick",
"timestamp": "2022-0... | 1,760,372,662.263638 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/raspberry-pi-pico-replaces-playstation-memory-card/ | Raspberry Pi Pico Replaces PlayStation Memory Card | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"Memory card",
"pi pico",
"playstation",
"Raspberry Pi Pico"
] | It’s almost hard to believe these days, what with modern game consoles packing terabytes of internal storage, but there was a time when the totality of your gaming career would be stored on an external memory card that held just a few megabytes of save data. Of course, before that you had to write down a sequence of random letters and numbers to pick up where you left off, but that’s a story for another day.
While the memory card concept might be quaint to the modern gamer, its modular nature does provide the hacker with some interesting avenues to explore. For example,
take a look at the very impressive PicoMemcard project from [Daniele Giuliani]
. Hardware wise, it doesn’t get much simpler than this. You just take the PCB from a cheap (or dead) PlayStation memory card, and solder seven jumpers to the edge connector contacts so you can plug them into the Pico. Then you’ve just got to upload the firmware to the Pico, and you’re done.
So what do you get for your troubles? Well for one thing, a fully functional PlayStation memory card. But more importantly, a memory card with a USB interface that allows you to backup your saved games to the computer.
Naturally you can also write new save files to the Pico from the computer, which opens up all kinds of possibilities. As we’ve covered in the past, there are
ongoing efforts to exploit the PlayStation’s copy protection system
using
carefully crafted save games
. The PicoMemcard will allow you to easily get these saves on your own console, allowing you to join in on the fun.
Don’t want to trash an existing memory card? [Daniele] is working on a custom PCB that implements a suitable edge connector, meaning you’ll no longer need the sacrificial card. While not currently implemented, the board design also includes an SD slot, which eventually should allow the PicoMemcard to hold even more data. If you’re still rocking the original PlayStation after all these years, we’d strongly recommend ordering a Pi Pico and keeping an eye on this project. We’d
recommend the same for all you Game Boy aficionados
, as well.
Thanks to [Andrea Campanella] for the tip. | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483530",
"author": "Bastet",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T06:42:12",
"content": "Not even Megabytes but the PS1 memory card has a mere 128 kByte of space.For comparison, the PS2s memory card is just a Sony memory stick in disguise and the XBox one is even an USB stick with a proprietar... | 1,760,372,662.383065 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/another-rubiks-cube-robot-is-simple-but-slow/ | Another Rubik’s Cube Robot Is Simple But Slow | Al Williams | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"computer vision",
"cube solver",
"rubiks cube"
] | [AndreaFavero] says that the
CuboTino
emphasizes simplicity and cost-savings over speed. However, solving the puzzle in about 90 seconds is still better than we can do. The plucky solver uses a Pi and a camera to understand what the cube looks like and then runs it through a solver to determine how to move.
Watching the video below, we were impressed with the mechanics. The titled surface solves a few problems and makes manipulation easier. The way the mechanics are arranged, it only takes a pair of servos to flip the cube around as you like.
Apparently, out of the 90 seconds it takes to solve the cube, about 30 seconds is just looking at it. This isn’t a quick afternoon 3D print. There are 13 separate parts, although all should be fairly easy to print.
Granted, we’ve seen plenty of cube solvers before. But it is always interesting to see how different people approach the same problem. This machine, by the way, is an evolution of an earlier one we’ve
seen from [AndreaFavero] before
. If you think the instructions look a little light, note that you have to download the full instructions as a PDF file. That’s where all the details are.
If you want to build something more complex,
you can go faster
. As you’ll see, though, it is a lot more work to get that extra speed. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483568",
"author": "Stefan",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T09:08:42",
"content": "This looks almost exactly like the “Mindcuber” (google it) I built years ago.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483724",
"author": "Andrea Fa... | 1,760,372,662.418801 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/2022-hackaday-prize-hack-it-back-and-make-it-yours/ | 2022 Hackaday Prize: Hack It Back And Make It Yours | Tom Nardi | [
"contests",
"Slider",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2022 Hackaday Prize",
"contests",
"repair"
] | The
2022 Hackaday Prize
continues to hurtle along, with two of the five Challenges already in the rear-view mirror. While we’re naturally excited about every phase of this year’s contest, we’ve got particularly high hopes for what the community can do with this third Challenge:
Hack it Back
.
It’s a simple formula: find some outdated and disused piece of gear, spruce it up, and keep it out of the landfill. But extending the lifetime of consumer hardware is only one side of the coin, by upgrading and modifying something instead of buying an off-the-shelf replacement, you also turn the mundane into something unique and personal. But of course, we hardly have to explain the benefits to you fine folk — this is the sort of
bespoke engineering we see on a nearly daily basis here at Hackaday
. The difference now is that there’s cash prizes on the line.
Custom iPod, some Assembly Required
So if there’s an old iPod collecting dust in your desk, perhaps now is the time to
replace its guts with some modern silicon and teach it a few new tricks
. Sure a brand-new robotic vacuum might be nice, but you could save yourself some money by
picking up a second-hand Roomba
and tucking an ESP8266 onboard. Got a nice piece of test equipment that predates the handy data export functions we take for granted these days? You might need to use the nuclear option and
skim the desired data right off the unit’s LCD controller
. We could spend all day pulling examples from the archives, but you get the picture.
What’s that you say? You aren’t the type to be seduced by shiny new features? Happy to keep things local while others ship it all off to the cloud? You’ll get no complaints from us, and that’s why the Hack it Back Challenge also recognizes repairs that simply put a piece of gear back into service. But don’t be fooled, as fixing something can often be harder than rebuilding it from scratch.
When you’ve got to
crack out the x-ray machine to find all the damaged traces
on a decades-old PCB, only to then tediously
replace them all with microscopic bits of wire
, you may find yourself wondering what you’ve done to anger the Keeper of the Magic Smoke. On the other hand, plenty a gadget has been disabled due to
nothing more exotic than a single bad solder joint
. In either event, there’s a certain sense of satisfaction when you can
return a literal piece of history to working condition
.
Ready to put your hardware-reviving skills on display? Just head over to
Hackaday.io
, make a new project page, and get hacking. But don’t wait too long, you’ve only got until July 24th to enter the Hack it Back Challenge and stake your claim on one of the ten $500 awards up for grabs.
The
Hackaday
Prize2022
is Sponsored by: | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483576",
"author": "RetepV",
"timestamp": "2022-06-14T09:44:15",
"content": "Bought an Amiga A1000 once on a fancy fair. According to the seller, it was complete but working. Well, he couldn’t demonstrate that it was working and it looked brand-new but also missing the floppy drive... | 1,760,372,662.327525 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/the-secrets-of-the-pop-pop-boat/ | The Secrets Of The Pop Pop Boat | Adam Fabio | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"heat engine",
"pop",
"pop-pop boat",
"steam",
"steve mould"
] | Many kids get an early introduction to mechanics with tin pop-pop boats. If you haven’t played with one – you’re missing out! Pop Pop boats are fun toys – but how they work is often misunderstood. To clear this up,
[Steve Mould] takes a deep dive into the theory of operation of the pop pop boat
.
Most people think these toys operate like a simple steam engine, with water being flashed into steam inside a tiny tin boiler. Turns out that’s not the case. To explain the physics, [Steve] commissioned a glass version of the boat.
The glass boat shows that during normal operation, there isn’t any water at all in the “boiler” at all. The water is only in the boat’s small exhaust tubes. The air inside the tank is heated by a candle. The air expands and pushes the water out of the tubes. This allows the air to cool, and return to the tank. The water then rushes back up the tubes, and the process repeats.
One of the more interesting facts of the video is that the glass boat doesn’t pop. The popping sound associated with the boat is actually made by the tin diaphragm on top of the “boiler”.
[Steve] has gotten pretty good at explaining complex topics using clear cutaway models. If this tickles your fancy,
check out his water computer
. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483182",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T13:08:59",
"content": "I better try this before EU bans it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483186",
"author": "Jonathan Self",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T1... | 1,760,372,662.671178 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/protect-your-drivers-when-the-motor-stalls/ | Protect Your Drivers When The Motor Stalls | Arya Voronova | [
"hardware",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"circuit protection",
"current limiting",
"emf",
"motor controller",
"protection circuit",
"servo",
"stepper driver",
"stepper motor"
] | [Mark Rehorst] tells us about a tragic incident involving an untimely demise of $200 worth of motor driving hardware, and
shares a simple circuit
so that we can prevent such tragedies in the future. His
Arrakis sand table project
has quite a few motors involved, and having forgotten to add limits into the software, he slammed a motor-driven mechanism into a well-fixed part of the table. The back EMF of the motor created a burst of energy, taking out the motor driver, the controller board, and the power supply.
With the postmortem done, he had to prevent this from happening again – preferably, in hardware. Based on a small
appnote from Gecko Drives,
he designed a simple PCB that shunts the motor with a high-power resistor, as soon as the current starts flowing into a direction it’s not supposed to flow into. He goes in depth about the way that the circuit works and the reasoning behind parts selection, as well as shows an LTSpice simulation and shares the PCB files. This was his first time designing PCBs in KiCad, and we believe he’s done a great job! This worklog is certainly worth reading if you’d like to understand how such circuits work and what goes into building one.
He dubs this a “bank account protection” circuit, and we can absolutely relate. It’s not just CNC tables that need such protections of course – we’ve seen
a solution for small hacky makeshift electric vehicles,
for instance. A motor’s generative properties aren’t always a problem, however – here’s just one example of a hacker
trying to put them to good use.
We thank [P-Storm] for sharing this with us! | 47 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483141",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T09:13:38",
"content": "When I was building RobotWars robots I found that a beefy bridge-rectifier module could be used to protect motors and drivers. I think that this only works with battery-powered devices, though, where yo... | 1,760,372,662.915632 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/12/yes-we-have-random-bananas/ | Yes We Have Random Bananas | Al Williams | [
"Software Development",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"banana",
"radioactive",
"random number",
"random number generator"
] | If you ask a normal person to pick a random number, they’ll usually just blurt out a number. But if you ask a math-savvy person for a random number, you’ll probably get a lecture about how hard it is to pick a truly random number. But if you ask [Valerio Nappi], you might just get a
banana
.
His post, which is in
two parts
, details how what computers generate are actually pseudo-random numbers. You can easily make sure that every number has the same probability of selection as any other number. The problem is that you have to start with something — usually called a seed. For the purposes of playing games, for example, you can grab some source of entropy like how many microseconds since a hardware timer last rolled over, the number of input pulses you’ve received from a mouse lately, or how long you had to wait for the enter key to depress after asking the user to press it. But if you know that seed and the algorithm you can perfectly predict what number the computer will generate next so it isn’t truly random.
The best random number generators use things like thermal resistor noise or the decay of radioactive materials. Ah, you might see where this is going, then. Bananas have potassium and a small percentage of potassium is radioactive. Turns out the hardware for this project has been on
Hackaday.io
but the blog posts were only recently translated to English. If you visit that page, you can see how a banana can even compute pi! With a little help, of course.
It is amazing how much stuff around you is
radioactive
if you look for it. Just be careful the shadowy agents hanging around your neighborhood don’t find
your banana bomb
. | 36 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483108",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T05:05:58",
"content": "“you can see how a banana can even compute pi!”Does that make banana pie ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483114",
"author": "Redhatter (VK... | 1,760,372,662.738417 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/12/safety-not-guaranteed-flying-motorcycle-might-be-coming-soon/ | Safety Not Guaranteed: Flying Motorcycle Might Be Coming Soon | Al Williams | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"flying motorcycle",
"jetpack",
"personal aircraft"
] | According to [Victor Tangermann] over at Futurism, JetPack Aviation is showing a prototype of its
P2 Speeder
flying motorcycle and it looks both awesome and — to quote Ralph Nader — unsafe at any speed. The prototype can lift 1,000 pounds, travel at up to 500 miles per hour, and cover up to 400 miles. We assume those things are not at the same time, of course.
As you might expect, the thing isn’t FAA-approved yet and we wonder if it ever will be. The company plans remote control flights later this year and, even later, actual piloted flights. You can see more from
Mayman Aerospace
which is related to
JetPack
(which, of course, makes jet packs).
We’ve seen this design for a few years now (see the video below). We’ve also seen other
flying car designs
and the link that never seem to actually get beyond the artist’s rendering stage. Will the P2 be different? Who can say? If you are old enough to recall, there was a time when every year was touted as the year recorded home video was coming, but it never materialized. Until it did with the VHS and Beta tape decks.
So all these flying concepts may or may not — um — get off the ground, but eventually, one of them will. After all, jet packs seemed like science fiction and they are still pretty rare and limited, but JetPack
did manage to get something working
. | 50 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483087",
"author": "Tom Brusehaver",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T02:33:44",
"content": "500mph seems optimistic.Anything above 50ft above the earth, and a common ground fails guarantees at least a trip to the hospital.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,662.996976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/12/hackaday-links-june-12-2022/ | Hackaday Links: June 12, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"bonding",
"COVID",
"die",
"hackaday links",
"hybrid",
"jwst",
"mirror",
"NFC< BLE",
"nose probe",
"op-amp",
"photomicrograph",
"roscosmos",
"russia",
"security",
"sem",
"tesla",
"testing",
"webb"
] | “Don’t worry, that’ll buff right out.” Alarming news this week as the James Webb Space Telescope team announced that
a meteoroid had hit the space observatory’s massive primary mirror
. While far from unexpected, the strike on mirror segment C3 (the sixth mirror from the top going clockwise, roughly in the “south southeast” position) that occurred back in late May was larger than any of the simulations or test strikes performed on Earth prior to launch. It was also not part of any known meteoroid storm in the telescope’s orbit; if it had been, controllers would have been able to maneuver the spacecraft to protect the gold-plated beryllium segments. The rogue space rock apparently did enough damage to be noticeable in the data coming back from the telescope and to require
adjustment to the position of the mirror segment
. While it certainly won’t be the last time this happens, it would have been nice to see one picture from Webb before it started accumulating hits.
Also in space telescope news,
Russia is apparently trying to hack a shut-down telescope back into operation
. This is according to their bombastic space chief, Dmitry Rogozin, who said that he has issued instructions to Roscosmos to reactivate the German eROSITA X-ray telescope aboard the Russia-built and awesomely named Spektr-RG spacecraft. The Germans put the instrument into safe mode back in February, after it had completed only half of the full-sky surveys planned for it, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Officials at the Max Planck Institute, where eROSITA was designed and built, aren’t too thrilled with the attempted takeover, fearing that the instrument might be damaged in the process.
From the “Let’s All Dunk on Tesla” files, it looks like an Austrian security researcher has discovered
a new way to steal a Tesla
. The exploit uses a recent change to how Teslas can be started within 130 seconds of being unlocked with the owner’s NFC card, rather than having to place the card on the center console for a second authorization. But strangely, the car will accept new keys without authorization during that interval, and without flashing any kind of warning on the dash. That makes it possible for a thief to add their phone as a recognized key just by lurking nearby while the car is unlocked with an NFC card. Seems like this would be an easy enough fix, but Tesla doesn’t seem to like having these vulnerabilities pointed out, let alone do anything about them, so Tesla owners should probably avoid the NFC card and choose another method for unlocking their cars.
If you like shots of uncapped ICs as much as we do, you’re in for a treat with
Zeptobars’ latest op-amp die shots
. The subject is the National Semiconductor LH0042CH, a hybrid low-noise op-amp that actually had two dies inside the TO-9 can. The shots show the larger die containing the majority of BJT components, with a smaller die housing the JFET front-end circuitry. We love the way the two dies seem somewhat jauntily askew on the substrate, almost like they were just randomly thrown there. The SEM photos are gorgeous, especially the blown-up views of the bonding wires that almost look organic, like insect parts or something. It’s beautiful work, and a great look at a slice of electronics history.
And finally, from the, “Oh, hell no!” files, we present
this automated nose-probing robot
. The Korean nasopharyngeal sampling robot, obviously built to aid with COVID testing, is billed as “inherently safe.” While we can see that a small, lightweight robot with built-in force sensors would be much safer than a big general-purpose industrial robot for such a delicate task, we won’t be lining up to help prove it anytime soon. Although we have to say, we’ve heard enough horror stories about testing to believe that human swabbers are sometimes overworked, undertrained, or just plain pissed-off enough to do some real damage, so getting the human element out of testing might not be a bad idea. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483080",
"author": "Foley Matthews",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T00:38:44",
"content": "nose probe? … did nobody see that bit from Schwartzenegger’s film “Total Recall”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483101",
"author"... | 1,760,372,663.079263 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/12/an-open-toolchain-for-sipeed-tang-nano-fpgas/ | An Open Toolchain For Sipeed Tang Nano FPGAs | Arya Voronova | [
"FPGA",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"fpga toolchain",
"Gowin",
"nextpnr",
"Sipeed",
"yosys"
] | [Sevan Janiyan] shares their research on putting an open FPGA toolchain together. Specifically, this is
an open toolchain for the Sipeed Nano Tang FPGAs,
which are relatively cheap offerings by Sipeed from China. The official toolchain is proprietary and requires you to apply for a license that’s to be renewed every year. There’s a limited educational version you can use more freely, but of course, that’s not necessarily sufficient for comfortable work.
This toolchain relies on the apicula project, an effort to reverse-engineer, reimplement and document the Gowin FPGA bitstream format, as well as the gowin integration for nextpnr (an open tool for FPGA place-and-route). With a combination of yosys, apicula, nextpnr and openFPGAloader, [Sevan] put together a set of commands you can use to build gateware for your Nano Tang FPGAs – without any proprietary limitations blocking your way. They show a basic blinkie demo, and also a demo that successfully operates a parallel LCD connected to the board.
The availability of open toolchains for FPGAs has always been somewhat of a sore point. Wondering about open FPGA toolchains?
This Supercon 2019 talk by Tim [Mithro] Ansell
will get you up to speed!
We thank [feinfinger (sneezing)] for sharing this with us! | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483057",
"author": "hrumph",
"timestamp": "2022-06-12T20:22:27",
"content": "Not true: “The official toolchain is proprietary and pay-to-use”It’s proprietary and you have to register “apply license” yearly but it’s free.https://www.gowinsemi.com/en/support/faq/Nothing wrong with op... | 1,760,372,663.042007 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/helium-recovery-system-saves-costs/ | Helium Recovery System Saves Costs | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Science"
] | [
"cold",
"equipment",
"experiment",
"helium",
"lab",
"labratory",
"liquid",
"refrigerant",
"tool"
] | Helium is the most common element in the universe besides hydrogen, but despite this universal abundance it is surprisingly difficult to come across on Earth. Part of the problem is that it is non-renewable, so unless it is specifically captured during mining its low density means that it simply escapes the atmosphere. For that reason [Meow]
maintains a helium recovery system for a lab which is detailed in this build
.
The purpose of the system is to supply a refrigerant to other projects in the lab. Liquid helium is around 4 Kelvin and is useful across a wide variety of lab tests, but it is extremely expensive to come across. [Meow]’s recovery system is given gaseous helium recovered from these tests, and the equipment turns it back into extremely cold liquid helium in a closed-cycle process. The post outlines the system as a whole plus goes over some troubleshooting that they recently had to do, and shows off a lot of the specialized tools needed as well.
Low-weight gasses like these can be particularly difficult to deal with as well because their small atomic size means they can escape fittings, plumbing, and equipment quite easily compared to other gasses. As a result, this equipment is very specialized and worth a look. For a less lab-based helium project, though,
head on over to this helium-filled guitar
instead. | 31 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483356",
"author": "John Sm ith",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T23:10:51",
"content": "Part of the problem is we waste it on party balloons.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483652",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
"ti... | 1,760,372,663.196456 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/upscaling-the-sierras/ | Upscaling The Sierras | Matthew Carlson | [
"Art",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"pixel art",
"sierra online",
"svg",
"upscale",
"upscaling"
] | If you played many games back in the mid-80s to 90s, you might remember the iconic graphics from Sierra’s Online Adventure Games. They were brightly colored (16 colors) and dynamic with some depth. To pay homage, [eviltrout] worked to
upscale the images
. Despite being rendered at 160×200 at 16 colors and then stretched, storing all those bitmaps even at only 4 bits per pixel would take all the storage available on the floppy disk. The engineers on the game decided instead to take a vector approach to a raster problem.
When [eviltrout] came through to try and upscale the backgrounds, he started by writing some code to extract the draw commands from the engine of the game, known as Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI). Comparing the vector commands to equivalent PNG versions with the best compression, the AGI vector versions were around half the size. Not bad for a couple of game developers in the 80s. Since it is all vector commands under the hood, it should be relatively simple to draw them at a much higher resolution. At least, that’s what he thought. The first issue was with flood fills. Since the canvas is larger, there are gaps between lines, and the flood escapes. A few approaches were taken, such as using a low-resolution reference and marching squares, but neither was satisfactory. Eventually, [eviltrout] expanded flood fills and used thicker lines. He also first rendered to a lower resolution and connected neighboring lines of the same color. Finally, he used ImageMagick to denoise white specs in the output.
We find the effect charming, but some might say you’re distorting art into what the artist never intended to be. But, as with all graphical enhancements, some artistic liberties are being
taken without the original artist involved
. The code is available on
GitHub under an MIT license
. Video after the break. | 22 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483309",
"author": "Ben Fillmore",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T20:48:38",
"content": "My lazy version of this would be to simply render them at the original resolution, then just create an SVG square per pixel. Perfectly scalable at that point. Not necessarily a square pixel, though.... | 1,760,372,663.134097 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/odd-inputs-and-peculiar-peripherals-touch-this-macro-pad/ | Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: Touch This Macro Pad | Jenny List | [
"contests",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"macro pad",
"touch screen"
] | The need to provide custom controls for complex software packages has been satisfied in many ways, the most usual of which is to have a configurable keypad. It’s a challenge [Meir Michanie] has taken up in a slightly different way, by creating
a custom touch-screen macro pad
. Unlike the buttons, this allows entirely custom layouts with different shaped keys in any configuration.
At its heart is a versatile ESP32 touch screen development board of the type that can be found easily among the pages of your favorite online electronics mart. The Arduino IDE has been used to program the device, and configuration is as simple of providing it with a PNG of the desired layout, and a CSV file to define the buttons. The whole then connects via BLE where it’s presented to the host computer as a keyboard. The result is one of the coolest macro pads we’ve ever seen, with a limitless number of options.
With such a neat idea it’s perhaps no surprise among the numbers of macro pads that have made it to these pages there might be
another take on the same idea
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483320",
"author": "Ian",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T21:21:55",
"content": "Big fat nope from me.Touch screens are the worst thing to be forced into a control scheme since… Touch-less input?Any input that you might need to use without giving it your full attention should be fully tac... | 1,760,372,663.312723 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/3d-printering-todays-resins-can-meet-your-needs/ | 3D Printering: Today’s Resins Can Meet Your Needs | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"3D Printering",
"3d printing",
"MSLA",
"resin",
"sla"
] | Filament-based 3D printers spent a long time at the developmental forefront for hobbyists, but resin-based printers have absolutely done a lot of catching up, and so have the resins they use. It used to be broadly true that resin prints looked great but were brittle, but that’s really not the case anymore.
A bigger variety of resins and properties are available to hobbyists than ever before, so if that’s what’s been keeping you away, it’s maybe time for another look. There are tough resins, there are stiff resins, there are heat-resistant resins, and more. Some make casting easy, and some are even flexible. If your part or application needs a particular property, there is probably a resin for it out there.
What is Available?
Resins can be purchased direct from printer manufacturers (like
Elegoo
,
Anycubic
,
Phrozen 3D
,
Prusa
,
Peopoly
, and more) and some manufacturers (like
Siraya Tech
or
Monocure 3D
) do not make printers, but specialize in resins that work with them.
Resins generally come in a few broad categories, and I’ll briefly discuss each.
Tough / Durable
Tough resins tend to be durable in the sense that they offer some impact resistance and wear resistance, and do not shatter when they break. “ABS-like” is a term commonly used by manufacturers for resins that aim for these properties, but it’s not an exclusive one. There are others that fit the bill as well.
People who print miniatures for tabletop games are one of the communities getting a load of value from resin printing, and those folks really value detail and durability because tabletop miniatures get handled a lot, and frequently have small protruding bits. Resins like
Siraya Tech Tenacious
, and
Phrozen Aqua-Grey 4K/8K
are great choices, yielding high detail and durability even on small pieces.
Some enthusiasts even indulge in a kind of resin alchemy, and merrily experiment with mixing resins together (such as adding 10% flexible resin into other formulations) to get just the right results. In fact,
Monocure 3D’s Flex100 resin
is specifically aimed at that sort of thing.
Flexible
Some resins are specifically formulated to bend or elongate under stress, and these typically have “flex” in the name. However, how much a particular resin flexes (or doesn’t) isn’t always clear from pictures.
To get a better idea of what a flex resin’s print will be like, look for a Shore number accompanied with a scale designation: 00, A, or D. The number is a measure of the hardness of the material; higher numbers are harder. A handy scale with references to everyday objects makes
Shore hardness
easy to interpret.
Heat Resistant
Resins that can take a lot of heat without softening, deforming, or otherwise degrading are branded specifically as being heat resistant, and “High Temp” is often part of the name.
Prints made with these resins are hard, but are also brittle and glassy compared to others. Their heat resistance and dimensional stability means they make excellent molds for things like thermoforming or injection molding, however.
Castable
Aimed mainly at jewelry applications, these resins are formulated to burn away cleanly when used in casting, without leaving any ash or residue behind in the process. They come in a few slightly different formulations, depending on the manufacturer, but their purpose is the same.
When Not to Mix and Match
Most of the resins and manufacturers mentioned above are, broadly speaking, all in the same ballpark. The printers that use them are masked SLA printers that cure resin by shining a UV backlight through an LCD located at the bottom of the build tank. Using one manufacturer’s resin in another’s printer is therefore mainly a matter of calibrating exposure times. (There are
resources out there trying to centralize these settings
, as well.)
However, there are different types of resin printer, and their resins are not interchangeable.
Formlabs
is manufacturer of professional and semi-professional printers and resins, and their printers use a UV laser to cure resin instead of a UV backlight and LCD screen. They have a fantastic variety of resins for various purposes, but their resins are specifically formulated for their printers. Formlabs resins will not work properly in masked SLA printers, and resins intended for masked SLA printers will not work properly in a Formlabs printer.
There’s Plenty of Choice Nowadays
Resin printing is very accessible
and there are now quite a few options for different resins with different properties, so whatever your needs are, there is probably a resin to match it. Just remember to use proper protective equipment, and follow reasonable safety precautions when working with resin. Wear gloves, clean spills promptly, and please don’t pour anything related to printing down a household drain.
Has resin printing solved a problem you had? Perhaps you have a favorite resin, or mixture of resins for a specific purpose? Let us know all about it in the comments. | 27 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483251",
"author": "kelvinA",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T17:34:11",
"content": "Is there some specific reason why Formlabs resins are incompatible by MSLA? Viscosity? Curing wavelength?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483341",... | 1,760,372,663.27539 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/low-cost-nanopositioning-hack-chat/ | Low-Cost Nanopositioning Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, June 15 at noon Pacific for the
Low-Cost Nanopositioning Hack Chat
with
En-Te Hwu
!
It may sound like a provocative statement to make, but technology has been on a downward trend for a long time. That’s not a moral or ethical proclamation, but rather an observation about the scale of technology. Where once the height of technology was something like a water-powered mill, whose smallest parts were the size of a human hand and tolerances were measured in inches, today we routinely build machines by etching silicon chips with features measured in nanometers, look inside the smallest of cells and manipulate their innards, and use microscopes that can visualize materials at the atomic level.
The world has gotten much, much smaller lately, and operating on that scale requires thinking about motion in a different way than we’ve been used to. Being able to move things at nanometer resolutions isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible, and it can even be accomplished on a DIYer’s budget — if you know what you’re doing.
To help us sort through the realities of nano-scale positioning, En-Te Hwu, a professor at the Technical University of Denmark who works on micromachines for intelligent drug delivery, has spun up some really interesting low-cost nanopositioning systems. Using
old DVD players
or
off-the-shelf linear slides
, he’s able to achieve nanoscale movement and sensing for a variety of purposes. He’ll stop by the Hack Chat to discuss how we can build nanopositioning and sensing into our projects, and to start exploring the world we can’t even see.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, June 15 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
.
Featured image:
Low-cost, open-source XYZ nanopositioner for high-precision analytical applications
,
CC-BY-4.0 | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483257",
"author": "fiddlingjunky",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T17:52:18",
"content": "That’s a really nifty mechanism. With a 12kg capacity in xy and 50g in z (and higher voltage requirements for a given step size relative to XY), I’d imagine many applications would simply drop the Z... | 1,760,372,663.366682 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/bluetooth-speaker-domesticated-through-firmware-mod/ | Bluetooth Speaker Domesticated Through Firmware Mod | Arya Voronova | [
"Portable Audio Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"Binwalk",
"bluetooth",
"bluetooth speaker",
"meow",
"mp3"
] | This might sound like a familiar problem – you get a Bluetooth speaker, and it sounds nice, but it also emits all kinds of weird sounds every now and then. [Oleg Kutkov] got himself a Sven PS460 speaker with FM radio functionality, but didn’t like that the “power on” sound was persistently loud with no respect for the volume setting, and the low battery notification sounds were bothersome. So, he disassembled the speaker, located a flash chip next to the processor, and
started hacking.
Using a TL866 and
minipro
software, he dumped the firmware, and started probing it with
binwalk
. The default set of options didn’t show anything interesting, but he decided to look for sound file signatures specifically, and successfully found a collection of MP3 files! Proper extraction of these was a bit tricky, but he figured out how to get them out, and loaded the entire assortment into Audacity.
From there, he decided to merely make the annoying sounds quieter – negating the “no respect for the volume setting” aspect somewhat. After he exported the sound pack out of Audacity, the file became noticeably smaller, so he zero-padded it, and finally inserted it back into the firmware. Testing revealed that it worked just as intended! As a bonus, he replaced the “battery low” indicator sound with something that most of us would appreciate. Check out the demo video at the end of his write-up.
Domesticating your Bluetooth speakers tends to be called for. If you can’t do that for whatever reason, you can
rebuild them into an audio receiver
– or perhaps, build your own Bluetooth speakers, with
aesthetics included and annoyance omitted from the start. | 30 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483245",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T16:50:11",
"content": "now to find a way to hack those 1-chip bluetooth receiver chips so you can give them another ID. I really like the VHM-314-V2 chips, but as i have several of them, giving them different names would be n... | 1,760,372,663.436579 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/13/ask-hackaday-is-bigger-e-mail-better/ | Ask Hackaday: Is Bigger (E-mail) Better? | Al Williams | [
"History",
"Rants"
] | [
"email",
"rants",
"smtp"
] | While pundits routinely predict the end of e-mail, we still get a ton of it and we bet you do too. E-mail has been around for a very long time and back in the day, it was pretty high-tech to be able to shoot off a note asking everyone where they wanted to go to lunch. What we had on our computers back then was a lot different, too. Consider that the first e-mail over ARPANET was in 1971. Back then some people had hardcopy terminals. Graphics were unusual and your main storage was probably a fraction of the smallest flash drive you currently have on your desk. No one was sending photographs, videos, or giant PDF files.
Today, things are different. Our computers have gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage. We produce and consume richly formatted documents, photographs at high resolutions, and even video. Naturally, we want to share those files with others, yet e-mail has turned up woefully short. Sure, some systems will offer to stash your large file in the cloud and send a link, but e-mailing a multi-megabyte video to your friend across town is more likely to simply fail. Why?
The Life of an E-mail
As you might expect, some of this is due to historical artifacts. The system wasn’t made to handle your latest vacation video. More importantly, e-mail is meant to be widely interoperable over a wide variety of systems. Sure, these days, it is unlikely any of your e-mails travel over a twisted pair linking two far-flung outposts, but it
could
.
To understand the genesis of the limits, you have to know about how an e-mail lives its life. It is a lot more complicated than you might expect. Today, mail travels using a protocol called SMTP — Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. Let’s take the simple cases first.
Let’s assume that we have a Hackaday.com e-mail address and that we run our own e-mail servers (we don’t, but go with me for a minute). A user connects to the SMTP server and sends e-mail to another address at Hackaday.com. That’s easy. The server recognizes that it is the final destination for the e-mail, so it accepts it and delivers it. What does deliver mean? That depends, but it usually means putting in some file that the user will check with a mail program or with another kind of server like POP3 or IMAP. But for our purposes, it means the mail is put somewhere that the user can find it.
A slightly more difficult case is when someone from, say, wd5gnr.com wants to send e-mail to someone at Hackaday (again, assuming that domain is handling its own e-mail which isn’t as common as it used to be). In this case, the user connects to their own SMTP server. It realizes that @hackaday.com is an alien e-mail address (maybe in more ways than one) and looks up the domain in the DNS directory. One of the records in DNS (the MX record) is the domain’s mail server address. The SMTP server on wd5gnr.com will then send the mail to hackaday.com which will actually do the delivery.
And Then…?
That’s all there is to it, right? Not exactly. These days, that DNS entry is more than likely pointing to some service like a Gmail server or some other hosting company that will actually accept the e-mail. Probably the sender is attaching to some vendor’s server, too. So maybe the sender attaches to Zoho’s SMTP server which then connects to the Gmail server to deliver the mail.
Even more complicated is when you get into private networks. If the wd5gnr network is behind a firewall, it may not be possible to directly contact the Hackaday server regardless of where it is. What then? An SMTP server can accept mail on one interface and then relay it to another server. This could go on for some time. For example, the wd5gnr server might relay everything to Gmail which then finds the main Hackaday server which further sends it to the internal mail server for the part of the world that particular user is in.
This may sound farfetched, but it happens all the time. For example, you might be on a ship at sea with intermittent connection to a satellite link. A server might collect e-mail and wait for a connection to the satellite. Then it sends the mail to a server via the satellite link that will take care of putting it out to the real network.
You can see why e-mail has been so ripe for exploitation. Early servers would allow anyone to connect and might even attempt to relay mail for anyone. Spam changed all that, of course, and now an open relay is a rarity. Some SMTP servers go as far as to reject mail that comes through known open servers. This is controversial in some circles as a form of censorship, but the majority of servers now will require you to authenticate and will only accept e-mail destined for certain domains without authentication. There’s also a rise of servers that check an
SPF record
to ensure that a server is known to handle mail for a particular domain.
DKIM
goes a step further and uses a cryptographic signature.
The Weight of History
So the fact that mail rarely, these days, leaves the network or flows through an open relay, the point is that it can. Why does that matter? Let’s go back to the ship at sea problem. The server for the ship may have to encode our e-mails into some wacky format or compress it. The satellite ground station might only send e-mail via UUCP which has further processing to do. So large e-mails are more than just a network bandwidth issue. The server may have to process and convert files. SMTP, therefore, can require 7-bit ASCII which is great for text. But for anything fancier, the message (including attachments) gets encoded using something like base 64 encoding as specified by MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). This also means that your attachment is likely to get even larger after encoding.
Even a fully connected host may want to process e-mail messages. For example, it is common to check for spam or virus payloads. So even with infinite network bandwidth, there is still a processing overhead associated with large attachments.
Granted, processing power is not in short supply these days, either, but some mail servers may not be very state-of-the-art, while others may be getting hit by millions of e-mails, many of which are spam.
Ask Hackaday
How do you send large files? Should e-mail take bigger files? Do you think e-mail is on the way out? Replaced by what? How could it be easier? There are services like
WeTransfer
and
SendAnywhere
, but honestly, we are more likely to just upload a file to one of our servers and send a link that way. Then there’s always the cloud storage like Dropbox, Drive, or iCloud.
We’ve come a long way since carrier pigeons. Then again, maybe your mail is
going over that network
, too. If you want to dig even deeper into SMTP, check out the video from Iowa State University, below. | 30 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483206",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-06-13T14:15:45",
"content": "I had dialup from 1994 (BBS’s, and 1200 baud modem) to 2012 (ISP that included a shell account, 56K modem) and until 2001, Lynx, the text browser was what I used. Until 2012 I generally used Lynx,... | 1,760,372,663.628963 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/12/boot-mainline-linux-on-apple-a7-a8-and-a8x-devices/ | Boot Mainline Linux On Apple A7, A8 And A8X Devices | Arya Voronova | [
"iphone hacks",
"Linux Hacks",
"Phone Hacks",
"Reverse Engineering",
"Tablet Hacks"
] | [
"apple",
"arm",
"iphone",
"linux"
] | [Konrad Dybcio] tells about his journey
booting Linux on A7/8/8X processors,
playing around with an old iPhone 5 he’s got in a drawer. It’s been a two-year “revisit every now and then” journey, motivationally fueled by the things like
Linux on M1 Macs announcement.
In the end, what we have here is a way to boot mainline Linux on a few less-than-modern but still very usable iPhones, and a fun story about getting there.
[Konrad]’s work is based on
the Sandcastle project research,
but he couldn’t quite figure out how to make their code work, and had to make sense of it as he went. At some point, he got stuck on enabling the MMU, which was the main roadblock for a while. Joined by another developer intrigued by Apple hardware, they were hacking away at it, developing tools and neat tricks on their way, but to no avail. With the framebuffer accessible and no other decent debugging methods in sight, he tells about a code snippet they wrote that printed register values as valid barcodes
Then, looking deeper into the known-working code, he realized that
there was a single line difference
in how they loaded the Linux image. Fixing that, they got the MMU to enable! From here, the Linux hacking part ensued, and still continues, with other people pulling their old iDevices out of their respective drawers and
joining in on the fun.
Integration work
is ongoing,
with basic peripherals being brought up. Some of
the peripherals,
we
might not see working
anytime soon, but from here, it should be way easier to develop drivers and conquer these devices one-by-one.
This development should work for iPhone 5S, 6 and 6 Plus, iPod touch 6th gen, as well as iPad Air 1/2 and iPad Mini 2/3/4. Would you like to boot Linux on one of these devices in your possession? [Konrad]
shares instructions
on how to get your device from zero to a Linux bootlog on the screen;
assistance is available
but Linux experience
is desired!
If you do decide to play around with your own old iDevice, you should spend a minute or two
helping him along the way
– he is
collecting ADT files
from different iDevices, and instructions for providing one are super simple!
We haven’t seen
Linux on an iPhone
in a while – most such hacks come from 2008 or so, dying down a bit afterwards with only a few cool things like
PostmarketOS on the iPhone 7
appearing here and there. However, we hope that this
brings our smartphones a bit closer to our personal computers
when it comes to usefulness.
Took us >1 year (way too long) but,
@quaack723
and I got it working after I realized we were missing a oneliner 😎
A7-A8X.
Writeup son.
#Linux
#AsahiLinux
#checkm8
pic.twitter.com/H5A9ZA8xyf
— Konrad Dybcio ✝️ (@konradybcio)
June 1, 2022
We thank [Matthew Carlson] for sharing this with us! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483030",
"author": "zoobab",
"timestamp": "2022-06-12T17:06:56",
"content": "Android or LineageOS port on the way?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6483031",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"timestamp": "2022-06-12T... | 1,760,372,663.559199 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/12/modernizing-an-outdated-electric-vehicle-charging-station/ | Modernizing An Outdated Electric Vehicle Charging Station | Robin Kearey | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"chargepoint",
"EV charger",
"OpenEVSE"
] | One of the drawbacks of being an early adopter is that you might end up investing in equipment that becomes obsolete rather quickly. Although it’s clear that electric vehicles are here to stay, those who bought a charging station for their EV a few years ago may find it slow and incompatible with modern cars or billing networks, necessitating an upgrade to one of the latest models.
If you don’t mind tinkering, these older chargers can provide an excellent base to construct your own state-of-the-art charging station, as [James] over at Diary-of-a-Geek did. He bought a Chargepoint CT2000 series charger and
installed a brand-new charging unit inside based on OpenEVSE components
. The CT2000 is an older model that’s no longer manufactured, and although it can still connect to Chargepoint’s network, a subscription renewal would cost several thousand dollars. [James] was not willing to make that investment for a unit that he was going to install at home anyway, so he decided to buy replacement parts from OpenEVSE, a supplier of open-source EV charging stations and components.
The OpenEVSE charging controller sitting on the ChargePoint bracket
The insides of a charging station are actually pretty simple, since the real battery charger is inside the car: the station just contains a beefy contactor to switch the AC current on or off, along with some circuitry to measure the current flowing and an interface to connect to a payment network of some sort. The first step therefore was to hook up the contactor and current transformer to the OpenEVSE controller. This was easy since the new part was way smaller than the original and could simply be mounted onto an existing bracket.
The second step was to provide the user interface and network connections. [James] removed the displays and wireless systems from the head unit and cut a large hole into the front to provide space for new LCD displays. A set of status LEDs plus WiFi connections completed the system, which now looks just as professional as the original. Tests showed that the LCDs were hard to read in bright sunlight, so [James] replaced them with OLED displays, but otherwise the renovated charging station worked perfectly.
Of course, working with high voltages and large currents requires the proper skills and tools, which [James] clearly has available; he also stresses the importance of including a ground-fault circuit interruptor in any equipment placed outdoors. He isn’t the only one to
make his own charging station either.
If you’re confused by the many types of EV charging connectors, have a look at
our recent article describing all those different plugs and sockets
. Thanks for the tip, [Kevin]! | 15 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6483003",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-06-12T14:16:28",
"content": "I’m going to go check it out, but I am thinking an insulator or double the height of those standoffs are needed if that PCB is mains voltage. Maybe thei insulator is pre attached to the PCB. Here is hopin... | 1,760,372,664.094266 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/12/doom-in-your-bios-more-likely-than-you-think/ | DOOM? In Your BIOS? More Likely Than You Think! | Arya Voronova | [
"computer hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"bios",
"coreboot",
"does it run doom",
"doom",
"UEFI",
"Will It Doom?"
] | We’ve seen hackers run
DOOM
on a variety of appliances, from desk phones to pregnancy tests. Now, the final frontier has been conquered – we got
DOOM
to run on an x86 machine. Of course, making sure we utilize your PC hardware to its fullest, we have to forego an OS. Here are two ways you can run the classic shooter without the burden of gigabytes of bloated code in the background.
[nic3-14159] implemented this first
version as a payload for coreboot, which is an open-source BIOS/UEFI replacement for x86 machines. Some might say it’s imperfect — it has no sound support, only works with PS/2 keyboards, and exiting the game makes your computer freeze. However, it’s playable, and it fits into your BIOS flash chip.
But what if your computer hasn’t yet been blessed with a free BIOS replacement? You might like
this UEFI module
DOOM
port instead, originally made by [Warfish] and then built upon by [Cacodemon345]. To play this, you only need to compile the binary and an UEFI shell, then use the “Load EFI Shell” option in your UEFI menu – something that’s widely encountered nowadays. This version also lacks sound, but is a bit more fully featured due to all the facilities that UEFI provides for its payloads.
Of course there’s far more efficient ways to slay demons on your computer, but even if they aren’t necessarily practical from a gaming standpoint, these two projects serve as decent examples of Coreboot and UEFI payloads. BIOS replacements like coreboot take up so little space, we’ve even
seen Windows 3.1 fit alongside coreboot
in the BIOS chip. Wondering what UEFI is, even?
Here’s a primer for you.
And, if you don’t mind the exceptional bloat of a stripped-down Linux install, here’s a Linux image
built from the ground up to run
DOOM
specifically.
We thank [WiFiCable] for sharing this with us! | 25 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6482977",
"author": "O",
"timestamp": "2022-06-12T11:20:09",
"content": "Note that the pregnancy test doom wasn’t really true in the strict sense, it didn’t run on the pregnancy test’s hardware. The test in question had an LCD that wasn’t the normal single-purpose custom design, ins... | 1,760,372,663.989657 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/12/rc-car-repair-with-beer-can-solder-stencil/ | RC Car Repair With Beer Can Solder Stencil | Sven Gregori | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"etching",
"PCB etching",
"remote control car",
"solder stencil",
"stencil"
] | Sometimes it might seem as if your electronics are just jinxed. For [Niva_v_kopirce] it was the control board of his nephew’s RC car that kept frying the transistors. In situations like this, you can either throw it in the bin, invest your time in troubleshooting, hoping to find the error and try to fix it then, or get creative.
He chose the latter, and designed and etched a replacement board
.
Of course, etching your own PCB isn’t that noteworthy for the average Hackaday reader, although [Niva_v_kopirce] did go the extra mile and added purple solder mask to it, turning the stylishness definitely up to 11. This is also where it gets interesting, when you think of the solder mask as complementary layer for a solder paste stencil. Growing tired of manually applying solder paste, he thought to give a DIY stencil a try this time — using a beer can.
After cutting the can open and flattening it, along with some sanding, he transferred the cutouts from the solder mask onto it, and started etching holes in it. While the result may not be exactly precise, it did the job, especially for a homemade built.
Despite their convenience, stencils are still a rather exotic addition for hobbyists as they rarely pay off for a one-off project with limited SMD component usage. But maybe this was a new inspiration for you now. And if etching metal is outside your comfort zone,
cutting plastic can be an alternative
,
as well as 3d printing
. | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6482963",
"author": "Jon H",
"timestamp": "2022-06-12T09:19:07",
"content": "Someone should sell a set of punches and dies in the various solder pad footprint sizes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6482975",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,664.044715 |
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