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https://hackaday.com/2022/02/28/ethernet-tester-needs-no-leds-only-your-multimeter/ | Ethernet Tester Needs No LEDs, Only Your Multimeter | Arya Voronova | [
"Network Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"cable tester",
"continuity tester",
"ethernet",
"ethernet jack",
"hackaday.io",
"network tester"
] | Ethernet cable testers are dime a dozen, but none of them are as elegant and multimeter-friendly as
this tester from our Hackaday.io regular
, [Bharbour]. An Ethernet cable has 8 wires, and the 9 volts of easily available batteries come awfully close to that – which is why the board has a voltage divider! On the ‘sender’ end, you just plug this board onto the connector, powered by a 9 volt battery. On the “receiver” end, you take your multimeter out and measure the testpoints – TP7 should be at seven volts, TP3 at three volts, and so on.
As a result, you can easily check any of the individual wires, as opposed to many testers which only test pair-by-pair. This also helps you detect crossover and miswired cables – while firmly keeping you in the realm of real-life pin numbers! This tester is well thought-out when it comes to being easily reproducible – the PCB files are available in the “Files” section, and since the “receiver” and “sender” PCBs are identical, you only need to do a single “three PCBs” order from OSHPark in order to build your own!
Bharbour has a rich library of projects, and
we encourage you to check them out
! If you ever want to get yourself up to speed on Ethernet basics, we’ve talked
about its entire history
– and we’ve
even explained PoE!
After some intensive learning time, perhaps you can try your hand at
crimping the shortest Ethernet cable ever
. | 27 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6437486",
"author": "iamseer",
"timestamp": "2022-03-01T01:20:09",
"content": "Is this cheaper or easier to use than an offshelf product?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6437492",
"author": "Arya Voronova",
"ti... | 1,760,372,776.521826 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/28/old-portable-tv-becomes-unique-crt-cyberdeck/ | Old Portable TV Becomes Unique CRT Cyberdeck | Dan Maloney | [
"Cyberdecks"
] | [
"cathode ray tube",
"crt",
"cyberdeck",
"luggable",
"portable",
"raspberry pi",
"tv"
] | Remember the “suitcase” form-factor for PCs? In the time before latops, these luggable machines were just the thing for the on-the-go executive. OK, maybe not really — but the ability to have PC, monitor, and peripherals in a single package had real appeal, and a lot of that rationale is behind the cyberdeck phenomenon. So when we saw
this retro portable TV turned into a cyberdeck
, it really caught our eye.
Ironically, the portable black-and-white TV that [Lucas Dul] chose as the basis for his cyberdeck hails from about the same period in time that luggable PCs were having their brief time in the sun. Scored from eBay, the Magnavox TV/radio combo had seen better days, and required a bit of surgery to repair what might have been drop damage. With the CRT restored and the video and audio paths located, the TV got a Raspberry Pi, a small touchpad, and a couple of concealed USB connectors. The Pi’s composite output drives the CRT, with about the results you’d expect. The keyboard appears to be just about the right size to serve as a cover, but [Lucas] said that’s a future project.
Still, with the TV’s original handle acting as a stand, this cyberdeck gives off a real Compaq or IBM portable PC vibe. We’ve seen a few
luggable-lookalike cyberdecks
before, but none that dared use a CRT monitor. It may be a far cry from HDMI, but we really appreciate that [Lucas] chose this way rather than slapping in an LCD.
Thanks for the tip, [Brian Goode]. | 10 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6437165",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2022-02-28T21:15:15",
"content": "‘Compag’? What’s that?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6437222",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2022-02-28T21:34:48",
"content": "... | 1,760,372,776.339047 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/28/swap-the-laser-for-a-vortex-cannon-and-you-have-lift/ | Swap The Laser For A Vortex Cannon And You Have… Lift? | Matthew Carlson | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"iteration",
"propulsion",
"vortex cannon",
"vortex tube"
] | When people are thinking of the future of space travel, an idea that floats around is a spaceship with a giant solar sail pushed along by a massive laser. Inspired by the concept but lacking a giant laser, [Tom Stanton] build
a small craft powered by a vortex cannon
.
Creating a vortex is hard enough, but creating a vortex with enough oomph to travel a longer distance and push something takes some doing. [Tom] started with some cheap solenoids, but had a few issues. Their interior nozzles were quite small, which restricted airflow. He used four valves all plumbed together to provide the volume of air needed. Additionally, he found that their response time was lacking. They couldn’t quite switch off quickly enough so instead of a puff of air, it pushed out something closer to a stream. To compensate, [Tom] 3d printed and tried a few different sizes of cone nozzles to see if that helped. Unfortunately, it did not. So he combined the nozzle with an expansion chamber that allowed the pressure wave to shorten, then it narrows to speed it up again. This provided a decent vortex.
Next [Tom] turned to his craft. After designing a 3d model, he had a template to cut out some shapes from paper and taped them together to form a light vehicle that can capture the vortex. The initial tests weren’t too promising as the craft twisted and the string that it traveled on had too much friction. Switching to a vertical test showed more promise but trying to generate multiple vortexes rapidly was unsuccessful as the turbulence from the previous rings broke up the newer rings.
So what’s to be learned from this? It seems like he doesn’t have much to show. [Tom] tweaked and iterated his way to a working vortex cannon and has continued to refine his craft. Hopefully, in the future, we’ll see a fully-functional version of this. The lesson is to keep enumerating the possibilities. Like
this webcam based posture sensor iterating its way to success
. Video after the break. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6436795",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2022-02-28T19:16:52",
"content": "Who is “[Sam]”? Shouldn’t that be “[Tom]”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6438970",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "202... | 1,760,372,776.378746 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/28/3d-printering-giants/ | 3D Printering: Giants | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"3D printers",
"large 3d prints"
] | Newton famously said, “If I see further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” For 3D printing, though, it might be the reverse. If a printer prints larger than others, it is probably using work developed for smaller printers. There are a variety of very large 3D printers out there now and you frequently see claims in the press of “world’s largest 3D printer.”
Roboze
, for example,
makes that claim
with a build volume of 1 meter on each axis.
Not to dispute them, but depending on your definitions, there are FDM printers with bigger volume capacity. There are also many other machines claiming roughly the same size, from 3D Platform’s
WORKBENCH XTREME
to the re:3D
Terabot
. Of course, all of these come with a large price. But we’ve even seen a
homebrew printer
with an 800 mm x 500 mm bed. In addition,
infinite bed printers
are not that uncommon, although they do have some limitations. In particular, they are usually only large on one axis.
Then there are the big industrial machines that print things like
houses
, bridges, and boats. The University of Maine, for example, has
a big printer
that has a 100-foot bed and prints about 500 pounds of plastic an hour! All that for only 2.5 million dollars. You can see in the video below that part cooling is done in a rather unique way on that printer.
The Problems
It is easy to think that if you can make a printer that can print the size of a postcard, you should be able to scale it up to the size of a poster board without too much trouble. But that’s not the case. Let’s focus on cartesian-style printers.
You basically have a few choices. You can move the bed around, you can move the print head around, or you can have a combination. For example, many printers move the head in the X and Z direction and then move the bed in the Y direction. Others move the bed in the Z direction and move the head in X and Y. This last scheme is especially popular for core XY mechanics.
So let’s start with the bed. If it moves, a big bed will be heavy. It is also harder to get a nice flat bed as it gets bigger. That’s OK. Just keep the bed still other than in the Z axis, then, right? It also probably requires heating. If you’ve ever had a cheap printer with an underpowered supply, you know that even getting a 150 mm bed hot can be a challenge. Unlike the heat block, you are trying to get a pretty large area that radiates heat to stay warm. When you multiply the size, you multiply that problem. To reduce the load on the power supply, maybe opt for an AC heater.
The bed has to support more weight, too. Granted, for any reasonably sized printer, the extra plastic isn’t likely to be too heavy, but if you were making something giant or printing in a dense material (like concrete) that could be another problem. Besides, we’ve seen a
3D printed part weigh in at over 1,500 pounds
already, so think big. Also, if the bed moves in the Z axis, that system has to lift the bigger bed with the heavier heaters onboard.
Speaking of beds, levelling a large bed will be even more touchy than it is today, although auto-leveling can help with that. Another thing that may be worse is warping. Larger parts will have more force as they contract.
Rigidity
A non-moving bed will be easier to brace up, but you still have the mechanism to support the head. Some very small printers use a cantilevered arm to hold the printhead, but even most normal-sized printers support both ends. At some point, the head is going to need larger rails or rods or whatever you are using to support it.
Of course, any alignment issues magnify as you get larger, too. That 0.5 mm deviation at 200 mm will be a lot wider at 1 meter. Errors of any sort will add up, of course. A small wobble on a Z-axis rod or a bit of slip on a belt will add up as travel increases.
Hot End Woes
Assuming you aren’t going to do something strange like break the print bed into zones, you also need to consider the hot end. We already don’t like waiting for 3D prints on our normal printers. A giant printer probably needs a larger nozzle and very high flow rates to increase the print speed. But that takes more temperature. Some of the newer hotends are made for high flow and even heating, but this will be a bigger concern with a very large printer. But consider the University of Maine’s printer. It uses a 10 mm nozzle to produce 12.5 mm lines in 5 mm layers.
Speaking of high flow, if you are really shooting for a large object, there is another concern: material supply. If you are feeding a spool, will it run out? Again, the huge printer takes pellets which makes sense. You just have to keep the hopper full.
One answer, of course, is to
use more than one hotend
, although that has its own set of problems. We saw a 5-head machine back in 2017.
Design Trades
Making tradeoffs is a fundamental part of engineering. We want safe cars, but an indestructible car would be expensive to buy and operate. So you make tradeoffs. The same goes for the design of a supersized printer.
A very large printer made as part of a Master’s thesis.
Of course, we’ve already made one fundamental decision that you could revisit: we are using a normal FDM printer. A
robot arm
or SCARA printer would be another option, although you’d just have a different set of tradeoffs to make. There is no perfect solution. Maybe really large printers will be mobile robots that straddle their
ad hoc
build plate, rising from the ground or descending from above?
What are your plans for making a giant printer? If you want detailed inspiration, there is this Master’s thesis that details the building
of a large printer
. The cost was a few thousand dollars, but that included some donated material. Of course, your current printer can print huge objects. Just
not all in one go
. Whatever you do, be sure to
let us know
so we can help you share your design. | 17 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6436585",
"author": "Dan Beaven",
"timestamp": "2022-02-28T18:11:11",
"content": "I made this one in 2016. It was a challenge, but great learning experience.https://3dprintzothar.blogspot.com/2016/11/big-fn-3d-printer.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,776.443419 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/27/hackaday-links-february-27-2022/ | Hackaday Links: February 27, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"Atmel",
"AVR32",
"drm",
"dymo",
"fast food",
"hackaday links",
"NFC",
"raspberry pi",
"restaurant",
"rfid",
"robotics",
"SBC",
"welding"
] | If there’s one thing that can trigger people, it’s the printer racket. Printer manufacturers who put DRM-like features into their consumables are rightly viewed as Satan’s spawn, and while these monsters have been content so far to only put digital rights management features into their ink and toner cartridges, they appear to
now have their rapacious gaze set on print media
too. At least according to the good folks over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who claim that Dymo’s latest generation of label printers will have RFID tags in the label cartridges, apparently to prevent consumers from buying non-Dymo media. The company doesn’t bill it as a way to lock you into their exorbitantly priced consumables, of course; rather, this is an exciting new feature that’s called “Automatic Label Recognition,” which keeps track of what labels are installed and how many are left. Of course, this is just red meat to people like us, and we fully expect to see workarounds in the not-to-distant future.
Also from the “The Welcome to the Dystopian Future” files, White Castle, the chain that literally invented the fast-food restaurant, has announced that they’ll be
deploying 100 robotic cooks
to stores beginning soon. Ironically, the track-mounted robot arm, which is dubbed Flippy 2, will not be making the company’s iconic sliders on the flattop; rather, it looks like they’ll be stuck making the fries. Flippy 2 is made by Miso Robotics, and basically amounts to a robotic work cell dedicated to fried foods, but it’s easy to see how this could encroach on other parts of the kitchen. But it makes sense to start here, since the fry station is dirty, dull, and often dangerous work with a high turnover rate. We’d just hate to be the field service tech who has to fix these greasy, nasty things when they break.
Remember the bad old days before you could buy a full-featured single-board computer that can run Linux for a just couple of bucks? We sure do, and present supply chain issues notwithstanding, the Raspberry Pi and similar machines have literally changed the world. But way back in 2007, what counted as a Linux SBC was something else entirely, and
taking a look under the (figurative) hood
shows just how far we’ve come. The Atmel NGW100 had an AVR32, ran at a whopping 140 MHz, and 32 MB of SDRAM. In a sign of the times, it still sported a D-sub RS-232 serial port, and looks like it was about twice the size of the original Raspberry Pi. But hey, it worked — and still does, according to the blog entry. Cool stuff.
Speaking of cool stuff, we got a tip about something that we don’t quite know what to make of, but we’re pretty certain could be incredibly useful. It’s called
Deck in a Box
, and it’s an online parametric design tool for custom boxes for decks of cards. We’d imagine the main use case is to make boxes for custom decks used in
Magic: The Gathering
, but the clever hacker could find so many more uses for this tool. Depending on the style of box you’re designing, it outputs either an SVG, PDF, or DXF file, suitable for sending to a laser cutter or a CNC with a drag knife. There’s also an option to design 3D-printable “token trays,” which could just as easily be custom parts trays or enclosures. Check it out — it’s pretty slick.
And finally, while normally we steer clear of politics here at Hackaday. we can’t help but poke a little fun at
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s trifecta of political errors
the other day. It wasn’t the fact that he missed a military commemoration ceremony that attracted our attention, nor was it violating the rule for politicians to never wear a funny hat, which in this case was a welding hood. But when Morrison decided to raise the hood while striking an arc during a welding lesson, well, that got our attention. We’ve all done it by mistake, but that freeze-frame at 00:35 is just painful to look at. | 15 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435785",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2022-02-28T00:12:49",
"content": "As for the Grand Wizard of Oz, well it just goes to show you that people go into politics because they don’t have the brains for a real job.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,372,776.289859 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/27/esp32-virtual-machine-lets-you-change-programs-on-the-fly/ | ESP32 Virtual Machine Lets You Change Programs On The Fly | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"CHIP-8",
"ESP32",
"microcontroller"
] | Often, reprogramming a microcontroller involves placing it in reset, flashing the code, and letting it fire back up. It usually involves shutting the chip down entirely. However, [bor0] has built a virtual machine that runs on the ESP32,
allowing for dynamic program updates to happen.
The code is inspired by the
CHIP-8,
a relatively ancient interpreter that had some gaming applications. [bor0] had already created a VM simulating the CHIP-8, and repurposed it here, taking out the gaming-related drawing instructions and replacing them with those that control IO pins. Registers have also been changed to 16 bits for added flexibility and headroom.
It’s probably not something with immediate ground-breaking applications for most people, but it’s a different way of working with and programming the ESP32, and that’s pretty neat.
The ESP32 is a powerful chip, too, as we all know –
and it makes a great 8-bit emulator to boot.
Sound off in the comments with your thoughts on what would make a killer application for the ESP32 VM!
[Thanks to satancete for the tip!] | 30 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435762",
"author": "Paula",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T21:31:16",
"content": "Wasn’t it QNX that advertised that they could update any part of the system (even kernel modules) without rebooting?Some time in the last millennium that was true. Post-RIMM/Blackberry? Dunno.",
"pare... | 1,760,372,776.236316 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/27/need-to-probe-circuits-remember-about-clothespins/ | Need To Probe Circuits? Remember About Clothespins! | Arya Voronova | [
"Lifehacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"clothespins",
"connector hacks",
"debugging tools",
"probes"
] | After browsing Thingiverse for some printable PCB probe designs, [Henry York] looked around and found a wooden clothespin on his desk. After some collaboration between his 3D printer and his CNC, Henry
graced us with a nifty helper tool design
that many of us might want to make in a pinch – a small, cheap and easy to make PCB probe, for circuits where soldering and headers are out of the question. Small magnets are glued to the clothespin, holding it flush to a magnetizable work surface (aka a toaster tray), and the probing itself is done by an extruder cleaning needle end. 3D printer and Edge.Cuts files are shared with us – thanks to Henry’s helpfulness, it should be easy to repeat if ever needed!
[Tyler Rosonke] (
@zonksec
) was programming a batch of badges and
needed a reliable way to attach to a 6-pin ISP header
– without actually soldering to the badges before they’re handed out to participants! A clothespin materialized nearby yet again – most likely, channeled from a different dimension by the spirit of numerous acrylic-cast pogopin-toothed clip-on tools we scroll by on Aliexpress. With a small perfboard piece and a bunch of pogopins jumping out of their respective drawers, it became no longer necessary to hold a bundle of male-ended pin header wires at a weird angle while nervously looking at the
avrdude
progress bar. This ended up saving a whole lot of time, something that’s always best spent on adding insidious bugs to the badge firmware (as well as, perhaps, easter eggs).
We’d love to hear about all the small hacks and improvements that you, hackers in our audience, invent. Whether it’s
reusing a SOIC flashing clip
for ISP programming or
printing yourself an octopus-like contraption with needle probes
, you should
share it with us
! | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435749",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T18:57:03",
"content": "Wooden clothespins are also a great soldering aid if you reverse the spring so that the flat ends press together. Cut one side shorter and it works well to keep through-hole pin headers and connectors in plac... | 1,760,372,776.628437 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/27/teaching-you-everything-you-might-have-missed-about-addressable-leds/ | Teaching You Everything You Might Have Missed About Addressable LEDs | Arya Voronova | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"addressable led",
"apa102",
"led",
"neopixel",
"RGB LED",
"sk6812",
"sk9822",
"ws2812",
"ws2812b",
"WS2813"
] | Often, financial motivation results in people writing great educational material for hackers. Such is absolutely the case with
this extensive documentation blog post on addressable LEDs
by [DeRun]. This article could very be named “Addressable LEDs 101”, and it’s a must-scroll-through for anyone, whether you’re a seasoned hacker, or an artist with hardly any technical background and a desire to put LEDs in your creations.
This blog post is easy to read, painting a complete picture of what you can expect from different addressable LED types, and with apt illustrations to boot. Ever wonder which one of the addressable strips you should get from your retailer of choice, and what are the limitations of any specific type? Or, perhaps, you’d like to know – why is it that a strip with a certain LED controller is suspiciously cheap or expensive? You’re more than welcome to, at least, scroll through and fill into any of your addressable LED knowledge gaps, whether it’s voltage drops, color accuracy differences, data transfer protocol basics or dead LED failsafes.
Addressable LEDs have a special place in our hearts, it’s as if the sun started shining brighter after we’ve discovered them… or, perhaps, it’s all the LEDs we are now able to use. WS2812 is a staple of the addressable LED world, which is why we see them even be targets of both
clone manufacturers
and
patent trolls
. However, just like the blog post we highlight today mentions,
there’s plenty of other options
. Either way do keep coming cover a new addressable LED-related hack, like
rewriting their drivers
to optimize them, or
adding 3.3V compatibility
with just a diode.
We thank [Helge] for sharing this with us! | 11 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435732",
"author": "Jeff Brown",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T16:43:43",
"content": "Good stuff! About a year ago, I rewrote a chunk of the FadeCandy firmware to overclock my SK6812 (a better WS2812B clone) LEDs to support temporal dithering of larger LEDs matrices at higher frequenci... | 1,760,372,776.076183 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/27/retro-and-new-tech-combine-in-this-hybrid-ham-transmitter/ | Retro And New Tech Combine In This Hybrid Ham Transmitter | Dan Maloney | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"12A6",
"amateur radio",
"ATmega88",
"ham",
"QRP",
"radio",
"SI5351",
"transmitter",
"vacuum tube",
"valve"
] | We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the best part about holding an amateur radio license is that it lets you build and use your own transmitting equipment. Hams have been doing this for more than a century — indeed, it was once the only way to get on the air — using whatever technology was available. But the mix of technologies in
this low-power transmitter for the 80-meter band
is something you don’t see every day.
As ham [Helge Fykse (LA6NCA)] describes in the video below, the project began when he came into possession of a bonanza of vacuum tubes — 12A6 tetrodes, specifically. The new-old-stock tubes were perfect for an RF power amplifier, but that left the problem of what to use for an oscillator. [Helge] chose to meld the old with the new and used oscillator board that he designed. The board has an ATmega88 microcontroller and an Si5351 oscillator, along with a 3V3 regulator to let the module run on 12 volts. And for a nice retro touch, [Helge] put the board in a 3D printed case that looks like an old-fashioned quartz crystal.
There are some other nice design touches here too. A low-pass filter cleans up the harmonics of the oscillator’s 3.5-MHz square wave output before feeding it to the amplifier, in a nod to proper spectrum hygiene. The primary for the amp’s air-core output transformer is hand-wound, with 3D printed spacers to keep the winding neat and even. The tuning process shown below is interesting, and the transmitter was used to make a solid contact with another ham about 100 km away. And we really liked the look of [Helge]’s shack, stuffed as it is with gear both old and new.
We’ve personally tried
the Si5351 for QRP transmitters
before, but this blend of the old and new really makes us want to find some tubes and get to playing.
Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip. | 9 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435701",
"author": "RÖB",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T12:52:43",
"content": "Not bad for one pentode given that the voltage out of the VCXO isn’t more than 3v3. I’ll bet there was some “tuning” of component values to keep the pentode away from idle and saturation. Oscillators never do... | 1,760,372,776.578294 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/27/allspice-building-a-hardware-development-ecosystem-for-companies/ | AllSpice Building A Hardware Development Ecosystem For Companies | Arya Voronova | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"collaboration",
"distributed engineering",
"github",
"hardware development"
] | In our “hardware development gets serious” news, we’ve
recently learned about AllSpice
, a startup building hardware development collaboration infrastructure for companies. Hardware developers are great at building hardware tools for themselves, but perhaps not always so when it comes to software, and AllSpice aims to fill that gap at the “hardware company” level. Nowadays, what commonly happens is that software development tools and integrations are repurposed for hardware needs, and the results aren’t always as stellar as they get in the software world. In other words, AllSpice is learning from the positive outcomes of software industry and building a platform that takes the best parts from these tools, aiming to get to similarly positive outcomes in areas where currently hardware team experiences are lacking.
What AllSpice is building seems to be an umbrella platform designed to augment, integrate and hook into a slew of different already-developed platforms like GitHub, GitLab, Jira (and some other ones), and add much-needed features that large-scale hardware developers can’t afford to maintain and develop themselves. “Design review by screenshot” isn’t unheard of in hardware circles, and likely a thing that everyone of us with hardware collaboration experience has partaken in. On a company scale, there’s a myriad of hardware-related problems like that to solve and polish over.
When trying to scale your project into a product, you might eventually find yourself in a team of people all working on the same hardware project. In collaboration like that, there’s a simple principle – you need to have tools that improve communication among all the people involved, and having a platform that’s hardware-tailored is paramount for that, especially when your product grows into a slew of different revisions and SKUs. Just like GitHub has integrations for compiling and testing your code when someone sends you a pull request, the tools we use for collaborative hardware development should keep track of our BOM, PCB and schematic changes in a developer-friendly way. If this project doesn’t grow into a platform that us mere mortal hackers can use, we shall hope it at least it becomes influential enough to positively influence the tools we currently use for our hardware collaboration needs.
We cover collaboratively developed products every now and then, and there was even a
“developed on Hackaday” series
at some point! An ever-popular example of collaborative design project are conference badges, each one typically a fruit of many people’s labor. Talking about the “growing into a product” aspects, an unexpected number of us hackers make a living from that, either
through selling on Tindie
or through
otherwise going big with our products
.
What are your hardware collaboration experiences? Any pain points you have discovered the hard way, either as a hobbyist or as an engineer?
Thanks to [Flagg] for sharing this with us! | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435721",
"author": "Dave B.",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T15:57:10",
"content": "When I looked at this last (month? Weeks?) there was no support for Eagle or KiCAD files. It’s very corporate i.e. Altium oriented. They do publish their visual PCB diff tool which integrates with a git... | 1,760,372,776.671144 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/26/bionic-implants-can-go-obsolete-and-unsupported-too/ | Bionic Implants Can Go Obsolete And Unsupported, Too | Lewin Day | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"eyeball",
"eyes",
"implant",
"medical",
"medical implant",
"medicine",
"neural implant",
"retinal implant"
] | When a piece of hardware goes unsupported by a company, it can be frustrating. Bugs may no longer get fixed, or in the worst cases, perfectly good hardware can stop working entirely as software licences time out. Sadly, for a group reliant on retinal implants from company Second Sight,
the company has since stopped producing and supporting the devices that give them a crude form of bionic sight.
The devices themselves consist of electrodes implanted into the retina, which can send signals to the nervous system which appear as spots of light to the user. A camera feed is used to capture images which are then translated into signals sent to the retinal electrodes. The results are low-resolution to say the least, and the vision supplied is crude, but it gives users that are blind a rudimentary sense that they never had before. It’s very much a visual equivalent to the cochlear implant technology.
The story is altogether too familiar; Second Sight Medical Products came out with a cutting-edge device, raised money and put it out into the world, only to go bankrupt down the road, leaving its users high and dry. Over 350 people have the implants fitted in one eye, while one Terry Byland is the sole person to have implants in both his left and right eyeballs. Performance of the device was mixed, with some users raving about the device while others questioned its utility.
However, all the users of Second Sight implants are now on their own. Any failure or issue will go unrectified, as the company and its staff no longer exist to support or service the implants or associated hardware. For some, the implants still work. For others, like Barbara Campbell, the device simply powered down one day and has left her without sight ever since. Medical problems can crop up too – one patient was unable to get an MRI as doctors couldn’t secure information on the device after the company collapsed.
It’s a sobering tale of what can happen when
a tech company goes out of business.
It’s a story that bears thinking about for anyone taking on a medical device from a new, untested company. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Ben and Adrian for the tip!] | 33 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435659",
"author": "Greg Garriss",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T07:27:03",
"content": "Sadly, a lot of biotech companies rarely have the resources to take such really cutting edge stuff much past the working prototype stage. They find initial test subjects to waiver the installs and ho... | 1,760,372,776.739744 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/26/60-pc-oscilloscope-review/ | $60 PC Oscilloscope Review | Al Williams | [
"Reviews"
] | [
"hantek",
"oscilloscope",
"review"
] | Owning an oscilloscope is a real gamechanger and these days, scopes are more capable and less expensive than ever before. However, there is a big difference between scopes that cost several hundred dollars which are usually quite good and many of the very inexpensive — below $100 — instruments that are often — but not always — little more than toys. [Adrian] looks at a
PC-based scope from Hantek
that costs about $60. Is it a toy? Or a useful tool? He answers the question in the video below.
The Hantek 6022BE sports two channels with a 20 MHz bandwidth and 48 million samples per second. The device included probes, too. Of course, you also need a PC, although there is apparently third-party software for
Android
if you don’t want to lug a laptop around.
With two channels and relatively low bandwidth and sample rates, this Hantek is not going to displace a good benchtop scope, but you aren’t going to get one of those at this price point. The question you have to ask yourself is what do you actually need? In [Adrian’s] case, he wants to work on things like Commodore 64 computers, so 20MHz should be just fine for that sort of thing.
The software looks a bit dated, but it does have a lot of features you’d find on traditional scopes. The triggering, however, wasn’t very capable but since the device uses USB2, you can guess that the triggering is all happening in the device which probably can’t handle anything too complex. The results matched fairly well with a more capable instrument that [Adrian] had on hand.
The verdict? [Adrian] thought it was probably worth the money, but did wish for some things to be better. Many commenters, however, urged him to try unofficial software for the device which is supposed to be much better. We weren’t that interested in the device as an oscilloscope, but given that the protocol is apparently understood, we wondered if it might not find a home as a cheap data acquisition module in some future project.
We’ve seen reviews of
Hantek’s scope meter
recently. We are always on the lookout for what kind of scope you can get for
under $100
. | 46 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435638",
"author": "A.J. Lenze",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T04:49:39",
"content": "In Adrian’s next video, “Guide to using inexpensive tools to diagnose and fix old computers”, he uses the cheap Hantek scope with (better) OpenHantek software to fix a broken Commodore 64. (Oh the mem... | 1,760,372,776.980402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/26/heres-how-those-battery-free-flashing-phone-stickers-worked/ | Here’s How Those Battery-Free Flashing Phone Stickers Worked | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"cellphone",
"gsm",
"phone"
] | The late 90s and early 2000s were a breakout time for mobile phones, with cheap GSM handsets ushering in the era in which pretty much everybody had a phone. Back then, a popular way to customize one’s phone was to install a sticker that would flash when the phone rang. These required no batteries or any other connection to the phone,
and [Big Clive] has dived in to explain how they worked.
The simple schematic of the flashing sticker circuit. The flashing was generated by the pulses of RF energy from the smartphone.
It’s an old-fashioned teardown that requires a bit of cutting to get inside the sticker itself. A typical example had three LEDs in series for a total voltage drop of around 7V, hooked up to two diodes and a PCB trace antenna. A later evolution used raw unpackaged components bonded to the PCB. Future versions went down to a single diode, using the LEDs to serve as the second. The basic theory was that the PCB traces would pick up RF transmitted by the phone when a call was coming in, lighting the LEDs.
In the 2G era, the freuqencies used were on the order of 300 MHz to 1.9GHz. A combination of the change in frequencies used by modern phone technology and the lower transmit powers used by handsets means that the stickers don’t work properly with modern phones according to [Big Clive].
Incidentally, you might like to consider running
your own old-school cellphone network.
Video after the break.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVmLyladBy8
[Thank to Zane Atkins for the tip!] | 27 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435615",
"author": "Frequency Slip?",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T00:36:14",
"content": "freuqencies?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6435616",
"author": "Been Grabau",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T00:49:54",
... | 1,760,372,777.04562 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/26/3d-printed-climbing-holds-now-with-texture/ | 3D Printed Climbing Holds, Now With Texture | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"climbing",
"diy",
"grip",
"resin",
"rock climbing",
"salt",
"soluble",
"texture",
"wall"
] | Technology enables all kinds of possibilities to mold our environments in the way we best see fit. Plenty of ski resorts use snowmaking to extend their seasons, there are wave pools for surfing hundreds of miles away from oceans, and if you don’t live near any mountains you can build your own climbing wall as well. For the latter, many have turned to 3D printers to create more rock-like climbing grips but plastic doesn’t tend to behave the same as rock unless you do what [Giles Barton-Owen] did
and incorporate salt into the prints.
For small manufacturers, typically the way that the rock texture is mimicked is by somehow incorporating sand, permanently, into the grip itself. This works well enough but is often too rough on climbers’ hands or otherwise doesn’t faithfully replicate a rock climbing experience. For these grips, instead of including sand, salt crystals of a particular size were added to a resin that was formed over the 3D printed grip. Once the resin cures substantially, the water-soluble salt can be washed away leaving a perfect texture to grab onto with chalked hands.
While this might not be a scalable method for large-scale climbing grip manufacturers, [Giles] hopes this method will help smaller operations or
even DIY climbers
to build more realistic grips without having to break the bank. In fact, he has already found some success at his local climbing gym using these grips. The method may be more difficult to scale for larger manufacturers but for anyone who wants to try it out themselves, all that’s needed for this build is a 3D printer, salt, and time. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435594",
"author": "The",
"timestamp": "2022-02-26T21:35:58",
"content": "…and resin",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6435622",
"author": "Giles Barton-Owen",
"timestamp": "2022-02-27T01:21:57",
"conten... | 1,760,372,777.088029 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/26/3d-printed-mechanical-contraption-shows-live-weather-forecast/ | 3D Printed Mechanical Contraption Shows Live Weather Forecast | Robin Kearey | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino MKR",
"automaton",
"weather display"
] | “What’s the weather going to be like today?” is a question that’s near-permanently on the mind of those living in places like Britain, where brilliant sunshine can follow thick clouds, only to turn into drizzle an hour later. Nowadays you simply need to glance at your phone to know whether you need to pack an umbrella, but where’s the fun in that? Why not have a huge mechanical display to show you a summary of today’s weather?
As a fan of automatons and other contraptions filled with gears and pulleys,
[Mike] decided to build just such a machine
for his latest
Mikey Makes
video. It uses brightly coloured indicators inspired by the BBC’s famous “fluffy cloud” symbols that can show various combinations of sunshine, clouds, rain and snow. These symbols are moved around by dozens of gears, levers, swinging arms and other moving parts which were all 3D printed. We especially like the system that folds out rays of sunshine from behind the cloud; you can see it working in the video embedded below.
Live weather data is fetched through an open weather API by an Arduino MKR WiFi 1010. This then drives the mechanical system through a pair of motor driver ICs. The heavy work is performed by stepper motors and servos, while micro-switches and optical detectors determine the end point of each movement.
If you’re into weather displays, you’re in luck: we’ve featured many different styles over the years, including
e-paper screens
,
analog gauges
,
split-flap displays
and even a
miniature recreation of the local weather
. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435568",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2022-02-26T18:40:13",
"content": "Reminds me, does anyone remember the music that was on the music television weather forecast some time in the 90’s? It had pictures of falling umbrellas and clouds – I guess it was the BBC weather forecast, ... | 1,760,372,777.127996 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/26/you-break-it-we-fix-it/ | You Break It, We Fix It | Elliot Williams | [
"Rants",
"Security Hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"Apple AirTag",
"hacking",
"privacy",
"public service",
"security"
] | Apple’s AirTags have caused a stir, but for all the wrong reasons. First, they turn all iPhones into Bluetooth LE beacon repeaters, without the owner’s permission. The phones listen for the AirTags, encrypt their location, and send the data on to the iCloud, where the tag’s owner can decrypt the location and track it down. Bad people have figured out that this lets them
track their targets
without their knowledge, turning all iPhone users into potential accomplices to stalkings, or worse.
Naturally, Apple has tried to respond by
implementing some privacy-protecting features
. But they’re imperfect to the point of being almost useless. For instance, AirTags now beep once they’ve been out of range of their owner’s phone for a while, which would surely alert the target that they’re being tracked, right? Well, unless the evil-doer took the speaker out, or bought one with the speaker already removed — and there’s a surprising market for these online.
If you want to know that you’re being traced, Apple “innovated with the first-ever proactive system to alert you of unwanted tracking”, which almost helped patch up the problem they created, but it only runs on Apple phones. It’s not clear what they meant by “first-ever” because hackers and researchers from the SeeMoo group at the Technical University of Darmstadt beat them to it by at least four months with the
open-source AirGuard project
that runs on the other 75% of phones out there.
Along the way, the SeeMoo group also
reverse engineered the AirTag system
, allowing anything that can send BLE beacons to play along. This opened the door for [Fabian Bräunlein]’s
ID-hopping “Find You” attack
that breaks all of the tracker-detectors by using an ESP32 instead of an AirTag. His basic point is that most of the privacy guarantees that Apple is trying to make on the “Find My” system rely on criminals using unmodified AirTags, and that’s not very likely.
To be fair, Apple can’t win here. They want to build a tracking network where only the good people do the tracking. But the device can’t tell if you’re looking for your misplaced keys or
stalking a swimsuit model
. It can’t tell if you’re silencing it because you don’t want it beeping around your dog’s neck while you’re away at work, or because you’ve planted it on a luxury car that you’d like to lift when its owners are away. There’s no technological solution for that fundamental problem.
But hackers are patching up the holes they can, and making the other holes visible, so that we can at least have a reasonable discussion about the tech’s tradeoffs. Apple seems content to have naively opened up a Pandora’s box of privacy violation. Somehow it’s up to us to figure out a way to close it.
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 45 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435546",
"author": "Olivier",
"timestamp": "2022-02-26T15:37:10",
"content": "Whatever happened to those keychains that would beep if you clapped? that was 100x better then this privacy drama waiting to get even worse. Also a lot cheaper.Cant say im surprised though, with all due r... | 1,760,372,777.512535 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/26/solving-wordle-by-adding-machine-vision-to-a-3d-printer/ | SolvingWordleBy Adding Machine Vision To A 3D Printer | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"3d printer",
"camera",
"machine vision",
"open cv",
"python",
"raspberry pi",
"smartphone",
"stylus",
"Wordle"
] | Truth be told, we haven’t jumped on the
Wordle
bandwagon yet, mainly because we don’t need to be provided with yet another diversion — we’re more than capable of finding our own rabbit holes to fall down, thank you very much. But the word puzzle does look intriguing, and since the rules and the interface are pretty simple, it’s no wonder we’ve seen a few efforts like
this automated
Wordle
solver
crop up lately.
The goal of
Wordle
is to find a specific five-letter, more-or-less-common English word in as few guesses as possible. Clues are given at each turn in the form of color-coding the letters to indicate whether they appear in the word and in what order. [iamflimflam1]’s approach was to attach a Raspberry Pi camera over the bed of a 3D printer and attach a phone stylus in place of the print head. A phone running
Wordle
is placed on the printer bed, and Open CV is used to find both the screen of the phone, as well as the position of the phone on the printer bed. From there, the robot uses the stylus to enter an opening word, analyzes the colors of the boxes, and narrows in on a solution.
The video below shows the bot in use, and
source code is available
if you want to try it yourself. If you need a deeper dive into
Wordle
solving algorithms, and indeed other variant puzzles in the *dle space, check out
this recent article on reverse engineering the popular game
.
Thanks to [Gene] for the tip. | 19 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435545",
"author": "jwrm22",
"timestamp": "2022-02-26T15:31:07",
"content": "Certainly a nice approach for any Computer Vision project that requires an XYZ table. These have become so accessible it’s great, the best thing is that the printer parts don’t even need to work, making it... | 1,760,372,777.429066 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/26/3d-printed-cpu-bracket-reduces-temperatures/ | 3D Printed CPU Bracket Reduces Temperatures | Al Williams | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"cpu heatsink",
"heatsink",
"lga1700"
] | What do you do when your motherboard bends your CPU? If you’re [Karta] or [Luumi], you
3D print a new retaining bracket to fix the problem
. [Karta] originated the design, and [Luumi] also tried it and produced the video you can see below.
We think we find flat surfaces all the time, but it is actually very difficult to create something truly flat. You usually learn this when you try to maximize heat transfer between two surfaces. Getting two supposedly flat surfaces to touch is quite hard. CPU brackets use a combination of pressure and some sort of thermal media or paste to fill in any gaps between the CPU case and the heat sink. Intel’s LGA1700 bracket is an example, but there’s been a problem. Apparently, with recent CPUs, the bracket is a little too tight, and it bends the CPU’s case. It doesn’t hurt the CPU, but it does inhibit thermal transfer.
Others have “fixed” this problem by adding some washers to slightly raise the bracket. In both cases, there has been some very small improvement in CPU temperatures. [Luumi] says part of the problem is his water cooling block is not completely flat and needs to be lapped. [Karta], however, reported a 7 degree drop in temperatures, which is pretty significant.
We love seeing how 3D printing can
fix or improve
things you own. They talk a lot about lapping in the video, and, in some cases, people actually risk
lapping the IC die itself
to make it flatter. It can help, but the risk is relatively high and the gain is relatively low. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435512",
"author": "Oliver",
"timestamp": "2022-02-26T09:40:47",
"content": "Hmm, heat, plastic stiffness. Somehow I feel this won’t work forever? Even with water cooling you can get the temps in the low 60C to which certain plastics become soft …",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,372,777.374513 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/drift-trike-puts-a-new-spin-on-things-with-ice-wheels/ | Drift Trike Puts A New Spin On Things With Ice Wheels | Matthew Carlson | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"drift trike",
"pykrete"
] | A drift trike is a small sturdy tricycle with a powered front wheel and rear wheels with low friction so that you can drift. They’re fun but there are tons of them. Nowadays, if you want to make your own drift trike that stands out, you have to put your own spin on it. And in terms of extra spin, what better way to do it,
than to use ice for the wheels
. [Sam Barker] started by breaking down an old used BMX bike. A front-wheel hub motor wasn’t available so he had to make some modifications to use his rear-wheel one as a front wheel. After tweaking the seat to put more weight on the front wheel for better traction, it was time to get started on wheels.
Rather than using straight ice, he settled on using a composite. Inspired by
Pykrete
, he swapped the wood pulp for cotton fibers. After weighing out different percentages of fiber to water, he had a half dozen or so different samples to test. What he found was that anything about 2% was quite strong to the point where smacking it with a hammer didn’t do much. Happy with the results, he 3D printed a mold to hold the ice as it hardens. [Sam] pulled it out a little too early only to have the some of the unfrozen middle leak out. He refilled the mold and got a second wheel going. After waiting for it to fully freeze, he had one and a half wheels and it was time to go for a spin. We appreciate the furze-esk music during the drifting as he is a clear inspiration throughout all of this. We love seeing the tire skids on the pavement, knowing they’ll evaporate soon.
It’s telling that wheels lasted longer than the frame. He admits he just got his MIG welder, so perhaps next time with more practice his tacks will be a little stronger. [Sam] has a love for making electronic vehicles as he’s made a monowheel, a bicycle, and now a tricycle. Perhaps some sort of giant four-wheeled inline skate is next?
Other drift trikes don’t go the route of reducing friction but instead focus on delivering so much torque to the wheels
that they can’t help but slip. Video after the break. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435491",
"author": "scott.tx",
"timestamp": "2022-02-26T06:19:26",
"content": "Icey what he did there.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6435508",
"author": ".",
"timestamp": "2022-02-26T08:48:54",
"content": "Not onl... | 1,760,372,777.239788 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/cascade-failures-computer-problems-and-ohms-law-understanding-the-northeast-blackout-of-2003/ | Cascade Failures, Computer Problems, And Ohms Law: Understanding The Northeast Blackout Of 2003 | Ryan Flowers | [
"Science"
] | [
"AC power",
"blackout",
"capacitance",
"grid",
"inductance",
"outage",
"power grid",
"Reactance"
] | We’ve all experienced power outages of some kind, be it a breaker tripping at an inconvenient time to a storm causing a lack of separation between a tree and a power line. The impact is generally localized and rarely is there a loss of life, though it can happen. But in the video below the break, [Grady] of Practical Engineering
breaks down the Northeast Blackout of 2003
, the largest power failure ever experienced in North America. Power was out for days in some cases, and almost 100 deaths were attributed to the loss of electricity.
[Grady] goes into a good amount of detail regarding the monitoring systems, software simulation, and contingency planning that goes into operating a large scale power grid. The video explains how inductive loads cause reactance and how the effect exacerbated an already complex problem. Don’t know what inductive loads and reactance are? That’s okay, the video explains it quite well, and it gives an excellent basis for understanding AC electronics and even RF electronic theories surrounding inductance, capacitance, and reactance.
So, what caused the actual outage? The complex cascade failure is explained step by step, and the video is certainly worth the watch, even if you’re already familiar with the event.
It would be irresponsible to bring up the 2003 outage without talking about the
Texas ERCOT outages just one year ago
– an article whose comments section nearly caused a blackout at the Hackaday Data Center! | 16 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435473",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-02-26T03:34:05",
"content": "Hmm… it’s been nearly two decades. I wonder if someone will go over this again in another two decades.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6435477",
... | 1,760,372,777.199489 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/hacking-an-extra-sata-port-into-a-thin-client/ | Hacking An Extra SATA Port Into A Thin Client | Lewin Day | [
"Network Hacks"
] | [
"nas",
"network",
"thin client"
] | Thin clients were once thought by some to be the future of computing. These relatively low-power machines would rely on large server farms to handle the bulk of their processing and storage, serving only as a convenient local way for users to get access to the network. They never quite caught on, but
[Jan Weber] found an old example and set about repurposing it as a NAS
.
The Fujitsu Futro S900 was built up to 2013, and only had one SATA port from the factory. [Jan] wanted to add another as this would make the device more useful as a network attached storage server.
The motherboard design was intended primarily for industrial control or digital signage applications, and thus has plenty of interfaces onboard. [Jan]’s first target was some unpopulated footprints for SATA ports onboard, but after soldering on a connector, it was found that the BIOS wouldn’t recognise the extra ports anyway.
However, after reflashing the BIOS with one from an alternate model, the port worked! The system also seemed to then imagine it was connected to many additional LAN interfaces, but other than that glitch, the hack is functional. Now, with a pair of 2 TB SSDs inside, the S900 is a great low-power NAS device that can store [Jan]’s files.
It’s a tidy hack, and one that will likely appeal to those who prefer to run their own hardware rather than
relying on the cloud.
If you’re working on your own innovative NAS project,
be sure to let us know
! | 24 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435453",
"author": "GotNoTime",
"timestamp": "2022-02-26T00:23:01",
"content": "The MAC and UUID got lost because they’re kept in a config block on the same flash but its now been overwritten by the empty config in the firmware image file. The manufacturer supplied updater knows no... | 1,760,372,777.569541 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/surgically-implanted-bluetooth-devices-dont-help-would-be-exam-cheats/ | Surgically Implanted Bluetooth Devices Don’t Help Would-Be Exam Cheats | Jenny List | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"exam",
"hearing",
"hearing implant"
] | A pair of would-be exam cheats were caught red-handed at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College in Indore, India,
as they tried to use Bluetooth devices surgically implanted in their ears
for a bit of unauthorised exam-time help.
It’s a news story that’s flashed around the world and like most readers we’re somewhat fascinated by the lengths to which they seem to have been prepared to go, but it’s left us with a few unanswered questions. The news reports all have no information about the devices used, and beyond the sensationalism of the story we’re left wondering what the practicalities might be.
Implanting anything is a risky and painful business, and while we’ve seen Bluetooth headphones and headsets of all shapes and sizes it’s hardly as though they’re readily available in a medically safe and sterile product. Either there’s a substantial rat to be smelled, or the device in question differs slightly from what the headlines would lead us to expect.
Miniature Bluetooth headphones were all the rage in the last decade, so now the pages of Amazon and AliExpress are bulging with high-tech devices to stuff in your ear canals. They’re tiny, but it’s worth thinking for a minute what tiny means in this context. A while back
we took a look at cheap Chinese ear cameras as microscopes
, and pulling out the review model for a quick measure we find that the business end which is a snug fit in an ear canal is 5.5 mm wide. It’s small in the scheme of USB cameras, but in the context of subcutaneous implants it’s huge. There are members of our community with an interest in embedable RFID tags, by contrast these tags are a fraction of a millimetre in diameter and are suitable for implantation using a hypodermic syringe.
Thus we are ready to smell a rat rather than take at face value the headline’s assertion that a Bluetooth earpiece was embedded complete with LiPo battery and enclosure. We think that anyone with one of those shoved under their skin would be not an effective exam candidate, suffering as they would be from significant pain and probably a nasty infection.
We are guessing that a far more likely source of this story is an implant that doesn’t involve any Bluetooth at all.
A bone conduction hearing aid implant
is a small magnetic device that is attached to the bone behind the ear, which vibrates in response to a magnetic field and transmits the resulting sound to the receptors of the inner ear via the bone itself. A search on miniature in-ear devices reveals a category of so-called “spy” products
in which an induction coil is worn around the neck
with a pocket amplifier, and we’re guessing that one of this type of devices might be the culprit. This leaves us significantly curious as to how the crafty pair were rumbled; did they
blast Barry Manilow
through a large induction coil, we wonder?
If you’re someone with expertise in these matters, perhaps even a user of an inductive hearing aid implant, we would like to hear your views in the comments.
Header: Internet Archive Book Images,
No restrictions
. | 35 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435421",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T21:38:19",
"content": "Cochlear implants bypass the existingearas we know it. But it’s not standalone. You have to couple from the outside, apparently a hearing aid like device.Even hearng aids don’t do bluetooth, or may... | 1,760,372,777.672725 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/better-kerf-cuts-with-a-cnc-bit/ | Better Kerf Cuts With A CNC Bit | Matthew Carlson | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"cnc bit",
"kerf bend",
"kerf bending",
"kerf cutting",
"wood bending",
"woodworking"
] | Bending wood is a complex affair. Despite the curves inherent in trees, most wood does not naturally want to bend. There are a few tricks you can use to bend it however, such kerf cutting and steaming. [JAR made]
has a clever hack to make better kerf cuts using a CNC bit
.
Typically kerfs are cut with a table saw or a miter saw set to trench. Many laser-cut box generations
use kerfs to allow the piece to bend
. The downside is that the cuts are straight cuts that are the same thickness throughout. This means that when the wood is bent into its shape, there are large gaps that need to be filled if you want the wood to look continuous. The hack comes in by using a router (not the networking kind) with a 6.2-degree taper. This means that the kerfs that it makes are angled. By placing the right amount of cuts and spacing them out equally, you get a perfectly rounded curve. To help with that even spacing, he whipped up a quick jig to make the cuts repeatable. Once all the cuts were made, the time to bend came, and [JAR made] used some hot water with fabric softener to assist with the bend. His shelves turned out wonderfully.
He makes the important statement that this CNC bit isn’t designed with this use case in mine and the chances of it snapping or breaking are high. Taking precautions to be safe is key if you try to reproduce this technique. Perhaps you can
bust out some framing lumber
and bend it into some beautiful furniture. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435404",
"author": "wolf+arthur",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T20:09:43",
"content": "«with this use case in mine »",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6435408",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T20:29:08",
"conten... | 1,760,372,777.765223 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/classic-chat-arko-takes-us-inside-nasas-legendary-jpl/ | Classic Chat: Arko Takes Us Inside NASA’s Legendary JPL | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"Classic Chat",
"Hack Chat",
"Jet Propulsion Laboratory",
"jpl",
"mars rover",
"nasa",
"Perseverance",
"robotics",
"rocketry",
"spaceflight"
] | Started by graduate students from the California Institute of Technology in the late 1930s, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was instrumental in the development of early rocket technology in the United States. After being tasked by the Army to analyze the German V2 in 1943, the JPL team expanded from focusing purely on propulsion systems to study and improve upon the myriad of technologies required for spaceflight. Officially part of NASA since December of 1958, JPL’s cutting edge research continues to be integral to the human and robotic exploration of space.
For longtime friend of Hackaday Ara “Arko” Kourchians, getting a job JPL as a Robotics Electrical Engineer was a dream come true. Which probably explains why he applied more than a dozen times before finally getting the call to join the team.
He stopped by the Hack Chat back in August of 2019
to talk about what it’s like to be part of such an iconic organization, reminisce about some of his favorite projects, and reflect on the lessons he’s learned along the way.
Given JPL’s incredible reputation, it’s perhaps no surprise that many of the questions were about how one gets a job there. Do you need a degree? Does it have to be from a prestigious university? Will you need to get a security clearance? What can a hacker do to get noticed?
For the specifics Arko directs folks to the lab’s Human Resources department, but from his own observations, he says nobody seems overly worried about where you went to school and that hackers are tinkerers are more than welcome. It’s more important to show you have the knowledge and passion they’re looking for, which is why be brought some of his own robots and custom PCBs to his interview.
As you might expect from our community, many users had technical questions about how the lab builds things internally. He explained that for hardware, they maintain a library of trusted components and circuit designs that can be pulled from so engineers aren’t constantly reinventing the wheel every time they need a reliable voltage regulator. Equally important — components in the JPL library are kept in stock.
On the software side, while Arko admitted to being a Rust fan personally, the “official” language used by most projects is C/C++. This is due at least in part to the accumulated knowledge already gained with these languages, with code from past missions often getting folded into their successors. Code is carefully reviewed and must follow JPL’s
10 Rules for Developing Safety-Critical Code
, each of which Arko says can be tracked back to a mission failure.
Moving on to some of his favorite projects, Arko talks about the recently completed testing of the Lander Vision System for the Mars 2020 rover. To validate the system that would eventually guide what we today know as the
Perseverance
lander to the Martian surface,
they installed an engineering model of its vision system on a helicopter
and flew it over the Death Valley National Park. With the system’s camera and inertial measurement unit (IMU) mounted to a gimbal on the front of the aircraft, they were able to simulate some of the unique dynamics of Martian Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) such as parachute deployment and movement. He explains that JPL has a philosophy of “Test as you fly. Fly as you test”, and that this elaborate installation allowed them to field test the complete system in the closest thing they could get to actual mission conditions here on Earth.
Arko wrapped up the Chat by talking about his work on the second version of the LLAMA, a
quadrupedal robot designed and built in-house by JPL
. He says this assignment was particularly exciting as he and the team had the opportunity to really make significant changes to the design. While only a research project and not destined for a trip to the Red Planet, NASA and JPL believe these sort of legged robots have applications on rocky worlds that can’t easily be explored by wheeled or tracked vehicles. In the meantime, the technology can also be used for terrestrial purposes such as rescue operations in disaster situations.
Arko (right), with the gimbal used to test the Mars 2020 Lander Vision System.
We’ve always believed that the Hack Chat is a valuable opportunity for individuals like Arko to share their fascinating first-hand knowledge and experience with the wider Hackaday community. But Chats like this one are as inspirational as they are informative. They serve as proof that with dedication, you can go from hacking on robots in your spare time to building hardware destined for Mars.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the
transcripts posted to Hackaday.io
make sure you don’t miss out. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435392",
"author": "Chris (MN)",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T19:00:58",
"content": "The rocket pictured in the preview is from Masten Space Systems, but no mention here.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6435468",
"author": "Pau... | 1,760,372,777.721296 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/hackaday-podcast-157-airtag-security-warped-3d-printing-suturing-grapes-with-a-diy-robot-arm-and-the-wizards-calculator/ | Hackaday Podcast 157: Airtag Security, Warped 3D Printing, Suturing Grapes With A DIY Robot Arm, And The Wizard’s Calculator | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi look at the week’s most interesting stories and projects, starting with the dystopian news that several people have had their bionic eye implants turn off without warning. We then pivot into an only slightly less depressing discussion about the poor security of Apple’s AirTags network and how it can be used to track individuals without their knowledge. But it’s not all doom and gloom. We’ll look at new projects designed to push the envelope of desktop 3D printing, and marvel at a DIY robotic arm build so accurate that it can put stitches in the skin of a grape. You’ll also hear about the surprisingly low cost of homebrew hydrophones, the uncomfortable chemistry behind wintergreen, and an early portable computer that looks like it came from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
You wouldn’t
Direct Download
a Podcast, would you?
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 157 Show Notes:
News This Week:
Bionic Eyes Go Dark
What’s that Sound?
This week’s sound was the clacking of MX Cherry Blue switches. Congratulations to [Edgar]!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
No Privacy: Cloning The AirTag
Get Apple To Track Your Bluetooth Devices For You
GitHub – seemoo-lab/AirGuard: Protect yourself from being tracked by AirTags
OzymanDNS 0.1
DIY Hydrophone Listens In On The Deep For Cheap
Bend Your Vase Mode Prints By Hacking The GCode
3D Printering: Non-Planar Layer FDM
FullControl GCODE Designer – Unconstrained design
Skeinforge – DEMOZENDIUM
I2C Breathes New Life Into Casio Pocket Calculator
Dummy The Robot Arm Is Not So Dumb
A Self-Driving Bicycle Is Something To Marvel At
Make Your Own Tabletop Game Organizers With Online Tool
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
Classic Multimeter Tells You If Your WiFi’s Working
Minimalistic Doorbell Doesn’t Need An Internet Connection – Or Even A Power Supply
Super Simple Camera Slider With A Neat Twist
FPGA Starter Videos To Help Soften That Learning Curve
Unique Clock Is All Hands, No Dial, And Does The Worm
Tom’s Picks:
Winamp Reborn With The Adafruit PyPortal
High-Power Laser Salvaged From Headlights
Winding Your Own Small Coils
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Big Chemistry: From Gasoline To Wintergreen
Inputs Of Interest: Canadian MCM/70 Was Kinda Like The First Cyberdeck | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,777.807697 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/finding-lo-fi-in-all-the-strange-places/ | Finding Lo-fi In All The Strange Places | Matthew Carlson | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"cassette tape hack",
"lofi",
"magnetic card audio",
"magnetic tape"
] | If you haven’t heard any lo-fi music yet, it stands for low-fidelity music. Lofi music today is characterized by audio imperfections such as cable noise or tape hiss. To get a pleasantly warm imperfect sound, many artists turn to vintage equipment. [HAINBACH] found an excellent instrument, the
obsolete classroom tool known as magnetic card audio recorders
.
The basic mechanism of the device is that it reads and writes to the two tracks on the quarter-inch tape fed through it. One track is meant for the teacher and one track is meant for the student. Originally designed to assist language learners, we can see why it would be an ideal source of good lo-fi samples. The microphone and speaker need to be high quality to hear the nuances of the example sentence. [HAINBACH] also admires the general tone and timbre of the device as opposed to just using a cassette recorder.
The tape in question is glued to little plastic cards. With some modification, you can run the card backward, create a loop, or stitch sections together. With multiple machines, you can run the card from one machine directly into another. They were made by several companies and can be found relatively cheap on online auction houses. While we can’t credit [HAINBACH] for coming up with
the idea as it was featured in the movie Baby Driver
, it’s still an example of an awesome hack.
Magnetic tape has long been a fascination of musical instruments. This
Crudman, which is a modern-day interpretation of the much older Mellotron
from 1963, is a great example of that.
Video after the break. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6432365",
"author": "Ø",
"timestamp": "2022-02-24T06:14:34",
"content": "Ain’t it “just” the tape from cassette tape glued to cardstock, and read/write head put in essentially a ol’ timey magnetic strip credit card reader, with a drive motor to ensure consistent speed?Because I can ... | 1,760,372,777.860083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/pixelating-text-not-a-good-idea/ | Pixelating Text Not A Good Idea | Al Williams | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"privacy",
"redact",
"redaction",
"security"
] | People have gotten much savvier about computer security in the last decade or so. Most people know that sending a document with sensitive information in it is a no-no, so many people try to redact documents with varying levels of success. A common strategy is to replace text with a black box, but you sometimes see sophisticated users pixelate part of an image or document they want to keep private. If you do this for text, be careful. It is possible to unredact pixelated images through
software
.
It appears that the algorithm is pretty straightforward. It simply guesses letters, pixelates them, and matches the result. You do have to estimate the size of the pixelation, but that’s usually not very hard to do. The code is built using TypeScript and while the process does require a little manual preparation, there’s nothing that seems very difficult or that couldn’t be automated if you were sufficiently motivated.
You don’t see it as often as you used to, but there have been a slew of legal and government scandals where someone
redacted a document by putting a black box
over a PDF so it was hidden when printed but the text was still in the document. Older wordprocessors often didn’t really delete text, either, if you knew how to look at the files. The
Facebook valuation
comes to mind. Not to mention that the
National Legal and Policy Center
was stung with poor redaction techniques. | 63 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6432320",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-02-24T06:01:29",
"content": "If an approach this simple works, throwing some AI at it means pixelating is double plus non-good for redaction.Also Cue CSI meme:. “Enlarge”",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
... | 1,760,372,778.130685 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/bend-it-like-sonar-beacon-with-a-phased-array/ | Bend It Like (Sonar) Beacon With A Phased Array | Matthew Carlson | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"phased array",
"ultrasonic",
"ultrasonic array"
] | Ultrasonic transducers are incredible, with them you can detect distances, as well as levitate and peer through objects. They can emit and receive ultrasonic soundwaves (typically above 18khz) and just like all waves, they can be steered via a phased array. [Bitluni] was trying to accurately measure distances but found the large field of view of the sensor was just too imprecise, so he
made a phased array of transducers
.
The inspiration came from
a Hackaday Supercon talk from 2019 about phased arrays
. [Bitluni] walks through an excellent explanation of how the array works with a bucket of water and his finger, as well as a separate simulation. By changing the phase offset of the different array members, the beam can effectively be steered as interference muffs the undesired waves. Using a set of solenoids, he created a test bench to validate his idea in a medium he could see; water. The solenoids fire a single pulse into the water creating a wave. You can see the wave move in the correct direction in the water, which validates the concept. A simple PCB sent off to a fab house with a stencil offers a surface to solder the transducers and drivers onto. An ESP32 drives the 8 PWM signals that go to the transmitters and reads in the single receiver via a small amplifier. Still not content to let the idea be unproven, he sets up the receiver on his CNC gantry and plots the signal strength at different points, yielding beautiful “heat maps.”
It sweeps a 60-degree field in front of it at around 1-3 frames per second. As you might imagine, turning sound wave reflections into distance fields is a somewhat noisy affair. He projects the sonar display on top of what we can see in the camera and it is fun to see the blobs line up in the correct spot.
We noticed he built quite a few boards, perhaps in the future, he will scale it up
like this 100 transducer array?
Video after the break. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431546",
"author": "Simon",
"timestamp": "2022-02-24T01:01:45",
"content": "“A simple PCB sent off to a fab house with a stencil offers a surface to solder the transducers and drivers onto.”Wow, just wow…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,372,777.926458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/pulling-off-a-crt-transplant-doesnt-have-to-be-tricky/ | Pulling Off A CRT Transplant Doesn’t Have To Be Tricky! | Lewin Day | [
"home entertainment hacks"
] | [
"crt",
"television",
"tv"
] | Whether it’s an engine swap in an old car or pulling a hard drive out of an old computer, we often find ourselves transplanting bits from one piece of hardware to another. [Emily Velasco] recently attempted this with a pair of CRTs,
and came away with great success.
The donor was an old 1980s fishing sounder, which came complete with a rather fetching monochrome amber CRT display. [Emily]’s goal was to transplant this into the body of a early 2000s portable television. The displays were of a similar size and shape, though the Toshiba CRT from the 80s used a lot more glass in its construction.
The tube socket in the TV used to hook up the display matched the old CRT perfectly, so there were no hassles there. A bit of soldering was all that was needed to hook up the yoke, and [Emily] was ready to test. Amazingly, it powered up cleanly, displaying rolling amber static as you’d expect, given that analog television stations
have been off the air for some time now.
After some perseverance, a VCR playing Mystic Pizza on VHS was able to deliver a video signal to the TV, proving that everything was working well. The next stage of the project is to get the television electronics to fit inside the 1980s fishing sounder housing, as it’s the more attractive of the two. Things were just built differently back in those days!
We’ve seen some other great vintage display swaps before, too.
Video after the break.
Oh my god. My transplanting scheme actually worked. The electronics from a terribly cheap early 2000s TV have been married to the amber CRT from a 1980s fishing sounder
pic.twitter.com/nqmuwMod72
— Emily Velasco (@MLE_Online)
February 20, 2022 | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431493",
"author": "Steven-X",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T22:39:52",
"content": "Looks like that would have been a fun project!And at least the weather band radio would still pick up stations (I’m assuming it also has FM)Personally, I wish they had left VHF analog stations alone. But... | 1,760,372,778.029212 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/coin-cell-eliminator-does-more-than-save-batteries/ | Coin Cell Eliminator Does More Than Save Batteries | Lewin Day | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"battery eliminator",
"CR2016",
"cr2032"
] | Coin cells are useful things that allow us to run small electronic devices off a tiny power source. However, they don’t have a lot of capacity, and they can run out pretty quickly if you’re hitting them hard when developing a project. Thankfully,
[bobricius] has just the tool to help.
The device is simple – it’s a PCB sized just so to fit into a slot for a CR2016 or CR2032 coin cell. The standard board fits a CR2016 slot thanks to the thickness of the PCB, and a shim PCB can be used to allow the device to be used in a CR2032-sized slot instead.
It’s powered via a Micro USB connector, and has a small regulator on board to step down the 5 V supply to the requisite 3 V expected from a typical coin cell. [bobricius] also gave the device a neat additional feature – a pair of pads for easy attachment of multimeter current probes. Simply open the jumper on the board, hook up a pair of leads, and it’s easy to measure the current being drawn from the ersatz coin cell.
If you’re regularly developing low-power devices that use coin cells, this tool is one that could save a lot of mucking about in the lab.
[bobricius] has them available on Tindie
for those eager to get their hands on one. We’ve seen similar designs before too,
albeit pursued in a different way
! | 32 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431388",
"author": "Col_Panek",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T19:41:50",
"content": "How about a supercapacitor so we can walk away and play with it for a while?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6431402",
"author": "Melllow... | 1,760,372,778.467997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/inputs-of-interest-canadian-mcm-70-was-kinda-like-the-first-cyberdeck/ | Inputs Of Interest: Canadian MCM/70 Was Kinda Like The First Cyberdeck | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"cassette drive",
"intel 8008",
"microcomputer",
"personal computer"
] | Not to start a debate in the comments or anything, but what would you say was the first microcomputer, or personal computer? We suppose the answer depends on your definition. Some would argue that the PC was born at Xerox PARC with a curious portrait-mode display and a three-button mouse, while others would say it all began in a garage in either Los Altos, California or Albuquerque, New Mexico.
If you take the term ‘computer’ to mean that which can crunch big numbers fairly quickly, then the Canadian-made MCM/70 is arguably the first personal computer in that it is portable, has an alphanumeric keyboard, a display, and supports cassette storage, which could be used to extend the 8K of memory. It was an all-in-one computing solution, and it could have an optional telephone modem built in. This was a forward-thinking machine for 1974.
A General-Purpose Personal Computer
We’re all used to personal computers as the norm, be they mobile, laptop, or desktop. But of course, in the early days, computers were large single-purpose machines used to crunch even bigger numbers. Go back even further in time, and the computers are humans operating fancy electromechanical calculators at high speeds, or, simply using pencils or chalk.
Before the personal computer arrived, people had to share time on mainframe machines to do their computing. Imagine having to go down to the library every time you wanted to look something up on the Internet. Wouldn’t you much rather do it at home on your own machine? Of course you would.
Image via
VintageComputer.ca
In the late 1960s, professor Mers Kutt of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario was tired of watching the efficiency of mainframe computer users be hampered by the long wait times involved in submitting programs. Kutt started a company in 1968 and built a data entry terminal with a one-line display that eradicated the need for punching cards.
Kutt wanted to build a different machine to support development of
APL, a new programming language
full of math symbols that was best programmed on a custom keyboard. He began a new company, Micro Computer Machines (MCM) to build the devices, which look like primitive cyberdecks that weighed 20 pounds.
A Luggable, Math-Minded Cyberdeck
The MCM/70 was designed to be an affordable, general purpose computer, if you consider $9,800 for the fully-equipped model in 1974 “affordable”. It’s based on the 800 KHz Intel 8008 and is one of the first commercial computers to use the CPU. The display was a 32-character glass plasma number that supported scrolling.
Image via
VintageComputer.ca
These machines came a couple of different ways: they either had no cassette decks at all, one cassette deck and one acoustic coupler for uploading programs to other machines, or two cassette decks. There was an APL interpreter built into the ROM, and a battery to save the workspace when powered down. They could even be rigged to run on battery power.
The MCM/70 had a specialized keyboard with QWERTY and APL legends, ISO Enter, and a honkin’ 9u space bar. Like any vintage computer, we’d love a crack at clacking on it. Be sure to check out all the pictures on
this Vintage Computers of Canada site
.
Of course, this type of computing power did not come cheap, and wouldn’t have typically been found in the average consumer’s home, which is arguably how many people might describe the personal computer. These minicomputers and their successors were mostly sold to companies and government institutions that needed to make big calculations. Various hospitals and insurance companies along with NASA and the US Army were a few of MCM’s customers, and they sold hundreds of units within a handful of years.
So What Happened?
It may have been a problem of passion. The book
Inventing the PC: the MCM/70
Story
alleges that Mers Kutt was neither a hacker nor a hobbyist; he was instead an entrepreneur and inventor who simply saw a market and found a partner to help him realize his vision. Nevertheless, he persisted.
According to
Inventing the PC
, there was a ‘devastating power struggle’ between Kutt and some of MCM’s investors. By the late 1970s, they began to see competitors offering the same amount of computing power, and MCM were designing an improved machine in response. As the story goes, they didn’t have the funding to fuel the rapid development required to beat the competition to market. By 1983, MCM was out of business.
Kutt started one final company called All Computers, Inc.
and ended up suing Intel
, alleging that they used his patented circuitry inside Intel processors. The suit was dismissed in 2005, and Kutt was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2006. | 30 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431355",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T18:50:31",
"content": "Don’t forget the Olivetti Programma 101 from 1965. Raw computing power right on your desktop. Display ( paper roll), input, storage (magnetic cards) and programming functions.But doom would be rather du... | 1,760,372,778.206681 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/pressure-gauge-built-in-a-vacuum/ | Pressure Gauge Built In A Vacuum | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"adc",
"arduino",
"calibration",
"gauge",
"measurement",
"mega",
"pirani",
"pressure",
"tool",
"vacuum"
] | Necessity might be the mother of all invention, but we often find that inventions around here are just as often driven by expensive off-the-shelf parts and a lack of willingness to spend top dollar for them. More often than not, we find people building their own tools or parts as if these high prices are a challenge instead of simply shrugging and ordering them from a supplier. The latest in those accepting the challenge of building their own parts is [Advanced Tinkering]
who needed a specialty pressure gauge for a vacuum chamber
.
In this specific case, the sensor itself is not too highly priced but the controller for it was the deal-breaker, so with a trusty Arduino in hand a custom gauge was fashioned once the sensor was acquired. This one uses an external analog-to-digital converter to interface with the sensor with 16-bit resolution, along with some circuitry to bring the ~8 V output of the sensor down to the 5 V required by the microcontroller. [Advanced Tinkering] wanted a custom live readout as well, so a 3D printed enclosure was built that includes both an LCD readout of the pressure and a screen with a graph of the pressure over time.
For anyone else making sensitive pressure measurements in a vacuum chamber, [Advanced Tinkering] made the
project code available on a GitHub page
. It’s a great solution to an otherwise overpriced part provided you have the time to build something custom. If you’re looking for something a little less delicate, though,
take a look at this no-battery pressure sensor meant to ride along on a bicycle wheel
. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431366",
"author": "Thopter",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T19:10:24",
"content": "Title seems misleading. The pressure gauge wasn’t assembled inside a vacuum chamber. It was assembled *for* a vacuum chamber.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comme... | 1,760,372,778.307926 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/prototype-robot-for-omniwheel-bicycle/ | Prototype Robot For Omniwheel Bicycle | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"balance",
"bike",
"gyroscope",
"IMU",
"inertial measurement unit",
"motor",
"omniwheel",
"robot",
"steering"
] | For all its ability to advance modern society in basically every appreciable way, science still has yet to explain some seemingly basic concepts. One thing that still has a few holes in our understanding is the method by which a bicycle works. Surely, we know enough to build functional bicycles, but like gravity’s inclusion into the standard model we have yet to figure out a set of equations that govern all bicycles in the universe. To push our understanding of bicycles further, however, some are performing experiments
like this self-balancing omniwheel bicycle robot
.
Functional steering is important to get the bicycle going in the right direction, but it’s also critical for keeping the bike upright. This is where [James Bruton] is putting the omniwheel to the test. By placing it at the front of the bike, oriented perpendicularly to the direction of travel, he can both steer the bicycle robot and keep it balanced. This does take the computational efforts of an Arduino Mega paired with an inertial measurement unit but at the end [James] has a functional bicycle robot that he can use to experiment with the effects of different steering methods on bicycles.
While he doesn’t have a working omniwheel bicycle for a human yet, we at least hope that the build is an important step on the way to [James] or anyone else building a real bike with an omniwheel at the front. Hopefully this becomes a reality soon, but in the meantime we’ll have to be content with
bicycles with normal wheels that can balance and drive themselves
.
Thanks to [BaldPower] for the tip! | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,778.503079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/iot-enabled-mailbox-lets-you-check-your-mail-without-leaving-your-house/ | IoT-Enabled Mailbox Lets You Check Your Mail Without Leaving Your House | Robin Kearey | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP32-CAM",
"IoT",
"mailbox"
] | Whether you live in an apartment downtown or in a detached house in the suburbs, if your mailbox is not built into your home you’ll have to go outside to see if anything’s there. But how do you prevent that dreadful feeling of disappointment when you find your mailbox empty? Well, we’re living in 2022, so today your mailbox is just another Thing to connect to the Internet of Things. And that’s exactly what [fhuable] did
when he made a solar powered IoT mailbox
.
The basic idea was to equip a mailbox with a camera and have it send over pictures of its contents. An ESP32-Cam module could do just that: with a 1600 x 1200 camera sensor, a 160 MHz CPU and an integrated WiFi adapter, [fhuable] just needed to write an Arduino sketch to have it take a picture every few hours and upload it to an FTP server.
The components inside: a solar cell, battery, power controller, LDO and ESP32-Cam module with WiFi antenna
But since running a long cable all the way from the house was not an attractive option, the whole module had to be completely wireless. [fhuable] decided to power it using a single 18650 lithium ion cell, which gets topped up continuously thanks to a 1.5 W solar panel mounted on the roof of the mailbox. The other parts are housed in a 3D-printed enclosure that’s completely sealed to keep out moisture.
The enclosure had to be made from a material that does not degrade in direct sunlight, which is why [fhuable] decided to try ASA filament;
this should be very resistant against UV rays
, but proved tricky to process. It warped so much during cooling that the only way to get a solid piece out of the printer was to enclose the entire machine in a cardboard box to keep it warm inside.
The end result was worth it though: a neat little extension on the back of the mailbox that should keep sending photos of its insides for as long as the Sun keeps shining. The camera should also give a good indication as to the contents of the mailbox, allowing the user to ignore any junk mail; this is a useful improvement over previous IoT-enabled mailboxes that use
proximity sensors
,
microswitches
or
optical sensors
. | 37 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435008",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2022-02-24T19:41:39",
"content": "Lithium batteries for outdoors projects are a pain in the rear, because most types can’t be charged below freezing. if it stays below freezing for 4-5 months a year, you basically have to design the device t... | 1,760,372,778.623846 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/remoticon-2021-joey-castillo-teaches-old-lcds-new-tricks/ | Remoticon 2021 // Joey Castillo Teaches Old LCDs New Tricks | Lewin Day | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Remoticon",
"7 segment",
"casio",
"Casio F-91W",
"Casio F91W",
"casio watch",
"lcd",
"Remoticon",
"segment lcd",
"sensor watch"
] | Segmented liquid crystal displays are considered quite an old and archaic display technology these days. They’re perhaps most familiar to us from their use in calculators and watches, where they still find regular application. [Joey Castillo] decided that he could get more out of these displays with a little tinkering, and rocked up to Remoticon 2021 to share his findings.
[Joey’s] talk is a great way to learn the skills needed to reverse engineer a typical segment LCD.
[Joey] got his start hacking on these displays via his
Sensor Watch project
– a board swap for the venerable Casio F-91W wristwatch, with the project
now available on CrowdSupply
. It kits out the 33-year-old watch design with a modern, low-power ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller running at 32 MHz that completely revolutionizes what the watch can do. Most importantly, however, it repurposes the watches original segmented monochrome LCD.
Segment LCDs are usually small monochrome devices made out of glass, that have the benefit of using very little power in their operation. They come with a fixed layout, which cannot be changed – so they’re often designed specifically for a given purpose. A calculator will have segments laid out to display numbers, often in the usual 7-segment fashion, while a watch may add dedicated segments for displaying things like “AM,” “PM,” or “ALARM.”
Their purpose-built nature means they’re often very thin and compact with useful layouts that are attractive and fitting for their given applications. Compared to general purpose LCDs, like the popular HD44780 character LCDs, they often have much cleaner aesthetics and a sleeker design as they’re meant to be consumer-facing, rather than used in any one of a million different industrial applications.
[Joey’s] talk starts off with a primer on how segment LCDs work, initially comparing them to 7-segment LEDs that so many of us are familiar with. However, LCDs are a little different in their operation, with segments darkening when a voltage differential exists, and are driven with AC signals rather than DC. [Joey] explains how to drive LCD segments in this manner, providing a CircuitPython example that demonstrates how its done.
Multiplexing is also described in detail, a technique used in many segment LCDs to allow them to be driven with less IO pins. Scoping out the LCD pins on a standard Casio F-91W wristwatch shows how the technique works, and it’s easy to follow along seeing the signals displayed clearly on an oscilloscope. [Joey] also explains that generating all the signals needed is easy if you just go out and purchase a microcontroller with an integrated segment LCD controller, like the Microchip SAM L22.
As a primary example of what can be achieved when hacking segment LCDs, [Joey] shows how he repurposed the display from the Casio Databank DB-36. The LCD has 55 connections and tons of segments, and is hooked up with zebra strips – a rather delicate method of connecting a segment LCD. Using some sticky tape, he blocks out a pin going to the LCD, reassembles the watch, and looks for which segments don’t work anymore. This technique allows the pinout of the display to be quickly mapped out.
Obviously, though, if you’re reverse-engineering a display, you’re limited to using the segments as laid out by the original designers. As [Joey] happily explains, though, you can actually get your own custom segment LCDs made without too much bother! He’s already done it himself, creating a dupe to match the Casio F-91W in a Feather-compatible form factor to ease development of the Sensor Watch board. There is a quantity requirement, but you can end up spending less than $1 per unit on big orders.
While segment LCDs are old-school and basic, they’re still a great technology for any low-power project that needs to display some data. After all, just think about how long the average digital wrist watch can last on a single coin-cell battery! [Joey]’s talk is a great primer if you’re interested in taking advantage of these displays, whether in existing hardware or by getting your own made from scratch! | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6434928",
"author": "MmmDee",
"timestamp": "2022-02-24T19:13:37",
"content": "At first read, I thought this was pretty much of a niche hobby, but I suspect there are quite a few people in to watch design/repurposing based on the number of write ups we see on HAD about watches. Kudos... | 1,760,372,778.672911 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/how-to-get-your-diffraction-grating-3d-prints-right-the-first-time/ | How To Get Your Diffraction Grating 3D Prints Right The First Time | Lewin Day | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"diffraction grating",
"how-to"
] | Diffraction gratings are beautiful things, bending transmitted and reflected light and splitting it into its component wavelengths to create attractive iridescent rainbow patterns. It’s the same effect you see on the bottom of a CD!
You can 3D print a functional diffraction grating, too, with the right techniques,
as it turns out!
The average 3D printer can’t recreate the tiny-scaled patterns of a diffraction grating directly; a typical diffraction grating may have up to 1000 lines per mm. Instead, by 3D printing onto an existing diffraction grating, the print can pick up the texture on its base layer. It’s a great way to add iridescence and shine to a print.
We’ve seen similar work before
, but the guide from [All3DP] goes into greater detail on how to get the effect to work
just right.
Getting the bed as close to perfectly level is key here, as is the first layer height. This is because the first layer of plastic has to meld perfectly with the diffraction grating to pick up the pattern. Too high and the grooves won’t transfer to the plastic, and too low, and it’s likely you’ll just melt the grating itself. Setting the Z-offset appropriately can help here.
Choosing the right bed temperature is also important to ensure the molten plastic is able to flow into the grooves of the grating. Again, the temperature at which the diffraction grating itself can survive is important to take into account; going above 90 degrees can be risky here. The guide also shows two methods of achieving the goal: one can either use an off-the-shelf grating, or one can prepare a no-longer-wanted CD into a suitable print surface.
Naturally, removing the print must be done delicately, lest one disturb the delicate structures key to generating the iridescent effect. [All3DP] recommends using a freezer to help separate the parts from the grating surface. It also bears noting that the print won’t survive excessive handling, as the grating structures will get damaged by physical touch.
It’s a great in-depth guide on how to get diffraction grating prints right. Meanwhile, consider diving deeper into the world
of 3D printed optics! | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435157",
"author": "Greg Garriss",
"timestamp": "2022-02-24T21:14:04",
"content": "You can use a traditional glass diffraction grating if you don’t mind losing the aluminum coating that makes it reflective. It’s also pretty easy to replicate in epoxy.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,778.542807 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/ask-hackaday-whats-your-worst-soldering-job/ | Ask Hackaday: What’s Your Worst Soldering Job? | Lewin Day | [
"Ask Hackaday",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"molten metal",
"nightmare",
"soldering"
] | Soldering! It’s the primary method for attaching one component to another in the world of electronics. Whether you’re free-forming a circuit, attaching connectors to cables, or populating a PCB, you’ll eventually find yourself doing some soldering, whether by hand, reflow, or maybe even a fancy wave soldering machine.
It’s a fundamental skill that nevertheless remains one of the biggest hurdles for newcomers to overcome when diving into the electronics hobby. Difficult jobs with tiny components or with large heat sinks can up the challenge for even well-practiced hands. Thus, today we ask the question: What’s your worst soldering job?
It’s All About Heat
A cold solder joint. Credit: MyName,. CC-BY-SA-3.0, GFDL
One of the most common causes of a bad solder joint is not getting everything hot enough. If you don’t get the temperature high enough, the solder will simply fail to stick. This doesn’t just apply to the soldering iron, or the solder itself. You have to get the component leads, PCB pads, or wire you’re soldering up to high temperature as well.
If you’ve ever had a molten blob of solder that simply won’t grab on to, or wet, the part you’re soldering, you probably haven’t gotten things hot enough. The principle is easy to see in action. Bring a soldering iron tip with plenty of solder on it up to a stripped piece of copper wire. The solder will blob ineffectually next to the wire until the copper itself reaches a suitable temperature. Then, you’ll readily see the solder wick on to the wire itself.
Of course, in some situations, it can be difficult to get things hot enough. Trying to solder a component on to a PCB pad that’s part of a large ground plane can be incredibly difficult, as the ground plane acts as a heat sink. Similarly, soldering large-diameter battery cables or big high-current connectors can be similarly difficult. Where a little 20 W soldering iron might be perfect for soldering small chips and resistors, you may find you want a 80 W iron – or more – when soldering things like connectors for high-current LiPo batteries in hobby applications. Alternatively, design changes can help – many PCBs use thermal reliefs around ground pads to reduce the outflow of heat from the pad while soldering.
Without plenty of heat, a solder joint will look frosty and have very poor adhesion. It’ll probably fail under even the slightest physical disturbance, flex, or vibration.
Chemistry Plays A Part
Other times, you might find a soldering job difficult because of the materials involved. Metals like aluminium are incredibly difficult to solder, as the metal forms a oxide skin that prevents solder sticking. Plus, it’s a great heatsink as well, only making things more difficult. In situations like these, specialist fluxes are often essential to making a bond without a lot of hassle.
Alternatively, homespun DIY techniques can also help. When it comes to aluminium, some see success by
pouring an oil layer over the metal
and scraping away with the soldering iron tip or a sharp object. This penetrates the oxide layer while the oil protects it from reforming.
But beware: often, a failed solder joint under these conditions will look like a smooth, well-rounded blob on a wire or component lead, but be completely unattached to the metal below.
Getting It Done, Anywhere, Anytime
Discord user [Yang] submitted this beauty to the ExpressLRS Community channel
Sometimes, you’ll find yourself soldering in less-than-ideal conditions. Maybe you’re stuck hooking up a soldering iron to a generator to do some repairs on crucial hardware in the field, or you’ve had to bust out your butane iron to mend some damaged wires under your truck in the mud. Or, perish the thought, you’ve had to tackle a tricky SMD chip swap of a quad-flat-package in a dark tent at 2 AM at your favorite hacker camp, hoping there’s enough charge left in your USB power bank to keep your USB-C powered iron on.
In these situations, mistakes are common, and injuries and light burns are often more likely. However, it’s these tough fixes that often bring the most pride and joy. Whipping up a crucial audio cable backstage might just save a gig, and some hasty jumper wiring might just get your company’s product up and running for the
big annual convention
.
Always Learning
Jumpers and last-minute bodges are what got the Commodore 128 up and running in time for the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show. Photo credit:
Bil Herd
The fact is, we’re all learning every day, with every solder joint we make. Along the way, it’s often the tough jobs and the bad joints that teach us how to become better at soldering, whether it’s through-hole, SMD, BGA, or for a production run of millions.
We’d love to hear your stories, and see your pictures, so hit us up in the comments. What are your worst solder joints, with the worst tools, or with the worst outcome? What have you gained or lost in the process? Let us know! | 114 | 47 | [
{
"comment_id": "6434118",
"author": "Paul G",
"timestamp": "2022-02-24T15:06:58",
"content": "My 9 year old self built a circuit using acid core plumber’s solder and a large factor soldering iron ( dad was a plumber). Suffice it to say, circuit stopped working a year later.",
"parent_id": null... | 1,760,372,778.837594 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/dont-miss-the-vcf-indoor-swap-meet-this-weekend/ | Don’t Miss The VCF Indoor Swap Meet This Weekend | Tom Nardi | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"swap meet",
"VCF",
"VCF East"
] | We don’t need to tell you that these last couple of years have been a real drag for in-person events. But at long last, after a bit of a false start last summer, it seems like we can
finally
start peeking our heads out and getting back to doing the things we love. So why not celebrate by taking part in that most sacred of geek pastimes: poring through boxes of dusty old gear in search of some electronic treasure?
On Saturday the
Vintage Computer Federation (VCF) is holding an indoor swap meet
at the InfoAge Science and History Museum in New Jersey, and everyone’s invited. Vintage computers will naturally be the main attraction, but if their previous events are any indication, you should expect the tables to be filled with a healthy mix of general electronics, classic games, and amateur radio gear as well. The doors open up at 8 AM sharp and it’s free to get in, so we’d suggest showing up early for the best selection.
A little less than a year ago
we visited the previous VCF swap meet
, which back then had to be held outdoors due to COVID-19 concerns, and were blown away by the selection of weird and wonderful hardware up for grabs. From arcade cabinets to luggable PCs and 3D printers, there was a little something for everyone, and all at rock-bottom prices. The only real gripe we had was the lack of on-site food and beverage, which according to the VCF website, has been addressed this time around. No word on whether or not there’s an ATM handy though, so you might want to stop and get some cash before heading to the relatively remote Camp Evans site.
After the swap meet wraps up at 2 PM, be sure to check out the Vintage Computer Federation’s permanent collection at InfoAge, as well as all the incredible exhibits and mini-museums the site has to offer. If nothing else, we strongly recommend you take the walk down the road to the
TLM-18 Space Telemetry Antenna that Princeton University currently operates as Linux-powered software defined radio telescope.
The fine folks of the VCF are also hard at work putting together their annual
East Coast Vintage Computer Festival
, which will take place at InfoAge on April 22nd to the 24th, so mark your calendars. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6433525",
"author": "Morton",
"timestamp": "2022-02-24T12:08:01",
"content": "Hopefully there are some good deals. There isn’t an ATM on the InfoAge grounds, so you best get some cash beforehand. No mask mandate in place either. Curious.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,778.881156 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/an-unbusy-usb-c-port-doubles-up-for-jtag-programming/ | An “unbusy” USB-C Port Doubles-up For JTAG Programming | Sonya Vasquez | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"jtag",
"usbc",
"usbc specifications"
] | Board space is a premium on small circuit board designs, and [Alvaro] knows it. So instead of adding a separate programming port, he’s found a niche USB-C feature that lets him use the port that he’s already added
both
for its primary application
and
for programming the target microcontroller over JTAG. The result is that he no longer needs to worry about spending precious board space for a tiny programming port; the USB-C port timeshares for both!
In
a Twitter thread
(
Unrolled Link
), [Alvaro] walks us through his discovery and progress towards an encapsulated solution. It turns out that the USB-C spec supports a “Debug-Accessory Mode” specification, where some pins are allowed to be repurposed if pins CC1 and CC2 are pulled up to Logic-1. Under these circumstances, the pin functions are released, and a JTAG programmer can step in to borrow them. To expose the port to a programmer, [Alvaro] cooked up a small breakout board with a USB-C plug and separate microcontroller populated on it.
This board also handles a small quirk. Since [Alvaro’s] choice of programming pins aren’t reversible, the USB-C plug will only work one of the two ways it can be plugged in. To keep the user informed, this breakout board sports a red LED for incorrect orientation and a green LED for correct orientation–nifty. While this design quirk sacrifices reversibility, it preserves the USB 2.0 D+ and D- pins while also handling some edge cases with regard to the negotiating for access to the port.
Stick through [Alvaro]’s Twitter thread for progress pics and more details on his rationale behind his pin choices. Who knows? With more eyes on the USB-C feature, maybe we’ll see this sort of programming interface become the norm?
[Alvaro] is no stranger to Hackaday. In fact, take a tour back to our
very first Supercon
to see him chat about shooting lasers at moving targets to score points on a DEFCON challenge in the past | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6432936",
"author": "Rick",
"timestamp": "2022-02-24T09:11:46",
"content": "This is really nice, I‘ll keep it in mind and do this on the next microcontroller board. Could also be used to break out GPIOs over tje USB-C connector.Small correction: In this case it‘s SWD – not JTAG.",
... | 1,760,372,778.929285 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/grocery-store-rocket-fuel-dont-try-this-at-home/ | Grocery Store Rocket Fuel: Don’t Try This At Home! | Ryan Flowers | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"Chemistry",
"rocket",
"Rocket Candy",
"rocketry",
"Scott Manley",
"sugar"
] | It seems like whenever the topic of rocket science comes up, the conversation quickly shifts to that of rocket fuels. As discussed in the excellent [Scott Manley]
video below the break
, there are many rocket fuels that can be found in some way, state, or form at your local grocery or liquor store. The video itself is a reaction to some college students in Utah who caused an evacuation when the rocket fuel they were cooking up exploded.
[Scott] himself theorizes that the fuel they were cooking was
Rocket Candy
, a volatile mix of sugar and potassium nitrate that is known to go Kaboom on occasion. And as it turns out, the combination might not even be legal in your area because as much as it can be used as rocket fuel, it can also be used for other things that go boom.
So, what else at your local megamart can be used to get to orbit? [Scott] talks about different kinds of alcohols, gasses, cleaners- all things that can be used as rocket fuel. He also talks about all of the solid reasons you
don’t
want to do this at home.
If this type of things gets your molecules excited, you might enjoy a bit we posted recently about using another
grocery store staple to save Martian colonists from being held back by gravity
. | 29 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435361",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T16:16:18",
"content": "I have never been able to find Potassium Nitrate at my grocery store.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6435368",
"author": "tekki... | 1,760,372,778.998036 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/this-week-in-security-updraft-termux-and-magento/ | This Week In Security: Updraft, Termux, And Magento | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"pfsense",
"Qualsys",
"Termux",
"This Week in Security"
] | One of the most popular WordPress backup plugins, UpdraftPlus,
has released a set of updates, x.22.3
, that contain a potentially important fix for CVE-2022-23303. This vulnerability exposes existing backups to any logged-in WordPress user. This bug was found by the guys at Jetpack,
who have a nice write-up on it
. It’s a combination of instances of a common problem — endpoints that lacked proper authentication. The heartbeat function allows any user to access it, and it returns the latest backup nonce.
A cryptographic nonce is a value that’s not exactly a cryptographic secret, but is only used once. In some cases, this is to mitigate replay attacks, or is used as an initialization vector. In the case of UpdraftPlus, the nonce works as a unique identifiers for individual backups. The data leak can be combined with another weak validation in the
maybe_download_backup_from_email()
function, to allow downloading of a backup. As WordPress backups will contain sensitive information, this is quite the problem. There are no known in-the-wild instances of this attack being used, but as always, update now to stay ahead of the game.
Termux
It wouldn’t be surprising to find that many of us use the Termux app on Android. It’s almost as good as installing a real Linux distro for the command line tools, and even running some graphical Linux apps. What you may not know is that the version on the Google Play Store is far out of date, because of a change to Android security policy in Android 10. That was simply annoying, but now it’s a real problem, as
a series of vulnerabilities have been announced
in the Termux app. The two most serious problems require the
Termux:Tasker
and
Termux:Widget
add-ons, respectively. Tasker didn’t have a defined permission for allowing execution via intents, so any other app could trigger a command. On top of this, there was a trivial directory traversal attack, so that command could reference any binary Termux could access.
The Widget problem is similar, but this app at least had an auth token that was checked on incoming intents. The problem there is that with a valid token, any command could be run. On top of that, the third vulnerability was a file permission issue, where any app could read Termux files, including the issued tokens. There’s one more issue to consider, when contemplating the severity of this bug, and that is rooted phones. If you’re running an
su
binary, and you’ve given Termux root permissions, then the above vulnerabilities are suddenly much more serious.
Magento and Adobe Commerce
There’s a really nasty vulnerability in the Magento project, and by extension, Adobe Commerce.
CVE-2022-24086 was announced February 13
, as a RCE accessible without authentication. Worse, it appears to be pretty simple to exploit, though a precise PoC hasn’t been made public yet. Adobe patched the vulnerability, and within a few days,
researchers had bypassed their fix
, leading to CVE-2022-24087 being issued. Researchers at Sansec have
seen attacks in the wild already
. Patch now, and give any Magento install a very close look for potential malware.
A new patch have been published for Magento 2, to mitigate the pre-authenticated remote code execution. If you patched with the first patch, THIS IS NOT SUFFICIENT to be safe.
Please update again!
https://t.co/vtYj9Ic6ds
@ptswarm
(as you had a PoC too!)
#magento
— Blaklis (@Blaklis_)
February 17, 2022
More Qualsys Finds
Qualsys has found
another round of vulnerabilities, this time in
snap-confine
. The most important one is CVE-2021-44731, a race condition that can lead to privilege escalation, which happens to work in most default configurations.
snap-confine
is another setuid binary, which can be executed by unprivileged users, but automatically gains root privileges in order to run. The problem stems from snap mounting its own temporary directory on the system’s
/tmp
location, but not properly checking for symlinks.
By making a change to the
/tmp
directory as it is being mounted, arbitrary folder locations can be accessed from within the snap, but with modified access controls inherited from the snap. One impressive technique they demonstrated in the attack is putting
snap-confine
into a debug mode, and then single-stepping the program’s execution. That’s certainly one way to guarantee your exploit wins the race.
Thunderbird, Strlen, and Single Byte Overflows
Mozilla Thunderbird has an unusual vulnerability,
fixed in the 91.6.1 release
. CVE-2022-0566 is
tracked internally as bug 1753094
, and so far has a maximum impact of a one byte buffer overflow. Turning this into an exploit would be quite difficult, but we’ve seen stranger things. If anything, I would expect this to be chained with another bug to achieve something more interesting, but so far it seems that no-one has managed this. As always, update sooner than later!
Red Cross Targeted
The International Committee of the Red Cross
has published an announcement
, that one of their systems were breached back in November. Attackers used CVE-2021-40539, an authentication bypass in the Zoho Active Directory infrastructure. A database of over 500,000 contacts was exposed, and likely exfiltrated. What’s particularly interesting here is that it seemed to have been a very targeted attack, and there was no ransomware deployed. What exactly motivated the attack is unclear at this point, but the ICRC points out that this was likely carried out by an APT.
PfSense RCE
While a pfSense RCE sounds like a nightmare scenario, it’s not quite time to hit the panic button.
This vulnerability requires access to the web interface
as an authenticated user. The flaw is improperly sanitation of user input, which is then run through the
sed
command. One way this can be turned into an exploit is through writing arbitrary data to the filesystem, and using this to add a webshell. The problem has been fixed in pfSense CE 2.6.0 and pfSense Plus 22.01. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435352",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T15:27:52",
"content": "“the ICRC points out that this was likely carried out by an APT.” Advanced Passenger Train? What does this stand for in this context?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,779.044887 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/custom-ssd-gives-new-life-to-handheld-atom-pc/ | Custom SSD Gives New Life To Handheld Atom PC | Arya Voronova | [
"computer hacks",
"handhelds hacks",
"Reverse Engineering"
] | [
"benq",
"mid",
"reverse engineering",
"sata",
"ssd",
"upgrade"
] | People don’t usually go as far as [Wenting Zhang] has –
designing a new IDE SSD board
for a portable x86 computer made in 2006. That said, it’s been jaw-dropping to witness the astounding amount of reverse-engineering and design effort being handwaved away.
The Benq S6 is a small MID (Miniaturized Internet Device) with an Atom CPU, an x86 machine in all but looks. Its non-standard SSD’s two gigabytes of storage, however, heavily limit the OS choice – Windows XP would hardly fit on there, and while a small Linux distro could manage better, it’s, and we quote, “not as exciting”. A lot of people would stop there and use an external drive, or a stack of adapters necessitating unsightly modifications to the case – [Wenting] went further and broke the “stack of adapters” stereotype into shards with his design journey.
Tracing quite a few complex multi-layer boards into a unified and working schematic is no mean feat, especially with the SSD PCB being a host to two BGA chips, and given the sheer amount of pins in the IDE interface of the laptop’s original drive. Even the requirement for the SSD to be initialized didn’t stop him – a short fight with the manufacturer’s software ensued, but was no match for [Wenting]’s skills. The end result is a drop-in replacement SSD even thinner than the stock one.
This project is well-documented for all of us to learn from! Source code and PCB files are on GitHub, and [Wenting] has covered the journey in three different places at once – on Hackaday.io, in
a YouTube video
embedded down below, and also
on his Twitter
in form of regular posts. Now, having seen this happen, we all have one less excuse to take up a project seemingly so complex.
Hackers play with SSD upgrades and repurposing every now and then, sometimes
designing proprietary-to-SATA adapters
, and sometimes
reusing custom SSD modules
we’ve managed to get a stack of. If case mods are acceptable to you aesthetics-wise, we’ve seen
an SSD upgrade for a Surface Pro 3
made possible that way. | 12 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435333",
"author": "Falcon1",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T14:02:10",
"content": "Intel GMA500 (poulsbo) is a PowerVR in disguise, Brrr.. I once bought a Dell mini 1010 with the explicit intent of running Linux for email and, music and photo’s on holiday’s. Was I in for shit show when ... | 1,760,372,779.09978 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/25/3d-printed-suncatcher-shines-in-the-light/ | 3D Printed Suncatcher Shines In The Light | Lewin Day | [
"Art"
] | [
"ornament",
"star",
"suncatcher"
] | Diffraction gratings create beautiful rainbow patterns when interacting with natural white light, and [audreyobscura] was familiar with their properties. Thus, she set about producing an attractive 3D-printed suncatcher ornament
that positively shines in the sun.
The design is straightforward, consisting of a 3D printed frame made of pieces glued together using QuickGrab glue. The pieces come together into a 7-segment star design, with a subtle 3D structure to it which helps add strength in addition to looking good.
Once assembled, sections of plastic diffraction grating are cut to size using a Curio desktop cutter. These are then glued into each segment of the star. While it’s possible to 3D print pieces with diffraction-grating like effects, using the film in this way allows light to pass through the suncatcher to create a more impressive effect.
On a cloudy day, the suncatcher looks almost entirely unassuming. However, when Earth’s nearest star shines, it projects glorious rainbows throughout the room, and letting it sway in the breeze lets the light play across the walls.
It’s a nice build, and a relatively easy ornament to make even if you’re new to 3D printing. We do like a good bit of decoration around here,
especially if it’s a tiny version of a real TV
. Video after the break.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZjMyQ94mhWU%3Ffeature%3Doembed%26autoplay%3D1 | 9 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435299",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T10:15:27",
"content": "There was me thinking this was entirely printed in a single piece, using a sheet of defraction grating to imprint the structure on the surface.I do wonder, if a defecation grating sheet were pressed onto t... | 1,760,372,779.152523 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/90s-pc-with-modern-parts-throws-many-off-track/ | 90s PC With Modern Parts Throws Many Off Track | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"case",
"Case mod",
"gpu",
"hot wheels",
"pc",
"retro",
"Ryzen",
"sleeper"
] | When building a desktop computer, usually the budget is the limiting factor. Making sacrifices on one part in order to improve another without breaking the bank is part of the delicate balance of putting together a capable PC. If you’re lucky enough to have the sponsors that [Shank] has though, caution can be thrown to the wind with regards to price for some blisteringly fast parts.
Putting them in a ’90s Hot Wheels case to build the ultimate sleeper PC
, though, is just icing on the top.
This isn’t quite as simple as replacing a motherboard in a modern PC case, though. The Hot Wheels PC used a mini-ITX standard and is quite a bit smaller than most modern computers outside of something like a Mac Mini. To get the RTX 3060 GPU into the computer the shrouds needed to be removed to save space, plus an unusual 92mm form factor liquid CPU cooler needed to be installed. An equally obscure power supply was included to round out the Ryzen 9 build and after a lot of tinkering eventually all the parts were fitted into this retro case including the original, working floppy disk drive. After that some additional case modding was installed such as RGB lighting, wheels with spinning rims, a spoiler, and an exhaust pipe.
The main issue with this build was temperatures, and both the CPU and GPU were topping out at dangerously high temperatures until [Shank] installed a terrifying 11,000 RPM case fan. With a series of original CRT monitors to go along with this sleeper PC he can have up to 9 displays with surprisingly high video quality thanks to the fundamental properties of CRTs. The video is definitely worth a watch and falls right in line with some of [Shank]’s other console mods that he is famous for
such as this handheld Virtual Boy
.
Thanks to [Fast Rock Productions] for the tip! | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435274",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T06:07:16",
"content": "And there was a pink Barbie computer to match. I’m sure they had the same specs, I vaguely remember a 400MHz clock but obviously one intended for boys and the other for girls",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,372,779.400936 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/caps-wiki-place-for-you-to-share-your-repair-notes/ | Caps Wiki: Place For You To Share Your Repair Notes | Arya Voronova | [
"hardware",
"Repair Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"capacitor failure",
"recapping",
"repair",
"repair guide",
"right to repair",
"troubleshooting"
] | A right-to-repair battle is being waged in courts. The results of it, we might not see for a decade.
The Caps Wiki
is a project tackling our repairability problem from the opposite end – making it easy to share information with anyone who wants to repair something. Started by [Shelby], it’s heavily inspired by his vintage tech repairs experience that he’s been sharing for years on the
[Tech Tangents] YouTube channel
.
When repairing a device, there are many unknowns. How to disassemble it? What are the safety precautions? Which replacement parts should you get? A sporadic assortment of YouTube videos, iFixit pages and forum posts might help you here, but you have to dig them up and, often, meticulously look for the specific information that you’re missing.
The Caps Wiki talks a lot about capacitor replacement repairs – but not just that. Any device, even modern ones, deserves a place on the Caps Wiki, only named like this because capacitor repairs are such a staple of vintage device repair. You could make a few notes about something you’re fixing, and have them serve as help and guideline for newcomers. With time, this won’t just become a valuable resource for quick repairs and old tech revival, but also a treasure trove of datapoints, letting us do research like “which capacitors brands or models tend to pass away prematurely”. Plus, it also talks about topics like
mains-powered device repair safety
or
capacitor nuances
!
As an example,
this page on repairing a Toshiba T1600
talks about the known issues, disassembly instructions, and replacement capacitors (plus other parts). As a result, anyone with a broken T1600 now knows how to disassemble it and which parts to order! Other pages may have less extensive documentation – it’s a volunteer-driven system, after all. That said, “which capacitors had to be replaced” documentation notes alone tend to be exceptionally useful.
Crowdsourcing such a database is a ginormous goal. With thousands of devices out there, an ambitious project like this requires plenty of effort before it’s part and parcel of our repairs journeys – as it ought to eventually become. Would you be interested in helping that come true? Here’s what we think you should do.
Whenever you next repair a device, be it by recapping or fixing some other fault that others might encounter, take a few notes and photos of what you’re doing. Then, do pay a visit to the Caps Wiki and
try out their device documentation process
, streamlined by [Shelby] to make it easy and painless. There’s even an eight-minute video
showing you how to quickly create a page
and outlining the things to keep in mind!
After going through the process, see how you can integrate it into your repair workflow. If you have some feedback for the project,
the Caps.Wiki forum
and
the Discord server
are both good places to visit.
We’ve covered Tech Tangents exploits before, for instance,
repairing this IBM PCjr with an ATX power supply
and then
designing an adapter PCB so that any of us can do the same
, or
repurposing a Macbook charger-specific powerbank
for use with generic AC PSUs. It is nice to see them apply their experience to a significant project like this!
We thank [Chaos] for sharing this with us! | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435264",
"author": "Draco",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T04:17:53",
"content": "While we are talking at right-to-repair I will post the wiki from Louis Rossmann as well:https://repair.wiki/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6435301",... | 1,760,372,779.327227 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/24/a-gameport-joystick-to-usb-midi-converter/ | A Gameport Joystick To USB-MIDI Converter | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"gameport",
"Joystick",
"logilink",
"midi",
"Teensy",
"Teensy LC",
"usb",
"usb midi"
] | These days, live music performance often involves electronic synthesizers and computers rather than traditional instruments played by hand. To aid in his own performances, [alekappa] built
a special interface to take signals from a joystick and convert them to MIDI messages carried over USB.
The build is simple and straightforward, using a Teensy LC to interface with a simple gameport joystick. With a smattering of simple components, it’s easy to read the outputs of the joystick with only a little debounce code needed to ensure the joystick’s buttons are read accurately. Similarly, analog axes are read using the analog-to-digital converters onboard the microcontroller.
This data is then converted into control changes, note triggers and velocity levels and sent out over the Teensy LC’s USB interface. A mode switch enables changes to the system’s behaviour to be quickly made. The device is wrapped up in a convenient housing nabbed from an old Gameport-to-USB converter from many years ago.
It’s a neat project and we’re sure the joystick allows [alekappa] to add a new dimension to his performances on stage. We’ve seen other great MIDI controllers, too, from the
knitted keyboard
to the impressive
Harmonicade.
If you’ve got your own mad musical build under construction, don’t hesitate
to drop us a line! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6435290",
"author": "RÖB",
"timestamp": "2022-02-25T09:25:24",
"content": "The four constant current sinks do look to … constant.The reference is a 1N4148 (Si SS Diode) and is driving the bases of some BC337 or some old Si transistor like that the different would be at most 0.1V to ... | 1,760,372,779.271206 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/20/the-usb-c-connectors-you-never-knew-you-wanted-to-avoid/ | The USB-C Connectors You Never Knew You Wanted To Avoid | Arya Voronova | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"connector",
"connector design",
"usb",
"USB C",
"USB connector",
"USB Type-C"
] | On Tech Twitter, some people are known for Their Thing – for example, [A13 (@sad_electronics)], (when they’re not busy designing electronics), searches the net to find outstanding parts to marvel at. A good portion of the parts that they find are outstanding for all the wrong reasons. Today, that’s a
through-hole two-pin USB Type-C socket
. Observing the cheap tech we get from China (or the UK!), you might conclude that two 5.1K pulldown resistors are very hard to add to a product – this socket makes it literally impossible.
We’ve seen two-pin THT MicroUSB sockets before, sometimes used for hobbyist kits. This one, however, goes against the main requirement of Type-C connectors – sink (Type-C-powered) devices having pulldowns on CC pins, and source devices (PSUs and host ports) having pull up resistors to VBUS. As disassembly shows, this connector has neither of these nor the capability for you to add anything, as the CC pins are physically not present. If you use this port to make a USB-C-powered device, a Type-C-compliant PSU will not give it power. If you try to make a Type-C PSU with it, a compliant device shall (rightfully!) refuse to charge from it. The only thing this port is good for is when a device using it is bundled with a USB-A to USB-C cable – actively setting back whatever progress Type-C connectors managed to make.
As much as USB Type-C basics are straightforward, manufacturers get it wrong on the regular – back in 2016, a wrong cable could
kill your $1.5k MacBook
. Nowadays, we might only need to mod a device with a pair of 5.1K resistors every now and then. We can only hope that the
new EU laws
will force devices to get it right and stop ruining the convenience for everyone, so we can
finally enjoy what was promised to us
. Hackers have been making more and more devices with USB-C ports, and
even retrofitting iPhones
here and there. If you wanted to get into mischief territory and abuse the extended capabilities of new tech, you could even make a device that
enumerates in different ways
if you flip the cable, or make a “BGA on an FPC” dongle
that is fully hidden inside a Type-C cable end
! | 24 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428991",
"author": "Miles",
"timestamp": "2022-02-21T06:55:26",
"content": "I still do not own a single USB C to C cable.I had one for hot minute, but as soon as my Oculus Quest arrived with the LCD shards rattling around I returned it.The day will come, but I still don’t get the a... | 1,760,372,779.497749 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/20/immersive-stereo-sound-recording-with-this-binaural-microphone/ | Immersive Stereo Sound Recording With This Binaural Microphone | Jenny List | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"binaural audio",
"microphone"
] | Sound recording has been a consumer technology for so long now that it is ubiquitous, reaching for a mobile device and firing up an app takes only an instant. Anyone who takes an interest in audio recording further will find that while it’s relatively straightforward to make simple recordings. But, as those among you who have fashioned a pair of Shure SM58s into an X configuration with gaffer tape will know, it can be challenging to create a stereo image when recording outside the studio. In the quest to perfect this, [Kevin Loughin]
has created a binaural microphone,
which simulates a human head with microphones placed as ears to produce ambient recordings with an almost-immersive stereo image.
Commercial binaural microphones can cost thousands of dollars, but this one opts for a more budget design using an off-the-shelf mannequin head sold for hairdressers. It’s filled with high-density foam, and in its ears [Kevin] placed 3D-printed ear canals with electret microphone capsules. On the back goes a battery and a box for the bias circuitry.
The results as you can hear in the video below the break are impressive, certainly so for the cost. It’s not the first such microphone we’ve shown you, compare it with
one using a foam-only head
. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428878",
"author": "Isaac",
"timestamp": "2022-02-21T04:44:15",
"content": "Got a vinyl binaural recording years ago. With good cans (didn’t work with speakers), the illusion of “being there” was stunning. Until you turned your head. When you did that, the sound field spun around w... | 1,760,372,779.715546 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/20/hackaday-links-february-20-2022/ | Hackaday Links: February 20, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"chip shortage",
"DeLorean",
"flash",
"hackaday links",
"memory",
"nand",
"palindrome",
"planned obsolescence",
"selective soldering",
"soldering",
"through hole",
"Twos-day",
"western digital"
] | Sounds like somebody had a really bad day at work, as
Western Digital reports that “factory contamination” caused a batch of flash memory chips to be spoiled
. How much, you ask? Oh, only about 7 billion gigabytes! For those of you fond of SI prefixes, that’s 7
exabytes
of storage; to put that into perspective, it’s seven times what Google used for Gmail storage in 2012, and enough to store approximately 1.69 trillion copies of Project Gutenberg’s ASCII King James Version Bible. Very few details were available other than the unspecified contamination of two factories, but this stands poised to cause problems with everything from flash drives to phones to SSDs, and will probably only worsen the ongoing chip shortage. And while we hate to be cynical, it’ll probably be prudent to watch out for any “too good to be true” deals on memory that pop up on eBay and Ali in the coming months.
Speaking of broken stuff, we came across a site called
FailScout
, which purports to be “a crowdsourced database of broken and worn-out products.” The idea apparently is to document cases of what appears to be either systematic manufacturing defects, engineering problems, or outright planned obsolescence. The goal of this is ostensibly to hold manufacturers accountable for their products, but we can see how this could just devolve into a morass of ax-grinding by people who have unreasonable expectations about how long products should last. Yes, pretty much everything we buy is subject to “value engineering” decisions in terms of materials and designs, and some of that will no doubt send products to the landfill long before their time. But when someone is complaining about
broken five-year-old flip-flops
, we think we’ll take a hard pass on this one.
For the numerically obsessive among us, a momentous day is approaching. This coming Tuesday will be
“Twos Day,”
when everyone’s calendar will show 2/22/22 (or 22/2/22, if you’re so inclined) all day. And for a special treat, if you want to add to the symmetry and don’t mind getting up early, or staying up late, you can watch the clock flip to 2:22:22 on the appointed day. If this excites you as much as watching an odometer flip over, you’ll probably want to visit this interesting
Palindrome Date calculator
, and see how long it’ll be before some other interesting sequence of numbers will be encoded in the date.
While trolling through Hackaday.io the other day, we happened upon a project that looks interesting:
a miniature selective soldering machine
. Until we saw this, we hadn’t even wondered how mixed through-hole and SMD boards are assembled; selective soldering seems to be the answer. It seems to be a very localized version of wave soldering. Instead of using a large tank that covers the entire underside of a board, the molten solder is pumped into a special nozzle to form a tiny fountain. This little solder volcano is moved around the board to all the through-hole leads that need soldering, and it’s a very satisfying process to watch.
And finally, because the world is crying out for a car with 80’s styling and a 21st-century electric drivetrain, it looks like
DeLorean is trying to make another go of it
. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of the approaching 40th anniversary of the first installment of the
Back to the Future
trilogy, or maybe it’s just because they can, but whatever the reason, the hype machine is already rolling, albeit with nothing but a silhouette shot of the iconic and never-practical gullwing doors opening. And even though it’s electric, we wouldn’t count on a 1.21-gigawatt battery. Or a Mr. Fusion. | 23 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428776",
"author": "Queeg",
"timestamp": "2022-02-21T00:26:02",
"content": "Kinda hard to wrap my head around 7 exabytes of chips. What would that be in Olympic swimming pools?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6428788",
... | 1,760,372,779.656844 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/20/reverse-engineering-a-900-mhz-rc-transmitter-and-receiver/ | Reverse Engineering A 900 MHz RC Transmitter And Receiver | Robin Kearey | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"channel hopping",
"drone",
"long range",
"remote control",
"TBS Crossfire"
] | For those building their own remote controlled devices like RC boats and quadcopter drones, having a good transmitter-receiver setup is a significant factor in the eventual usability of their build. Many transmitters are available in the 2.4 GHz band, but some operate at different frequencies, like the 868/915 MHz band. The TBS Crossfire is one such transmitter, and it’s become a popular model thanks to its long-range performance.
The channel hopping sequence
When [g3gg0] bought a Crossfire set for his drone, he discovered that the receiver module consisted of not much more than a PIC32 microcontroller and an SX1272 LoRa modem. This led him
to ponder if the RF protocol would be easy to decode
. As it turns out, it was not trivial, but not impossible either. First, he built his own SPI sniffer using a CYC1000 FPGA board to reveal the exact register settings that the PIC32 sent to the SX1272. The Crossfire uses channel hopping, and by simply looking at the register settings it was easy to figure out the hopping sequence.
Once that was out of the way, the next step was to figure out what data was flowing through those channels. The data packets appeared to be built up in a straightforward way, but they included an unknown CRC checksum. Luckily, brute-forcing it was not hard; the checksum is most likely used to keep receivers from picking up signals that come from a different transmitter than their own.
[g3gg0]’s blog post goes into intricate detail on both the Crossfire’s protocol as well as the reverse engineering process needed to obtain this information. The eventual conclusion is that while the protocol is efficient and robust, it provides no security against eavesdropping or deliberate interference. Of course, that’s perfectly fine for most RC applications, as long as the user is aware of this fact.
If you’re into decoding RF protocols, you might also want
to try using a logic analyzer
. But if you merely want to replicate an existing transmitter’s signals, it might be easier to simply
spoof a few button presses
. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428672",
"author": "Gösta",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T21:23:24",
"content": "Most impressive :-)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6429029",
"author": "HexAndFlex",
"timestamp": "2022-02-21T07:30:12",
"content": "Anyon... | 1,760,372,779.761744 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/20/winamp-reborn-with-the-adafruit-pyportal/ | Winamp Reborn With The Adafruit PyPortal | Tom Nardi | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"CircuitPython",
"llama",
"PyPortal",
"touch screen",
"winamp"
] | One look at the default Winamp skin is sure to reawaken fond memories for a certain segment of the community. For those who experienced the MP3 revolution first hand, few audio players stick out in the mind like Winamp and its llama whipping reputation. No, the proprietary Windows-only media player isn’t the sort of thing you’d catch us recommending these days; but it was the 1990s, and things were very different.
For those who want to relive those heady peer-to-peer days, [Tim C] has posted a tutorial on
how to turn Adafruit’s PyPortal into a touch screen MP3 player
that faithfully recreates the classic Winamp look. As you can see in the video below it certainly nails the visuals, down to the slightly jerky scrolling of the green track info which we’re only now realizing was probably the developer’s attempt to mimic some kind of a physical display like a VFD.
With minimal UI functionality, playlists must be created manually.
[Tim] has even included support for original Winamp themes, although as you might expect, some hoop-jumping is required. In this case, it’s a Python script that you have to run against an image of the original skin pulled from the
Winamp Skin Museum
. From there, you just need to edit a couple of lines of code to point the player at the right skin files. In other words, switching between skins is kind of a hassle, but you should at least be able to get your favorite flavor from back in the day up and running.
But before you get too excited, there’s a bit of a catch. For one thing, the Winamp UI isn’t actually functional. You can tap the top section of the screen to pause the playback, and tapping down in the lower playlist area lets you change songs, but all the individual buttons and that iconic visual equalizer are just for show. Managing your playlists also requires you to manually edit a JSON file,
which even in the 1990s
we would have thought was pretty wack, to use the parlance of the times.
Of course, things could easily be streamlined a bit with further revisions to the code, and since [Tim] has released it into the public domain under the Unlicense, anyone can help out. As it stands, it’s still a very slick media display that we certainly wouldn’t mind having on our desk. | 23 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428557",
"author": "Phillip",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T18:40:52",
"content": "I love the idea. Loved WinAmp back in the day and it’s actually still my primary media player on my PC today. It would be amazing to see this developed to full functionality, especially the equalizer feat... | 1,760,372,781.57579 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/20/all-about-dichroic-optical-filters/ | All About Dichroic Optical Filters | Dave Rowntree | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"dichroic",
"diffusion filter",
"mirror",
"optical"
] | [IMSAI Guy] presents for your viewing pleasure, a nice
video on the topic of optical filters and mirrors
. (Video, embedded below) The first optical device is a simple absorption filter, where incoming light is absorbed in a wavelength-selective manner. Much more interesting however is the subject of interference or dichroic filters. These devices are constructed from many thin layers of a partially reflective material, and operate on the principle of interference. This means that photons hitting the filter stack will interfere either constructively or destructively giving the filter a pass or stop response for a particular wavelength.
As [IMSAI Guy] demonstrates, this makes the filters direction-specific, as photons hitting the stack at a different angle will travel slightly further. Longer travel means the interference effect will be different, and so will the filtering response. You can see this by playing around with one in your hands and seeing the color change as your rotate it. Dichroic filter films can also make for
some stunning optical effects
. Very cool stuff.
By creating a filter stack with a wide enough range of inter-layer thicknesses, it’s possible to construct a mirror that covers the full spectrum with excellent reflectivity. Since you can tune the layers, you can make it reflect any range of wavelengths you like. One thing we’ve not seen before is a wedge-like optical filter device, where the layer thicknesses progressively increase lengthways, creating a variable optical frequency response along the length. We guess this would be useful for diagnostics in the field, or perhaps for manually tuning a beam path?
We like the applications for dichroic films – here’s an
Infinity Mirror ‘Hypercrystal’
. If you don’t want to buy off-the-shelf films, perhaps you could
sputter yourself something pretty
? | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428472",
"author": "[Todd]",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T16:08:17",
"content": "Before RGBAWXYZ leds were a thing, Dichroic filters were used quite a bit in stage lighting. A company called Vari Lite invented a color fading fixture that used a stack of dichroic vanes that would tilt i... | 1,760,372,781.708767 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/20/how-a-pentester-gets-root/ | How A Pentester Gets Root | Donald Papp | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"escalation of privilege",
"HackTheBox",
"security"
] | Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall, watching a penetration tester attack a new machine — working their way through the layers of security, ultimately leveraging what they learned into a login? What tools are used, what do they reveal, and how is the information applied? Well good news, because [Phani] has documented
a step-by-step of every action taken to eventually obtain root access on a machine
— amusingly named DevOops — which was set up specifically for testing.
[Phani] explains every command used (even the dead-end ones that reveal nothing useful in this particular case) and discusses the results in a way that is clear and concise. He starts from a basic port scan, eventually ending up with root privileges. On display is an overall process of obtaining general information. From there, [Phani] methodically moves towards more and more specific elements. It’s a fantastic demonstration of privilege escalation in action, and an easy read as well.
For some, this will give a bit of added insight into what goes on behind the scenes in some of the stuff covered by our regular feature,
This Week in Security
. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428444",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T13:57:29",
"content": "Follow ippsec on YouTube for this sort of content.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6428463",
"author": "Raivis",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T15:20:... | 1,760,372,781.927999 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/21/3d-printing-livers/ | 3D Printing Livers | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Medical Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"bioprinting",
"liver",
"Tomography"
] | The University of Utrecht has a team that is successfully bioprinting “
liver units
” that are able to do some of the functions of a human liver and may open the door to new medical treatments. This isn’t simply printing a fake liver in a jar though, instead the technique uses optical tomography to rapidly create small structures of about 1 cc of volume in less than 20 seconds.
Apparently, one problem with printing hydrogels full of biological structures is that passing them through a nozzle tends to disturb the delicate structures. This technique uses no nozzle or layers, which makes it useful in this situation.
Of course, there is no free lunch. Using tomographic light techniques requires light to penetrate the hydrogel to form structures and this requires special care to prevent material around the edges from distorting light intended for interior volumes.
The new technique uses a bio-compatible compound often used as a contrast agent to make cells more transparent and, thus, less likely to interfere with the light patterns.
So far, this isn’t going to result in a new liver for you anytime soon. However, it seems to be a first step and there are other reasons small liver analogs can be useful.
This could be a step towards
regenerative liver treatments
. Maybe one day you’ll just have to get a new part printed to order if you need one. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6449508",
"author": "Nick",
"timestamp": "2022-03-22T02:54:54",
"content": "This is great progress. The number of patients needing new organs is much, much larger than the number of available donors!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,781.884238 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/21/ray-tracing-on-a-modern-ti-graphing-calculator/ | Ray Tracing On A Modern TI Graphing Calculator | Maya Posch | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"graphic calculator",
"ti-84"
] | Something being impractical isn’t any reason not to do it, which is why just about anything with a CPU in it can run Doom by now. For the same reason there obviously is a way to do ray tracing of 3D scenes on a modern-day TI-84 Plus CE graphical calculator. This is excellent news for anyone who has one of these calculators, along with a lot of time, perhaps during boring classes, to spare.
As [TheScienceElf] demonstrates in a
video,
also embedded after the break, it’s not quite the real-time experience one would expect from an NVidia RTX 30-series GPU. Although the
eZ80
-based CPU in
the calculator
is significantly more efficient than a Z80 as found in many 1980s home computers, the demo scene at standard resolution takes about 12 minutes to render, as also noted on the
GitHub project
page.
Perhaps the most interesting part about this project is its use of the Clang-based C & C++
toolchain for the TI-84 Plus CE
which gives easy access to the calculator’s hardware and related, including graphics, file I/O, fonts, keypad input and more. Even if using a TI-84 Plus CE to render the next Pixar-level movie isn’t the most productive use imaginable for these devices, this project and the CE toolchain make it all too easy to tinker with these $150 devices.
It would also offer a nice change of pace from writing Snake in TiBASIC, a BASIC dialect in which [TheScienceElf] incidentally has also
written a ray tracer.
(Thanks to [poiuyt] for the tip) | 16 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6429999",
"author": "Unfocused",
"timestamp": "2022-02-22T01:15:47",
"content": "$150? I’m assuming you’re paying primarily for the software running on it (& branding), rather than the hardware these days",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,781.845453 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/21/an-off-grid-makeshift-cell-network/ | An Off-Grid Makeshift Cell Network | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"android",
"app",
"communication",
"ESP8266",
"LoRa",
"network",
"off grid",
"sx1278",
"wireless"
] | When traveling into the wilderness with a group of people, it’s good to have a method of communications set up both for safety and practicality. In the past people often relied on radios like FRS, CB, or ham bands if they had licenses, but nowadays almost everyone has a built-in communications device in their pocket that’s ready to use. Rather than have all of his friends grab a CB to put in their vehicle for their adventures together, [Keegan]
built an off-grid network which allows any Android phone to communicate with text
even if a cell network isn’t available.
The communications system is built on the LoRa communications standard for increased range over other methods like WiFi using a SX1278 chip and an ESP8266. The hardware claims a 10 km radius using this method which is more than enough for [Keegan]’s needs. Actually connecting to the network is only half of the solution though; the devices will still need a method of communication. For that, a custom Android app was created which allows up to 8 devices to connect to the network and exchange text messages with each other similar to a group text message.
For off-grid adventures a solution like this is an elegant solution to a communications problem. It uses mostly existing hardware since everyone carries their own phones already, plus the LoRa standard means that even the ESP8266 base station and transmitter are using only a tiny bit of what is likely battery power. If you’re new to this wireless communications method,
we recently featured a LoRa tutorial as well
. | 51 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6429888",
"author": "Kurt",
"timestamp": "2022-02-21T21:07:45",
"content": "This definitely sounds like something you shouldn’t try in Germany if you don’t want to pay a hefty penalty…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6430001",... | 1,760,372,781.795494 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/21/dummy-the-robot-arm-is-not-so-dumb/ | Dummy The Robot Arm Is Not So Dumb | Dave Rowntree | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"AHRS",
"ble",
"ESP32",
"force feedback",
"harmonic drive",
"harmonyOS",
"robot arm",
"robotic arm",
"stepper motor",
"stm32",
"unity"
] | [Zhihui Jun] is a name you’re going to want to remember because this Chinese maker has created quite probably one of the
most complete open-source robot arms
(video in Chinese with subtitles, embedded below) we’ve ever seen. This project has to be seen to be believed. Every aspect of the design from concept, mechanical CAD, electronics design and software covering embedded, 3D GUI, and so on, is the work of one maker, in just their spare time! Sound like we’re talking it up too much? Just watch the video and try to keep up!
After an initial review of toy robots versus more industrial units, it was quickly decided that servos weren’t going to cut it – too little torque and lacking in precision. BLDC motors offer great precision and torque when paired with a good controller, but they are tricky to make small enough, so an off-the-shelf compact harmonic drive was selected and paired with a stepper motor to get the required performance. This was multiplied by six and dropped into some slick CNC machined aluminum parts to complete the mechanics. A custom closed-loop stepper controller mounts directly to the rear of each motor. That’s really nice too.
Stepper controller mounts on the motor rear – smart!
Control electronics are based around the STM32 using an ESP32 for Wi-Fi connectivity, but the pace of the video is so fast it’s hard to keep up with how much of the design operates. There is a brief mention that the controller runs the LiteOS kernel for
Harmony OS
, but no details we can find. The
project GitHub has many of the gory details to pore over
perhaps a bit light in places but the promise is made to expand that. For remote control, there’s a BLE-connected teaching device (called ‘Peak’) with a touch screen, again details pending. Oh, did we mention there’s a force-feedback (a PS5 Adaptive Trigger had to die for the cause) remote control unit that uses binocular cameras to track motion, with an AHRS setup giving orientation and that all this is powered by a Huawei Atlas edge AI processing system? This was greatly glossed over in the video like it was just some side-note not worth talking about. We hope details of that get made public soon!
Threading a needle through a grape by remote control
The dedicated GUI, written in what looks like
Unity
, allows robot programming and motion planning, but since those harmonic drives are back-drivable, the robot can be moved by hand and record movements for replaying later. Some work with AR has been started, but that looks like early in the process, the features just keep on coming!
Quite frankly there is so much happening that it’s hard to summarise here and do the project any sort of justice, so to that end we suggest popping over to YT and taking a look for yourselves.
We love robots ’round these parts, especially robot arms, here’s a
big one by [Jeremy Fielding]
, and if you think stepper motors aren’t necessary, because
servo motors can be made to work just fine
, you may be right.
Thanks to [djtano] for the tip! | 30 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6429782",
"author": "Richard",
"timestamp": "2022-02-21T18:08:28",
"content": "Can we wind back a little, where did he get that monitor at the bottom???? It’s awesome!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6429801",
"author... | 1,760,372,781.51208 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/21/rotary-valve-engine-gets-a-second-chance-smokes-the-competition/ | Rotary Valve Engine Gets A Second Chance, Smokes The Competition | Ryan Flowers | [
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"4-stroke",
"DIY engine",
"Engine hacks",
"gasoline",
"machining",
"Otto cycle",
"rotary valve"
] | It’s a dedicated hacker who has the patience to build an engine from scratch. And it’s a borderline obsessed hacker who does it twice. [Meanwhile In the Garage] is of the second ilk, and
in the video below the break
, he takes a failed engine design and musters up the oomph to get it running.
The whole build began with an idea for a different kind of intake and exhaust valve. [Meanwhile In the Garage] dreamed up a design that does away with the traditional poppet valve. Instead of valves that open by being pushed away from their seat by a camshaft, this design uses a cylinder that is scooped so that as it rotates, its ports are exposed to either the intake or the exhaust.
Four Stroke Cycle with Poppet valves. Courtesy
Wikipedia
,
CC BY-SA 3.0
During the compression stroke, the valve cylinder becomes part of the combustion chamber, with both ports facing away from the piston. If you read the comments, you’ll find that multiple people have come up with the idea through the years. With his mill, lathe, and know-how, [Meanwhile In the Garage] made it happen. But not without some trouble.
The first iteration resisted all valiant attempts at getting it started. The hour-long video preceding this one ended up in a no-start. Despite his beautiful machine work and a well thought out design, it wasn’t to be. Fire came from the engine either through the exhaust or the carburetor, but it never ran. In this version, several parts have been re-worked and the effect is immediate! The engine fired up nicely and even seems to rev up pretty well. Being a first-generation prototype, it lacks seals and other fancy parts to keep oil out of the combustion chamber. Normal engine oil has been added to the fuel as a precaution as well. The fact that it smokes quite badly isn’t a surprise and only proves that the design will benefit from another iteration. Isn’t that true for most prototypes, though?
Home-grown engines aren’t a new thing at Hackaday, and one of This Author’s favorite jet turbines used a toilet paper holder.
Yes, really.
Thanks to [Keith] for the
Tip
! | 42 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6429664",
"author": "Wallace+Owen",
"timestamp": "2022-02-21T15:24:18",
"content": "Missing diagram of his engine, to compare to provided diagram.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6429668",
"author": "Ryan Flowers",
... | 1,760,372,781.432727 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/21/the-little-replacement-psu-that-could-kill-a-microsoft-surface-and-monitor/ | The Little Replacement PSU That Could: Kill A Microsoft Surface And Monitor | Maya Posch | [
"hardware",
"Teardown"
] | [
"failure analysis",
"hardware failure",
"laptop notebook",
"psu",
"surface"
] | Recently [Big Clive], everyone’s favorite purveyor of anything electronic that’s dodgy, cheap, cheerful, decidedly crispy or any combination thereof, got sent a
very dead external power supply unit
. Being clearly a third-party PSU with poorly written and many (likely not truthful) safety approval markings on its label, this PSU had the dubious honor of having destroyed a Microsoft Surface computer as well as the monitor that was connected at the time.
In [Clive]’s video (also embedded after the break) the black and very crispy board is examined, showing a wealth of vaporized traces and plenty of soot. What’s however most fascinating is the failure mode: instead of something obvious like e.g. the main transformer between the primary and secondary side failing, here it would seem that an inductor (see heading image) on the secondary side had its insulation rubbed off and shorted on a nearby heatsink. A heatsink that just happened to be also electrically connected on the primary (mains-level) side.
Judging by the former owner’s report and aftermath, this led to a very sudden and violent demise of the PSU, with mains power very likely making its way into the unsuspecting Surface system and connected monitor. The number of ‘very nope’ design decisions made in this PSU are astounding, and a lesson for both aspiring EEs and anyone considering getting a ‘cheap’ third-party replacement PSU.
(Thanks to [Helge] for the tip) | 55 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6429416",
"author": "Jerry",
"timestamp": "2022-02-21T12:33:34",
"content": "Designers in my group, always seemed to assign “Jobs” to the fresh out of schoolengineers. What could possibly go wrong?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,781.665338 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/21/a-ball-lens-for-optical-fiber-coupling-on-the-cheap/ | A Ball Lens For Optical Fiber Coupling On The Cheap | Jenny List | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"ball lens",
"fiber optic",
"fibre optic",
"led"
] | It’s fair to say that for most of us, using a fiber optic cable for digital audio or maybe networking will involve the use of an off-the-shelf termination. We snap the cable into the receptacle, and off we go. We know that inside there will be an LED and some lenses, but that’s it. [TedYapo] though has gone a little further into the realm of fibers, by building his own termination. Faced with the relatively high cost of the ball lenses used to focus light from an LED into the end of the fiber he started looking outside the box. He discovered that
spherical glass anti-bumping balls used when boiling fluids in laboratories make an acceptable and much cheaper alternative
.
A ball lens has an extremely short focal length, meaning that this same property which allowed Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to use them in his microscopes is ideal for LED focusing in a small space at the end of a fiber. Chromatic aberrations are of no consequence for light of a single wavelength. It seems that the glass balls are uniformly spherical enough to do the job. Fitted with the LED and fiber termination in a 3D-printed block, the relative position of the ball can be controlled for optimum light transfer. It’s a relatively simple hack mentioned in passing in a Twitter thread, but we like it because of its cheapness and also for an insight into the world of optical fiber termination.
Curious to know more about optical fibers?
We covered just the video for you back in 2011
. | 16 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6429339",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2022-02-21T11:35:18",
"content": "Another good source pf a ball lems is the little ball that seals fountain pen ink cartridges. They are often glass and much rounder than silica gel balls, all be it less common these days. They make pretty... | 1,760,372,781.344571 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/19/mon-dieu-french-parent-kills-cell-service-for-an-entire-town-to-stop-kids-surfing/ | Mon Dieu! French Parent Kills Cell Service For An Entire Town To Stop Kids Surfing | Jenny List | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"France",
"interference",
"jammer"
] | It used to be that having technical skills meant that fixing the computer problems of elderly relatives was a regular occurrence. Over the last few years this has been joined by another request on our time; friends with teenage children requesting help configuring their routers such that Internet access is curtailed when the kids should sleeping. In France a desperate parent took more extreme measures, buying a wideband frequency jammer to ensure
les petits anges
can’t waste the night away on social media sites through their cellular connections. It had the intended effect, but sadly it also interrupted cellular coverage over a wide area The French spectrum regulator ANFR
sent in their investigators
(French,
Google Translate link
), and now the unfortunate parent faces the prospect of up to 6 months imprisonment and €30,000 fine for owning and using a device that’s illegal in France.
A cursory search of everybody’s favourite online electronics bazaars will find plenty of these devices, so perhaps what’s surprising is that we don’t see more of these devices
even if it’s not the first tale of interference tracking that we’ve seen
. Judging by the strategies our friends with kids take, we’d suggest meanwhile to the unfortunate French person, that they simply equip their kids with restricted data plans. | 34 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427976",
"author": "RÖB",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T12:24:31",
"content": "We had a similar situation in my country where the owner of a cinema jammed mobile signals to stop phones ringing during the movies. Unfortunately there easy to buy on ebay and the like and people don’t reali... | 1,760,372,782.040371 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/19/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-do-my-eyes-deceive-me-after-all/ | Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, Do My Eyes Deceive Me After All | Matthew Carlson | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3D printed optical illusion",
"blender",
"illusion",
"reverse engineer"
] | Say what you will about illusions, [Create Inc] has some 3D prints that appear to change shape
when viewed in a mirror
. For example, circles transform into stars and vice versa. A
similar trick was performed by [Kokichi Sugihara] in 2016
, where he showed circles that appear as squares in the mirror. For the trick to work, the camera’s position (or your eye) is important as the shapes look different from different angles. The illusion comes in when your brain ignores any extra information and concludes that a much more complex shape is a simpler one. [Create Inc] walks you through the process of how the illusion works and how it was created in Blender.
When
he posted the video on Reddit
, most seemed to think that it wasn’t a mirror and there was some camera trickery. At its heart, this is reverse-engineering a magic trick, and we think it’s an impressive one. STL files
are on Thingiverse
or
Etsy if you want to print your own
. We covered a
second illusion that [Kokichi] did
that relies on a similar trick.
Thanks to [Vipul Rajan] for sending this one in! | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428001",
"author": "LonC",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T13:31:28",
"content": "Not much of a mistake, but he created the shape in blender using (basically) the same viewpoint parameters (VP1: x=0, y=42, z=42 and VP2: x=0, y=-42, z=42; the same except for minus in y) which ignores the f... | 1,760,372,782.434399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/homemade-toy-wind-tunnel-blows-really-well/ | Homemade Toy Wind Tunnel Blows (Really Well) | Adam Zeloof | [
"News",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"fan",
"mechanical engineering",
"wind tunnel",
"wood working"
] | Sometimes a kid wakes up on Christmas morning and runs downstairs, only hoping to see one thing: a shiny new wind tunnel. This past December, that’s exactly what [SparksAndCode]’s son found
under
beside the tree, complete with a bag of scarves, ping-pong balls, and other fun things to launch through it (in the name of physics, of course).
The real story here starts about a week before Christmas, when [SparksAndCode]’s son was enthralled by a similar device at a science museum. At his wife’s suggestion,
[SparksAndCode] got to work designing a and building a wind tunnel with hardware-store parts
, his deadline looming ahead. The basic structure of the tunnel is three rods which support plywood collars. The walls are formed by plastic sheets rolled inside the collars to make a tube. Underneath, a Harbor Freight fan supplies a nice, steady stream of air for endless entertainment.
After finding a few bugs during his son’s initial beta testing on Christmas morning, [SparksAndCode] brought the wind tunnel back into the shop for a few tweaks and upgrades, including a mesh cover on the air intake to stop things from getting sucked into the fan. The final result was a very functional (and fun!) column of air. Looking for even more function (but not necessarily less fun)? We’ve got you covered too with t
his home-built research wind tunnel from a few years back
. | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427910",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T09:03:56",
"content": "Awesome dad!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6427958",
"author": "TacticalNinja",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T11:37:59",
"content": "I wish I ha... | 1,760,372,782.346646 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/open-source-lxi-tools-free-us-from-vendor-bloat/ | Open Source LXI Tools Free Us From Vendor Bloat | Dave Rowntree | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"gpib",
"ieee-488",
"lua",
"LXI",
"scpi",
"test equipment",
"usb"
] | LXI, or LAN eXtensions for Instrumentation is a modern control standard for connecting electronics instrumentation which supports ethernet. It replaces the older GPIB standard, giving much better performance and lower cost of implementation. This is a good thing. [Martin Lund] has created the
open source lxi-tools project
which enables us to detach ourselves from the often bloated vendor tools usually required for talking LXI to your bench equipment. This is a partial rewrite of an earlier version of the tool, and now sports some rather nice features such as mDNS for instrument discovery, support for screen grabbing, and a LUA-based scripting backend. (
API Link
)
SCPI or Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments
is the text-based language spoken by many instruments, allowing control and querying of an instrument. Just to be clear, SCPI is not at all a new thing, and older instruments that have GPIB or RS232 connectors, still could talk SCPI. lxi-tools is not for those. Some instruments can also be very picky about the formatting of commands, especially if they’re buggy, so the ability to interactively debug commands is very desirable. It is quite possible to make poor use of SCPI commands in your test script and end up with tests that just take far longer to execute that they need to. lxi-tools has a benchmarking tool too, which helps you to dig in and find out where all the time is going and make suitable adjustments.
We’ve not seen much about LXI on Hackaday, but we did cover using
PyVISA for dealing with SCPI-over-GPIB
in python. If you have an older instrument with GPIB and you don’t want to sell a internal organ to pay for a USB adaptor,
here’s one you can make yourself
. | 8 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427849",
"author": "helge",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T06:09:22",
"content": "SCPI isn’t as old (and thus bad) as this article suggests. lndeed the example picture shows the use of SCPI via ethernet on standard port 5025 (SCPI-RAW).See also:https://hackaday.com/2021/11/17/scpi-on-tea... | 1,760,372,782.391779 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/rc-snowmobile-makes-tracks-on-ice/ | RC Snowmobile Makes Tracks On Ice | Bryan Cockfield | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"chain",
"Frozen",
"ice",
"lake",
"rc",
"remote control",
"servo",
"skates",
"skis",
"snowmobile",
"vehicle"
] | With all the futuristic technology currently at our disposal, it seems a little bizarre that most passenger vehicles are essentially the same thing that they were a century ago. Four wheels, a motor, and some seats would appear to be a difficult formula to beat. But in the 3D printing world where rapid prototyping is the name of the game, some unique vehicle designs have been pushed out especially in the RC world. One of the latest comes to us from [RCLifeOn]
in the form of a single-wheeled RC snowmobile
.
While not a traditional snowmobile with tracks, this one does share some similarities. It has one drive wheel in the back printed with TPR for flexibility and it also includes studs all along its entire circumference to give it better traction on ice. There are runners in the front made from old ice skates which the vehicle uses for steering, and it’s all tied together with an RC controller and some lithium batteries to handle steering and driving the electric motor.
There were some design flaws in the first iteration of this vehicle, including a very large turning radius, a gearing setup with an unnecessarily high torque, and a frame that was too flexible for the chain drive. [RCLifeOn] was also testing this on a lake which looked like it was just about to revert to a liquid state which made for some interesting video segments of him retrieving the stuck vehicle with a tree branch and string. All in all, we are hopeful for a second revision in the future when some of these issues are hammered out and this one-of-a-kind vehicle can really rip across the frozen wastes
not unlike this other interesting snowmobile from a decade ago
.
Thanks to [Timo] for the tip! | 7 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427905",
"author": "Johannes Burgel",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T08:49:31",
"content": "“This was mediocre at best”Jup",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6427940",
"author": "Jkk",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T10:35:35",
"co... | 1,760,372,782.642558 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/dial-into-the-internet-like-its-1999/ | Dial Into The Internet Like It’s 1999 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"56k",
"90's",
"analog",
"dial-up",
"digital",
"homelab",
"networking",
"Qube",
"retrocomputing",
"server",
"telephone",
"terminal"
] | Restoring classic hardware of any sort is a great hobby to have, whether it’s restoring vintage cars, tools, or even antique Apple or Commodore computers. Understanding older equipment can help improve one’s understanding of the typically more complicated modern equivalents, plus it’s just plain fun to get something old up and running again. Certainly we see more retro computing restorations around here, but one thing that we don’t typically see much of is the networking equipment that would have gotten those older computers onto the early Internet. [Retrocet] has a strong interest in that area,
and his latest dial-up server really makes us feel like we’re back in the 90s
.
This home networking lab is built around a Cobalt Qube 2 that was restored after it was gifted to him as a wedding present. The Qube had a cutting edge 250 MHz 64-bit processor with up to 256 MB of RAM, and shipped with a customized Linux distribution as an operating system. The latest upgrade to this build sped up the modems to work at their full 56k rates which involved the addition of a DIVA T/A ISDN terminal and some additional hardware which ensures that incoming calls to the modems are digital. Keeping the connections digital instead of analog keeps the modems from lowering their speed to 33k to handle the conversions.
Until recently
, [Retrocet] was running some of the software needed for this setup in a custom virtual machine, but thanks to the full restoration of the Qube and some tweaking of the Red Hat Linux install to improve the Point-to-Point Protocol capabilities of the older system, everything is now running on the antique hardware. If you are like [Retrocet] and have a bunch of this older hardware sitting around, there are
still some ISPs available that can provide you with some service
. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427683",
"author": "Redhatter (VK4MSL)",
"timestamp": "2022-02-18T21:32:25",
"content": "Ahh the venerable Cobalt Qube II… an interesting machine.NetBSD still supports them I think.Gentoo does if you’re patient — waiting for Gentoo’s Catalyst tool to grind out a stage 3 tarball was... | 1,760,372,782.492603 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/retro-future-nixie-corvair-instrument-panel/ | Retro Future Nixie Corvair Instrument Panel | Matthew Carlson | [
"car hacks"
] | [
"car dash",
"nixie",
"nixie tachometer",
"nixie tube",
"odometer"
] | The future we know today looks very different than the one envisioned in the 60s and 70s. For starters, it has far too few Nixie tubes. An oversight [nixiebunny] wants to address
with his Nixie tube instrument panel
.
All the essential info is there: engine temperature, tachometer, speed, battery voltage, and even odometer. You might have noticed that there isn’t a clock. The justification that [nixiebunny] gives is that he’s always wearing his Nixie watch, so a clock in his car seems redundant. There is also a gap in the panel to allow an oil pressure display. Corvairs are known for throwing belts next to the oil sender, so any attached sensor needs to be designed well and thought through. A Teensy receives engine telemetry data (no OBDII port to hook into — GM didn’t come out with the
first OBD port until the 80s
) from the engine bay. The data is transformed into SPI data sent to the 74HC595 shift register chain via a CAT5 cable. Details are a little sparse, but we can see a custom PCB to fit the shape of the hole in the dash with the different Nixie tube footprints silkscreened on.
We love seeing Nixie tubes in unexpected places. Like
this POV Nixie clock
or this
Nixie robot sculpture
. | 21 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427663",
"author": "BobH",
"timestamp": "2022-02-18T19:54:53",
"content": "That brings back fond memories. I drove a couple of different Corvairs as a kid. They were very short on Nixies though.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,782.745108 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/20/homemade-panadapter-brings-waterfall-to-old-radio/ | Homemade Panadapter Brings Waterfall To Old Radio | Adam Zeloof | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ham radio",
"sdr",
"vintage radio",
"waterfall"
] | Ham radio operators can be pretty selective about their gear. Some are old-school tube purists who would never think of touching a rig containing transistors, and others are perfectly happy with the small Software Defined Radio (SDR) hooked up to their PC. The vast majority, though, of us are somewhere in between — we appreciate the classic look and feel of vintage radios as well as the convenience of modern ones. Better yet, some of us even like to combine the two by adding a few modern bells and whistles to our favorite “boat anchor.”
[Scott Baker] is one such Ham. He’s only had his license for a few months now and has already jumped into some great projects, including
adding a panadapter to an old Drake R-4B Receiver.
What’s a panadapter, you may ask? As [Scott] explains in his excellent writeup and video, a panadapter is a circuit that grabs a wideband signal from a radio receiver that typically has a narrowband output. The idea is that rather than just listen to somebody’s 4kHz-wide transmission in the 40m band, you can listen to a huge swath of the spectrum, covering potentially hundreds of transmissions, all at the same time.
Well, you can’t actually
listen
to that many transmissions at once — that would be a garbed mess. What you
can
do with that ultrawide signal, however, is look at it. If you take an FFT of the signal to put it in the frequency domain (by using a spectrum analyzer, or in [Scott]’s case, an SDR), you can see all sorts of different signals up and down the spectrum. This makes it a heck of a lot easier to find something to listen to — rather than spinning the dial for hours, hoping to come across a transmission, you can just
see
where all of the interesting signals are.
This isn’t the first (or even the twentieth) time that [Scott]’s work has graced our pages, so make sure to check
some of his other incredible projects
in our archives! | 16 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428406",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T12:10:34",
"content": "nice enhancement. The automation keypad on his monitor with the vfd is also interesting, i found the write-up on:https://www.smbaker.com/creating-the-ultimate-home-automation-keypad",
"parent_id": null,... | 1,760,372,782.543358 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/19/spectrometer-detects-chemicals-by-zapping-samples-with-a-laser-beam/ | Spectrometer Detects Chemicals By Zapping Samples With A Laser Beam | Robin Kearey | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"laser",
"LIBS",
"nd:yag laser",
"spectrometer"
] | Here at Hackaday, we love projects that result in useful lab equipment for a fraction of the cost of professional gear. [Lorenz], over at Advanced Tinkering,
built his own instrument for Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy
, or LIBS, and it’s quite an impressive device. LIBS is a technique for analyzing substances to find their chemical composition. Basically, the idea is to zap a sample with a powerful laser, then look at the little cloud of plasma that results and measure the wavelengths emitted by it.
The spectrum of hematite (iron oxide), compared to that of pure iron
The laser [Lorenz] used is a Nd:YAG unit salvaged from a tattoo removal machine. After it fires a pulse, a photodiode detects the light and triggers a spectrometer, which consists of a diffraction grating, a few lenses and mirrors, and a linear CCD sensor. The grating splits the incoming lights into its constituent components, which fall onto the CCD and trigger its pixels. An STM32 Nucleo board reads out the results and sends them to a PC for further processing.
That processing bit turned out to be a full project on its own. [Lorenz] called upon [g3gg0], who
software that simplifies the operation of the spectrometer
. First, it helps with the instrument’s calibration. Point the detector at a well-known light source like a laser or a fluorescent lamp, then select the expected wavelengths on the resulting spectral plot. The software then automatically calculates the correct coefficients to map each pixel to a specific wavelength.
The software also contains a database of spectra corresponding to chemical elements: once you’ve taken a spectrum of an unknown sample, you can overlay these onto the resulting plot and try to find a match. The resulting system seems to work quite well. Samples of iron oxide and silver oxide gave a reasonable match to their constituent components.
We’ve seen other types of spectrometers before: if you simply want to characterize a light source, check out
this Raspberry Pi-based model
. If you’re interested in chemical analysis you might also want to look at
this open-source Raman spectrometer
. | 18 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428438",
"author": "Alan McRae",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T13:43:04",
"content": "This is an awesome diy project! The possibility of having one of these spectrometers in a community accessible lab associated with a local school or public library is very exciting. Looking forward to ... | 1,760,372,782.600199 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/19/make-your-own-tabletop-game-organizers-with-online-tool/ | Make Your Own Tabletop Game Organizers With Online Tool | Donald Papp | [
"Games",
"how-to"
] | [
"3d model",
"3d printed",
"cardstock",
"games",
"openscad",
"organizer",
"papercraft",
"replicad",
"Tabletop",
"token tray",
"tray"
] | There is a vibrant cottage industry built around selling accessories to improve the storage and organization of tabletop games, but the more DIY-minded will definitely appreciate
[Steve Genoud]’s deckinabox tool
, which can create either 3D-printable designs, or ones more suited to folded paper or cardstock. Making your own organizer can be as satisfying as it is economical, and [Steve]’s tool aims to make customization simple and easy.
The tool can also generate models for folded paper or cardstock.
The interface for customizing the 3D-printable token tray, for example, begins with a simple filleted receptacle which one can split into additional regions by adding horizontal or vertical separators. The default is to split a given region down the middle, but every dimension can of course be specified. Things like filleting of edges (for easier token scooping) and other details are all handled automatically. A handy 3D view gives a live render of the design after every change.
[Steve] has a blog post that goes into
some added detail about how the tool was made
, and it makes heavy use of
replicad
, [Steve]’s own library for generating browser-based 3D models in code. Intrigued by the idea of generating 3D models programmatically, and want to use it to make your own models? Don’t forget to also check out
OpenSCAD
; chances are it’s both easier to use and more capable than one might think. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428412",
"author": "Tristan",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T12:28:10",
"content": "Well done! Would love to see the source to add support laser cutting.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6428772",
"author": "TehDan",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,782.690013 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/19/diy-hydrophone-listens-in-on-the-deep-for-cheap/ | DIY Hydrophone Listens In On The Deep For Cheap | Tom Nardi | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"acoustics",
"casting resin",
"hydrophone",
"transducer"
] | The microphone is a pretty ubiquitous piece of technology that we’re all familiar with, but what if you’re not looking to record audio in the air, and instead want to listen in on what’s happening underwater? That’s a job for a hydrophone! Unfortunately, hydrophones aren’t exactly the kind of thing you’re likely to find at the big-box electronics store. Luckily for us, [Jules Ryckebusch] picked up a few tricks in his 20-year career as a Navy submariner, and has
documented his process for building a sensitive hydrophone
without needing a military budget.
Fascinated by all the incredible sounds he used to hear hanging around the Sonar Shack, [Jules] pored over documents related to hydrophone design from the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) until he distilled it all down to a surprisingly straightforward build. The key to the whole build is a commercially available cylindrical piezoelectric transducer designed for underwater communication that, incredibly, costs less than $20 USD a pop.
The transducer is connected to an op-amp board of his own design, which has been adapted from his previous work with condenser microphones. [Jules] designed the 29 x 26 mm board to fit neatly within the diameter of the transducer itself. The entire mic and preamp assembly can be cast inside a cylinder of resin. Specifically, he’s found an affordable two-part resin from Smooth-On that has nearly the same specific gravity as seawater. This allows him to encapsulate all the electronics in a way that’s both impervious to water and almost acoustically transparent. A couple of 3D-printed molds later, the hydrophone was ready to cast.
Interestingly, this
isn’t the first homebrew hydrophone we’ve seen
. But compared to that earlier entry, which basically just waterproofed a standard microphone pickup, we think this more thoughtful approach is likely to have far better performance. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428338",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T04:29:47",
"content": "Wow! Awesome! I would love to make some and do beam forming with them.At a bit of a tangent, there is an old open source project I liked HASAS (https://sourceforge.net/projects/hasas/), which was basically ... | 1,760,372,782.795243 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/19/diy-float-valve-for-passive-hydroponics-leverages-3d-printing/ | DIY Float Valve For Passive Hydroponics Leverages 3D Printing | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"green hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"float valve",
"hydroponics",
"kratky method",
"passive"
] | [Billy] has a special interest in passive hydroponics (also known as the Kratky method), which is a way of growing plants in nutrient-rich water that does not circulate. As the plant grows and liquid level drops, only the tips of the roots remain submerged while more and more of the root surface is exposed to oxygen in a harmonious balance. However, “thirsty” plant types (tomatoes, for example) throw off this balance, and the system needs to be modified. To address this, [Billy] designed and printed
a passive float valve system
that takes care of topping up the reservoir only when needed, without using pumps or any other electrical equipment.
Commercial or industrial float valves are too big to use in his small tanks, which led [Billy] to test dozens of DIY designs. He used everything from plastic water bottles to pipe ends, but nothing quite measured up. With 3D printing, [Billy] was able to create a sealed, lightweight float that exactly matched the housing and tube locations.
A strip of silicone works as a sealing agent.
The way [Billy]’s float valve works is by using a hollow object as a kind of buoyant plug inside a housing. When the water level is high, the buoyant object rises up and presses a strip of silicone against an outlet, preventing water from flowing. If the water level is low, the buoyant plug drops and water is free to flow. With a reservoir of fresh nutrient-rich water placed above the grow tank, gravity takes care of pushing a fresh supply down a tube, so no active pump is needed. Combined with a passive float valve, the system pretty much runs itself.
Watch [Billy] give a tour of his system and valve design in the video embedded below. He’s got a lot of experience when it comes to working with projects involving liquids. Only someone as comfortable as he is would
make his own DIY dishwasher
. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428245",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T22:18:37",
"content": "I think this can still be optimised further to have no moving parts, like those self-fillong dog bowls that use a sealed container turned upside down to set the water level at the container opening. When fi... | 1,760,372,782.920881 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/19/its-bad-apple-but-on-a-32k-eprom/ | It’s Bad Apple, But On A 32K EPROM | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"bad apple",
"eprom",
"HD4480"
] | The
Bad Apple!!
video with its silhouette animation style has long been a staple graphics demo for low-end hardware, a more stylish alternative to the question “Will it run
DOOM
?”. It’s normal for it to be rendered onto a screen by a small microcomputer or similar but as [Ian Ward] demonstrates in an unusual project, it’s possible to display the video without any processor being involved. Instead he’s used
a clever arrangement involving a 32K byte EPROM
driving a HD44780-compatible parallel alphanumeric LCD display.
While 32K bytes would have seemed enormous back in the days of 8-bit computing, even when driving only a small section of an alphanumeric LCD it’s still something of a struggle to express the required graphics characters. This feat is achieved by the use of a second EPROM, which carries a look-up table.
It’s fair to say that the result which can be seen in the video below the break isn’t the most accomplished rendition of
Bad Apple!!
that we’ve seen, but given the rudimentary hardware upon which it’s playing we think that shouldn’t matter.
Why
didn’t we think of doing this in 1988! | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428108",
"author": "Eric Chapin",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T19:50:26",
"content": "That icon looks like Michigan state mirrored.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6428353",
"author": "dlcarrier",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T0... | 1,760,372,783.211063 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/19/against-the-cloud/ | Against The Cloud | Elliot Williams | [
"Rants"
] | [
"cloud",
"diy",
"everything as a service",
"newsletter",
"server"
] | One of our writers is working on an article about hosting your own (project) website on your own iron, instead of doing it the modern, cloudy-servicey way. Already, this has caused quite a bit of hubbub in the Hackaday Headquarters. Who would run their own server in 2022, and why?
The arguments against DIY are all strong. If you just want to spin up a static website, you can do it for free in a bazillion different places. GitHub’s
Pages
is super convenient, and your content is version controlled as a side benefit. If you want an IoT-type data-logging and presentation service, there are tons of those as well — I don’t have a favorite. If you want e-mail, well, I don’t have to tell you that a large American search monopoly offers free accounts, for the low price of slurping up all of your behavioral data. Whatever your need, chances are very good that there’s a service for you out there somewhere in the cloud.
And that’s awesome if you only want the service provided. But what if you want to play around? Or learn how it all works under the hood? This is Hackaday!
For instance, you could run your own mail server just for your friends and family. The aforementioned search monopolist will probably flag all of your e-mail as spam, partly because they don’t trust small e-mail providers, and partly because that’s the “m” in monopoly. But if you can get folks to whitelist the addresses, you’ll be in business. And then you open up a world of fun and foolery. You can write hooks to automatically handle mail, or you can create an infinite number of mail accounts, even on the fly as per
Spamgourmet
, the most awesome anti-spam tool of the last 30 years. Or you can invent your own. Run a mailing list for your relatives. Or do something stupid.
I used to run a service where, when a particular account received an e-mail, the attached photo was pushed up to a website with the subject line as the caption. Instant photo-blog, of the strangest and least secure sort. Getting it running was a few lines of Bash scripting, and an afternoon of fun. Is there a service that does this, already existing in the cloud? Probably. One that allows you a little privacy and doesn’t track your every move? Maybe. But even if there is, would I have learned about
sendmail
by using this service? Nope!
I hear you saying “security” under your breath, and you’re right. This system was secured by lock made of purest obscurity. But still, in seven years of running the service, nobody guessed the magic e-mail address, not once. Knowledge of the e-mail address was essentially a password, but if I needed extra security I probably could have implemented it in a few lines of Bash anyway. The webpage itself was static HTML, so good luck with that,
Hackerman
! (The site’s been down for a while now, so you missed your chance.)
If you just want a service, you can be served. But if you want to be a
server
, a first-class Internet citizen, with your own cloud in the sky, nothing’s stopping you either. And in contrast to using someone else’s computers, running your own is an invitation to play. It’s a big, Internet-connected sandbox. There are an infinity of funny ideas out there that you can implement on your own box, and a lot to learn. If you hack on someone else’s box, it’s a crime. If you hack on your own, it’s a pleasure.
I know it’s anachronistic, but
give it a try
. (PDF, obscenity, uncorrected typos.) Be your own cloud.
This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on
the web version of the newsletter
.
Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning?
You should sign up
! | 58 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428025",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2022-02-19T15:06:32",
"content": "I run my own server to host a website, but let me tell you ….It was like the sunrise on a bright new day when I stopped having anything to do with mail and let a large US search monopoly do tha... | 1,760,372,783.307782 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/bend-your-vase-mode-prints-by-hacking-the-gcode/ | BendYour Vase Mode Prints By Hacking The GCode | Dave Rowntree | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"2.5d printing",
"3d printing",
"nonplanar",
"python"
] | [Stefan] from
CNCKitchen
wanted to make some bendy tubes for a window-mountable ball run, and rather than coming up with some bent tube models, it seemed there might be a different way to
achieve the desired outcome
. Starting with a simple tube model designed to be quickly printed in vase mode, he wrote a Python script which read in the G-Code, and modified it allow it to be bent along a spline path.
Vase mode works by slowly ramping up the Z-axis as the extruder follows the object outline, but the slicing process is still essentially the same, with the object sliced in a plane parallel to the bed. Whilst this non-planar method moves the Z-axis in sync with the horizontal motion (although currently limited to only one plane of distortion, which simplifies the maths a bit) it is we guess still technically a planar solution, but just an inclined plane. But we digress, non-planar in this context merely means not parallel to the bed, and we’ll roll with that.
[Stefan] explains that there are quite a few difficulties with this approach. The first issue is that on the inside of the bend, the material flow rate needed to be scaled back to compensate. But the main problem stems from the design of the extruder itself. Intended for operating parallel to the bed, there are often a few structures in the way of operating at an angle, such as fan mounts, and the hotend itself. By selecting an appropriate machine and tweaking it a bit, [Stefan] managed to get it to work at angles up to 30 degrees off the horizontal plane. One annoyance was that the stock nozzle shape of his E3D Volcano hotend didn’t lend itself to operating at such an inclination, so he needed to mount an older V6-style tip with an adapter. After a lot of tuning and fails, it did work and the final goal was achieved! If you want to try this for yourselves, the code for this can be found on the
project GitHub
.
If you want to learn more about non-planar printing, we’ve covered the process of
non-planar slicing a while back
, and if you think your
2.5D
printer doesn’t quite have the range for really funky print paths, then you may want to look into a
robot arm based printer instead
.
Thanks to [Keith] for the tip! | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431139",
"author": "JohnU",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T09:20:29",
"content": "Following that video I ended up down a rabbit hole and discoveredhttps://www.scorchworks.com/which appears to be a dude who writes some incredibly useful G-Code software, including some for warping G-code a... | 1,760,372,783.165811 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/ai-maybe-revives-dead-languages/ | AI Maybe Revives Dead Languages | Al Williams | [
"Artificial Intelligence",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"ai",
"languages",
"rants"
] | While Star Trek’s transporter is hard to imagine — perfect matter movement across vast distances with no equipment on one end — it may not be the most far-fetched piece of tech on the Enterprise. While there are several contenders, I strongly suspect the universal translator is the most unlikely
MacGuffin
. After all, how would you decipher a totally unknown language in real-time? Of course, no one wants to watch 30 episodes of TV about how we finally figured out what Klingons call clouds, so pretty much every science fiction movie has some hand-waving explanation for speaking the viewer’s language. Farscape had microbes, some aliens have telepathy that works with alien brains of any kind, and still others study English from afar for decades off camera. Babelfish anyone?
I was thinking about this because of an article I read by [Alizeh Kohari] about [Jiaming Luo’s] work using AI to decode
dead languages
. While this might seem to be similar to Spock’s translator, it really isn’t. Human languages change over time and distance. You only have to watch the BBC or read something written by Thomas Jefferson to see that. But there is still a lot in common, at least within certain domains.
You’re Only Human
If you are a native English speaker, you can probably puzzle out a lot of words given a text in, say, Spanish or French. Most of these languages either started with or borrowed from Latin and share roots with languages like Greek, so you can often puzzle out a sign with a little context. Now try that with Arabic or Mandarin. Most of us don’t have a clue. Do you read right to left? What are the characters? There’s nothing to grab onto unless you know the language or one that is similar. For example: “每天閱讀 Hackaday” probably doesn’t give you any clues other than it is about Hackaday.
The AI isn’t much different. The software learned how languages change as they evolve by studying patterns between related languages like Ugaritic and Hebrew. You might think languages develop
ad hoc
, but there are definite patterns — at least, among human languages.
For example, although not all languages have the same words for colors, it has been known since around 1969 that humans tend to develop words for colors in the same order. That is black and white get names along with red. Then, later, names for other colors appear. You can watch an interesting video about this effect below.
Close Relations
Assuming that the AI could translate one related language into another, what happens if you feed it languages that are related, but we no longer know how to read?
An impression of a cylindrical seal from Iran dating back a few thousand years. Photo by [ALFGRN],
CC-BY-SA-2.0
.
For example, [Kohari] points out Indus script — Harappan — found on thousands of small stamps or seals around Pakistan and as far away as Iraq. Despite decades of analysis, no one knows what they say. There have even been theories that the seals say nothing, but mathematical analysis shows the symbols are not placed randomly and appear to correlate with other languages.
The problem for the AI is that no one knows what languages might be related to the Indus script. [Luo] and his team have done work to devise an algorithm that can tell how close two scripts are even if it can’t understand them. This could help. We’ll see if his computer can eventually read the dead Indus language.
If this works, it could open up a lot of archeology. There are many languages that have been forgotten like Etruscan and Rongorongo. If you knew they had morphed into other languages we do know, this could help unlock them. Even languages we do understand fairly well today were not always known in modern times. Egyptian hieroglyphics, for example, were a mystery until the discovery of the Rosetta stone which had the same message in the hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic script, and Greek. At least we knew how to read Greek.
AI Hype
If we had the true universal translator, it would be fun to see what the dolphins and the bees are saying to each other. It seems like if we could do that, reading Indus would be easy. The truth is, though, AI is a long way from being able to totally replace humans and human insight into creative problem solving and that’s important to remember as people look to us as people who understand technology to help them make decisions about AI.
For example, researchers think the people who wrote the Indus script seals wrote right to left because sometimes the left characters are scrunched up as sometimes happens when you get close to the edge of your paper. However, since the seals were probably meant to be used as stamps, that doesn’t necessarily imply the language itself is right to left. For instance, Chinese used to be written top to bottom and right to left, but in modern formats is written row-wise left to right. Both styles persist, but you know which way to read from context. Insights like that are still the purview of humans, at least for now.
I have read recently that AI may
already be conscious
. If you know much about how the brain works and how modern AI works, you’ll probably find that statement to be as unlikely as I do. We may one day replicate an electronic brain that embodies that thing that makes us “human” or even just conscious. But that day seems far away, indeed. Besides, if we do, who is to say we won’t have as much trouble speaking with them as we do with dolphins? | 45 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6430671",
"author": "C. Scott Ananian",
"timestamp": "2022-02-22T18:53:17",
"content": "There are also hundreds of knotted-cord quipu that have been digitized. Similarly, analysis seems to show statistical patterns more akin to language than accounting (zipf’s law vs benford’s law)... | 1,760,372,783.750766 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/minimalistic-doorbell-doesnt-need-an-internet-connection-or-even-a-power-supply/ | Minimalistic Doorbell Doesn’t Need An Internet Connection – Or Even A Power Supply | Robin Kearey | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"doorbell",
"electromechanical",
"stepper motor",
"voice coil"
] | Doorbells are among those everyday objects that started out simple but picked up an immense amount of complexity over the years. What began as a mechanism to bang two pieces of metal together evolved into all kinds of wired and wireless electric bells, finally culminating in today’s smart doorbells that beam a live video feed to their owners even if they’re half a world away.
But sometimes, less is more. [Low tech obsession]
built a doorbell out of spare components
that doesn’t require Internet connectivity or even a power supply. But it’s not a purely mechanical device either: the visitor turns a knob mounted on a stepper motor, generating pulses of alternating current. These pulses are then fed into the voice coil of an old hard drive, causing its arm to vibrate and strike a bell, mounted where the platters used to be.
Besides being a great piece of minimalistic design, the doorbell is also a neat demonstration of Faraday’s law of induction. The stepper motor is apparently robust enough to withstand vandalism, although we can imagine that the doorbell’s odd shape might confuse some well-meaning visitors too. If you’re into unusual doorbells, you might want to check out
this one made from an old wall phone
, as well as
this electromechanical contraption
. | 57 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6430612",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2022-02-22T16:40:58",
"content": "My door has a knocker. No power needed, no wires either.However, UPS refuses to train their drivers how to operate a knocker, so they don’t use it. Instead they fill out a little card as their excuse to no... | 1,760,372,783.649966 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/big-chemistry-from-gasoline-to-wintergreen/ | Big Chemistry: From Gasoline To Wintergreen | Dan Maloney | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"benzene",
"Chemistry",
"cumene",
"flavoring",
"Kolbe-Schmitt",
"methanol",
"phenol",
"propylene",
"salicylic acid",
"wintergreen"
] | Most of us probably have some vivid memories of high school or college chemistry lab, where the principles of the science were demonstrated, and where we all got at least a little practice in experimental methods. Measuring, diluting, precipitating, titrating, all generally conducted under safe conditions using stuff that wasn’t likely to blow up or burn.
But dropwise additions and reaction volumes measured in milliliters are not the stuff upon which to build a global economy that feeds, clothes, and provides for eight billion people. For chemistry to go beyond the lab, it needs to be scaled up, often to a point that’s hard to conceptualize. Big chemistry and big engineering go hand in hand, delivering processes that transform the simplest, most abundant substances into the things that, for better or worse, make life possible.
To get a better idea of how big chemistry does that, we’re going to take a look at one simple molecule that we’ve probably all used at one time or another: the common artificial flavoring wintergreen. It’s an innocuous ingredient in a wide range of foods and medicines, but the infrastructure required to make it and all its precursors is a snapshot of just how important big chemistry really is.
Natural or Artificial?
My interest in wintergreen came from
a recent video
that described what happened to a child who accidentally overdosed on wintergreen essential oil; spoiler alert, it wasn’t good. The medical story itself was fascinating, but it got me curious about where wintergreen oil comes from. While wintergreen oil can be harvested from a number of shrubs of the
Gaultheria
genus and from some species of birch, the primary aromatic substance in wintergreen oil, methyl salicylate, is much more commonly produced synthetically. Artificial wintergreen lacks the additional compounds found in natural wintergreen oil, and therefore some of its complexities, but methyl salicylate still has enough of the familiar aroma and flavor of the real deal to serve as a suitable substitute.
Methyl salicylate (right) is formed by the esterification of salicylic acid with methanol (left). This is done in the presence of sulfuric acid, which serves as a catalyst and a dehydrating agent. This is commonly referred to as a Fischer esterification.
The pleasant aroma of methyl salicylate is a characteristic of the chemical bonds within it, specifically the ester bond. An ester bond is one that connects two species through a carboxyl group; in the case of methyl salicylate, it’s the methyl group (-CH
3
) that is ester bonded to the salicylic acid. The reaction that accomplishes this is known as a Fischer esterification, and while there’s a lot of complexity involving exactly how electrons are shuffled around, for our purposes all that’s important to know is that mixing salicylic acid together with the alcohol methanol (CH
3
OH) in the presence of sulfuric acid transfers the methyl group from the alcohol to the salicylic acid.
This sounds simple, and it is — simple enough that there are plenty of examples of making artificial wintergreen oil on YouTube. On an industrial scale, things get a little more complicated, as the reaction needs to be cleaned of impurities, but the interesting part here is where the two main compounds needed for this reaction — methanol and salicylic acid — come from in the first place. As it turns out, like natural oil of wintergreen, both of these substances can be found in nature, but both are now more commonly sourced from the same place that nearly everything else seems to come from — petrochemicals.
Methanol
We’ll take methanol first. Methanol, also known as methyl alcohol or wood alcohol, is a single-carbon alcohol that is produced as a waste product by some anaerobic bacteria. Methanol was traditionally produced by burning wood under reducing (low-oxygen) conditions and condensing the vapor that comes out. Industrially, the process is much different, and relies on syngas, or synthesis gas, as a feedstock.
Syngas is a mixture of mainly carbon monoxide and hydrogen, with a little carbon dioxide and water vapor mixed in. Although most syngas produced is used to make methanol, to the tune of 157 million tonnes globally in 2020, it’s also a feedstock for myriad chemical processes, including
the Haber-Bosch method
of making ammonia. While syngas can be made using virtually any source of carbon — the gas given off by the aforementioned low-oxygen wood fire is pretty much syngas — and via multiple methods, most syngas today is manufactured by steam reformation of natural gas, or methane, in the presence of a catalyst like nickel or copper:
Steam reformation is a process that requires huge industrial installations to handle the high temperatures and pressures needed — up to 850 °C at 25 to 40 atmospheres. Since so much syngas is devoted to methanol production, the output of the steam reformers is often piped directly into the reactors, which contain beds of zinc oxide catalyst on ceramic supports. The reactor is heated and under pressure, but to a comparatively mild 250 °C at 50 to 100 atmospheres:
The crude reactor output is a mix of methanol, ether, and other products such as ketones, aldehydes, and heavier alcohols. These byproducts are isolated through a combination of distillation and phase separation to leave methanol that’s ready to use.
Salicylic Acid
Despite the fact that nature seems to make salicylic acid in abundance — it’s found naturally in the bark and leaves of some species of willow tree, extracts of which have been used medicinally since antiquity — it turns out to be easier to manufacture than to obtain from nature. And again, the primary feedstock for its synthesis is petrochemicals.
Salicylic acid is most commonly made with the Kolbe-Schmitt reaction, which combines a sodium salt of phenol, called sodium phenolate, with carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. The reaction is carried out at moderate temperature and pressure (125 °C, 100 atmospheres) and results in the carboxylation of phenol, with salicylic acid being the primary product.
Kolbe-Schmitt reaction. A sodium salt of phenol is treated under high pressure with carbon dioxide, then the intermediate product is acidified with sulfuric acid to create salicylic acid.
The Kolbe-Schmitt reaction is carried out on huge scales every day, as the salicylic acid it produces is the precursor for one of the most commonly used medicines ever: aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid. About 40,000 metric tons of aspirin are produced every year.
Phenol
Big Chemistry indeed. A plant in Belgium that produces phenol using the cumene method. Source: by Alf van Beem, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
So where does the feedstock for the Kolbe-Schmitt reaction come from? Sodium phenolate is derived from phenol, which is also known as carbolic acid. Phenol is a common organic acid that has all sorts of uses in making everything from plastics, including everyone’s favorite retro plastic Bakelite, to pharmaceuticals. Oral analgesic sprays like Chloraseptic are basically a weak phenol solution mixed with flavoring to mask its characteristically medicinal aroma.
It should come as no surprise by now that phenol is mainly sourced, drumroll please, from petrochemicals. Just a glance at its chemical structure shows that phenol is based on benzene, a six-carbon ring with alternating double bonds. Each of the carbon atoms in benzene has
two hydrogens
a hydrogen attached to it, giving it plenty of places for other species to attach; in the case of phenol, a hydroxyl (-OH) group is attached to one of the carbons.
While phenol was once extracted from coal tars, today there are more efficient ways to make it. There are several commercial processes, but the cumene process is one of the more common methods for phenol production. It uses benzene and propylene, a three-carbon alkene, which react with oxygen in the presence of a catalyst to create phenol and acetone. The overall reaction is shown below, but that’s a simplified picture of the full reaction, which proceeds through the intermediate isopropyl benzene, or cumene, hence the process name. About 11 million tonnes of phenol were produced in 2020 worldwide.
The cumene process takes benzene and propylene and converts them into phenol and acetone. Both are extremely useful industrial chemicals.
Benzene and Propylene
We’re now almost at the end of the road for artificial wintergreen — remember wintergreen? The last two feedstocks to consider are benzene and propylene, both of which come more or less directly from crude oil processing. Propylene, which is also a feedstock for the manufacture of polypropylene plastics, is made by a process called steam cracking. Steam cracking uses high temperatures and pressures to break saturated hydrocarbons, where every carbon has a full complement of hydrogens, into smaller, unsaturated molecules. For propylene, the starting saturated hydrocarbon is propane, a three-carbon gaseous hydrocarbon.
Steam cracking turns propane into propylene and hydrogen gas (not shown).
Which finally brings us to benzene. While the six-carbon ring does occur naturally in crude oil, it’s generally in small enough concentrations that other methods are needed to get industrial quantities. Benzene is the “B” in the so-called BTX hydrocarbons, which along with toluene and xylene are made from a mixture of crude-oil-derived hydrocarbons having between six and twelve carbons. The feedstock undergoes a process called catalytic reformation, where it’s mixed with hydrogen gas, often sourced from our old friend syngas, in the presence of a catalyst like platinum. The reaction takes place at high temperature and pressure, 500 °C and up to 50 atmospheres, and converts the long-chain hydrocarbons into ring structures. Distillation and extraction steps separate the BTX products into separate streams, which then go on to produce hundreds of different products.
While none of this is to say that these are all the exact reactions used in the synthesis of artificial wintergreen, or that starting the process with benzene and propylene would be commercially viable — it would be far easier to start with salicylic acid, which is an ingredient used in the synthesis of aspirin, and treat it with some methanol — the string of reactions discussed here trace one common flavoring agent back to its unexpected roots, and points out just how dependent we still are on petrochemicals, even when we’re not burning them. | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6430571",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2022-02-22T15:17:58",
"content": "I feel like I just read the script for a NileRed video, which is meant as a compliment.Also, kudos for watching ChubbyEmu.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,372,783.817232 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/no-privacy-cloning-the-airtag/ | No Privacy: Cloning The AirTag | Al Williams | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"AirTag",
"apple",
"bluetooth",
"bluetooth low energy",
"ESP32",
"OpenHaystack",
"privacy"
] | You’ve probably heard of the infamous rule 34, but we’d like to propose a new rule — call it rule 35: Anything that can be used for nefarious purposes will be, even if you can’t think of how at the moment. Case in point: apparently there has been an uptick in people using AirTags to do bad things. People have used them to stalk people or to tag cars so they can be found later and stolen. According to [Fabian Bräunlein], Apple’s responses to this don’t consider cases where clones or modified AirTags are in play. To prove the point, he
built a clone that bypasses the current protection features
and used it to track a willing experimental subject for 5 days with no notifications.
According to the post, Apple says that AirTags have serial numbers and beep when they have not been around their host Apple device for a certain period. [Fabian] points out that clone tags don’t have serial numbers and may also not have speakers. There is apparently a thriving market, too, for genuine tags that have been modified to remove their speakers. [Fabian’s] clone uses an ESP32 with no speaker and no serial number.
The other protection, according to Apple, is that if they note an AirTag moving with you over some period of time without the owner, you get a notification. In other words, if your iPhone sees your own tag repeatedly, that’s fine. It also doesn’t mind seeing someone else’s tags if they are near you. But if your phone sees a tag many times and the owner isn’t around, you get a notification. That way, you can help identify random tags, but you’ll know if someone is trying to track you. [Fabian] gets around that by cycling between 2,000 pre-loaded public keys so that the tracked person’s device doesn’t realize that it is seeing the same tag over and over. Even Apple’s Android app that scans for trackers is vulnerable to this strategy.
Even for folks who aren’t particularly privacy minded, it’s pretty clear a worldwide network of mass-market devices that allow almost anyone to be tracked is a problem. But what’s the solution? Even the better strategies employed by AirGuard won’t catch everything, as [Fabian] explains.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had a look at
privacy concerns around AirTags
. Of course, it is always possible to
build a tracker
. But it is hard to get the worldwide network of Bluetooth listeners that Apple has. | 55 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6430443",
"author": "Colton",
"timestamp": "2022-02-22T12:31:14",
"content": "If you try to mention the rules, at least check if the number is occupied or not.35) The exception to rule #34 is the citation of rule #34.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,372,783.420038 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/super-simple-camera-slider-with-a-neat-twist/ | Super Simple Camera Slider With A Neat Twist | Dave Rowntree | [
"digital cameras hacks"
] | [
"camera slider",
"dc motor",
"motion control",
"pan",
"Tilt",
"timing belt"
] | When you get into making videos of products or your own cool hacks, at some point you’re going to start wondering how those neat panning and rotating shots are achieved. The answer is quite often some kind of mechanical slider which sends the camera along a predefined path. Buying one can be an expensive outlay, so many people opt to build one. [Rahel zahir Ali] was no different, and designed and built a very
simple slide, but with a neat twist
.
This design uses a geared DC motor, taken from a car windscreen wiper. That’s a cost effective way to get your hands on a nice high-torque motor with an integral reduction gearbox. The added twist is that the camera mount is pivoted and slides on a third, central smooth rod. The ends of this guide rod can be offset at either end, allowing the camera to rotate up to thirty degrees as the slide progresses from one end to the other. With a few tweaks, the slider can be vertically mounted, to give those up-and-over shots. Super simple, low tech and not an Arduino in sight.
The CAD modelling was done with Fusion 360, with all the models downloadable with source, in case someone needs to adapt the design further. We were just expecting a pile of STLs, so seeing the full source was a nice surprise, given how many open source projects like this (especially on
Thingiverse
) do often seem to neglect this.
Electronics consist of a simple DC motor controller (although [Rahel] doesn’t mention a specific product, it should not be hard to source) which deals with the speed control, and a DPDT latching rocker switch handles the motor direction. A pair of microswitches are used to stop the motor at the end of its travel. Other than a 3D printer, there is nothing at all special needed to make yourself quite a useful little slider!
We’ve seen a few slider designs, since this is a common problem for content creators. Here’s a
more complicated one
, and
another one
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6430449",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2022-02-22T12:38:32",
"content": "Really like it, a sound design that looks like it would scale up well and I like it being pure mechanical – computerized everything is silly, it really can’t give much gain for something like this and a... | 1,760,372,783.471852 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/21/i2c-breathes-new-life-into-casio-pocket-calculator/ | I2C Breathes New Life Into Casio Pocket Calculator | Chris Wilkinson | [
"classic hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"calculator",
"casio",
"fx-502p",
"stm32"
] | When is a pocket calculator more than just a calculator? [Andrew Menadue] has been pushing the limits of his 1970s Casio FX-502P by
adding all sorts of modern functionality via the calculator’s expansion port
.
Several older Casio calculators included an expansion port for connecting cassette tape storage and printing functionality. Data on the FX-502P could be saved on cassette tape using the well-known Kansas City standard, however this signal was produced by Casio’s FA-1 calculator cradle, not the FX-502P itself. To interact with the calculator itself would require an understanding of whatever protocol Casio designed for this particular model.
It turns out that the protocol is a little quirky compared to its contemporaries, with variable length data packets and inverted data logic, (zero volts is ‘1’ and three volts is ‘0’). Once the protocol was untangled, it was ‘simply’ a matter of connecting the calculator to the GPIO interface on the STM32, and using some software wizardry to start shooting data packets back and forth.
This hack can be used to send and receive data from an SD card (via a RAM buffer), however it’s the other expansion capabilities that really make us wonder. [Andrew] has demonstrated how easy it is to add a real-time clock or thermal printer. Using the I
2
C capabilities of the STM32, it’s likely that all sorts of gadgets and sensors could be coupled with this vintage calculator, and many others like it.
You can find even more details about this hack over here
, including some follow up videos to the original hack. No stranger to vintage calculators, we last featured [Andrew] after
he retrofitted a modern LCD display to an old Casio
. It’s charming to see how these calculators are far from obsolete. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6430223",
"author": "itsthatidiotagain",
"timestamp": "2022-02-22T07:12:27",
"content": "My guess is that this should also work with the FX-501P and the FX-601P and FX-602P, all of which could use the FA-1 cassette interface, although the latter pair have a different (enhanced) inst... | 1,760,372,783.940456 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/astras-frugal-design-leads-to-latest-unusual-failure/ | Astra’s Frugal Design Leads To Latest Unusual Failure | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"Astra",
"commercial space",
"fairing",
"Falcon 9",
"payload",
"SpaceX"
] | We’ve all heard it said, and it bears repeating: getting to space is hard. But it actually gets even
harder
the smaller your booster is. That’s because the structure, engines, avionics, and useful payload of a rocket only make up a tiny portion of its liftoff mass, while the rest is dedicated to the propellant it must expend to reach orbital velocity. That’s why a Falcon 9 tipping the scales at 549,054 kilograms (1,207,920 pounds) can only loft a payload of 22,800 kg (50,265 lb) — roughly 4% of its takeoff weight.
As you might imagine, there’s a lower limit where there simply isn’t enough mass in the equation for the hardware necessary to build a fully functional rocket. But where is that limit? That’s precisely what aerospace newcomer Astra is trying to find out.
Their Rocket 3 is among the smallest orbital boosters to ever fly
, closer in size and mass to the German V2 of World War II than the towering vehicles being built by SpaceX or Blue Origin. Even the Rocket Lab Electron, itself an exceptionally svelte rocket, is considerably larger.
The reason they’re trying to build such a small rocket is of course very simple: smaller means cheaper. Assuming you’ve got a payload light and compact enough to fit on their launcher, Astra says they can put it into orbit for roughly $2.5 million USD; less than half the cost of a dedicated flight aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron, and competitive with SpaceX’s “rideshare” program. Such a low ticket price would have been unfathomable a decade ago, and promises to shake up an already highly competitive commercial launch market. But naturally, Astra has to get the thing flying reliably before we can celebrate this new spaceflight milestone.
Their latest mission ended in a total loss of the vehicle and payload
when the upper stage tumbled out of control roughly three minutes after an otherwise perfect liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Such issues aren’t uncommon for a new orbital booster, and few rockets in history have entered regular service without a lost payload or two on the books. But this failure, broadcast live over the Internet, was something quite unusual: because of the unconventional design of Astra’s diminutive rocket, the upper stage appeared to get stuck
inside
the booster after the payload fairing failed to open fully.
A Slight Second Stage
To understand this failure, we have to take a step back and look at the design of a conventional multi-stage rocket. While an oversimplification, it would be fair to say that the upper stage is generally just a smaller version of the first stage. It will be shorter in length, perhaps more narrow in diameter, and have fewer engines; but fundamentally its design will resemble that of its larger counterpart. The payload is mounted to the top of the upper stage, which in turn is enclosed by an aerodynamic fairing or nosecone.
The first and second stages of the Falcon 9, separated by the black interstage, are the same diameter.
But Astra’s Rocket 3 is unique in that its second stage looks nothing like the first. Rather than a sleek rocket, its design is more reminiscent of a satellite; with exposed tanks and a skeletal structure that would never survive flight through the dense lower atmosphere. Since this stage will be traveling through the wispy upper atmosphere where drag isn’t a concern, Astra decided to strip it down to the bare essentials to reduce its mass.
A rare look at the Rocket 3’s satellite-like upper stage
, partially tucked inside of the conical interstage.
The downside of this design is that the fragile upper stage must be covered until the rocket has gained considerable altitude. So rather than placing just the payload into a protective aerodynamic fairing, the entire second stage needs to be enclosed. The lower portion of the second stage is tucked into the hollow interstage, and an elongated fairing makes sure the payload and its ride to space aren’t exposed to supersonic airflow in the early phases of flight.
Costly Compromise
The beauty of this design is that the material used to construct a payload fairing, usually carbon fiber or fiberglass, is exceptionally lightweight. Even taking into account the additional fairing length required, the overall weight ends up being lower than if the second stage had a more traditional rigid fuselage. That said, there’s a glaring problem with this approach if you’re looking to build the cheapest rocket possible:
producing these lightweight payload fairings is very expensive
.
Assembling Rocket 3’s aluminum payload fairing.
In fact,
in a 2020 interview with
Ars Technica
, Astra co-founder Chris Kemp admitted the astronomical cost of carbon fiber fairings forced the company to abandon them in favor of aluminum for Rocket 3. Rather than spending $250,000, Kemp said the team at Astra was able to produce them in-house for just $2,500. That’s a huge cost savings for such a low-cost vehicle, but the trade-off is that the new metal fairings weigh 20% more than the originals.
The switch to heavier aluminum payload fairings means the mass savings of Astra’s unique second stage design isn’t quite as substantial as was originally intended. In practice this likely resulted in a hit to the total payload capacity of the vehicle, but it was still deemed the right call from a cost standpoint. But given this recent failure, perhaps the change had larger implications that are only now becoming apparent.
Getting Jammed Up
Looking at the live video from the February 11th launch
, we can clearly see the chain of events that led to the upper stage losing control and ultimately failing to enter orbit. At almost exactly three minutes into the flight the payload fairing visibly shudders, but fails to open. Four seconds later the second stage, propelled forward by a spring-loaded mechanism, slams into the fairing but fails to knock it loose. Finally, at three minutes and eleven seconds into the mission, the second stage’s engine ignites while still inside the interstage. This build up of pressure blows off the fairing, but unfortunately also destabilizes the second stage and sends it tumbling.
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/astrastage_video.mp4
We can clearly see
what
happened, but the task for Astra is now to figure out
why
it happened. The Alameda, California based company is
still working their way through an investigation with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
, and as of yet haven’t released any public statement as to why the payload fairing didn’t open properly when commanded.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t speculate as armchair engineers. Could it be that the mechanism used to separate the payload fairing needs to be made stronger due to the added mass of the aluminum? One also wonders if the lighter carbon fiber payload fairings might have given way once the second stage smashed into them, potentially saving the mission. In any event, one thing is for sure: Astra’s low-cost rocket
seems to have a knack for failing in unusual ways
. | 36 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431278",
"author": "Daid",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T15:31:43",
"content": "Scott Manley has a good compare with a version of how it was suppost to happen, and makes it obviously clear that one side of the fairing failed to unlock.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLfl6ADRyu0(Also, an... | 1,760,372,783.896441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/levitating-with-light/ | Levitating With Light | Al Williams | [
"LED Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"led",
"levitation"
] | The University of Pennsylvania has a team that did a little light research. Well, not light in the usual sense of that phrase. They used very strong light to
levitate Mylar disks in a vacuum chamber
.
Of course, it is no secret that light can exert pressure. That’s how solar sails work and some scientists have used it to work with aerosols and the like. But this appears to be the first time light lifted a large item against gravity. The team claims that their tests showed that a sunlight-powered flying vehicle might carry up to ten milligrams of payload. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s impressive and the paper mentions that since the lift is not from aerodynamic forces, there might be applications in flying at very high altitudes.
The Mylar disks were 500 nanometers thick and had a 300 nanometer layer of carbon nanotubes beneath. The nanotubes absorb light, make the disks more rigid, and improve the Mylar’s surface-gas characteristics. The light source had a strong center beam and an even stronger ring around the center beam that causes the disk to remain over the center beam. The LED system used eight arrays, each consuming 100 watts of input power.
Preparing the disk might be difficult, but the
LED power isn’t that hard
. Even if you do like the researchers did and use
water cooling
. | 31 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431201",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T12:18:51",
"content": "How do they know if it wasn’t heat from 100W LED with 40% efficiency?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6431203",
"author": "Florian",
... | 1,760,372,784.07798 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/23/novena-open-source-laptop-reborn-as-desktop-machine/ | Novena Open Source Laptop Reborn As Desktop Machine | Chris Lott | [
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"Novena",
"open source hardware",
"repair"
] | When your 5-year-old laptop dies it’s usually time for a replacement. But [Andrew Menadue]’s Novena laptop is fully open-source. He has full access to all the documentation, so he decided to
try his hand at repairing it instead
. The power supply circuit board went up in smoke one day — he attributes this to poor battery health due to him not using it frequently enough. Given his usage pattern, he decided to switch the Novena into a desktop machine.
He made the conversion with a new pass-through power supply board, and the computer booted up but with no display. It seems that the power supply failure took out additional circuits as well. [Andrew] goes down a deep rabbit hole of board and chip swapping, all to no avail. Eventually the display suddenly springs to life, and he concludes the problem was with the EEPROM configuration settings and not LCD display hardware.
Experimenting with LCD Outputs on the Mainboard
It’s comforting to know that you can easily spin a replacement PCB for your computer when needed. But this situation is far from mainstream. Furthermore, all projects, open-sourced or not, face the issue of part obsolescence, even Novena. Back in 2019 founders [Bunnie] and [Xobs] issued an
end-of-life announcement
on the project’s five year anniversary for this very reason. The fact that Novena availability even lasted five years was due to up-front purchases of critical parts.
We wrote about
the Novena way back in 2014
, and more recently
the MNT Reform project
. What are your thoughts on these open source laptop projects? Do you have any laptops that you’ve rehabilitated after five or more years? Let us know in the comments below. | 35 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431174",
"author": "Senile Data Systems",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T11:14:35",
"content": "My daily driver at home is from around 2010-2011 and it works great! Until around 2018 I used a laptop from 2006 (64 Bit AMD Turion x2 that’s outrunning some laptops from 2009), but that finis... | 1,760,372,784.014441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/winding-your-own-small-coils/ | Winding Your Own Small Coils | Al Williams | [
"Parts"
] | [
"coil",
"coils",
"inductor",
"inductors"
] | Depending on what you build, you may or may not run into a lot of inductors. If you need small value coils, it is easy to make good-looking coils, and [JohnAudioTech]
shows you how
. Of course, doing the winding itself isn’t that hard, but you do need to know how to estimate the number of turns you need and how to validate the coil by measurement.
[John] uses a variety of techniques to estimate and measure his coils ranging from math to using an oscilloscope. He even uses an old-fashioned nomogram from a Radio Shack databook circa 1972.
In fact, we get the idea that [John] really misses Radio Shack. In addition to the book, we noted guest appearances from a Radio Shack calculator and a caliper. We were a bit surprised that he didn’t use a Radio Shack pen as a coil form.
Traditionally, if you wanted to keep your coils from moving much, you’d paint them with “coil dope” or “Q dope” which doesn’t interfere much with the coil’s desirable characteristics. You can buy it, still, but it is also fairly easy to make by dissolving
styrofoam packing peanuts
.
If you need a variable inductor, you can
make those
, too. If, however, you are making a lot of inductors,
consider automation
. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6431128",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T08:42:54",
"content": "If you want nice even spacing, wind your coil around a fine pitched bolt, using the thread as a guide, by rotating it off like a nut, you’ll get a coil matching the thread spacing. By stretching and squeez... | 1,760,372,784.127019 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/how-big-is-the-moon-figure-it-out-yourself/ | How Big Is The Moon? Figure It Out Yourself | Al Williams | [
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"moon",
"science"
] | We have to confess that we occasionally send friends a link to “let me Google that for you” when they ask us something that they could have easily found online. Naturally, if someone asked us how big the moon is, we’d ask Google or another search engine. But not [Prof Matt Strassler]. He’d tell you to figure it out yourself and he would then
show you how to do it
.
This isn’t a new question. People have been wondering about the moon since the dawn of human civilization. The ancient Greeks not only asked the question, but they worked out a pretty good answer. They knew approximately how big the Earth was and they knew the moon was far away because it is seen over a very wide area. They also knew the sun was even further away because the moon sometimes blocks the sun’s light in an eclipse. Using complex geometry and proto-trigonometry they were able to work out an approximate size of the moon. [Matt’s] method is similar but easier and relies on the moon occluding distant stars and planets.
[Matt] explains that a distant sphere illuminated by a distant light source will cast a shadow on a plane about the size of the sphere. What’s more, is that anyone on the plane in the shadow who can’t see the light source must be in the shadow, which allows you to measure the shadow, and that gives an approximation of the sphere’s size. For this to work, the light source needs to be at least ten times further away from the plane than the sphere is. The further away the light source is, the lower the error in the final number.
Obviously, there are a few sources of error trying to use this method where the light source is a distant star, the moon is the sphere, and the Earth is the plane. Most obviously, the Earth is not flat. However, it is so large that small parts of it are nearly flat, especially towards the center. The moon is small compared to the Earth, so it is simple to arrange for the shadow to not be at, for example, the poles.
Of course, you also need to ask a lot of people if they can see the star in question. Luckily, people already do this. So you could, for the sake of demonstration, use the projected maps for a future occultation or you can read off historical data from previous observations.
Using some historical data and eyeballing Google maps, [Matt] came up with 3,600 km as an estimate of the moon’s diameter. The accepted number based on precise measurements is 3,474.8 km. Not too far off. There’s another method at the end of the post that uses the sun as a reference if you want to double-check. That method yielded an estimate of 3,554.49 km, also very close.
If you’d rather take an up-close look at the Moon, there is
video
enhanced from the old moon missions to watch. You’ll need to know the size, though, before you build your
orrery
. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6430896",
"author": "Craig",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T03:23:46",
"content": "I believe you mean “occulting” not occluding stars. SorrythanksFun article.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6435292",
"author": "Milon Ganiza... | 1,760,372,784.169527 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/what-to-do-with-a-broken-television-when-you-cant-fix-it/ | What To Do With A Broken Television When You Can’t Fix It | Maya Posch | [
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"lcd",
"lvds",
"television repair"
] | Who can say ‘no’ to a free TV, even if it’s broken? This was the situation [Andrew Menadue] ended up in last year when he was offered an LG 39LE4900 LCD TV. As
[Andrew] describes
in the blog post along with videos (see first part embedded after the break), this particular television had been taken to a television repair shop previously after the HDMI inputs stopped working, but due to a lack of replacement parts the owner had to make due with the analog inputs still working. That is, until those stopped working as well.
The nice thing about these TVs is that they are very modular inside, as [Andrew] also discovered to his delight. In addition to the LG controller board, an inverter board and the power supply board, this TV also contained a TCON PCB. After some initial unsuccessful swapping of the parts with EBay replacements, nothing was (surprisingly) working, but it did turn out that the TCON and inverter boards are made and sold by AUO (major Taiwanese display manufacturer), along with the display itself.
In the end it turned out that the AUO boards and screen were fine, and after sourcing a board to convert VGA input to the LVDS signal accepted by the TCON board, the whole display worked. Naturally using a board with HDMI inputs would be nice, but it does show how a ‘broken’ TV can be turned into a really nice, big monitor without all too much effort if it’s just the controller board that went on the fritz.
Top image: the AUO-manufactured controller board inside the LG-branded TV. (Credit: Andrew Menadue) | 31 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6430815",
"author": "Andrew Wells",
"timestamp": "2022-02-23T00:17:51",
"content": "Do I have this right that this kind of modification bypasses all the post-processing that modern TVs do?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "64308... | 1,760,372,784.283912 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/22/classic-multimeter-tells-you-if-your-wifis-working/ | Classic Multimeter Tells You If Your WiFi’s Working | Robin Kearey | [
"internet hacks"
] | [
"analog multimeter",
"connection speed",
"ping meter"
] | Debugging network issues isn’t easy; many a sysadmin has spent hours trying to figure out which of the many links between client and server is misbehaving. Having a few clear pointers helps: if you can show that the internet connection is up, that already narrows down the problem to either the server or, most likely, the client computer.
After hearing “is the internet up” one too many times, [whiskeytangohotel] decided to make
a clearly visible indicator to show the status of the local uplink
. He used his father’s old Simpson 260 VOM as a display, with its large analog indicator pointing at a steady value if the internet’s up, and wagging back and forth if there’s an outage. The exact value indicated is determined by the average ping time for a couple of different servers, so that you can also tell if the connection is slower than normal.
The ping times are measured by an ESP8266 connected to WiFi, which checks a predefined list of web servers and calculates the average ping time every fifteen seconds. An analog value in the 2.5 V range is then generated and measured by the meter. The smooth motion of an old analog meter stands in nice contrast to the modern-day problem of unstable WiFi.
While analog multimeters definitely
have their uses
, we’re the first to admit that our classic meters don’t see as much action as they could. Repurposing them as [whiskeytangohotel] did is a neat way of keeping those heirlooms around for the next generation. Of course, if you don’t have an analog multimeter, you could also
use an analog clock for your ping meter
. | 14 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6430738",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2022-02-22T21:25:02",
"content": "“While analog multimeters definitely have their uses” [..] “The answer lies in being able to measure voltages that change.”Absolutely. Digital multimeters are an alternative, no substitute by any means. If... | 1,760,372,784.216806 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/17/hello-many-quantum-worlds/ | Hello (Many Quantum) World(s) | Al Williams | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"quantum computing"
] | Historically, the first program you write for a new computer language is “Hello World,” or, if you are in Texas, “Howdy World.” But with quantum computing on the horizon, you need something better. Like “Hello Many Worlds.” [IonQ] proposes what that looks like and then writes it in
seven different quantum languages
in a post you should check out.
Here’s the description of the simple program:
The basic quantum program we’ll write is simple. It creates a fully-entangled state between two qubits, and then measures this state. This state is sometimes called a Bell State, or Bell Pair, after physicist John Stewart Bell.
The measurement results for this program should give us 0 for both qubits or 1 for both qubits, in equal amounts. When running these, we’ll be able to tell that we’re running on real hardware because that’s not always what we get! These errors are what currently limit quantum computers, but the first steps to overcome this with quantum error correction have already begun.
The languages include IBM’s Qiskit, Microsoft’s Q#, Amazon’s Braket, Google’s Cirq, ETH Zurich’s ProjecctQ, Pennylane, Pytket, and XACC. If you are wondering which of these to learn, it is interesting to see the differences between them.
For example, Braket looks nice and simple:
from braket.circuits import Circuit
qc = Circuit().h(0).cnot(control=0, target=1)
print(qc)
None of the languages look too complex, but sometimes the setup to run them on remote quantum computers is a bit more code. Many of these could also be run on a simulator if you want the practice.
We noted that
Twist
— a relatively new language, wasn’t on the list. If you want a gentle
introduction to quantum
, try our series. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427465",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-02-18T09:25:23",
"content": "Is there a Bitcoin hash implementation? ( SHA-256)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6427484",
"author": "Rog77",
"timestamp": "2022-0... | 1,760,372,784.534617 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/17/infinity-mirror-hypercrystal-is-as-beautiful-as-it-sounds/ | Infinity Mirror Hypercrystal Is As Beautiful As It Sounds | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"hypercrystal",
"infinity mirror"
] | Sometimes, we feature projects that are full to the brim with advanced functionality or solve some tricky little problem for the end-user. Other times, we feature stuff that just looks super damn cool,
and the Infinity Mirror Hypercrystal is firmly in that latter category.
This show-stopping build comes to us from [Inanna Malick], who put together the design using algorithmic and generative art techniques she’s been working on for years. The form is a non-symmetrical, non-platonic solid, with each of its eight faces laser cut from mirrored acrylic. Plywood sections are used to hold together the structure.
Initially, the build was illuminated from within by white LEDs, but [Inanna] wasn’t satisfied with the look, which was too rooted in regular human technology. They were instead covered up with transparent dichroic tape, creating the lurid shifting colors that do so much to add to the mystery of the legendary Hypercrystal.
The result is an
infinity mirror piece
that looks more advanced, more alien, and more luridly enticing than most we’ve ever seen. The dichroic shift placed on the LEDs goes a long way to elevating this sculpture to new aesthetic heights. Video after the break. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427382",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2022-02-18T00:12:58",
"content": "Oooh pretty. I’d say there’s probably a market for selling those. I’m just envisioning something like that as a coffee table. Or even just suspended from the ceiling in a restaurant or lobby.",
"parent... | 1,760,372,784.491424 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/17/unique-clock-is-all-hands-no-dial/ | Unique Clock Is All Hands, No Dial, And Does The Worm | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"arduino",
"clock",
"nRF04L01+",
"slip ring"
] | Back in the old days, we didn’t have fancy digital clocks. No, we had good analog clocks with a big hand and a little hand, and if you wanted to know the time you had to look at the clock and figure out which number each hand was pointing at, or kind of pointing at. It wasn’t easy, and we liked it that way.
So now, along comes
an analog clock that’s nothing but the hands
— no dial, no numbers, just hands. How is such a thing possible? The clue is in the clock’s name: AKUROBATTO, and in the video below, which shows the acrobatic movements of the clock’s hands as it does its thing. Serial improbable-clock maker [ekaggrat singh kalsi] clearly put a lot of thought into this mechanism, which consists of the hands and a separate base. The hands are joined together at one end and powered by small stepper motors. The base has two docking areas, where servo-driven claws can grasp the hand assembly, either at the center pivot or at the tip of either hand. With a little bit of shuffling around at transition points, the hands sweep out the hours and minutes in a surprisingly readable way.
For as cool as the design of AKUROBATTO is, the internals are really something else. There are custom-built slip rings to send power to the motors and the Arduinos controlling them, sensors to determine the position of each hand, and custom gearboxes for the steppers. And the locking mechanisms on the base are worth studying too — getting that right couldn’t have been easy.
All in all, an impressive build. Whether displaying the time on
a phosphorescent screen
or
a field of sequins
, it seems like [ekaggrat] has a thing for unique clocks. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427328",
"author": "Brendan Sleight",
"timestamp": "2022-02-17T21:22:04",
"content": "Love it – would like to build one myself.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6427394",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,372,784.643871 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/17/fpga-starter-videos-to-help-soften-that-learning-curve/ | FPGA Starter Videos To Help Soften That Learning Curve | Dave Rowntree | [
"FPGA"
] | [
"apio",
"blackice",
"fpga",
"gtkwave",
"icarus",
"iCE40",
"icestorm",
"lattice",
"mystorm",
"nextpnr",
"project trellis",
"yosys"
] | Digi-Key have been producing YouTube videos for a number of years now, and if you weren’t aware, they’re definitely worthy of some viewing time.
The playlist we’re highlighting here
is a pretty good introduction to FPGAs, specifically those supported by open source tools, with low cost hardware. If you’ve always wanted to get into hacking FPGA platforms, but don’t know where to start, this is going to be a big help. After first covering what an FPGA is and is not, and why you want to use one, [Shawn Hymel] dives in to the toolchain.
We’re really lucky that the bitstream for the Lattice iCE40 was reverse engineered by the super talented
Claire (née Clifford) Wolf
(AMP hour interview) which enabled the
project ICEstorm toolchain
to be created. Leveraging
Yosys
for synthesis and logic mapping,
Icarus verilog
coupled with
GTKwave
for simulation,
netpnr
for place and route and finally the project ICEstorm bitstream tools for packing into iCE40 format and loading onto the hardware. The whole toolchain flow is managed by
APIO
for simplicity, that is, provided your FPGA board is supported!
Of course, [Shawn] is using the low cost (for an FPGA)
ICEStick
by Lattice for this tutorial series, and they’re currently hard to get (
you know why by now
!) but, there are many other boards you could use. If you want to play with applications coupling a ARM micro to an FPGA, then the excellent
BlackIce Mx
is an option, but there are many other boards now with an decent micro nestled next to an FPGA and a few peripherals for convenience.
We should mention here, that project ICEstorm and the iCE40 is not the only show in town.
Project Trellis
has had our eye for a while, which targets the more complex Lattice ECP5 device. Yosys and friends do support more architectures, but the available flows usually require at least some vendor tool support at this time (looking straight at you, Xilinx) but as more devices get decoded, the open source tools will grow, and we will bring you that news!
What’s nice about this Digi-Key YT series, is that it doesn’t just cover the basic toolchain flow, then drop you in at the deep end of a big learning curve. There are videos covering subjects such as
finite state machines
(FSMs), test-benching and simulation, using embedded (block) memories, PLLs, harder subjects like dealing with
metastability
and
clock-domain crossing
(OK, he covers one technique – there’s more than one way to skin that particular cat) before finally looking at soft cores like the
RISC-V
. Lots to learn, and pretty well executed if you ask us! A
Github version is available,
for those who can’t stand watching the videos!
Thanks to [Mark] for the tip! | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427321",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2022-02-17T21:04:21",
"content": "I’ve known one of the FAEs at Lattice since… well ever since I was born. Pretty sure their toolchain is already largely free, only having to pay for some IP blocks if you need them. They have quite a few n... | 1,760,372,784.593367 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/17/remoticon-2021-matt-venn-helps-you-make-asics/ | Remoticon 2021 // Matt Venn Helps You Make ASICS | Matthew Carlson | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"hardware"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Remoticon",
"ASIC",
"fab"
] | What would you make if you were given about ten square millimeters of space on a silicon wafer on a 130 nm process? That’s the exact question that the Open MPW program asks, and that [Matt Venn] has stepped up to answer. [Matt] came to
Remoticon in 2020 to talk about his journey from nothing to his own ASIC,
and he came back in 2021 to talk about what has happened in a year.
[maxiborga] has been
making beautiful renders
of his and others’ chip designs
We expected great designs, but the variety of exciting and wonderful designs that have been submitted we think exceeded our expectations. [Matt] goes through quite a few of them, such as an
analog neuron
, a
RISC-V Arduino-compatible microprocessor
, and a
satellite transceiver.
Perhaps an unexpected side effect has been the artwork. Since the designs are not under an NDA, anyone can take the design and transform it into something gorgeous.
Of course, all of this hardware design isn’t possible without an open toolchain. There is an SRAM generator known as OpenRAM that can generate RAM blocks for your design. Coriolis2 is an RTL to GDS tool that can do placement and routing in VLSI. Finally, FlexCell is a cell library that tries to provide standard functions in a flexible, customizable way that cuts down on the complexity of the layout. There are GitHub actions that can run tests and simulations on PRs to keep the chip’s HDL in a good state.
However, it’s not all roses, and there was an error on the first run (MPW1). Hold time violations were not detected, and the clock tree wasn’t correct. This means that the GPIO cannot be set up, so the designs in the middle could be working, but without the GPIO, it is tricky to determine. With a regular chip, that would be the end, but since [Matt] has access to both the layout and the design, he can identify the problem and come up with a plan. He’s planning on overriding the IO setup shift register with an auxiliary microcontroller. (Ed Note: [tnt] has been making some serious progress lately,
summarized in this video
.)
It is incredible to see what has come from the project so far, and we’re looking forward to future runs. If this convinces you that you need to get your own ASIC made, you should check out [Matt]’s “
Zero to ASIC
” course. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427286",
"author": "Jonathan+Wilson",
"timestamp": "2022-02-17T19:45:08",
"content": "This isn’t the first time such a “design your own chip and get it fabbed” program is a thing, back in the late 70s and early 80s university chip design courses existed where you were able to not o... | 1,760,372,784.795019 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/17/pendulumsynth-ties-music-and-physics-together/ | PendulumSynth Ties Music And Physics Together | Lewin Day | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"metronome",
"pendulum"
] | Many musicians will be familiar with the metronome, a pendulum charged with generating a rhythmic tick to keep one’s performance in regular time. With PendulumSynth, [mrezanvari] takes the same basic pendulum
but uses it in an altogether different musical way
.
The build relies on a 10-inch plastic ball to serve as the weighted end of the pendulum, stuffed with a STM32F411CE BlackPill board, a BNO085 IMU, and an nRF radio module for sending out data for external processing. The pendulum’s motion is turned into MIDI data or CV for output to musical hardware which handles actually generating the output sounds.
The system operates in a variety of modes. Gravity mode outputs continuous MIDI data and CV relative to the continuous motion of the pendulum, while DIV3 mode tracks the pendulum’s motion and outputs 3 regular trigger points that correspond as such.
The combination of the intuitive physical nature of the pendulum and its sheer large size makes for an enticing musical exhibit.
We’ve seen some other great musical installation pieces before, too
. Video after the break. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427349",
"author": "me",
"timestamp": "2022-02-17T22:43:23",
"content": "Pendulum Music Steve Reich 1968",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6427679",
"author": "echodelta",
"timestamp": "2022-02-18T21:12:07",
"content"... | 1,760,372,784.836561 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/17/the-electrifying-debate-around-where-lightning-comes-from/ | The Electrifying Debate Around Where Lightning Comes From | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"lightning"
] | Along with many other natural phenomena, lightning is probably familiar to most. Between its intense noise and visuals, there is also very little disagreement that getting hit by a lightning strike is a bad thing, regardless of whether you’re a fleshy human, moisture-filled plant, or conductive machine. So it’s more than a little bit strange that the underlying cause of lightning, and what makes certain clouds produce these intense voltages along ionized air molecules, is
still
an open scientific question.
Many of us have probably learned at some point the most popular theory about how lightning forms, namely that lightning is caused by ice particles in clouds. These ice particles interact to build up a charge, much like in a capacitor. The only issue with this theory is that this process alone will not build up a potential large enough to ionize the air between said clouds and the ground and cause the lightning strike, leaving this theory in tatters.
A recent study, using data from Earth-based radio telescopes, may now have provided fascinating details on lightning formation, and how the charge may build up sufficiently to make us Earth-based critters scurry away to safety when dark clouds draw near.
Follow The Streamers
The triboelectric effect, demonstrated by a cat and styrofoam peanuts. (Credit: Sean McGrath)
The most succinct way to summarize lightning is probably as a ‘really big spark’. Like any spark, this requires the build up of a potential to the point where the dielectric medium between the potential and a target breaks down. In the case of air as the dielectric medium, this involves the breaking down of air molecules, at roughly 2 MV/m, into electrically conductive plasma by stripping electrons from atoms. Once there is a plasma track, the rest of the charge is free to dump; during the subsequent discharge in a lightning strike, in the order of a gigajoule of energy is transferred.
To build up this charge, the
triboelectric
effect is deemed to be primarily involved. While heavier
graupel
(soft hail) remains mostly stationary inside the cloud, updrafts carry lighter ice crystals and super-cooled droplets between the graupel, resulting in the physical interaction that underlies the triboelectric charging effect.
As noted earlier, the resulting charge that builds up inside a thundercloud in this manner is not sufficient by itself to cause a lightning stream with the ground. This has for ages left open the question of what initiates the build-up of such a breakdown. One theory here is that of relativistic runaway electron avalanche (
RREA
), with an extensive explanation provided by Gurevich et al. (2005) in
Physics Today
(
PDF
).
Interaction between rising ice crystals and graupel (soft hail) in thunderclouds. (Credit: NOAA)
The short version of this theory is that relativistic electrons from outside the atmosphere are the trigger for the sudden initiation charge of a lightning strike event. As the electrons that exist inside the cloud at that point are thermal (‘slow’) electrons, this would provide the impulse that would set off the formation of self-replicating streamers.
Streamers are the clearest observable sign of a lightning strike in progress: they are ionization events caused by the breakdown of the air molecules into a plasma. This does not only provide an electrical path for the stored charge, but also causes the release of electromagnetic radiation. If there are enough free electrons to continue the further ionization of the surrounding air, the streamer will propagate, with ultimately a leader surge forming.
It is this leader that forms the clear bright line in a lightning strike, preceded and surrounded by streamers.
Lit Up Like A Christmas Tree
Thunderstorm in the Mojave Desert. (Credit: Jessie Eastland)
If there’s one property of clouds that makes them a bother when it comes to observing the formation of lightning, it is that they are opaque to most types of observations. Whether we send up balloons with cameras, fly airplanes around or through thunderstorms, the problem remains that we cannot see a lot of what’s happening inside the clouds. The main exception to this is in the RF spectrum, which is where thunderstorms are exceptionally visible.
As mentioned by Gurevich et al., during thunderstorms RF events called narrow bipolar pulses of about 5 μs are common, along with X-ray bursts that can last up to a minute. These events are in addition to the release of gamma ray bursts (0.05 MeV – 10 MeV) that occur at an altitude of between 500 and 600 km. For Gurevich et al. these highly energetic events were highly indicative of relativistic electrons playing a role in lightning ignition.
Due to the aforementioned difficulties with actually seeing inside clouds, all of this was based on observations in mostly the radio spectrum, until a 2018 attempt by the Dutch Low-Frequency Array (
LOFAR
) radio telescope was it possible to
image the formation
of a lightning strike in 3D space. As implied by the name, LOFAR consists out of an array of distributed radio telescopes, with a core in the Netherlands and further distributed throughout Europe.
Using the Dutch part of the array, it was possible to use the time-delay from the observed RF events during a lightning storm at the different parts of the array to form a picture of the events as they developed. This enabled Sterpka et al. to create the following hypothesis based on these observations.
Sketch of proposed initiation process based on observations. (Credit: Sterpka et al.)
What they found is that, rather than an external trigger, the process starts (a) with a single positive streamer (b), which creates the initial VHF field (c). The middle panel describes an avalanche cascade of streamers, with each streamer producing more streamers, creating the ever stronger VHF field, which the LOFAR equipment captured. Finally, the right panel shows the formation of a leader (h).
Sterpke et al. propose that the narrow bipolar pulses that are observed at the initialization event are due to the breakdown of virgin air or similar, which forms a precondition for the lightning initiation. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that a system of streamers appear to have very different properties from an individual streamer, which might play a significant role in the formation of lightning.
Flashy Science
A fulgurite from Okechoobee in Florida. (Credit: Mario Hendriks)
Interestingly, lightning is a phenomenon that doesn’t just affect the present, but also the past. When lightning strikes the ground, it can cause the formation of
fulgurites
(from Latin
fulgur
, meaning ‘lightning’). This is a type of mineraloid formed by the fusion of mineral grains, which follows the shape of the lightning strike which was responsible for its formation. Within a lightning channel, temperatures can exceed 30,000 Kelvin.
More than just a curiosity, fulgurites are an invaluable paleoenvironmental indicator, giving us an idea of what the climate including lightning frequency was like in a region. This is part of the field of
paleolightning
. Along with evidence of the role lightning may have played during the formation of life on Earth (e.g. the
Miller-Urey
experiment), lightning plays a role in nitrogen fixation.
Another interesting, more recent finding came from during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the shutdowns of 2020. Namely that of the
correlation
between pollution and the frequency of lightning. This would presumably be due to anthropogenic pollution providing e.g. fine dust particles which form a nucleus for ice formation inside clouds.
Hopefully over the coming years we’ll find out more details about what makes lightning work, as well as what affects the formation of the cumulonimbus clouds. With more refined radio telescope arrays like the Square Kilometre Array (
SKA
) coming online, it might be that they could give us more glimpses at this phenomenon that has mesmerized human cultures since the dawn of time.
While being an obvious risk to life and property, lightning remains one of the primal forces that shaped the biosphere of the Earth, and continues to do so to this day. Even as we admire its beauty from a (hopefully) safe distance, it might behoove us to acknowledge how little we truly know about it and the high-energy physics that underlie it. | 26 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427160",
"author": "vib",
"timestamp": "2022-02-17T15:31:28",
"content": "When I and two friends saw a ball of lightning entering the house through the window, then BOUNCING on the stairs, passing between us, to finally explode when reaching the (de-facto grounded) heating pipe, we... | 1,760,372,784.907055 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/classic-chat-preserving-computer-history/ | Classic Chat: Preserving Computer History | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Interviews",
"Retrocomputing",
"Slider"
] | [
"Classic Chat",
"computer history",
"Hack Chat",
"preservation",
"retrocomputing"
] | Among the many facets of modern technology, few have evolved faster or more radically than the computer. In less than a century its very nature has changed significantly: today’s smartphones easily outperform desktop computers of the past, machines which themselves were thousands of times more powerful than the room-sized behemoths that ushered in the age of digital computing. The technology has developed so rapidly that an individual who’s now making their living developing iPhone applications could very well have started their career working with stacks of punch cards.
With things moving so quickly, it can be difficult to determine what’s worth holding onto from a historical perspective. Will last year’s Chromebook one day be a museum piece? What about those old
Lotus 1-2-3
floppies you’ve got in the garage? Deciding what artifacts are worth preserving in such a fast moving field is just one of the challenges faced by Dag Spicer, the Senior Curator at the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California.
Dag stopped by the Hack Chat back in June of 2019
to talk about the role of the CHM and other institutions like it in storing and protecting computing history for future generations.
To answer that most pressing question, what’s worth saving from the landfill, Dag says the CHM often follows what they call the “Ten Year Rule” before making a decision. That is to say, at least a decade should have gone by before a decision can be made about a particular artifact. They reason that’s long enough for hindsight to determine if the piece in question made a lasting impression on the computing world or not. Note that such impression doesn’t always have to be positive; pieces that the CHM deem “Interesting Failures” also find their way into the collection, as well as hardware which became important due to patent litigation.
Of course, there are times when this rule is sidestepped. Dag points to the release of the iPod and iPhone as a prime example. It was clear that one way or another Apple’s bold gambit was going to get recorded in the annals of computing history, so these gadgets were fast-tracked into the collection. Looking back on this decision in 2022, it’s clear they made the right call. When asked in the Chat if Dag had any thoughts on contemporary hardware that could have similar impact on the computing world, he pointed to Artificial Intelligence accelerators like Google’s Tensor Processing Unit.
In addition to the hardware itself, the CHM also maintains a collection of ephemera that serves to capture some of the institutional memory of the era. Notebooks from the R&D labs of Fairchild Semiconductor, or handwritten documents from Intel luminary Andrew Grove bring a human touch to a collection of big iron and beige boxes. These primary sources are especially valuable for those looking to research early semiconductor or computer development, a task that several in the Chat said staff from the Computer History Museum had personally assisted them with.
Towards the end of the Chat, a user asks why organizations like the CHM go through the considerable expense of keeping all these relics in climate controlled storage when we have the ability to photograph them in high definition, produce schematics of their internals, and emulate their functionality on far more capable systems. While Dag admits that emulation is probably the way to go if you’re only worried about the software side of things, he believes that images and diagrams simply aren’t enough to capture the true essence of these machines.
The CHM’s PDP-1 Demo Lab, image by
Alexey Komarov
.
Quoting the the words of early Digital Equipment Corporation engineer Gordon Bell, Dag says these computers are “beautiful sculptures” that “reflect the times of their creation” in a way that can’t easily be replicated. They represent not just the technological state-of-the-art but also the cultural milieu in which they were developed, with each and every design decision taking into account a wide array of variables ranging from contemporary aesthetics to material availability.
While 3D scans of a computer’s case and digital facsimiles of its internal components can serve to preserve some element of the engineering that went into these computers, they will never be able to capture the experience of seeing the real thing sitting in front of you. Any school child can tell you what the
Mona Lisa
looks like, but that doesn’t stop millions of people from waiting in line each year to see it at the Louvre.
The Hack Chat is a weekly online chat session hosted by leading experts from all corners of the hardware hacking universe. It’s a great way for hackers connect in a fun and informal way, but if you can’t make it live, these overview posts as well as the
transcripts posted to Hackaday.io
make sure you don’t miss out. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427630",
"author": "Ray Knight",
"timestamp": "2022-02-18T18:31:41",
"content": "You are correct any museum containing technology should be closed and there inventory scrapped. Lets start with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,784.971284 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/hackaday-podcast-156-3d-printing-rainbows-split-flap-clocks-swapping-ev-car-batteries-and-floppy-time/ | Hackaday Podcast 156: 3D-Printing Rainbows, Split-Flap Clocks, Swapping EV Car Batteries, And Floppy Time | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | This week, Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos fawn over a beautiful Italian split-flap clock that doesn’t come cheap, and another clock made of floppies that could be re-created for next to nothing. We’ll also sing the praises of solderless circuitry for prototyping and marvel over a filament dry box with enough sensors to control an entire house. The finer points of the ooh, sparkly-ness of diffraction gratings will be discussed, and by the end of the show, you’ll know what we each like in a microscope.
Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
(And if you’re wondering about what my joke about not having Kristina on the show for 28 seconds, and all the professionalism, was about — we
both
forgot to press record the first time through and got ~15 minutes into the show before noticing. Yeah. But we had a good time the second time around anyway.)
Direct Download
(The best 40 MB you’ll download today!)
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
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Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 156 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
If you know what kind of keyswitch was being typed on in anger,
let us know
and you stand to win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt!
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
A Solari Mechanical Digital Clock Hack With A Little Extra
Sticker Brings The Heat
Filament Dry Box Design Goes Way Over The Top
Do You Really Need To Dry Filament?
3D Printing Rainbows
Print-a-Sketch Turns Any Surface Into A Printed Circuit Board
The Shaper Router
pulls off a similar trick
The Flexible Permanence Of Copper Tape Circuits
It’s Always Floppy Time!
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
AR Display Shows CNC Lathe Operations In Real Time
Accurately Track Your Mains Frequency
Dead Mouse Reincarnated As Macropad
Kristina’s Picks:
Pyrotechnic Posters Are Fireworks Drawn On Paper
Spin Some Spudgers From Secondhand Silverware
This Minibike Will Land You In Hot Water
Can’t-Miss Articles:
China Loves Battery Swapping EVs, But Will They Ever Make It Here?
First Days With A New Microscope
But sometimes you only need an
otoscope
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6428626",
"author": "Alexis",
"timestamp": "2022-02-20T20:14:33",
"content": "Hi nice one, fun fact, I thought you have tig notaro as guest.https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0449299/Kristina’s voice sounds so close",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"c... | 1,760,372,785.013214 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/sound-and-light-play-off-acrylic-and-wire-in-this-engaging-circuit-sculpture/ | Sound And Light Play Off Acrylic And Wire In This Engaging Circuit Sculpture | Dan Maloney | [
"Art"
] | [
"acrylic",
"art",
"Circuit Sculpture",
"echo",
"ESP32",
"led",
"ring modulator",
"synthesizer"
] | It’s no secret that we really like circuit sculptures around here, and we never tire of seeing what creative ways people come up with to celebrate the components used to make a project, rather than locking them away in an enclosure. And
a circuit sculpture that incorporates sound and light in its design
is always a real treat to discover.
Called “cwymriad” by its designer, [Eirik Brandal], this sound sculpture incorporates all kinds of beautiful elements. The framework is made from thick pieces of acrylic, set at interesting angles to each other and in contrasting colors. The sound-generating circuit, which uses square wave outputs from an ESP32 to provide carrier and modulation signals for a dual ring modulator, is built on a framework of tinned wires. The sounds the sculpture makes have a lovely resonance to them, like random bells and chimes that fade and mix together. There’s also a matrix of white LEDs that form a sort of digital oscilloscope that displays shifting waveforms in time with the music.
While we like the way this looks and sounds, the real bonus here is the details of construction in the video below. [Eirik]’s careful craftsmanship working with multiple materials is evident throughout; we were especially impressed by the work needed to drill holes for the LED matrix, any one of which slightly out of place would have been painfully obvious in the finished product.
This is far from [Eirik]’s first appearance on these pages.
His vacuum tube and silicon “ioalieia”
was featured just a few weeks back, and
“ddrysfeöd”
used the acrylic parts as light pipes in a lovely way. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427625",
"author": "quarterturn",
"timestamp": "2022-02-18T18:17:18",
"content": "When I saw the “oscilloscope” I was expecting an LM3914/CD4017 based Forrest Mims design. Seems like you could dispense with the ESP32 if you fed pseudorandom data to a pair of TLC7524 DACs controllin... | 1,760,372,785.053753 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/this-week-in-security-chrome-0-daycassandra-and-a-cisco-poc/ | This Week In Security: Chrome 0-day,Cassandra, And A Cisco PoC | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"Cassandra",
"This Week in Security",
"wordpress"
] | Running Chrome or a Chromium-based browser?
Check for version 98.0.4758.102
, and update if you’re not running that release or better. Quick tip, use
chrome://restart
to trigger an immediate restart of Chrome, just like the one that comes after an update. This is super useful especially after installing an update on Linux, using
apt
,
dnf
, or the like.
CVE-2022-0609 is the big vulnerability just patched, and Google has acknowledged that it’s being exploited in the wild. It’s a use-after-free bug, meaning that the application marks a section of memory as returned to the OS, but then accesses that now-invalid memory address. The time gap between freeing and erroneously re-using the memory allows malicious code to claim that memory as its own, and write something unexpected.
Google has learned their lesson about making too many details public too early, and this CVE and associated bug aren’t easily found in in the Chromium project’s source, and there doesn’t seem to be an exploit published in the Chromium code testing suite.
Apache Cassandra
Cassandra is a popular distributed database built on the NoSQL paradigm.
It’s vulnerable to CVE-2021-44521
, a potentially nasty RCE ranking an 8.4 CVSS. The saving grace here is it’s a non-default configuration that’s vulnerable, requiring three specific configuration flags to be changed from defaults to be vulnerable. On the other hand, those flags all relate to Cassandra’s User Defined Functions (UDFs), something of a killer feature for the project. Those three flags are:
enable_user_defined_functions
and
enable_scripted_user_defined_functions
set to true, and
enable_user_defined_functions_threads
set to false.
Let’s break that down a bit, and understand what’s going on here. First,
enable_user_defined_functions
is self-explanatory, in that it enables UDFs. This allows a user to provide a Java function that runs on the server, doing data manipulation. The second flag enables scripted functions, meaning JavaScript in this context. Note that it’s known to be unsafe to allow these user defined JavaScript functions, but this is mitigated by running them in a sandbox, which happens automatically. The last flag,
enable_user_defined_functions_threads
, is set to true by default, and forces those UDFs to run on separate threads. Most importantly, these threads run with a security manager set with no special permissions.
Setting that boolean to false means that each function runs in the main program thread. What isn’t apparent is that this means that the security manager settings are inherited from the main program, too. One of those settings simply allows the security manager to be disabled. From there, the simplest escape is to call
this.engine
, which has functions to execute non-sandboxed code, including a Java
.exec()
call.
NAS Breaking
A very clever attack went awry at Pwn2Own, and
we’re lucky enough to get a write-up about it
. It’s the Western Digital My Cloud Pro, and the vulnerability is a command injection resulting from an HTTP response being included in a shell command. The device does an HTTP call every five minutes, checking for internet connectivity. The response is eventually logged used the
analyticlog
binary, and of course simply includes part of the response in the system call. If you’re not familiar with this class of vulnerability, on Unix systems, the backtick
`
character can be used to include an command as part of an argument. It’s extremely useful to include the output of
date
in a filename, for instance, but a security nightmare in instances like this.
The twist to this story is that the attack failed at Pwn2Own. It was a simple exploit, just a Man-in-the-Middle attack against the HTTP Domain, sending a malicious command back in the response. The problem was that the attack did this by returning an attacker-controlled IP address, and they forgot to change this address for the Pwn2Own network layout. The timing just didn’t quite work out to allow for fixing the IP address and catching a connectivity check in the allotted time.
Proper PoC for Cisco
Last week we talked about the vulnerability in several of Cisco’s small business VPN gateways, and now
a PoC has been published
. It’s a simple pair of buffer overflows on incoming HTTP packets. The first happens when combining the HTTP headers and body into a 16k buffer. Because both the headers and body can be up to a max of 16k, and no further size checks are done, this can neatly overflow the packet buffer, but doesn’t cause a crash or exploit, as a second 16k buffer comes directly after it in memory. What does happen, is this is later copied into yet another 16k buffer, but this one doesn’t have accidental overflow protection. It’s a naive
memcpy()
of null-terminated data, so the whole double-buffer worth of data is copied, smashing the stack and leading to exploitable corruption.
Bits and Bytes
Sanity wins in
the Missouri “hacking” incident
. We brought you the story of the researcher/journalist that
found Social Security numbers embedded in a state website
. After responsibly disclosing the find, the governor went off-script, and threatened the researcher with legal action. This week the state prosecutor assigned to the case released a statement, a portion of which is embedded here.
Upon a review of the case file, the issues at the heart of the investigation have been resolved through non-legal means. As such, it is not in the best interest of Cole County citizens to utilize the significant resources and taxpayer dollars that would be necessary to pursue misdemeanor criminal charges in this case.
(Ed Note: That’s
almost
an apology, right?)
Google has
turned up the incentives
for certain exploitable 0-day bugs turned in to their Vulnerability Reward Program, particularly those involving the Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, and a couple other projects. The maximum payout for an exploit is now a whopping $91,337, and the rules for what is eligible for reward have been relaxed. If this is at all in your wheelhouse, now is the time to go bug hunting.
And finally, [Krzysztof Zając] has
published a slew of WordPress plugin problems
, found through his custom fuzzing framework. It doesn’t look like the code has been published, but it’s a detailed write-up of how he found well over 100 CVEs this way. It’s great inspiration for finding new ways to look for bugs. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427560",
"author": "Rick Seiden",
"timestamp": "2022-02-18T15:42:55",
"content": "Two things. First, what’s “Bhromium”? :PSecond, IIRC, Edge is a Chromium based browser. I just opened Edge to check its version, and it shows 98.0.1108.56, and says it’s up to date. Does that mean th... | 1,760,372,785.106661 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/18/bionic-eyes-go-dark/ | Bionic Eyes Go Dark | Elliot Williams | [
"Medical Hacks",
"News"
] | [
"bankruptcy",
"bionic eye",
"implant",
"mri",
"obsolete hardware",
"proprietary"
] | If you were blind, having an artificial retinal implant would mean the difference between seeing a few hundred pixels in greyscale and seeing all black, all the time. Imagine that you emerged from this total darkness, enjoyed a few years of mobility and your newfound sense, and then
everything goes dark again because the company making the devices abandoned them for financial reasons
.
This is a harrowing tale of close-source technology, and how a medical device that relies on proprietary hard- and software essentially holds its users hostage to the financial well-being of the company that produces it. When that
company is a brash startup
, with plans of making money by eventually pivoting away from retinal implants to direct cortical stimulation — a technology that’s in it’s infancy at best right now — that’s a risky bet to take. But these were people with no other alternative, and the technology is, or
was
, amazing.
One blind man with an implant may or may not have brain cancer, but claims that he can’t receive an MRI because
Second Sight
won’t release details about his implant. Those bugs in your eyes? When the firm laid off its rehab therapists, patients were told they weren’t going to get any more software updates.
If we were CEO of SecondSight, we know what we would do with our closed-source software and hardware right now. The company is facing bankruptcy, has lost significant credibility in the medical devices industry, and is looking to pivot away from the Argus system anyway. They have little to lose, and a tremendous amount of goodwill to gain, by enabling people to fix their own eyes.
Thanks to [Adrian], [Ben], [MLewis], and a few other tipsters for getting this one in! | 49 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6427480",
"author": "Rob Ward",
"timestamp": "2022-02-18T12:18:18",
"content": "Classic “can do capitalism”. Well done guys.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6427520",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": ... | 1,760,372,785.193573 |
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