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https://hackaday.com/2022/01/27/recreating-ms-paint-for-the-esp32/ | Recreating MS Paint For The ESP32 | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"microsoft paint",
"ms paint"
] | Microsoft Paint was one of the first creative outlets for many children when they first laid hands on a computer in the 1990s. Now, [Volos Projects] has brought the joy of this simple application
to a more compact format on the ESP32!
The GUI is a fair bit simpler than even the Windows 3.1 version of MS Paint, looking a little more like something from the very early GUI era. Regardless, one can draw simple shapes in block colors just like the old days, with a pair of potentiometers to move the cursor and twin tactile buttons for selecting tools and committing changes to the canvas.
The build shows that even a 1.3″ 240×240 TFT display can display some charming, colorful graphics, and realistically it’s not far off the resolution most computers had in the late 80s anyway. We’d love to see the software get some more tools too, like the spray can and brushes that were such a key part of the MS Paint experience.
Code is available
for those
eager to play with ES Paint 32 for themselves.
It bears noting that despite some claims to the contrary,
MS Paint isn’t dead.
Incidentally, if you’re a masochist,
you can even program in everybody’s favorite Windows-bundled art program.
Video after the break. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6418019",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2022-01-27T21:06:47",
"content": "Next up, loading Windows 3.1 or CE onto it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6418370",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2022-01-28T1... | 1,760,372,808.504264 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/27/reject-modernity-return-to-tamagotchi/ | Reject Modernity; Return To Tamagotchi | Arya Voronova | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"atsamd21",
"pawpet",
"tamagotchi"
] | Browsing through the recent projects on Hackaday.io, we’ve found this entry by [NanoCodeBug]:
a single-PCB low-power trinket reviving the “pocket pet” concept
while having some fun in the process! Some serious thought was put into making this device be as low-power as possible – with a gorgeous Sharp memory LCD and a low-power-friendly SAMD21, it can run for two weeks on a pair of mere AAA batteries, and possibly more given a sufficiently polished firmware. The hardware has some serious potential, with the gadget’s platform lending itself equally well to Arduino or CircuitPython environments, the LCD being overclock-able to 30 FPS, mass storage support to enable pet transfer and other PC integrations, a buzzer for all of your sound needs, and an assortment of buttons to help you create mini-games never seen before. [NanoCodeBug]
has been working on the hardware diligently
for the past month, having gone through a fair few revisions – this is shaping up to be a very polished gadget!
There’s no wonder that people love to start Tamagotchi-like projects – something special happens when an electronic device invokes the same feelings that we’d get while caring for our own pet, and this project does justice to the idea. With homebrew Tamagotchi projects, there’s a trend – once hardware is finished, the software doesn’t always get to a usable stage, feeling more like an afterthought. There’s a hacker twist that should help us subvert this trend, however – [NanoCodeBug] has shared all sources with us
in a GitHub repository
! If you would like to help with the “software” part, you can start working on that with just a few breakouts. The board files are also there, if you feel like the boards are marvelous enough for your liking to go through modern-day component sourcing pains.
Hackers have been playing with the “pocket pet” concept here and there, to delightful and unconventional results. If you’re on the lookout for other serious Tamagotchi recreation projects,
this one takes the cake
– otherwise, check out this
furry Tamagotchi-like Tribble pet
, disarming in its cuteness! If you’re one of our mischief-minded hackers, we have two posts to keep you entertained – one about
dumping ROM on newer Tamagotchi toys
, and another about
building a WiFi-cracking one
. And when it comes to the spirit of “what we have on hand” builds, this
giant desktop-sized LED matrix Tamagotchi
fits the bill pretty well! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6418254",
"author": "tyjtyj",
"timestamp": "2022-01-28T12:30:07",
"content": "good number of keys, meybe to small screen (old boy need this)nice",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6418258",
"author": "wfewtrt.pl",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,808.800604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/27/remoticon-2021-voja-antonic-makes-you-a-digital-designer/ | Remoticon 2021 // Voja Antonic Makes You A Digital Designer | Dave Rowntree | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Microcontrollers",
"Slider"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Remoticon",
"Digital electronics",
"logic",
"microcontrollers",
"Voja Antonic"
] | [Voja Antonic] has been building digital computers since before many of us were born. He designed with the Z80 when it was
new
, and has decades of freelance embedded experience, so when he takes the time to present a talk for us, it’s worth paying attention.
For his Remoticon 2022 presentation, he will attempt to teach us how to become a hardware expert in under forty minutes. Well, mostly the digital stuff, but that’s enough for one session if you ask us. [Voja] takes us from the very basics of logic gates, through combinatorial circuits, sequential circuits, finally culminating in the description of a general-purpose microprocessor.
A 4-bit ripple-carry adder with additional CPU flag outputs
As he demonstrates, complex digital electronics systems really are just built up in a series of steps of increasing complexity. starting with individual active elements (transistors operating as switches) forming logic elements capable of performing simple operations.
From there, higher level functions such as adders can be formed, and from those an ALU and so on. Conceptually, memory elements can be formed from logic gates, but it’s not the most efficient way to do it, and those tend to be made with a smaller and faster circuit. But anyway, that model is fine for descriptive purposes.
Once you have combinatorial logic circuits and memory elements, you have all you need to make the necessary decoders, sequencers and memory circuits to build processors and other kinds of higher complexity circuits.
Obviously forty minutes isn’t anywhere nearly enough time time to learn all of the intricacies of building a real microprocessor like the pesky details of interfacing with it and programming it, but for getting up the learning curve from just a knowledge of binary numbers to an understanding of how a CPU is built, it’s a pretty good starting point.
Now, If you can only tear your eyes away from his
slick game-of-life wall mounted LED display
, you might pick up a thing or two. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6418047",
"author": "fofo",
"timestamp": "2022-01-27T22:23:19",
"content": "Thanks that was an awesome presentation. I really like the effort for making it. With all that demos and stuff. The batch also looks cool",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,809.05636 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/27/robotic-xylophone-makes-music-with-midi-magic/ | Robotic Xylophone Makes Music With MIDI Magic | Chris Wilkinson | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"marimba",
"music",
"Musical",
"solenoid",
"xylophone"
] | The MIDI format has long been used to create some banging electronic music, so it’s refreshing to see how [John P. Miller] applied the standard in his decidedly analog
self-playing robotic xylophone
.
Framed inside a fetching Red Oak enclosure, the 25-key instrument uses individual solenoids for each key, meaning that it has no problem striking multiple bars simultaneously. This extra fidelity really helps in reproducing the familiar melodies via the MIDI format. The tracks themselves can be loaded onto the device via SD card, and selected for playback with character LCD and rotary knob.
The
software
transposes the full MIDI music spectrum of a particular track into a 25-note version compatible with the xylophone. Considering that a piano typically has 88 keys, some musical concessions are needed to produce a recognizable playback, but overall it’s an enjoyable musical experience.
Perhaps most remarkable about this project is the documentation. If you want to build your own, everything you need to know is available online, and the no-solder approach makes this project very accessible. Most of the write-up happened some years ago, and we’re really interested to see what improvements have been made since.
The robotic xylophone is reminiscent of these
automatic tubular bells
from some time ago. These musical hacks can be particularly inspiring, and we can’t wait to see more.
[Thanks Assad Ebrahim for the great tip.] | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417924",
"author": "Jon",
"timestamp": "2022-01-27T16:47:38",
"content": "Too bad the clacking of the solenoids or wood on wood hitting takes away from the xylophone sound. Maybe some other solenoids or dampers would help. Otherwise cool build",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,372,809.003641 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/27/sherloc-and-the-search-for-life-on-mars/ | SHERLOC And The Search For Life On Mars | Dan Maloney | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"astrobiology",
"laser",
"mars",
"organic",
"Perseverance",
"Raman",
"spectroscopy",
"Stokes",
"uv"
] | Humanity has been wondering about whether life exists beyond our little backwater planet for so long that we’ve developed a kind of cultural bias as to how the answer to this central question will be revealed. Most of us probably imagine that NASA or some other space agency will schedule a press conference, an assembled panel of scientific luminaries will announce the findings, and newspapers around the world will blare “WE ARE NOT ALONE!” headlines. We’ve all seen that movie before, so that’s the way it has to be, right?
Probably not. Short of an improbable event like an alien spacecraft landing while a Google Street View car was driving by or receiving
an unambiguously intelligent radio message from the stars
, the conclusion that life exists now or once did outside our particular gravity well is likely to be reached in a piecewise process, an accretion of evidence built up over a long time until on balance, the only reasonable conclusion is that we are not alone. And that’s exactly what
the announcement at the end of last yea
r that the Mars rover Perseverance had discovered evidence of organic molecules in the rocks of Jezero crater was — another piece of the puzzle, and another step toward answering the fundamental question of the uniqueness of life.
Discovering organic molecules on Mars is far from proof that life once existed there. But it’s a step on the way, as well as a great excuse to look into the scientific principles and engineering of the instruments that made this discovery possible — the whimsically named SHERLOC and WATSON.
Would You Like Some CHNOPS with That?
Defining what exactly constitutes biological life is difficult, and there are plenty of philosophical arguments that muddy the waters even when you reduce life to characteristics such as the transformation of energy or the ability to reproduce. But at the end of the day, such macroscale characteristics don’t help much when looking for microscopic life on other planets — especially when you suspect that you’re just looking for the remains of ancient microbial life, as is likely the case on Mars.
To explore the possibility that Mars once harbored life,
the Mars 2020 mission’s Perseverance rover science payload
includes a range of instruments designed to search for the smallest remains of past life. Chief among these instruments is SHERLOC, for “Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals” — a somewhat forced but impressively descriptive acronym.
At the heart of SHERLOC, which rides at the end of the rover’s two-meter robotic arm, is an ultraviolet laser Raman spectrometer, designed to identify the specific signatures of the so-called CHNOPS elements — carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. Something like 98% of the biomass on Earth is composed of these six elements; finding them on Mars will be pretty good evidence that life once existed there. But simply finding the CHNOPS elements doesn’t make a sample biologically relevant. It’s how those elements are organized and the structures they form that determine whether a sample might have the remains of ancient life, and figuring that out is what Raman spectroscopy is really good at.
Scattering Two Ways
Raman spectroscopy takes advantage of what’s known as inelastic scattering, or Raman scattering. Normally, electromagnetic waves interact with particles of matter by elastic, or Rayleigh, scattering. When incoming photons interact with molecules, they excite them from the ground state to a higher-energy virtual state. In Rayleigh scattering, the excited state quickly collapses and the particle returns to the ground state without any loss of the kinetic energy the incident photon had. It’s like a moving billiard ball that transfers all its kinetic energy into a motionless ball, which then goes on to move while the first ball stops dead.
But about one out of every 100 million scatterings results in dropping from the excited virtual state to a state different from where the molecule started. To stretch the earlier analogy, this would be like the moving billiard ball hitting a motionless ball with a crack in it. The cracked ball would still absorb the energy of the incoming ball, but the crack would attenuate some of it, sending the ball off at a different speed than the incoming ball, and perhaps even in a different direction than would occur in a purely elastic collision.
Just as the difference in speed and direction could reveal information about the characteristics of the cracked ball, so too can Raman scattering be used to probe the structure of a molecule. The difference in energy between the incident photons and the scattered photons depends on the vibrational and rotation states of the chemical bonds within the molecule. This results in a population of photons with different wavelengths that represent the different chemical bonds within a molecule. When spread out onto a detector with a diffraction grating, these photons create a fingerprint that’s characteristic of the molecules in the sample.
While Raman has been used for decades on Earth to analyze all sorts of chemical samples, SHERLOC is the first time the technique has been used on another world. And as you’d imagine, it takes some special engineering to package up all the optics and electronics and make it not only robust enough to survive the rigors of space travel, but also to operate autonomously.
Built to Perform
The SHERLOC Turret Assembly, or STA. The ACI/SHERLOC objective lens is at lower left, while WATSON is located middle right. Both cameras have their motorized lens covers in place. For reference, both cameras are about 9 cm across. Note part of the hexapod strut suspension system visible behind the ACI/SHERLOC objective. Source: NASA-JPL/Caltech
To accomplish all this, SHERLOC is divided into two major assemblies: the SHERLOC Body Assembly (SBA) and the SHERLOC Turret Assembly (STA). The STB is where all the command and data handling circuits are located, and where the power supply lives. The STA is the business end of SHERLOC, and lives at the end of Perseverance’s robotic arm. The heart of the STA is the deep-UV (DUV) laser, a heavily modified off-the-shelf neon-copper metal-vapor laser. It provides a highly stable 248.60 nm pulse and is expected to last long enough to deliver 3 million spectra, which is about seven times the design life of the rover.
As with any Raman spectroscope, the optics of SHERLOC are a complicated set of lenses, mirrors, beam splitters, and filters. Unlike most of its Earth-bound cousins, though, SHERLOC has to handle the “S” in its name: scanning. Rather than rely on fine control of the robotic arm to position its beam, SHERLOC has a scanner subsystem that’s quite similar to the galvanometers used for beam steering in laser shows. The scanner gives SHERLOC control of the beam over a 7 mm x 7 mm sample area with a step size of less than a micron in both dimensions, allowing it to gather data from the smallest of features without having to rely on robot arm moves.
Another way in which SHERLOC differs from other Raman instruments is in the need to correlate spectra with spatial information about a sample. It’s not enough to get the spectral fingerprint of a particular section of a sample; rather, SHERLOC must also determine the context of what that exact spot on the sample looks like in visible light. To accomplish this, SHERLOC requires the help of two cameras: the Autofocus and Context Imager (ACI), a high-resolution grayscale camera that shares the optical path of the Raman spectroscope, and WATSON, the Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering camera. WATSON is a separate, full-color, high-resolution camera with a macro capability down to 1.78 cm focal length. WATSON and the ACI together are basically the equivalent of a geologist’s hand lens, allowing SHERLOC to overlay visible light images with Raman data over a wide range of operating distances.
Finally, SHERLOC’s Raman spectroscope is designed to survive the long trip to Mars, the high-energy landing, and the harsh conditions of the cold, dusty world. While the SBA is nestled safely inside the hull of Perseverance, the STA has to be exposed to the elements to do its job. SHERLOC is mounted on a hexapod arrangement of spring-loaded struts that dampen vibrations encountered both during spaceflight and rover operations. The STA is also equipped with a complex thermal management system, including survival heating elements that keep the electronics and optics warm enough to survive the worst-case Martian cold.
Context is Key
While most of the public’s attention to the Mars 2020 mission so far has understandably been drawn to the wildly successful Ingenuity helicopter, SHERLOC has been busily gathering data pretty much non-stop since Perseverance arrived on Mars back in March of 2021. The confirmation of organics in Jezero crater came from a series of samples analyzed back in September of 2021, and one rock in particular, which was dubbed “Garde.” The rover’s arm-mounted tool assembly was used to grind away some of the weathered rock before SHERLOC was swung into place to analyze the sample.
Garde rock, with evidence of organics called out. Note the way SHERLOC can combine the visible light images with Raman data to provide geological context. Source: NASA-JPL/Caltech.
Thanks to the power of SHERLOC and its ability to overlay visible light images with Raman data, planetary scientists were able to determine that Garde contains both olivine minerals, which indicate an igneous history, and carbonate minerals, which suggest a past period of water reacting with the rock. This is consistent with what we already know about the Jezero crater and the river delta that once flowed into it. Finding organic materials in a rock with that kind of geological history is a tantalizing bit of data, and may someday prove to be part of the evidence that life once teemed on Mars. | 24 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417898",
"author": "spiritplumber",
"timestamp": "2022-01-27T15:22:13",
"content": "You can also pick up chlorophyll directly with this.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-xffa_ewnU",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6417905",
"... | 1,760,372,808.867541 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/27/an-up-to-date-development-environment-for-the-nokia-n-gage/ | An Up-To-Date Development Environment For The Nokia N-Gage | Jenny List | [
"Phone Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"handheld game",
"N-Gage",
"nokia",
"symbian"
] | One of the brave but unsuccessful plays from Nokia during their glory years was the N-Gage, an attempt to merge a Symbian smartphone and a handheld game console. It may not have managed to dethrone the Game Boy Advance but it still has a band of enthusiasts, and among them is [Michael Fitzmayer] who has produced
a CMake-based toolchain for the original Symbian SDK
. This is intended to ease development on the devices by making them more accessible to the tools of the 2020s, and may serve to bring a new generation of applications to those old Nokias still lying forgotten in dusty drawers.
In much of the public imagination, the invention of the smartphone came with the release of the first Apple iPhone in 2007. Hackaday readers will of course trace the smartphone back much further than that to an original IBM prototype, and will remind any doubters that the Nokias which the iPhone vanquished were very successful smartphones without any of Cupertino’s magic in sight. Nokia’s tragedy was that they appeared not to understand what they had in Symbian, and released a bewildering array of devices intended to satisfy every possible market without recognizing that the market they needed to serve was their customers being easily able to run the apps of their choice on the things.
Symbian itself has long ago become a piece of abandonware, but during its chequered history there was a period
in which an open-source version was released
. It would be nice to think that projects such as this one might revive interest in this capable yet forgotten operating system, as with the passage of a decade the cost of hardware which might run it has fallen to the point of affordability. Does anyone want to relive the 2000s?
Header image: Evan-Amos,
Public domain
. | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417856",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2022-01-27T12:11:09",
"content": "> Nokia’s tragedy was that they appeared not to understand what they had in SymbianLeading up to the Microsoft takeover, the board of directors were filled with moles who attempted to bring the market value ... | 1,760,372,808.706765 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/27/upgrading-a-soviet-calculator-with-a-modern-cpu/ | Upgrading A Soviet Calculator With A Modern CPU | Robin Kearey | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"CPU upgrade",
"Elektronika MK-85",
"programmable calculator"
] | Today’s supply chain issues can make it hard to buy microcontrollers, or really any kind of semiconductor. But for those keeping retrocomputers alive, this problem has always existed: ancient components might have been out of production for decades, with a dwindling supply of second-hand parts or “new old stock” as the only option. If a rare CPU breaks, you might have no option but to replace the entire computer.
[Piotr Patek] ran into this issue when he obtained an Elektronika MK-85 programmable calculator with a broken CPU. Unable to find a replacement, he decided instead to build
a pin-compatible CPU unit based on an STM32 microcontroller
. Of course no modern CPU is pin-compatible with a Soviet design from the 1980s, so [Piotr] had to design a small interposer PCB to match the original pinout. This also gave him enough space to add an efficient DC/DC converter chip that generates the 2.5 V supply for the STM32.
As for the software, [Piotr] managed to port the original BASIC interpreter, which was written in PDP-11 assembly, to a modern equivalent written in C. While he was at it, he fixed a few bugs that had been sitting there for about 35 years. The updated CPU also allows the MK-85 to run circles around its contemporary siblings: [Piotr] timed it to be about thirty times faster than the original chip, while using a comparable amount of power.
If you also happen to have an MK-85 with a dodgy CPU, you’ll be pleased to find that the schematics and source code to [Piotr]’s modification are all available on his blog. This is probably the first calculator CPU update we’ve seen, although we’ve featured other ancient calculators
updated with new firmware
, and some
completely new calculator designs based on classic hardware
.
Thanks for the tip, [cmholm]! | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417861",
"author": "BT",
"timestamp": "2022-01-27T12:41:00",
"content": "I would have been interested to see pictures of the whole calculator, not just parts of the circuit board.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6417864",
... | 1,760,372,808.75732 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/turn-on-sarcasm-with-the-flip-of-a-switch/ | Turn On Sarcasm With The Flip Of A Switch | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"communication",
"keyboard",
"online",
"pico",
"poe's law",
"raspberr pi",
"sarcasm",
"uart",
"usb"
] | Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to distinguish in online communities. So much, in fact, that a famous internet rule called Poe’s Law is named after the phenomenon. To adapt, users have adopted several methods for indicating implied sarcasm such as the
/s
tag, but more recently a more obvious sarcasm indicator has appeared that involves random capitalization througout the sarcastic phrase. While this looks much more satisfying than other methods, it is a little cumbersome to type
unless you have this sarcasm converter for your keyboard
.
The device, built by [Ben S], is based around two Raspberry Pi Pico development boards and sits between a computer and any standard USB keyboard. The first Pi accepts the USB connection from the keyboard and reads all of the inputs before sending what it reads to the second Pi over UART. If the “SaRcAsM” button is pressed, the input text stream is converted to sarcasm by toggling the caps lock key after every keystroke.
For communicating in today’s online world with rapidly changing memes, a device like this is almost necessary for making sure you aren’t misunderstood on whichever popular forum you like to frequent. We don’t know how long this trend will continue, either, but until something else replaces it to more concisely communicate sarcasm we expect it to remain relevant. The build is also a reminder of the various
interesting ways that microcontrollers can be programmed to act as keyboards
.
Thanks to [ted yapo] for the tip! | 43 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417809",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2022-01-27T07:29:35",
"content": "Pff. I cOuLd hAvE dOnE tHaT wItH a FiVeFiVeFiVe….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6417819",
"author": "Ø",
"timestamp": "2022-01-... | 1,760,372,808.954126 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/better-farming-through-electricity/ | Better Farming Through Electricity | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"agriculture",
"electroculture",
"farming"
] | Chinese researchers are reporting that applying
an electric field to pea plants
increased yields. This process — known as electroculture — has been tested multiple times, but in each case there are irregularities in the scientific process, so there is still an opportunity for controlled research to produce meaningful data.
This recent research used two plots of peas planted from the same pods. The plants were tended identically except one plot was stimulated by an electric field. The yield on the stimulated plot was about 20% more than the control plot.
The actual paper is paywalled in the journal Nature Food, but the idea seems simple enough. If you search for the topic, you’ll find there have been
other studies
with
similar findings
. There are also anecdotal reports of electrical plant stimulation going back to 1746.
The researchers can’t offer an explanation for why this would work. They did, however, use a novel method for generating electricity by harvesting energy from the environment with equipment they say costs about $40. From the diagram, it looks like a windmill-operated Wimshurst machine that rubs rabbit fur against some plastic. We imagine this would make a decent high school science project.
We’ve heard that electrical stimulation
makes nerves grow
, so why not pea plants? Or even, say,
all your nerves
? | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417778",
"author": "David",
"timestamp": "2022-01-27T03:09:45",
"content": "There is nothing new about this. I’m 75 years old and remember doing a science experiment like this in grade school using pins and a battery on bean sprouts. And it wasn’t new knowledge then. I don’t rem... | 1,760,372,808.658443 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/pocket-sized-doom-is-actually-playable/ | Pocket-Sized Doom Is Actually Playable | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"doom",
"ESP32",
"retro-go"
] | It used to be that you needed a well-equipped expensive new beige-box PC if you wanted to play Doom at all. Now, you can do so in a form factor with a footprint smaller than a credit card,
as demonstrated by this nifty little build from Adafruit.
The build relies on the
Retro-Go firmware
for ESP32 devices, which can emulate a range of machines, from the Nintendo NES and Game Boy to the NEC PC Engine, Atari Lynx, and, yes, Doom itself. It can even run Doom mods, via the WAD architecture used by the game.
It was a simple matter of porting Retro-Go to run on the tiny QT Py ESP32 Pico board, and everything fell into place. With six tactile buttons, it’s capable of not just running Doom, but running it at full playable speeds including that classic soundtrack. The 1.3″ 240×240 screen looks surprisingly crisp and does a great job of displaying the game while keeping everything readable.
It’s one of the smaller Doom-capable portables we’ve seen; we reckon you could stuff this in the change pocket in your jeans if you tried hard enough. We’ll never quite get over seeing the world’s most loved FPS
running on commercial kitchen hardware, though
. Video after the break. | 19 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417758",
"author": "EBo",
"timestamp": "2022-01-27T00:44:19",
"content": "I looked on Adafruit and I see the QT Py, but not the interface board. While I would enjoy to toy with one for the sheer geekyness of it, I would actually live to try to hack this to build interfaces for sma... | 1,760,372,808.45815 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/building-switching-points-for-a-backyard-railway/ | Building Switching Points For A Backyard Railway | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"points",
"railway",
"switch"
] | A home-built railway is one of the greatest things you could possibly use to shift loads around your farm. [Tim] and [Sandra] of YouTube channel [Way Out West] have just such a setup, but they needed some switching points to help direct carriages from one set of rails to another.
Fabrication ensued!
The basic layout of the railway points.
The railway relies on very simple rails made with flat bar and angle iron, allowing the railway to be built without a lot of heavy blacksmithing work. For a light-duty home railway, these are more than strong enough to do the job.
As for the points, a simple V-shaped frog-and-blade design was used. The frog is the V-shaped section where the rails diverge into two directions, sitting in the center of the Y, while the blade is the part that moves to either side to guide the carriages in one way or t’other.
The blade consists of a 2.2 meter long piece of angle iron with a pin welded on, allowing it to pivot. Two pieces of flat bar were then welded together with a pin to make the frog. Two metal bushes were then forced into a wooden sleeper, allowing the blade to pivot as needed. The rails themselves are slightly kinked as needed and everything tacked down into sleepers with bolts and pipe pegs.
The design runs smoothly, much to [Tim]’s enjoyment. It’s a clear improvement
over the earlier design we looked at least year.
There’s something inherently charming about a railway built with little more than wood, metal, and hammers. Seeing the little stone wagon run down the rails to bed in the sleepers is utterly joyful in a way that’s difficult to fully explain. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Foley for the tip!] | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417718",
"author": "Robb Smith",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T21:52:25",
"content": "Somebody should put Tim and Sandra in touch with the guy who did the electric Minecraft cart featured earlier on Hackaday.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,809.162695 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/reverse-engineering-the-next-computer-keyboard-protocol/ | Reverse Engineering The NeXT Computer Keyboard Protocol | Lewin Day | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"keyboard",
"NeXT",
"nextcube",
"nextstep"
] | The NeXT computer was introduced in 1988, with the high-end machine finding favor with universities and financial institutions during its short time in the marketplace. [Spencer Nelson] came across a keyboard from one of these machines, and with little experience,
set about figuring out how it worked.
The keyboard features a type of DIN connector and speaks a non-ADB protocol to the machine, but [Spencer] wanted to get it speaking USB for use with modern computers. First attempts at using
pre-baked software found online
to get the keyboard working proved to be unreliable. [Spencer] suspected that the code, designed to read 50 microsecond pulses from the keyboard, was miscalibrated.
Some analysis with an oscilloscope and logic analyzer allowed [Spencer] to figure out the keyboard was communicating with pulses ever 52.74 microseconds, corresponding to a frequency of 18.960 kHz, sending two 9-bit messages at a time. Disassembling the keyboard confirmed these findings – inside was a 455 kHz clock, with the keyboard sending a signal every 24 ticks producing the 18.960 kHz output.
Reworking the initial code found online to work with the actual pulse widths coming from the keyboard got everything humming along nicely. Now, [Spencer] has a nice vintage keyboard with excellent feel that reliably works with modern hardware. We’d call that a win.
If you need more of a fix, be sure to dive into
Keebin’ with Kristina
, a regular column
all about our favorite tactile input devices! | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417677",
"author": "macsimski",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T19:52:11",
"content": "There was also a very nice Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) keyboard. very sleek and the ctrl knob was actually a ctrl bar under the space bar in the rim of the keyboard itself. This was for the last incarnation... | 1,760,372,809.11423 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/linux-fu-bash-strings/ | Linux Fu: Bash Strings | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"bash",
"linux",
"shell scripting"
] | If you are a traditional programmer, using
bash
for scripting may seem limiting sometimes, but for certain tasks,
bash
can be very productive. It turns out, some of the limits of
bash
are really limits of older shells and people code to that to be compatible. Still other perceived issues are because some of the advanced functions in
bash
are arcane or confusing.
Strings are a good example. You don’t think of
bash
as a string manipulation language, but it has many powerful ways to handle strings. In fact, it may have too many ways, since the functionality winds up in more than one place. Of course, you can also call out to programs, and sometimes it is just easier to make a call to an
awk
or Python script to do the heavy lifting.
But let’s stick with
bash
-isms for handling strings. Obviously, you can put a string in an environment variable and pull it back out. I am going to assume you know how string interpolation and quoting works. In other words, this should make sense:
echo "Your path is $PATH and the current directory is ${PWD}"
The Long and the Short
Suppose you want to know the length of a string. That’s a pretty basic string operation. In
bash
, you can write
${#var}
to find the length of
$var
:
#/bin/bash
echo -n "Project Name? "
read PNAME
if (( ${#PNAME} > 16 ))
then
echo Error: Project name longer than 16 characters
else
echo ${PNAME} it is!
fi
The “((” forms an arithmetic context which is why you can get away with an unquoted greater-than sign here. If you don’t mind using
expr
— which is an external program — there are at least two more ways to get there:
echo ${#STR}
expr length "${STR}"
expr match "${STR}" '.*'
Of course, if you allow yourself to call outside of
bash
, you could use
awk
or anything else to do this, too, but we’ll stick with
expr
as it is relatively lightweight.
Swiss Army Knife
In fact,
expr
can do a lot of string manipulations in addition to length and match. You can pull a substring from a string using
substr
. It is often handy to use
index
to find a particular character in the string first. The
expr
program uses 1 as the first character of the string. So, for example:
#/bin/bash
echo -n "Full path? "
read FFN
LAST_SLASH=0
SLASH=$( expr index "$FFN" / ) # find first slash
while (( $SLASH != 0 ))
do
let LAST_SLASH=$LAST_SLASH+$SLASH # point at next slash
SLASH=$(expr index "${FFN:$LAST_SLASH}" / ) # look for another
done
# now LAST_SLASH points to last slash
echo -n "Directory: "
expr substr "$FFN" 1 $LAST_SLASH
echo -or-
echo ${FFN:0:$LAST_SLASH}
# Yes, I know about dirname but this is an example
Enter a full path (like
/foo/bar/hackaday
) and the script will find the last slash and print the name up to and including the last slash using two different methods. This script makes use of
expr
but also uses the syntax for
bash
‘s built in substring extraction which starts at index zero. For example, if the variable FOO contains “Hackaday”:
${FOO} -> Hackaday
${FOO:1} -> ackaday
${FOO:5:3} -> day
The first number is an offset and the second is a length if it is positive. You can also make either of the numbers negative, although you need a space after the colon if the offset is negative. The last character of the string is at index -1, for example. A negative length is shorthand for an absolute position from the end of the string. So:
${FOO: -3} -> day
${FOO:1:-4} -> ack
${FOO: -8:-4} -> Hack
Of course, either or both numbers could be variables, as you can see in the example.
Less is More
Sometimes you don’t want to find something, you just want to get rid of it.
bash
has lots of ways to remove substrings using fixed strings or glob-based pattern matching. There are four variations. One pair of deletions remove the longest and shortest possible substrings from the front of the string and the other pair does the same thing from the back of the string. Consider this:
TSTR=my.first.file.txt
echo ${TSTR%.*} # prints my.first.file
echo ${TSTR%%.*} # prints my
echo ${TSTR#*fi} # prints rst.file.txt
echo $TSTR##*fi} # prints le.txt
Transformation
Of course, sometimes you don’t want to delete, as much as you want to replace some string with another string. You can use a single slash to replace the first instance of a search string or two slashes to replace globally. You can also fail to provide a replacement string and you’ll get another way to delete parts of strings. One other trick is to add a # or % to anchor the match to the start or end of the string, just like with a deletion.
TSTR=my.first.file.txt
echo ${TSTR/fi/Fi} # my.First.file.txt
echo ${TSTR//fi/Fi} # my.First.File.txt
echo ${TSTR/#*./PREFIX-} # PREFIX-txt (note: always longest match)
echo ${TSTR/%.*/.backup} # my.backup (note: always longest match)
Miscellaneous
Some of the more common ways to manipulate strings in
bash
have to do with dealing with parameters. Suppose you have a script that expects a variable called
OTERM
to be set but you want to be sure:
REALTERM=${OTERM:-vt100}
Now
REALTERM
will have the value of
OTERM
or the string “vt100” if there was nothing in
OTERM
. Sometimes you want to set
OTERM
itself so while you could assign to
OTERM
instead of
REALTERM
, there is an easier way. Use := instead of the :- sequence. If you do that, you don’t necessarily need an assignment at all, although you can use one if you like:
echo ${OTERM:=vt100} # now OTERM is vt100 if it was empty before
You can also reverse the sense so that you replace the value only if the main value is not empty, although that’s not as generally useful:
echo ${DEBUG:+"Debug mode is ON"} # reverse -; no assignment
A more drastic measure lets you print an error message to stderr and abort a non-interactive shell:
REALTERM=${OTERM:?"Error. Please set OTERM before calling this script"}
Just in Case
Converting things to upper or lower case is fairly simple. You can provide a glob pattern that matches a single character. If you omit it, it is the same as ?, which matches any character. You can elect to change all the matching characters or just attempt to match the first character. Here are the obligatory examples:
NAME="joe Hackaday"
echo ${NAME^} # prints Joe Hackaday (first match of any character)
echo ${NAME^^} # prints JOE HACKADAY (all of any character)
echo ${NAME^^[a]} # prints joe HAckAdAy (all a characters)
echo ${NAME,,] # prints joe hackaday (all characters)
echo ${NAME,] # prints joe Hackaday (first character matched and didn't convert)
NAME="Joe Hackaday"
echo ${NAME,,[A-H]} # prints Joe hackaday (apply pattern to all characters and convert A-H to lowercase)
Recent versions of
bash
can also convert upper and lower case using
${VAR@U}
and
${VAR@L}
along with just the first character using
@u
and
@l
, but your mileage may vary.
Pass the Test
You probably realize that when you do a standard test, that actually calls a program:
if [ $f -eq 0 ]
then ...
If you do an ls on
/usr/bin
, you’ll see an executable actually named “[” used as a shorthand for the test program. However,
bash
has its own test in the form of two brackets:
if [[ $f == 0 ]]
then ...
That test built-in can handle regular expressions using =~ so that’s another option for matching strings:
if [[ "$NAME" =~ [hH]a.k ]] ...
Choose Wisely
Of course, if you are doing a slew of text processing, maybe you don’t need to be using
bash
. Even if you are, don’t forget you can always leverage other programs like tr,
awk
,
sed
, and many others to do things like this. Sure, performance won’t be as good — probably — but if you are worried about performance why are you writing a script?
Unless you just swear off scripting altogether, it is nice to have some of these tricks in your back pocket. Use them wisely. | 40 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417654",
"author": "Severe Tire Damage",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T18:58:13",
"content": "Bash sucks as a programming language. Only donkeys use bash as a general purpose programming language.Why waste time and space even talking about it?Whenever I come across a multi-hundred line... | 1,760,372,809.70254 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/major-bug-grants-root-for-all-major-linux-distributions/ | Major Bug Grants Root For All Major Linux Distributions | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Linux Hacks",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"admin",
"exploit",
"linux",
"patch",
"pkexec",
"polkit",
"root",
"security",
"update",
"vulnerability"
] | One of the major reasons behind choosing Linux as an operating system is that it’s much more secure than Windows. There are plenty of reasons for this including appropriate user permissions, installing software from trusted sources and, of course, the fact that most software for Linux including the Linux kernel itself is open source which allows anyone to review the code for vulnerabilities. This doesn’t mean that Linux is perfectly secure though, as
researchers recently found a major bug found in most major Linux distributions that allows anyone to run code as the root user
.
The exploit is a memory corruption vulnerability in Polkit, a framework that handles the privilege level of various system processes. It specifically impacts the program
pkexec
. With the
proof-of-concept exploit
(file download warning) in hand, all an attacker needs to do to escalate themselves to root is to compile the program on the computer and run it as the default user.
An example is shown by [Jim MacDonald] on Twitter
for those not willing to try this on their own machines.
As bad as this sounds, it seems as though all of the major distributions that this impacts have already released updates that patch the issue, including Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, open SUSE, and Arch. There is also a temporary workaround that removes read/write permission from the
pkexec
program so it can’t run at all. That being said, it might be best to check that your Linux systems are all up-to-date and that no strangers have been typing random commands into the terminal recently. | 65 | 23 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417600",
"author": "Twisty Plastic",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T16:39:10",
"content": "Yah. Pretty much everything ending in …kit, Sytemd, PulseAudio, etc… Linux has gotten too complicated for it’s own good. There’s always going to be some security hole in there. Given the ubiquity ... | 1,760,372,809.799946 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/strange-computer-languages-a-hackers-field-guide/ | Strange Computer Languages: A Hacker’s Field Guide | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art"
] | [
"brainfuck",
"esoteric language"
] | Why do we build radios or clocks when you can buy them? Why do we make LEDs blink for no apparent purpose? Why do we try to squeeze one extra frame out of our video cards? We don’t know why, but we do. That might be the same attitude most people would have when learning about esolangs — esoteric programming languages — we don’t know why people create them or use them, but they do.
We aren’t talking about mainstream languages that annoy people like Lisp, Forth, or VBA. We aren’t talking about older languages that seem cryptic today like APL or Prolog. We are talking about languages that are made to be… well… strange.
INTERCAL
We have to start at the beginning. INTERCAL. This was started as a joke in 1972 and the acronym is purportedly for Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym. There was no actual implementation, though, until around 1990. Now there are two: C-INTERCAL and CLC-INTERCAL.
Since INTERCAL is a parody, it makes some very odd choices. For example, bitwise operators like AND operate with two arguments, but one of the arguments is reversed. That is, the top bit of one operand matches the bottom bit of the second operand. In a nod to social convention, there is a modifier known as PLEASE that you should sometimes use when, for example, reading data as in “PLEASE READ IN.” If you don’t use it often enough, the compile will fail warning you that the program is insufficiently polite. However, if you use it too often, you’ll also get an error that your program is excessively polite.
Originally, the implementation used EBCDIC, so it uses some characters that don’t appear on conventional 7-bit ASCII systems. This forced some character substitutions and now, with Unicode, some versions will allow the old-style characters if you prefer them. The INTERCAL manual renames nearly all the special characters for further confusion. A single quote is a “spark” and the equal sign is a “half-mesh”. Only the ampersand remains unscathed.
Want to know more? Be careful
what you wish for
.
FALSE and Brainf**k
Fast forward to 1993 to the birth of FALSE, a stack language made to be unreadable. As a consolation, the compiler only needed 1,024 bytes. This inspired an even more minimal language, Brainf**k. There are only eight characters needed in a BF program.
Brainf**k has spawned a lot of similar languages like Befunge and JSF**k. If you’ve heard of only one language in this post, it was probably this one.
What does it look like? From the
esoteric language Wiki
:
++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+<<<<-]>+>+>->>+[<]<-]>>.>---.+++++++..+++.>>.<-.<.+++.------.--------.>>+.>++.
That’s Hello World, by the way!
Binary Combinatory Logic and Unlambda
We once knew a college professor who used to say “maximize the boolean variable” when he meant “set the bit to 1.” We think he’d like
BCL
. If you want to express true in BCL, you write K(KK). False? K(K(SK)). It gets worse from there. Here’s XOR: S(S(S(SS)(S(S(SK)))S))K.
However, this is binary, so S is really 01 and K is 00 and the left parenthesis is a single 1. Super strange and apparently has some application in some theoretical math studies.
There are several versions of this, all slightly different.
Unlambda
, for example, uses a lot of different characters. Here’s a “cat” program in Unlambda:
```s`d`@|i`ci
Whitespace
Most programming languages don’t care about white space and you can use it liberally or not. That is, in C you can write:
x=10*2;
or:
x = 10
*
2;
The compiler doesn’t care. Python is different. Indentation levels matter.
Whitespace
takes that to the extreme. The entire program is written in tab, space, and linefeed, and everything is ignored. That may seem odd, but interestingly it allows you to hide a program inside another program — as long as it isn’t a Python program.
The first whitespace character tells you what the next one means. For example, all flow control sequences start with a linefeed. Stack manipulation starts with a space. A tab and a linefeed introduce I/O operations. A tab and a space is for math and two tabs manage heap access.
Even numbers are in binary where a space is positive, a tab is negative. After that, a space is 0 and a tab is 1.
LOLCODE
While whitespace is possibly even less comprehensible than Brainf**k, some languages try to imitate particular readable things. Case in point: LOLCODE which has programs that match up with LOLCAT meme captions. Apparently, LOLCATs were the main reason the Internet was invented, after all.
Why do we assume cats talk like this? We aren’t sure, but we have a feeling the narrative inside a real cat’s brain is more like, “It is certainly hard to find good servants these days!” The ancient Egyptians worshipped cats and cats have not forgotten this.
Here’s a program to count to 10:
HAI 1.3
IM IN YR loop UPPIN YR var TIL BOTH SAEM var AN 10
VISIBLE SMOOSH var AN " " MKAY!
IM OUTTA YR loop
KTHXBYE
Rockstar
Maybe you aren’t a fan of LOLCATs but you like rock music. Well, then, Rockstar is the programming language for you. Variable names can be almost anything and data have types like “mysterious.”
We assume that to be a good coder in this language you need to grow your hair out, mumble, and own at least one article of clothing made of spandex. Come to think of it, that describes quite a few programmers we know.
Among the clever things it does, numbers are expressed in the length of words, and many programming constructs have “obvious” English-language correlates. So “Hate is water” assigns 5 to the variable “Hate”.
Here’s Fizbuzz written in
Rockstar
:
Midnight takes your heart and your soul
While your heart is as high as your soul
Put your heart without your soul into your heart
Give back your heart
Desire is a lovestruck ladykiller
My world is nothing
Fire is ice
Hate is water
Until my world is Desire,
Build my world up
If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing and Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing
Shout "FizzBuzz!"
Take it to the top
If Midnight taking my world, Fire is nothing
Shout "Fizz!"
Take it to the top
If Midnight taking my world, Hate is nothing
Say "Buzz!"
Take it to the top
Whisper my world
Shakespeare
If rock music is too pedestrian for you, there’s always SPL, the Shakespeare Programming Language. Like the bard, the programming language isn’t known for its economy of words.
Numbers are especially tricky in SPL. Nouns have a value of -1 or 1 depending on how nice they are (e.g., trees and flowers are 1 while pigs are -1). Adjectives multiply by 2. So “lying stupid fatherless big smelly half-witted coward” is -1 (coward) * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = -64.
Around the Hackaday watercooler, we’ve thought about writing a new version of this language where all programs are in the form of a conversation between the bard and Sir Francis Bacon. We’ll call it Shake ‘n Bake.
Here’s just part of the 89-line
Hello World script
— er — program:
The Infamous Hello World Program.
Romeo, a young man with a remarkable patience.
Juliet, a likewise young woman of remarkable grace.
Ophelia, a remarkable woman much in dispute with Hamlet.
Hamlet, the flatterer of Andersen Insulting A/S.
Act I: Hamlet's insults and flattery.
Scene I: The insulting of Romeo.
[Enter Hamlet and Romeo]
Hamlet:
You lying stupid fatherless big smelly half-witted coward!
You are as stupid as the difference between a handsome rich brave
hero and thyself! Speak your mind!
You are as brave as the sum of your fat little stuffed misused dusty
old rotten codpiece and a beautiful fair warm peaceful sunny summer's
day. You are as healthy as the difference between the sum of the
sweetest reddest rose and my father and yourself! Speak your mind!
You are as cowardly as the sum of yourself and the difference
between a big mighty proud kingdom and a horse. Speak your mind.
Speak your mind!
[Exit Romeo]
Scene II: The praising of Juliet.
[Enter Juliet]
Hamlet:
Thou art as sweet as the sum of the sum of Romeo and his horse and his
black cat! Speak thy mind!
Malbolge
Malbolge
was designed to be difficult to use. Reportedly, the first program to print hello world required another computer program to search all the possible programs until it found the right sequence. If you don’t recognize the reference, Malbolge is a misspelling of Malebolge, the 8th circle of hell in Dante’s
Inferno
.
Malbolge uses a base-three virtual machine. There are only a few instructions including rotate right and the “crazy” operation that changes bits in a way defined in a table and — as far as we can tell — has no relation to any normal math operation, and is essentially encryption. Malbolge is so awful that there are some attempts like Dis have been made to be “slightly less evil.”
Piet
Have you ever noticed how in science fiction movies, aliens almost always communicate using some kind of sound we can hear? They either speak English or they speak something that sounds like Andy Kaufmann doing a character. You rarely see aliens that flash lights, emit pheromones, or beam low-frequency radio waves to communicate. All the languages on this list use characters of some sort either as numbers, symbols, or words.
Except for Piet
. Piet programs are abstract art of the sort created by Piet Mondrian.
A single unit of code is a codel and blocks of codels have the same color. The “program counter” can move in two dimensions, of course. If Piet interpreted, for example, red as add and green as jump then it would be another form of symbols. But that’s not how it works. Instead, the interpreter looks at the change in hue and intensity between colors. So one step in hue and no change in lightness is an add operation. But if the color changes darker, that’s subtract. Here’s hello world in Piet. Don’t ask us to explain it!
Why? Why?
It isn’t worth wondering why people create or use these languages. Why do people buy pet rocks? Why do people collect postage stamps? They just do. Still, learning a little about one of these quirky languages can push you out of your comfort zone and that’s not always a bad thing. Besides, a lot of people would say writing assembly for a PIC or AVR is only slightly less cryptic than Malbolge and many Hackaday readers do that.
As for us, we’ll stick with more practical programming languages.
Forth
seems cryptic, but is great and can create very legible programs in the hands of an expert. We do, however, occasionally dive into
these languages
for fun. | 50 | 28 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417589",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T16:08:17",
"content": "Holy crap, those are just plain cruel!And I have a hard enough time just writing simple programs in QuickBASIC! (I’m no programmer, obviously)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,372,809.987362 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/monitor-for-bedridden-patients-aims-to-improve-care/ | Monitor For Bedridden Patients Aims To Improve Care | Ryan Flowers | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"arduino mega",
"biomedical",
"medical",
"tft"
] | One of the joys of being a Maker and Hacker is solving problems and filling needs. When you can do both, well, that’s something special. [rodrigo.mejiasz]’s project surely fits into that special category of solving a problem and filling a dire need with his
Bedridden Patient Monitor
.
While [Rodrigo]’s project page does not specify his motivation for creating this project, one only needs to look as far as their local hospital ward or senior care facility to understand why this device is so wonderful. Healthcare workers and caregivers are stretched paper thin, and their attention is being constantly interrupted.
This is where the Bedridden Patient Monitor comes in. A healthy person can reposition themselves if they are uncomfortable, but bedridden patients cannot. It’s not just that a bedridden patient is unable to get out of bed, but that they are unable to move themselves without assistance. The result is a great amount of pain. And if left unchecked, pressure sores can be the result. These are not only extremely unpleasant, but an added danger to a patients health.
The Bedridden Patient Monitor steps in and provides not just an egg-timer like alert, but helps caregivers track a patients position in bed across even several working shifts. This ensures a continuity of care that might otherwise be easy to miss.
The beauty of this build is in its application but also its simplicity: it’s just an Arduino Mega, a TFT shield with its Micro SD card, and the touch screen itself. A few LED’s and a buzzer take care of alerts. A thoughtfully configured interface makes the devices use obvious so that staff can make immediate use of the monitor.
Makers have a long history diving into the medical field, such as
this stab wound treatment device that won the Dyson award in 2021
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci7wMSaqY4E | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417524",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T12:10:38",
"content": "Ok, but what if it fails and someone dies?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6417533",
"author": "A",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T12:28:0... | 1,760,372,809.572968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/26/the-sha2017-badge-just-keeps-on-giving-this-time-its-a-solar-monitor/ | The SHA2017 Badge Just Keeps On Giving, This Time It’s A Solar Monitor | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"green hacks"
] | [
"badgelife",
"sha2017",
"solar monitor"
] | Regular readers will know that we have covered the world of electronic badges for many years, and nothing pleases us more than seeing an event badge having a life afterwards rather than becoming a piece of e-waste. Thus we were especially pleased to see [Angus Gratton]’s use of
a SHA2017 badge as a solar output monitor
, over four years after the event.
The SHA badge used an ESP32 as its processor, and paired it with a touch keypad and an e-ink screen. Its then novel approach of having a firmware that could load MicroPython apps laid the groundwork for the successful open source
badge.team
firmware project, meaning that it remains versatile and useful to this day.
The solar monitor simply grabs time-series information from the database used by his web graphing system and displays it on the e-ink screen in graph form, but the interest apart from the use of the badge in his treatise on MicroPython coding. He makes the point that many of us probably follow unconsciously, writing for full-fat Python and then fixing the parts which either don’t work or use too many resources on its slimmer cousin. Finally he powers the device from an old phone charger, and shares some tips on controlling its tendency to reboot on power spikes.
It’s almost a year ago that we showed you
a SHA badge being used as an environmental sensor
.
Thanks [Sebastius] for the tip. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417568",
"author": "Ewald",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T14:48:39",
"content": "if you don’t have a sha2017 badge, an old hackable kindle might probably just do as well",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6417754",
"author": "kevin... | 1,760,372,809.523321 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/exercise-bike-hacked-as-input-for-xbox-360/ | Exercise Bike Hacked As Input For Xbox 360 | Lewin Day | [
"Games"
] | [
"cycle",
"cycling",
"exercise",
"gaming",
"Grand Theft Auto",
"pedal",
"xbox 360"
] | If you like playing Grand Theft Auto, you’re pretty familiar with squeezing the triggers for accelerating and braking while driving around. [David Programa] decided this was too easy, and instead developed a system to allow him
to pedal his way around the virtual world.
The device relies on a flywheel-based exercise bike, with six magnets placed on the flywheel that triggers a reed switch six times per rotation. The extra magnets give the system better resolution at slow speeds. A Hall Effect sensor would be a more reliable way to build this to survive in the long term, but the reed switch does work. It’s paired with a debounce circuit to keep the output clean. A Raspberry Pi is pressed into service, running a Python program to read a GPIO pin activated by the reed switch, counting pulses to determine the speed of pedalling.
The trigger control used in the Xbox 360 controller is a potentiometer that creates varying voltages depending on its position, allowing it to act as an analog accelerator input. 0 volts corresponds to no input, while the trigger reads 3.3 volts when fully depressed. The Raspberry Pi emulates this with its PWM output, paired with a low-pass filter to create the relevant voltage to inject into the trigger input on a generic Xbox 360 controller.
While it’s a lot less practical than simply using a regular controller, the pedal controls do allow you to get a great workout while playing Grand Theft Auto. Some of the more intense chase missions should be a great way to get your heart rate up, and that’s got to be a good thing.
Ironically, though, the system only works for cars and motorbikes in game. The bicycles in Grand Theft Auto are controlled by mashing the A button instead. Alternatively, you might consider a similar system for
playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo Switch
. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Zane Atkins for the tip!] | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417473",
"author": "Geoff",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T08:11:56",
"content": "I think it would be easier to just get a small DC motor with a rubber wheel and rest it against the flywheel. Add a capacitor and a potentiometer to smooth and adjust the voltage. No meed for a microcontrol... | 1,760,372,809.618678 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/better-car-hinges-by-3d-printing/ | Better Car Hinges By 3D Printing | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"finite element analysis"
] | We often use 3D printing to replicate items we might otherwise make with traditional machining methods. Fraunhofer’s new door hinge for a sports car takes a different tack: it tries to
be better than the equivalent machined part
. The company claims that the new part is half the cost and weighs 35% less than the normal hinge.
Using tools in their 3D Spark software, the team analyzed different factors that led to manufacturing cost. Some of these were specific to the part while others were specific to the process. For example, orienting the part to minimize support and maximize the quantity that fit on the build surface.
By simulating the force on the hinge, the tools could remove material where it didn’t make much difference. This allowed a 35% reduction in weight. Less material also means less print time, further saving costs.
Honestly, nothing they did should be news to anyone involved in 3D printing. Orienting a part in a sensible way makes sense. We’ve seen the removal of unnecessary material both in 3D printing and traditional manufacturing. The interesting part is the use of tools to help automate these optimizations. We can’t tell what the pricing of
the software
is, and we are guessing it isn’t aimed at the hobby 3D printing market. But it is interesting what can be done and we suspect a little elbow grease and simulation in available software could net similar results.
In theory, any tool that can do
finite element analysis
ought to be able to determine the material to remove. We’ve noticed carmakers are
embracing 3D printing
. | 30 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417421",
"author": "Onetruegod",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T03:53:09",
"content": "” By simulating the force on the hinge, the tools could remove material where it didn’t make much difference. I am not an engineer but I read this and thought “finite element analysis”. Then I saw you ... | 1,760,372,810.165402 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/reverse-engineering-trash-printer-gives-up-its-control-panel-secrets/ | Reverse Engineering: Trash Printer Gives Up Its Control Panel Secrets | Dave Rowntree | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"epson",
"lcd",
"printer",
"Raspberry Pi Pico",
"reverse engineering"
] | Many of us hardware-oriented types find it hard to walk past a lonely-looking discarded item of consumer electronics without thinking “If only I could lug that back to the car and take it home to play with” and [phooky] from NYC Resistor is no stranger to this sentiment. An old Epson WF-2540 inkjet printer was disassembled for its important ‘nutrients,’ you know, the good stuff like funky motors, encoders and switches. But what do you do with the control panel? After all, they’re usually very specific to the needs of the device they control, and don’t usually offer up much scope for reuse.
The RP2040 PIO is quite capable of pushing out those LCD pixels
[phooky] doesn’t usually bother with them, but
this time decided to have a crack at it for fun
. Inside, nothing out of the ordinary, with a large single-sided PCB for the key switches and LEDs, and a small PCB hosting the LCD display. The easy part was to figure out how the keyboard scanning was done, which turned out to be pretty simple, it just uses some 74-series shift register devices to scan the columns and clock out the row lines. A Raspberry Pi Pico module was pressed into service to scan the keyboard and enable a keyboard map to be created, by pure brute-force. No need to trace the circuit.
Things got interesting when [phooky] started looking into the LCD interface, based on the Epson E02A46EA chip (good luck finding a datasheet for that one!) and quickly realised that documentation simply wasn’t available, and it would be necessary to do things the hard way. Poking around the lines from the main CPU (an Epson E01A9CA , whatever that is) the display clock was identified, as well as some control signals, and three lines for the RGB channels. By throwing a Saleae data capture into some ROM exploring software, the display configuration was determined to be a standard 320×120 unit.
The PIO unit of the RP2040 was used to generate the video waveforms and push the pixels out to the LCD controller, allowing the RP2040 board to be wired inside the case permanently, converting the control panel into a USB device ready for action!
Want to know a little more about reverse engineering junk (or not) items and repurposing them to your will? Checkout
this hacking piece
from a couple of weeks back. For something a little more advanced, you could try your hand at a spot of
car ECU hacking
.
Thanks [Perry] for the tip! | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417471",
"author": "x14km2d",
"timestamp": "2022-01-26T08:09:46",
"content": "Ok. This is the strangest thing that has happened to me here on the blog. I have the exact same component on my to do list. Exactly the same project with a similar build as I am looking at hardware and I ... | 1,760,372,810.209536 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/building-a-lightsaber-and-scoring-a-world-record-too/ | Building A Lightsaber And Scoring A World Record, Too | Lewin Day | [
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"electrolysis",
"hydrogen",
"lightsaber"
] | As we all know, the lightsaber is an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. [Alex Burkan] is doing what he can to
bring that technology to fruition,
and even secured a Guinness World Record
in the process.
Melty melty.
The build relies on an electrolyzer, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen gas which is stored in a small tank. This gas can then be released and combusted in a burning stream, creating a weapon with a vague resemblance to a movie-spec lightsaber. With the hydrogen torch burning at temperatures of thousands of degrees, it’s hot enough to melt steel just like in the films.
While the concept of operation is simple, actually building such a device in a handheld size is incredibly difficult. [Alex] highlights key features such as the flashback arrestor that stops the gas tank exploding, and the output nozzle that was carefully designed to produce a surprisingly long and stable flame.
The resulting device only burns for 30 seconds, so you’ve only got a short period of time to do what you need to do. However,
unlike previous designs we’ve seen
, it doesn’t use any external gas bottles and is entirely self-contained, marking an important step forward in this technology. Video after the break.
[Thanks to Chuckz for the tip!] | 32 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417350",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T22:54:30",
"content": "That is one very awesome build!Very impressive, [Alex]!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6417688",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"t... | 1,760,372,810.056949 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/young-maker-mixes-traditional-japanese-construction-with-modern-art/ | Young Maker Mixes Traditional Japanese Construction With Modern Art | Ryan Flowers | [
"classic hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"electric guitar",
"kumiko",
"stratocaster",
"Young Makers"
] | We’re Makers. By definition, we make things. Some of us prefer to build from scraps, while others like to make their own IC’s in their garage. [Make With Miles] on the other hand prefers one of the oldest types of making around: woodworking. And in this build, he goes a step further by using a very old Japanese method of woodworking called Kumiko to build a Stratocaster style electric guitar. The results are absolutely stunning
as you can see in the video below
.
Inspired by a challenge put forth by [
The Modern Maker Podcast
] to build a woodworking project that ties into another hobby that isn’t related to woodworking, [Miles] knocked it out of the park by including several art forms in this one-off Strat.
The centerpiece of this guitar build is the
Kumiko
style of construction used within the body. Kumiko is a Japanese method of assembling wood without the use of fasteners. Developed around 600-700AD, Kumiko is as much a construction method as an art form. [Miles] went further by filling the Kumiko framework with blackened epoxy resin which was then sanded and polished. Decals bring the headstock into the motif, but the attention to details goes much, much further. Be sure to watch the video so you can get an appreciation for the high level of workmanship that this young man displays.
That’s right- [Miles] isn’t a maker with decades of experience. In fact in 2017, one of his YouTube videos was “
12 yr Old Builds a Row Boat!!!
” [Miles], our hats are off to you and we look forward to seeing your art progress, for you truly have commanded the attention of the maker community that you are so rightfully part of.
Just as [Miles]’ guitar hides some great hacks, so does this
guitar with Hot Swappable pickups
. Thanks to [Keith] for sending this on to the
Tip Line
! | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417324",
"author": "Steve L",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T21:41:06",
"content": "Do NOT put that guitar in the hands of any living member of The Who.What beautiful workmanship!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6417482",
"author... | 1,760,372,810.098981 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/the-road-is-peppered-with-rock-salt-alternatives/ | The Road Is Peppered With Rock Salt Alternatives | Kristina Panos | [
"chemistry hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"calcium magnesium acetate",
"chicken grit",
"coffee grounds",
"de-icer",
"kitty litter",
"road salt",
"sodium chloride"
] | Every winter, millions of tons of rock salt is sprinkled across roads in the US, mostly in the Midwest and Northeast regions. It’s a cheap and effective way to prevent accidents. Rock salt is chemically the same as the stuff that sits next to the pepper, except it isn’t as finely ground, and it doesn’t have sodium or potassium iodine added to it to prevent goiters. Both table salt and rock salt melt ice by lowering the freezing point of water. So does sugar.
Much of what we salt the Earth with every winter comes from underground networks of salt crystal that formed when various ancient seas dried up. As natural as it may be,
rock salt is bad for the environment
. For one thing, chloride is forever, and can’t easily be decoupled from the soil and water it taints when it washes away. Rock salt also corrodes concrete, makes its way into the groundwater, and is bad for pets. Worst of all, its efficacy drops along with the temperature. At 15° F (-9° C), rock salt
loses more than 86% of its melting power
.
Disposable Detroit
All this salt is not great for cars, either — it’s bad for the paint and eats up the frame. In the saltiest parts of the US, aka
The Salt Belt
, cars only last a handful of years before they become Flintstones mobiles. Well, not really, but salt is terrible for the brake lines and most of the undercarriage. Consumer woes aside, there’s a real environmental impact to manufacturing all these disposable cars to meet the demand.
But the problem is that we need to use salt, or at something like it. Even though millions of people are staying home a whole lot more, the trucking industry still relies on salted highways and local roads. So if you like stocked grocery stores and stuff arriving from the Bezos Barn in a timely fashion, you can see the problem. So what are the alternatives? Are there any?
Adding Abrasives
A handful of chicken grit. Image via
Omelet
Freezing point depressants aren’t the only solution, but they’re usually a large part of it. For years, plenty of jurisdictions supplemented salt with sand until it started clogging the sewer pipes. One of the modern alternatives to salting the streets willy-nilly is to meter out usage based on road temperature readings. Another trick is to distribute a liquid salt solution instead, which works faster and won’t bounce into the gutter.
As far as eco-friendly alternatives go,
some individuals use abrasives on their sidewalks and driveways
like kitty litter, coffee grounds, or
chicken grit
, which is a mixture of shells and small pebbles that helps their digestion. But of course, all of these are just traction agents — they don’t melt the ice. Although when it comes to your property, unless there’s a layer of ice under the snow, some kind of traction agent will probably suffice after shoveling or snow-blowing.
Of course, these would likely cause the same problems as sand if used on a large enough scale, especially coffee grounds. So even though these may be better for the environment, they come with their own set of problems.
Brine is Fine, Sort Of
Cheeses take in the light after their brine bath. Image via
Recycle Reminders
Several years ago, we heard that Wisconsin was using cheese brine on their roads,
and not only is it true, it works at much lower temperatures than salt
. But how does the average Joe source his cheese brine for home use? We’re not sure. Fortunately, other food by-products work too, like sugar beet juice and pickle juice.
But some of those have their problems, too. Sugar beet juice still requires salt to work — the point is to make a goo that won’t run off into the gutters as readily. The problem is that the organic material can deplete the oxygen in rivers, lakes, and streams.
Possibly the worst brine of all comes from fracking, an already controversial practice.
This radioactive runoff has already been used in places like Pennsylvania
. Road salt is starting to look pretty good, no?
Is There a Nicer De-Icer?
But there is one that’s sort of better than salt: potassium acetate. It contains no chloride and is biodegradable, but it has that oxygen-lowering problem and has been proven harmful to aquatic insects. Potassium acetate is more effective as a preventive measure, as it keeps ice from bonding to surfaces. It’s roughly three times as expensive as rock salt, but a little goes a long way, so the cost is nearly even. Another preventive treatment known as
calcium magnesium acetate
is environmentally friendly, but it’s only as effective as rock salt when the temperature plummets.
So, what’s the answer? We suppose change begins at home, so consider the contents when you go to buy de-icer, or try making your own. Whatever you do, do it sparingly.
[Main and thumbnail images via
Shawn Dearn
on
Unsplash] | 79 | 25 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417265",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T18:26:23",
"content": "Solution: studded tires, learning to drive, and this:https://www.alaskapublic.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/raikoicebreaker.png",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,810.362565 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/laser-z-axis-table-comes-into-focus/ | Laser Z-Axis Table Comes Into Focus | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Laser Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"calibration",
"engraver",
"laser cutter",
"prototype",
"table",
"z-axis"
] | Laser cutters and 3D printers are game-changing tools to have in the workshop. They make rapid prototyping or repairs to existing projects a breeze as they can churn out new parts with high precision in a very short amount of time. The flip side of that, though, is that they can require quite a bit of maintenance. [Timo] has learned this lesson over his years-long saga owning a laser cutter, although he has attempted to remedy most of the problems on his own, this time by
building a Z-axis table on his own
rather than buying an expensive commercial offering.
The Z-axis table is especially important for lasers because a precise distance from the lens to the workpiece is needed to ensure the beams’s focal point is correctly positioned. Ensuring this distance is uniform over the entire bed can be a project all on its own. For this build, [Timo] started by building a simple table that allowed all four corners to be adjusted, but quickly moved on to a belt-driven solution that uses a stepper motor in order to adjust the entire workspace. The key to the build was learning about his specific laser’s focal distance which he found experimentally by cutting a slot in an angled piece of wood and measuring the height where the cut was the cleanest.
After everything was built, [Timo] ended up with a Z-axis table that is easily adjustable to the specific height required by his laser. Having a laser cutter on hand to bootstrap this project definitely helped, and it also seems to be an improvement on any of the commercial offerings as well. This also illustrates a specific example of how a
laser cutter may be among the best tools for prototyping parts and building one-off or custom tools
of any sort. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417248",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T17:40:35",
"content": "This is one thing I like about the Emblaser 2. It has a Z-axis motor which allows the height to be set in software. This means that the focus is correct if you specify the thickness of the material you are... | 1,760,372,810.248328 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/would-nuclear-winter-cancel-out-global-warming/ | Would Nuclear Winter Cancel Out Global Warming? | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"agriculture",
"catastrophe",
"nuclear winter"
] | Nuclear war was very much a front-of-mind issue during the fraught political climate of the Cold War era. Since then, atomic sabre rattling has been less frequent, though has never quite disappeared entirely.
Outside of the direct annihilation caused by nuclear war, however, is the threat of nuclear winter. The basic concept is simple: in the aftermath of a major nuclear war, the resulting atmospheric effects could lead to a rapid cooling in global temperatures.
Some say it couldn’t ever happen, while others –
including
Futurama
– suggest with varying degrees of humor that it could help cancel out the effects of global warming. But what is the truth?
Hard data is isn’t really available, as thus far there have been no large-scale nuclear wars for scientists to measure. Several studies have explored the concept of nuclear winter, however, and explored its potential effects.
How Does It Work, Anyway?
Hundreds of large firestorms triggered by nuclear weapons could loft soot into the upper atmosphere, serving as the causative mechanism of the “nuclear winter” theory. The nuclear aspect is only as an ignition source; any other cause of widespread firestorms could do the same. Image Credit:
Public Domain
, Jim Peaco
The basic concept of nuclear winter is simple. In a large nuclear conflict, where nuclear weapons are used in strategic strikes against urban and industrial areas, large-scale fires would rage out of control. These fires would then loft large amounts of black carbon soot into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Once there, the smoke particles might then be lofted further up into the stratosphere as they absorb heat from the sun, up to a point where the particles are too high to be quickly “rained out” of the air by precipitation. These particles would then essentially shade the surface, creating a cooling effect.
Papers published
as recently as 2007
suggests that a full-scale nuclear war between superpowers could cause a drop in global average temperatures by as much as 8 °C . If that doesn’t sound dramatic, to put it into perspective the average temperature was 5 °C lower during the last ice age 18,000 years ago.
Modelling from researchers on the topic suggests that
the major knock on effect on agriculture
would be crippling to humanity around the globe. Temperatures in critical growing regions in Ukraine and Iowa, for example, could see daily minimum temperatures reach below freezing for several years, making growing food crops near-impossible. Global famine would be the result.
This photo is often mistaken for being a shot of the mushroom cloud created by the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. However, it is in fact an image of the pyrocumulus cloud created in the firestorm that happened in the aftermath of the attack. Image credit:
Public domain
, US Military
Running simulations with newer climate models has continued to turn up similar results,
even in recent studies
. Those studies are run with similar base numbers that suggest an all-out nuclear war using up most of the stockpiles of major superpowers would loft around 150 teragrams of soot into the atmopshere. However, that value remains an assumption that has drawn criticism from some sectors.
The basic underpinning assumption of the nuclear winter theory is that nuclear detonations will cause major city-sized firestorms capable of lofting significant amounts of smoke into the upper atmosphere. On the one hand, the
oil rig fires of Kuwait
failed to generate a major cooling effect in the wake of the Gulf War. On the other hand, studies have borne out the transmission of smoke to high altitudes from things like
forest fires.
Either way, whether real-world nuclear strikes would cause guaranteed firestorms that can loft large amounts of smoke into the stratosphere remains a difficult question to answer. Data is in short supply; while the tragic nuclear strike on Hiroshima saw a firestorm develop, the following strike on Nagasaki did not.
The other major point of contention surrounds the longevity of aerosolized smoke particles in the upper atmosphere. If the particles all disappear in a matter of weeks, any cooling effect, no matter how drastic, would be relatively short-lived, rather than the multi-year disaster fortold of in some papers on the topic.
In that regard, studying existing high-altitude aerosols will be key. Volcanic eruptions are another way that large amounts of smoke, ash, and aerosolized material gets lofted into the sky, as per the recent tragic eruptions in Tonga that were the most violent eruptions the Earth has seen in 30 years. An ash cloud was lofted
as high as 39 kilometers above the Earth’s surface
, well into the stratosphere. However in this case, cooling is limited because only around 400,000 metric tons of sulfur dioxide was sent up in to the air. The time that this material spends lingering in the atmosphere could serve as a useful guide to scientists attempting to model the expected results of widespread nuclear-induced firestorms. In any case, past volcano aerosols have only lasted in the atmosphere for a
couple of years at most
.
Normally, science is at its best when we can run a real experiment and measure the results, rather than simply relying on models. In the words of Grace Hopper, “One accurate
measurement
is worth a thousand expert opinions.” Unfortunately, short of creating gigantic firestorms with nuclear weapons, such experimentation is out of the question.
But Could It Stop Global Warming?
If the worst modelling is true, agriculture would become impossible in much of the world as daily temperatures regularly hit below freezing, potentially for years on end. Image credit:
Evelyn Simak
, CC BY-SA 2.0
If nuclear winter is indeed possible, as per the modelling shown in several research papers, then in a way, nuclear winter could indeed counteract global warming. In the most shocking results of a full-scale conflict between superpowers,
modelling run in 2007
suggests average global temperatures could fall by as much as 8 °C, levelling out to 4 °C after a decade or so. Global warming, on the other hand, is expected to reach a level of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial averages
within the next decade or so.
Thus, a smaller-scale implementation of nuclear-sparked city-sized firestorms could theoretically help reverse global warming entirely. However, it would come at a insurmountable cost. The nuclear weapons cannot simply be detonated in bare unpopulated areas like the ocean; the entire effect of nuclear winter is created by resulting firestorms after detonation. Attempting to recreate the effect using areas of forest or other land would come with its own negative effects to the environment, and these areas may not have enough density of flammable material to create true firestorms anyway.
The effect would not last forever, either. Following the models, within a decade or two, any cooling effect from lofted soot would likely have passed, while humanity would be left with huge swathes of burned-out areas for its trouble and likely a not-negligible contribution to CO2 levels from the multiple firestorms. Along the way, if the effect was overdone, excess cooling would still cause trouble for agriculture which could lead to widespread starvation. The answer to the question of which catastrophe would win out is: short term, nuclear winter; long term, global warming.
Other methods of generating high-altitude aerosols are being explored
to these ends
, all of which would prove far less destructive and more maintainable than the idea of a nuclear winter.
Humanity’s current problems need more complex solutions than simply blowing everything up. It was ever thus! Regardless, it is important to understand the science, in order to know how we may best preserve our lifestyles today, and into the future beyond. | 79 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417197",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T15:15:50",
"content": "The next ice age is around the corner anyway.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6417203",
"author": "skept",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T... | 1,760,372,811.511083 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/555-teardown-isnt-just-a-good-time-its-to-die-for/ | 555 Teardown Isn’t Just A Good Time, It’s To Die For | Ryan Flowers | [
"classic hacks",
"Parts"
] | [
"555 teardown",
"555 timer",
"die",
"microscope",
"npn",
"pnp",
"teardown"
] | It seems only appropriate that hot on the heels of the conclusion of Hackaday’s 555 Timer Contest that [Ken Shirriff] posts a
silicon die teardown
of an early version of a hacker’s favorite chip, the 555.
A Microscopic View Of the 555 Die
Starting with a mystery chip from January 1973, [Eric Schlaepfer] painstakingly sanded down the package to reveal the die, which he deemed to be a 555 timer. Why didn’t they know it was a 555 timer to start? Because the package was not marked with “555” but rather some other marks that you can see in
the blog post
.
In addition to a great explanation of how the 555 works in general, [Ken] has taken a microscopic look at the 555 die itself. The schematic of a 555 is easily available, and [Ken] identifies not just sections of the die but individual components. He goes further yet by explaining how the PNP and NPN resistors are constructed in silicon. There’s also a nice and juicy bit of insight into the resistors in the IC, but we won’t spoil it here.
Be sure to show your love for the
winners of the 555 contest
, or at the very least check out the project that took the stop spot:
a giant sized 555
that you don’t need a microscope to see inside of. | 10 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417160",
"author": "RÖB",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T13:15:23",
"content": "The description of the operation of a current mirror is wrong.Quote : “Since both transistors have the same emitter voltage and base voltage, they source the same current”This is not true, identical transisto... | 1,760,372,810.468387 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/25/an-entire-computer-in-icmp-packets/ | An Entire Computer In ICMP Packets | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"icmp",
"manchester baby",
"tube computer"
] | The earliest stored program computer in the modern sense was not one of the names such as ENIAC or Colossus that you might expect, but the Manchester Baby, an experimental prototype computer built at the University of Manchester in 1948. Its 550 tubes gave it the multi-rack room-filling size common to 1940s machines, but its architecture makes it a comparatively simple processor by the standards of today. So simple in fact, that [Hrvoje Čavrak]
has recreated it using ICMP packets as its storage, and a custom packet filter as its processor emulation
. It’s a project that’s simultaneously both elegant and gloriously pointless, but as he says,
“It’s still better than doing drugs or JavaScript”.
The result simulates the Baby’s combined storage and display tube in a dump of the network traffic, and gives an excellent excuse to read up
about its operation
. The tiny instruction set brings to mind today’s RISC architectures, but this is illusory as the designers of 1948 would have had less of an eye towards clock cycles than they would have towards the machine working at all in the first place.
If early computers tickle your fancy it may be worth taking a while to read about the UK’s
National Museum of Computing
, and then about
Colossus, the primordial electronic computer
.
Header: Geni,
CC BY-SA 4.0
. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417124",
"author": "Mark",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T10:07:01",
"content": "Wow, that’s brilliant!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6417136",
"author": "kevin",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T11:19:16",
"content": "“Better ... | 1,760,372,810.415857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/tiny-homemade-injection-molder/ | Tiny Homemade Injection Molder | Matthew Carlson | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"actionbox",
"injection molding",
"plastic injection"
] | With 3D printing continually gaining ground, some hackers might not see the need for traditional injection molding. After all, you can tweak the code or the model and print dozens of different iterations with fairly minimal lead time. Things get trickier when you need to print hundreds or thousands of the same thing and that ten-hour print time adds up quickly. [Actionbox] built a
tiny injection molder they dubbed INJEKTO to speed up their manufacturing
.
The design was optimized to be accessible as it is held together with brackets and cheap aluminum flat stock. The hardest part to source is the heating chamber, as it is a piece of turned aluminum. A PID controller keeps the temperature relatively stable and heats the plastic pellets you can dump in the top. Next, you’ll need an external air compressor to power the dual 2″ pneumatic pistons. The pistons push the plastic out of the spring-loaded extruder nozzle. [Actionbox] is already planning on a second version with 4″ pistons that provide significantly more force to extrude larger amounts of plastic as the current version tops out at about 27 grams.
Injection molding still needs a heavy-duty mold to inject into, which can be hard to machine. So until we can 3D print an injection mold, this
multi-head 3D printer
is something in between a 3D printer and an injection molder, as it can print a dozen of the same thing, speeding up that print time. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417083",
"author": "Naxes",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T06:28:01",
"content": "3D printed injection molds are a thinghttps://youtu.be/wMRSPXt48CI, as are cheap simple manual injection molders.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "641... | 1,760,372,810.583921 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/saving-martian-colonists-using-table-salt-and-rocket-science/ | Saving Martian Colonists Using Table Salt And Rocket Science | Ryan Flowers | [
"Major Tom",
"Science",
"Space"
] | [
"diy rocket",
"model rocketry",
"potassium chlorate",
"Rocket Motor",
"RUD",
"sodium chlorate",
"sodium choride",
"solid rocket"
] | Imagine for a moment that you are a member of an early Mars colony. You’re stranded, and the only way to get a message home is to launch a radio well above the surface. To make matters worse, you’ve got no rockets! It was this thought experiment that has motivated [Thoisoi2] to experiment with making a rocket motor using only ingredients and methods available to your average Martian colonist.
The methods he has chosen can be seen in the video below the break
.
If you skipped Rocketry 101, a quick refresher might help: Rockets work by burning a fuel in an enclosed chamber and then expelling it at high speed in one direction. To get the fuel to burn more quickly (and therefore adding more oomph to the angry end) a complement to the fuel called an Oxidizer is added. It serves to create an oxygen rich environment for the fuel to burn in. It’s the same reason a oxy-propane torch burns hotter than propane by itself.
The Sugar Powered Rocket Motor says “Boom!”
Firstly, a stranded Martian would need rocket fuel. If you recall the 1999 movie October Sky, four high school kids used table sugar as their fuel. You might also recall that those tended to get all explody. This volatility caused [Thoisoi2] to eschew sugar as a fuel in favor of a fuel that would also be available to any Martian colonist but be far less likely to cause Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.
What about the oxidizer? In October Sky, the boys experimented with Potassium Chlorate. This is commonly used in rockets but may be more difficult to obtain for your average Mars colonist. But, it turns out that Potassium Chlorate and Sodium Chlorate which can be prepared from table salt will work equally. It’s quite a bit more involved than that however.
Simply adding salt and fuel does not a rocket motor make. The nuances, the science, and the chemistry are all laid out in the wonderful video that [Thoisoi2] has put together, and we are sure you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.
You’ll also get to find out if our stranded Martian ever makes it home or if his potato farming was for naught.
We’d also like to echo the warning in the video: This is an experiment that is pretty dangerous, so don’t try this at home! Definitely try it at somebody else’s house first. Or on the surface of Mars.
Recently Hackaday covered another great attempt at making a rocket motor at home,
although this one was a bit less successful
, but every bit as interesting! | 45 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417066",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T05:07:28",
"content": "The Martian atmosphere is quite thin and mostly carbon dioxide. I’m not a chemist but I’m hoping these facts were not overlooked.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,811.112427 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/rainwater-storing-gojo-is-a-stroke-of-genius/ | Rainwater Storing Gojo Is A Stroke Of Genius | Dave Rowntree | [
"green hacks",
"home hacks"
] | [
"building",
"ethiopia",
"Gojo",
"Rain harvesting",
"Rural",
"Water storage"
] | A traditional Ethiopian Gojo. Image courtesy of easterntravelandtour.com
The traditional Ethiopian Gojo is a circular domed dwelling constructed from a central vertical beam, and a surrounding structure of curved beams made from wood or bamboo. A covering of dried grass and mud completes the outer structure. These buildings are found everywhere in rural areas, due to their ease of construction, and availability of cheap materials. One major problem living in rural areas in developing countries is access to water. Ethiopian inventor [Anteneh Gashaw] knows a thing or two about the practicalities of living in a developing nation, and has come up with
an ingenious take on the traditional Gojo
. The idea is to replace the outer structure with pipes capable of storing rainwater. A collector plate on the top of the roof directs rain water into the pipes — with some small balancing tubes connecting them at the bottom — distributing the stored water evenly. A tap at the bottom of structure allows the pipes to be emptied on demand. Another interesting point about this design, is that the water adds some extra weight, for free, which gives the structure much improved stability in high winds, increasing safety.
{Anteneh] notes that proper water infrastructure is incredibly expensive, and just simply won’t happen. Well digging, installation of underground water tanks, and other such stop gap measures are great, but still need significant investment, and he believes that his modified Gojo idea will help reduce the problem of storing water during the rainy season, and reduce the pressure on centralised wells and other such community-orientated solutions. What’s more, it should be cheap. We shall watch with interest where this goes.
We’ve seen a few hacks from Africa nations, not many, just a few, but they are interesting ones. Like this
DIY Helicopter that didn’t quite get to fly
, and this
e-waste 3D printer
. We’ll keep our eye peeled for more! | 57 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6417002",
"author": "Alex99a",
"timestamp": "2022-01-25T00:06:57",
"content": "I hope they plan on some purification. Bird crap, bugs, wind-borne dirt…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6417011",
"author": "Anteneh Gasha... | 1,760,372,810.844487 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/portable-pizza-oven-has-temperature-level-over-900/ | Portable Pizza Oven Has Temperature Level Over 900 | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"baking",
"burner",
"cooking",
"custom",
"gas",
"metal",
"oven",
"Pizza",
"plumbing",
"temperature",
"welding"
] | While it’s possible to make pizza from scratch at home right down to the dough itself, it’ll be a struggle to replicate the taste and exquisite mouthfeel without a pizza oven. Pizzas cook best at temperatures well over the 260°C/500°F limit on most household ovens while pizza ovens can typically get much hotter than that. Most of us won’t have the resources to put a commercial grade wood-fired brick oven in our homes,
but the next best thing is this portable pizza oven from [Andrew W]
.
The build starts with some sheet metal to form the outer and inner covers for the oven. [Andrew] has found with some testing that a curved shape seems to produce the best results, so the sheet metal goes through rollers to get its shape before being welded together. With the oven’s rough shape completed, he fabricates two different burners. One sits at the back of the oven with its own diffuser to keep the oven as hot as possible and the other sits underneath a cordierite stone to heat from the bottom. Both are fed gas from custom copper plumbing and when it fires up it reaches temperatures hot enough that it can cook a pizza in just a few minutes. With some foldable legs the oven also ends up being fairly portable, and its small size means that it can heat up faster than a conventional oven too.
This is [Andrew]’s third prototype oven, and it seems like he has the recipe perfected. In fact,
we featured one of his previous versions almost two years ago
and are excited to see the progress he’s made in this build. The only downside to having something like this would be the potential health implications of always being able to make delicious pizzas, but that is a risk we’d be willing to take. | 36 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416972",
"author": "imqqmi",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T21:33:08",
"content": "I’ve got an old electric powered oven from the 70ies which goes up to about 300 degrees C. It takes about 7 minutes to bake a pizza fully and tastes great, nice crunchy bite and puffy crust. Not as big as ... | 1,760,372,810.913197 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/heart-shaped-heartwarming-valentines-day-pendant/ | Heart-Shaped Heartwarming Valentine’s Day Pendant | Arya Voronova | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"charlieplexing",
"pcb art",
"pendant",
"STEAM education"
] | This is no ordinary
heart-shaped PCB pendant
project! To us, it’s also symbol representing the striking amount of love that [SaltyPaws] has put into its design and documentation. He tells us that he designed it for the two daughters he is raising, as an electronics and general STEAM introduction – with outstanding educational and aesthetic qualities, giving insights into a wide range of topics while looking . The PCB is mostly through-hole, making for easy soldering and quick return on the effort investment. The project is thought-out beyond the PCB, however – this pendant is designed to be wearable day-to-day, which is why it’s accompanied by a 3D-printed frame, protecting its wearer from sharp PCB edges and through-hole lead ends!
Open-sourcing things is a gift, and today, we are also the recipients. [SaltyPaws] has open-sourced everything involved – PCB files, 3D cover files, firmware, BOM, everything you would need to build your own version. All of this is in a GitHub repository, with
detailed sourcing and assembly instructions in the README.md
– we couldn’t ask for more! If you have loved ones that would take delight in putting such a pretty pendant together, you have about a week to order the PCBs – after that, Chinese New Year will likely thwart your plans!
Looking for more accessories that double as electronics projects? We’ve covered a wide variety, even when it comes to pendants alone – check out
this edge-lit fluorescent acrylic educational Maker Faire accessory
, or this
circuit sculpture BEAM-inspired bird-imitating
one, or this
tiny SAMD21-powered pendant with an IPS LCD
! | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,810.748662 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/can-robots-give-good-hugs/ | Can Robots Give Good Hugs? | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Lifehacks",
"Robots Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"elder care",
"hugs",
"robot",
"soft robotics"
] | We could all use a hug once in a while. Most people would probably say the shared warmth is nice, and the squishiness of another living, breathing meatbag is pretty comforting.
Hugs even have health benefits
.
But maybe you’re new in town and don’t know anyone yet, or you’ve outlived all your friends and family. Or maybe you just don’t look like the kind of person who goes for hugs, and therefore you don’t get enough embraces. Nearly everyone needs and want hugs, whether they’re great, good, or just average.
So what makes a good hug, anyway? It’s a bit like a handshake. It should be warm and dry, with a firmness appropriate to the situation. Ideally, you’re both done at the same time and things don’t get awkward. Could a robot possibly check all of these boxes? That’s the idea behind
HuggieBot, the haphazardly humanoid invention of Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and team
at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany (
translated
). User feedback helped the team get their arms around the problem.
A Different Kind of Soft Robotics
In the context of therapeutic and elder care robots, they of course must be both gentle and responsive. So Dr. Kuchenbecker and team are starting off with hugs and haptic interactions. Hugs are somewhat simple to replicate compared to complex movements like bathing someone, or turning them over in their bed.
HuggieBot has sensors in its arms to ensure that it gives a friendly hug and not a life-threatening squeeze, though we wonder if there are any fail-safe measures in place if a sensor goes bad. Another sensor on HuggieBot’s back detects the human returning the hug. When they lift up their arms or lean against the robot’s arms, it breaks the embrace. Hopefully.
Dr. Kuchenbecker and team knew that HuggieBot should be soft, warm, and roughly human-sized. Most importantly, it should know when to release from the hug. Something else HuggieBot can do that we hadn’t considered — it can adjust to a person’s height and posture the way a human would.
Physically speaking, HuggieBot looks about as huggable as a robot could. It is dressed comfortably in a gray hoodie and long purple skirt, and its tablet face bears a pleasant expression. HuggieBot’s upper body is both inflated and heated to make it more pleasant to hug. They even wrapped the arms in foam and put socks on the hands. We assume that HuggieBot is half dressed in order to show what’s underneath.
At the end of the day, you’re still getting hugged by robotic arms, which is more than a little bit scary. But they seem to do a nice job, which you can see in the video below featuring an earlier version of HuggieBot. It doesn’t just pull you in, it waits for your approach before closing its big industrial
pincers
arms around you.
Squeeze Play
Hugs are about both physical and emotional warmth, and although it’s more difficult to grow an emotional bond with a robot or even an inanimate object, it’s definitely not unheard of. Think about kids with their stuffed animals and security blankets. Or Tom Hanks and Wilson, his pet volleyball.
Let’s play devil’s advocate here. It’s not as though every human gives perfect hugs just because they’re human. We all know someone who hugs too hard or too long, or too often. What if you could train a robot to hug you exactly how you want to be hugged? If we’re serious about hugger robots becoming a thing, there are a lot more things to consider that would make the hugs even more pleasant and human. Like if you were crying, the robot might throw in a few pats and some open-handed back rubbing for extra comfort. It’s not that it’s a difficult problem to solve. The hard part is getting people to accept the idea and expose their viscera to a machine.
A robot leads seniors in an exercise routine. Image via
Reuters
In Japan, robots are already playing a part in elder care.
A nursing home in Tokyo has a whopping 20 different robots roaming around
. Many of them are designed to play games and carry on conversations with the residents, as well as leading them in exercise routines.
Would you hug a robot? Would you
let a robot brush your hair
? I would jump at the chance to hug HuggieBot, as long as Dr. Kuchenbecker was nearby to help out if things went south. In fact, I think robot hugs are better than no hugs at all, especially for lonely senior citizens who might really benefit from a friendly squeeze on the regular.
But that’s kind of an innocent take. Do we really want to go down the road of robotic intimacy? As with many things, it depends what people do with it. | 29 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416905",
"author": "Criatura",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T18:08:36",
"content": "Someone will hack that thing and never leave the house again.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6416909",
"author": "Kristina Panos",
... | 1,760,372,811.22424 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/compliant-mechanisms-hack-chat/ | Compliant Mechanisms Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"compliant mechanisms",
"constraint",
"elastic",
"flexible",
"flexure",
"Hack Chat",
"modulus",
"monolithic"
] | Join us on Wednesday, January 26 at noon Pacific for the
Compliant Mechanisms Hack Chat
with Amy Qian!
When it comes to putting together complex mechanisms, we tend to think in a traditional design language that includes elements like bearings, bushings, axles, pulleys — anything that makes it possible for separate rigid bodies to move against each other. That works fine in a lot of cases — our cars wouldn’t get very far without such elements — but there are simpler ways to transmit force and motion, like compliant mechanisms.
Compliant mechanisms show up in countless products, from the living hinge on a cheap plastic box to the nanoscale linkages etched into silicon inside a MEMS accelerometer. They reduce complexity by putting the elasticity of materials to work and by reducing the number of parts it takes to create an assembly. And they can help make your projects easier and cheaper to build — if you know the secrets of their design.
Amy Qian, from the
Amy Makes Stuff channel
on YouTube, is a mechanical engineer with an interest in compliant mechanisms, so much so that she ran a workshop about them at the 2019 Superconference. She’ll stop by the Hack Chat to share some of what she’s learned about compliant mechanisms, and to help us all build a little flexibility into our designs.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, January 26 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416933",
"author": "Dane",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T19:20:37",
"content": "This is great! Looking forward to it!-Dane",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6416939",
"author": "𐂀 𐂅",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T19:38:02",
... | 1,760,372,811.153074 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/one-piece-geared-hinge-can-take-the-weight/ | One-piece Geared Hinge Can Take The Weight | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"geared",
"herringbone",
"hinge",
"print in place"
] | 3D printers have come a long way from cranking out things like bottle openers and coat pegs, and [E. Soderberg]’s
Print in Place Geared Hinge
is a pretty nifty demonstration of that. This hinge is designed as a print-in-place part, meaning it is 3D printed as a single piece, requiring no assembly. Not only that, but the herringbone gears constrain the sturdy device in a way that helps it support heavy loads.
Of course, hinges — even strong ones — are not particularly hard to find items. They’re available in a mind-boggling array of shapes and sizes. But what’s interesting about this design is that it shows what’s easily within the reach of just about any hobbyist nowadays. Not that long ago, designing and creating an object like this would not have been accessible to most home enthusiasts. Making it without a modern 3D printer would certainly have been a challenge in its own right.
It doesn’t always matter that a comparable (or superior) off-the-shelf part is available; an
adequate
part that can be created in one’s own workshop has a value all its own. Plus, it’s fun to design and make things, sometimes for their own sake. After all, things like
3D-printed custom switch assemblies
would not exist if everyone were satisfied with the ability to just order some Cherry MX switches and call it a day. | 31 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416871",
"author": "Tom Hargrave",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T16:39:57",
"content": "Nice project.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6416879",
"author": "Canuckfire",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T16:58:38",
"content": "This... | 1,760,372,811.391262 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/floating-solar-farms-are-taking-the-worlds-reservoirs-by-storm/ | Floating Solar Farms Are Taking The World’s Reservoirs By Storm | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"floating solar",
"floatovoltaics",
"green energy",
"solar",
"solar power",
"sustainability"
] | Photovoltaic solar panels are wonderful things, capable of capturing mere light and turning it into useful electricity. They’re often installed on residential and commercial rooftops for offsetting energy use at the source.
However, for grid-scale generation, they’re usually deployed in huge farms on tracts of land in areas that receive plenty of direct sunlight. These requirements can often put solar farms in conflict with farm-farms — the sunlight that is good for solar panels is also good for growing plants, specifically those we grow for food.
One of the more interesting ideas, however, is to create solar arrays that float on water. Unlike some of the wackier ideas out there, this one comes with some genuinely interesting engineering benefits, too!
Not As Crazy As It Sounds
Floating solar arrays have better efficiency than their land-based counterparts by virtue of the fact that the water keeps the cells cooler. (Adobe Stock photo.)
“Floatovoltaics”, as they like to be known, come with significant engineering benefits relative to typical land-based installations. One of the primary benefits is that of cooling. Solar panels, like many other electrical devices, benefit from being kept in a nice cool temperature range. Of course, being exposed to the sun means that, when generating electricity, solar panels are in fact forced into operating at elevated temperatures. With the average commercially-available photovoltaic panel hitting a peak efficiency of only around 20%, and only roughly 1,000 W/m
2
available from the sun, solar panels are already up against it when it comes to producing decent amounts of electricity. The estimated efficiency benefit from floating a solar array on water is on the order of 5-6%
according to researchers
from the Institute for Energy Technology in Norway; certainly nothing to sniff at. Fully immersing panels in water has shown even greater improvements, up to an 11% boost in efficiency
in some tests.
The benefits of floating solar panels don’t end there, either. When floated on a reservoir, for example, solar panels can shade the water course, reducing evaporation. Proponents suggest that this effect can save
up to 90% of water
that would otherwise be lost to the air in dry climates, through a combination of shading as well as reducing the impact of wind. The lower levels of light reaching the water also have the benefit of reducing algal growth as a further bonus.
For these reasons, floating solar is most often proposed to be colocated with pumped hydroelectric storage dams. These facilities rely on storing large amounts of potential energy in water, and any water lost to the atmosphere is water that can’t be used to generate electricity later. As a further benefit, these facilities already have infrastructure tying them into the electrical grid, making wiring up solar generation more cost-effective compared to developing arrays at greenfield sites.
Indeed, perhaps the biggest benefit often cited when talking about floating solar is that it reduces the need to secure large tracts of expensive land. Instead, existing watercourses like reservoirs can add solar, providing electrical generation to the grid without needing any extra footprint on the ground, barring a few utility boxes.
Floating solar panels on water also has the benefit of reducing the environmental impact and waste of cleaning operations. Rather than having to pump in clean water to wash panels as in a land-based installation, a floating array can simply be cleaned with the very water it is floating on. Little of that water need be lost either, as it can simply run back down off the panels.
Drawbacks
There are drawbacks to floating solar installations, however. They must be designed carefully to manage and avoid corrosion wherever possible, as the wet environment can be harsh on cabling, framing and components. This is only compounded in salt-water installations, which increase the likelihood of damaging corrosion further. Of course, corrosion is a manageable problem, with all manner of freshwater and seawater hardware having been designed to withstand these environments. However, it adds cost and time to deal with these problems that aren’t such an issue in a typical land-based installation.
The array itself must also be designed and assembled in such a way as to not only float, but also resist the dynamic forces of being on the water. In inland reservoirs, this can involve being blown around or rocked by small waves kicked up by the wind, or even dealing with rocking, splashing or spray from water inlets when installed with pumped hydro. Off-shore applications are possible too, but locations must be chosen carefully to avoid tidal forces and weather from destroying the hardware, as demonstrated by the
destruction of the Yamakura dam in 2019
.
Naturally, maintenance is more difficult as well, as a floating installation is more difficult for technicians to work on and comes with additional health and safety risks as well. Dealing with all these engineering requirements can add significant cost to a floating array versus a more typical land-based installation.
The Future Is Already A Reality
Far from a pie-in-the-sky thought exercise, floating solar arrays are actually already in use around the world. The biggest installation presently operational is the
320 MW installation in Dezhou, China
. The floating array is expected to generate 550 million kWh of electricity per year, located in a reservoir near to the local coal power plant. It’s also colocated with a 100 MW wind farm and 8 MWh of battery storage on site.
It’s not a one-off facility, either. Projects have been undertaken all over the world, from
a 6.3 MW installation in London
to the 4.78 MW Healdsburg, California array that claims to be
the biggest in the United States
.
However, the biggest projects on the cards are in Asia. South Korea plants to build
a gigantic 2.1 GW solar farm
floating in the Yellow Sea. Expected to cost on the order of $4 billion USD, the project will span an area of 7,000 acres and feature 5,000,000 solar modules to generate its peak output.
Meanwhile, an Indian project hopes to construct a 600 MW floating solar project
in the Omkareshwar Dam.
The project hopes to begin power generation by 2023, exceeding the 520 MW capacity of the hydroelectric power station colocated at the site. The dam itself primarily serves to store water for irrigation purposes, with the solar installation likely to maintain much more water in the reservoir due to reduced evaporation.
Installation of floating solar is ramping up year-on-year as the technology matures and various jurisdictions see the benefits to be had. With the promise of generating more power, more efficiently without requiring more land purchases, it’s hard to deny the benefits of floating solar. Expect it to spread rapidly to reservoirs and calm coastal areas near you – presuming you live somewhere sunny! | 60 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416850",
"author": "Stanson",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T15:52:05",
"content": "> project will span an area of 7,000 acresWait a second. Killing 7000 acres of sea life that would be completely deprived from sunlignt with completely unknown consequences of the artificial permanent tem... | 1,760,372,811.325033 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/how-to-optimize-your-workspace-analyze-how-you-work/ | How To Optimize Your Workspace: Analyze How You Work | Donald Papp | [
"home hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"bun rack",
"cafeteria tray",
"optimization",
"space saving",
"workbench",
"workspace"
] | [Jay Carlson] has shared
some fantastic guidance on how to optimize one’s home workspace
, and you just might want to emulate some of his layout, especially if you routinely juggle multiple projects. He makes the important point that different people have different needs, so one size does not fit all. Optimizing one’s workspace must first take into account what kind(s) of work one does, and many of his tips and tricks are pretty broadly applicable.
Looking online for these? A common industry term is “bun rack”. This one is “half-height” in size.
[Jay] works on embedded systems, and often switches between many different jobs and projects. Get your notepads ready, because there are plenty of great takeaways.
For example, to get a good top-down camera view of what’s on the workbench, he uses a camera mounted on an articulated arm (the kind that usually has a lamp attached to the end.) This makes the camera easy to deploy and easy to stow, and he can effortlessly save footage or share video with colleagues online.
Another great tip is using what most of us would call cafeteria trays and a matching rack. With each tray devoted to a different project or version of hardware, it makes switching between jobs as simple as sliding in one tray and pulling out another. It’s also a highly space-efficient way to store a lot of in-progress hardware. [Jay] gives a detailed walkthrough of his workspace and explains every decision, it’s well worth a read.
It’s always better to save space, as long as doing so doesn’t negatively impact the work itself. If you’re looking for space-saving tips,
be sure to check out this tiny workshop’s space-saving hacks
for more ideas. | 27 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416787",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T12:35:03",
"content": "1hr of work, 4hrs of youtube",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6416826",
"author": "Nicolas Rubin",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T14:19:01"... | 1,760,372,811.633487 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/domesticating-old-server-hardware-in-the-age-of-shortages/ | Domesticating Old Server Hardware In The Age Of Shortages | Arya Voronova | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"fan controller",
"home server",
"HP",
"proliant",
"rack mount",
"rack mount server"
] | Our own [Dave Rowntree] started running into bottlenecks when doing paid work involving simulations of undisclosed kind, and resolved to get a separate computer for that. Looking for budget-friendly high-performance computers is a disappointing task nowadays, thus,
it was time for a ten-year-old HP Proliant 380-g6
to come out of Dave’s storage rack. This Proliant server is a piece of impressive hardware designed to run 24/7, with a dual CPU option, eighteen RAM slots, and hardware RAID for HDDs; old enough that replacement and upgrade parts are cheap, but new enough that it’s a suitable workhorse for [Dave]’s needs!
After justifying some peculiar choices like using dual low-power GPUs, only populating twelve out of eighteen RAM slots, and picking Windows over Linux, [Dave] describes some hardware mods needed to make this server serve well. First, a proprietary hardware RAID controller backup battery had to be replaced with a regular NiMH battery pack. A bigger problem was that the server was unusually loud. Turns out, the dual GPUs confused the board management controller too much. Someone wrote a modded firmware to fix this issue, but that firmware had a brick risk [Dave] didn’t want to take. End result? [Dave] designed and modded an Arduino-powered PWM controller into the server, complete with watchdog functionality – to keep the overheating scenario risks low. Explanations and code for all of that can be found in the blog post, well worth a read for the insights alone.
If you need a piece of powerful hardware next to your desk and got graced with an used server, this write-up will teach you about the kinds of problems to look out for. We don’t often cover server hacks – the typical servers we see in hacker online spaces
are full of Raspberry Pi boards
, and it’s refreshing to see actual server hardware get a new lease on life. This server won’t ever need a KVM crash-cart, but if you decide to run yours headless, might as well
build a crash-cart out of a dead laptop
while you’re at it. And if you decide that running an old server would cost more money in electricity bills than buying new hardware, fair – but
don’t forget to repurpose it’s PSUs
before recycling the rest! | 20 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416809",
"author": "Tilo",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T13:43:49",
"content": "At some point in my work life i had the task to set up a new Domain Controller for the small company i worked for.We also opted for a refurbushed HP Proliant server.It work fine and was silent. But as soon a... | 1,760,372,811.566654 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/23/silicone-devices-diy-stretchable-circuits/ | Silicone Devices: DIYStretchableCircuits | Dave Rowntree | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"elastic",
"flexible",
"Galinstan",
"gallium",
"silicone",
"stretch",
"stretchable",
"Wearables"
] | Flexible circuits built on polyimide film are now commonplace, you can prototype with them at multiple factories, at a cost that is
almost
acceptable to your average hacker. Polyimide film is pretty tough for something so thin, but eventually it will tear, and with larger components, bend radii are quite restricted. But what about
stretchable
circuits, as in circuits you can flex, twist and stretch? Let us introduce
silicone devices
. A research group from Hasselt University, Belgium, have been prototyping making truly flexible, silicone-based circuit substrates, managing to integrate a wide range of SMT component types with a dual layer interconnect, with vias and external contacts.
It should be possible to reproduce the process using nothing more special than your average Makerspace CO
2
laser cutter, and a couple of special tools that can be easily made — a guide for that is promised — it is purely a matter of gathering a few special materials, and using off-cuts you have lying around for the rest. The interconnect uses
Galinstan
, which is a low melting point alloy of gallium, indium, and tin. Unfortunately, this material is fairly expensive and cannot be shipped by air due to the gallium content, without specialised handling, at considerable expense. But that aside, other than some acrylic sheets, some vinyl, copper foil and a few sprays, nothing is beyond reach.
The construction process is reverse to what we normally see, with the components and copper contact plates placed first, on to a primed vinyl sheet. This sheet is laser marked with the component outlines to enable them to be corrected placed. Yes, that’s right, they’re using a laser cutter to mark vinyl, a chlorine-containing plastic. Hold on to that thought for a bit.
Insulating layers and substrate layers are constructed by
blade-coating
with a layer of clear silicone. Interconnect layers are formed by sticking a fresh vinyl sheet onto the exposed contacts and laser cutting just though it to expose the pads and the interconnect traces. Next the fancy Galinstan is applied by brush and the vinyl stencil removed. Rinse and repeat for the next layer of insulating silicone, more circuit traces, then use the laser cutter to precisely etch through the via regions to allow more metalisation to be added. Finally a coating of silicone is applied over the whole assembly, the laser is again used to etch the silicone away from the contact pads, and with a little solder tinning of these, you’re done. Simple, if only our Makerspaces didn’t have rules against laser cutting vinyl.
This was clearly a very brief overview, here is a very
detailed instructables guide
ready for you, as well as
a formal research paper
, detailing why this came about and why you might want to try this yourself.
If you’re into custom wearables, you might remember
this earlier piece about silicone circuits
, and this one
weird organic-looking thing
from the same time-frame.
Thanks [Daniel] for the tip! | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416832",
"author": "socksbot",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T14:43:04",
"content": "How about chopped carbon fiber or graphite powder in soft silicone, if we can trade some conductivity for not needing an MSDS:https://www.instructables.com/Conductive-Rubber-Make-Touch-Sensitive-Robot-Sk... | 1,760,372,811.678726 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/23/diy-solid-state-drive-puts-four-bytes-in-your-pocket/ | DIY “Solid State Drive” Puts Four Bytes In Your Pocket | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"binary",
"dip switch",
"EFM8UB2"
] | In a relatively short amount of time, the average capacity of USB flash drives has skyrocketed. It wasn’t so long ago that two and four gigabyte drives were considered to be on the high end, but today you can grab a 512 GB drive for less than $50 USD. In fact they’ve gotten so large that it can feel wasteful using them for some tasks, and we occasionally find ourselves wishing we could find some modern USB drives that didn’t rival the storage capacity of our whole computer.
That said, this
USB-C tetrabyte drive created by [Glen Akins]
might be
slightly
too small for our tastes. No, that’s not a typo. As in the Greek tetra, this drive can hold a massive four bytes at a time. Even better, you don’t need a computer to write to it: the 32 DIP switches let you key in the content on the fly, bit-by-bit.
Reading out the first byte from the DIP switches.
As
explained in a Twitter thread
, [Glen] was inspired to create this gadget after another user posted a picture of a 32 position DIP switch with a caption that said it was a “
One Tetrabyte SSD
” back in December. He apparently couldn’t track down the same switch, but the four red Grayhill 76 Series switches arguably make it a bit clearer when entering in your bytes.
Each of the individual DIP switches are connected to one of the GPIO pins of the 8-bit EFM8UB2 microcontroller, and the code simply reads the state of each pin in order and saves the binary results in a variable to put together the “file” it presents to the OS when plugged in.
We’ve seen our fair share
of
unusual USB flash drives in the past
, but this one is truly in a league of its own. Can’t say we can think of any four bytes of data important enough to hold on a dedicated piece of hardware, but we certainly appreciate the effort to store it in the most robust way possible.
Thanks to [J. Peterson] for the tip. | 71 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416708",
"author": "Aaron Fechter",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T03:10:09",
"content": "This is obivuously a password device. But, it could also be a test device to experiment with a program you’re writing that reads the ports.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [... | 1,760,372,811.782278 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/23/hackaday-links-january-23-2022/ | Hackaday Links: January 23, 2022 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"anemia",
"astronomy",
"contest",
"ethernet",
"hackaday links",
"hat",
"red blood cells",
"rp2040",
"shockwave",
"Starlink",
"Tonga",
"volcano"
] | When Tonga’s Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai volcano erupted on January 15, one hacker in the UK knew just what to do. Sandy Macdonald from York quickly cobbled together a Raspberry Pi and a pressure/humidity sensor board and added a little code to create a recording barometer. The idea was to see if the shock wave from the eruption would be detectable over 16,000 km away —
and surprise, surprise, it was!
It took more than 14 hours to reach Sandy’s impromptu recording station, but the data clearly show a rapid pulse of increasing pressure as the shockwave approached, and a decreased pressure as it passed. What’s more, the shock wave that traveled the “other way” around the planet was detectable too, about seven hours after the first event. In fact, data gathered through the 19th clearly show three full passes of the shockwaves. We just find this fascinating, and applaud Sandy for the presence of mind to throw this together when news of the eruption came out.
Good news for professional astronomers and others with eyes turned skyward — it seems like the ever-expanding Starlink satellite constellation isn’t going to kill ground-based observation. At least
that’s the conclusion of a team using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)
at the Palomar Observatory outside San Diego. ZTF is designed to catalog anything that blinks, flashes, or explodes in the night sky, making it perfect to detect the streaks from the 1,800-odd Starlink satellites currently in orbit. They analyzed the number of satellite transients captured in ZTF images, and found that fully 20 percent of images show streaks now, as opposed to 0.5 percent back in 2019 when the constellation was much smaller. They conclude that at the 10,000 satellite full build-out, essentially every ZTF image will have a streak in it, but since the artifacts are tiny and well-characterized, they really won’t hinder the science to any appreciable degree.
Speaking of space, we finally have
a bit of insight into the causes of space anemia
. The 10% to 12% decrease in red blood cells in astronauts during their first ten days in space has been well known since the dawn of the Space Age, but the causes had never really been clear. It was assumed that the anemia was a result of the shifting of fluids in microgravity, but nobody really knew for sure until doing
a six-month study on fourteen ISS astronauts
. They used exhaled carbon monoxide as a proxy for the destruction of red blood cells (RBCs) — one molecule of CO is liberated for each hemoglobin molecule that’s destroyed — and found that the destruction of RBCs is a primary effect of being in space. Luckily, there appears to be a limit to how many RBCs are lost in space, so the astronauts didn’t suffer from complications of severe anemia while in space. Once they came back to gravity, the anemia reversed, albeit slowly and with up to a year of measurable changes to their blood.
From the “Better Late Than Never” department, we see that this week that
Wired finally featured Hackaday Superfriend Sam Zeloof and his homemade integrated circuits
. We’re glad to see Sam get coverage — the story was also picked up by
Ars Technica
— but it’s clear that nobody at either outfit reads Hackaday, since we’ve been featuring Sam since
we first heard about his garage fab in 2017
. That was back when Sam was still “just” making transistors; since then, we’ve featured
some of his lab upgrades
, watched him delve into
electron beam lithography
, and broke the story on
his first legit integrated circuit
. Along the way, we managed to coax him out to Supercon in 2019 where he gave both
a talk
and
an interview
.
And finally, if you’re in the mood for a contest, why not check out
WIZNet’s Ethernet HAT contest
? The idea is to explore what a Raspberry Pi Pico with Ethernet attached is good for. WIZNet has two flavors of board: one is an Ethernet HAT for the Pico, while the other is as RP2040 with built-in Ethernet. The good news is, if you submit an idea, they’ll send you a board for free. We love it when someone from the Hackaday community wins a contest, so if you enter, be sure to let us know. And hurry — submissions close January 31. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416673",
"author": "rpavlik",
"timestamp": "2022-01-24T00:10:22",
"content": "Yeah when I learned about the pressure wave, I pulled up my home sensor network Grafana and confirmed that i also saw an anomaly just as the “big” sensor networks indicated it should have crossed my locat... | 1,760,372,811.881857 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/23/is-that-the-moon-worming-its-way-into-your-bios/ | Is That The Moon Worming Its Way Into Your BIOS? | Arya Voronova | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"CH341",
"CH341A",
"malware",
"moonbounce",
"UEFI"
] | When facing a malware situation, the usual “guaranteed solution” is to reinstall your OS.
The new developments in malware world
will also require you to have a CH341 programmer handy. In an arguably inevitable development, [Kaspersky Labs] researchers have found an active piece of malware, out in the wild, that would persist itself by writing its bootstrap code into the BIOS chip. It doesn’t matter if you shred the HDD and replace it with a new one. In fact, so-called MoonBounce never really touches the disk at all, being careful to only store itself in RAM, oh, and the SPI flash that stores the BIOS code, of course.
MoonBounce is Microsoft-tailored, and able to hook into a chain of components starting from the UEFI’s DXE environment, through the Windows Loader, and finishing as a part of
svchost.exe
, a process we all know and love.
This approach doesn’t seem to be widespread – yet, but it’s not inconceivable that we’ll eventually encounter a ransomware strain using this to, ahem,
earn a bit of extra cash on the side
. What will happen then – BIOS reflashing service trucks by our curbsides? After all, your motherboard built-in BIOS flasher UI is built into the same BIOS image that gets compromised, and at best, could be disabled effortlessly – at worst, subverted and used for further sneaky persistence, fooling repairpeople into comfort, only to be presented with one more Monero address a week later.
Will our hardware hacker skills suddenly go up in demand, with all the test clip fiddling and SOIC-8 desoldering being second nature to a good portion of us? Should we stock up on CH341 dongles? So many questions!
This week’s installment of “threat vectors that might soon become prevalent” is fun to speculate about! Want to read about other vectors we might not be paying enough attention to? Can’t go wrong with
supply-chain attacks on our repositories
! As for other auxiliary storage-based persistence methods – check out
this HDD firmware-embedded proof-of-concept rootkit
. Of course, we might not always need the newfangled ways to do things, the old ways still work pretty often – you might only need to
disguise your malicious hardware as a cool laptop accessory
to trick an average journalist, even in a hostile environment.
Thanks to
Brendan Dolan-Gavitt
on Twitter for highlighting this to us!
Main image
courtesy Kaspersky Labs
. | 52 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416628",
"author": "Alysson+Rowan",
"timestamp": "2022-01-23T21:09:19",
"content": "I have *ALWAYS* wondered why we don’t have a hardware BIOS Write Disable jumper on system boards. I have lost a couple of systems to BIOS problems. Indeed, my better systems at home have dual BIOS –... | 1,760,372,812.077193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/23/display-your-speech-in-realtime-to-help-lipreaders-in-the-mask-era/ | Display Your Speech In Realtime To Help Lipreaders In The Mask Era | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ai",
"deepgram ai",
"mask",
"speech recognition"
] | Masks are all well and good when it comes to reducing the spread of deadly pathogens, but they can make it harder to understand people when they speak. They also make lipreading impossible.
[Kevin Lewis] set about building something to help.
The system consists of a small screen that can be worn on the chest or other part of the body, and a lapel microphone to record the wearer’s speech. Using the Deepgram AI speech recognition API running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, the system decodes the speech and displays it on the Hyperpixel screen.
The API is quite capable, and can be set to only respond to the wearer’s voice, or in a group mode, display speech
from multiple people in the area
, displaying other voices in another colour. There’s also a translation feature
using the iTranslateApp API as well
.
It’s a neat tool that could be of great use in conferences or in situations where a quick simple machine translation could
majorly ease communication
. Video after the break.
Masks making it hard to understand people either audibly or because you rely on lip reading? Just got this hacked together – it displays my speech in real time with
@DeepgramAI
!
pic.twitter.com/lPu4CZboIk
— Kevin Lewis (he/him) (@_phzn)
January 4, 2022 | 18 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416611",
"author": "Anonymous",
"timestamp": "2022-01-23T19:30:01",
"content": "Live TV presentations could benefit from this by having subtitles and closed captions without manual labor.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "64166... | 1,760,372,811.833079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/23/printed-circuit-bird-family-calls-for-us-to-consider-analog/ | Printed Circuit Bird Family Calls For Us To Consider Analog | Arya Voronova | [
"Art",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"analog audio",
"art",
"beam",
"beam robotics",
"bird calls",
"birds are not real",
"birdsong",
"electronic art"
] | On our favourite low-attention-span content site, [Kelly Heaton] has recently started sharing
a series of “Printed Circuit Birds”
. These are PCBs shaped like birds, looking like birds and chirping like birds – and they are fully analog! The sound is produced by a network of oscillators feeding into each other, and, once tuned, is hardly distinguishable from the bird songs you might hear outside your window. Care and love was put into making this bird life-like – it perches on Kelly’s arm with legs woven out of single-strand wire and talons made out of THT resistors, in the exact same way you would expect a regular bird to sit on your arm – that is, if you ever get lucky enough. It’s not just one bird – there’s a family of circuit animals, including
a goose
,
a crow
and even
a cricket
.
Why did these animals came to life – metaphorically, but also, literally? There must be more to a non-ordinary project like this, and we asked Kelly about it. These birds are part of her project to explore models of consciousness in ways that we typically don’t employ. Our habit is to approach complex problems in digital domains, but we tend to miss out on elegance and simplicity that analog circuits are capable of. After all, even our conventional understanding of a neural network is a matrix of analog coefficients that we then tune, a primitive imitation of how we assume human brains to work – and it’s this “analog” approach that has lately moved us ever so closer to reproducing “intelligence” in a computer.
Kelly’s work takes a concept that would have many of us get the digital toolkit, and makes it wonderfully life-like using a small bouquet of simple parts. It’s a challenge to our beliefs and approaches, compelling in its grace, urging us to consider and respect analog circuits more when it comes to modelling consciousness and behaviours. If
it’s this simple
to model sounds and behaviour of a biological organism, a task that’d have us writing DSP and math code to replicate on a microcontroller – what else are we missing from our models?
Kelly has more PCBs to arrive soon in preparation for her NYC exhibit in February, and will surely be posting updates
on her Twitter page
! We’ve covered her work before, and if you haven’t seen it yet, her
Supercon 2019 talk on Electronic Naturalism
would be a great place to start! Such projects tend to inspire fellow hackers to build other non-conventional projects, and
this chirping pendant
follows closely in Kelly’s footsteps! The direction of this venture reminds us a lot of BEAM robotics, which
we’ve recently reminisced upon
as something that’s impacted generations of hackers to look at electronics we create through an entirely different lens.
Printed circuit bird. She is entirely analog electronic. Five oscillators with adjustable resistance combine to generate different patterns of song. Energy, frequency, vibration
#tesla
#ai
#mind
#birdsong
#art
#science
#nature
pic.twitter.com/mgkmwemuqx
— Kelly Heaton (@kelly_heaton)
December 1, 2021 | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416555",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-01-23T15:45:13",
"content": "Analog is very cool. I generally think of it as a more efficient but also magnitudes more difficult to design to fit a specification. Digital radically decreases the number of considerations needed via t... | 1,760,372,812.183968 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/23/cables-too-long-try-cable-management-via-diy-coiling/ | Cables Too Long? Try Cable Management Via DIY Coiling | Donald Papp | [
"how-to"
] | [
"cable coiling",
"cable management",
"diy",
"mandrel",
"thermoforming"
] | Annoyed by excessively-long cables? Tired of the dull drudgery and ugly results of bunching up the slack and wrapping it with a twist-tie? Suffer no longer, because the solution is to make your own coiled cables!
[Dmitry] is annoyed with long, unruly cables and
shared a solution he learned from the DIY keyboards community
: coil them yourself with a piece of dowel, a hair dryer, and about 10 minutes of your time. However, it’s just a wee bit more complicated than it may seem at first glance.
The process begins with wrapping a cable around a mandrel, then heating it as uniformly as possible to thermoform the jacket, but the instructional video (embedded below) says that all by itself that isn’t
quite
enough to yield lasting results. After heating the cable and letting it cool, the coils will be formed but it will not hold the new shape very well. The finishing touch is to “reverse” the direction of the coils, by re-wrapping it backward around the mandrel, inverting the coils upon themselves. This process is awkward to explain, but much simpler to demonstrate. This video by [DailySetupTech]
explains this process around the 2:30 mark
. That final step is what yields a tightly-wound, springy coil.
The nice part about using this process as a cable management technique is that it is possible to coil only a portion of a cable, leaving the exact amount of uncoiled slack required for a given application. Keep it in mind the next time some cables need managing. And if you don’t want to coil a cable but still need it out of the way,
you might find this design for a DIY cable chain made from a tape measure
useful. | 34 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416532",
"author": "KDawg",
"timestamp": "2022-01-23T14:10:40",
"content": "I would rather stab my eye with a needle than voluntarily use coiled cables",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6416557",
"author": "JanW",
... | 1,760,372,812.252579 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/23/web-centric-gabuino-has-compiler-will-travel/ | Web-Centric Gabuino Has Compiler, Will Travel | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Development"
] | [
"cloud application",
"pocket oscilloscope",
"web based"
] | Arguably the biggest advantage of the Arduino platform is its ease of use, especially when compared to what microcontroller development looked like before the introduction of the open source board and its associated software development environment. All you need to do is download the IDE for your platform, plug in your Arduino, and you can have code running on the hardware with just a few clicks.
But can it get even easier? [Gabriel Valky] certainly thinks so,
which is why he’s developed the cloud-based Gabuino platform
. As of right now it only supports the DS213 pocket oscilloscope and LA104 logic analyzer, but he says the code is lightweight enough that it should work with any STM32 board that has the appropriate bootloader. Using Gabuino requires no software to be installed on the computer, just plug in the board, and you’re already half way there.
Gabuino processing data from digital calipers.
The trick is that the code editor and compiler have been moved into the cloud, and are accessed through the host computer’s web browser. The web interface also integrates an impressive “Console”, which [Gabriel] likens to the Serial Monitor and Plotter functions of the Arduino IDE, but is actually far more capable. The Gabuino Console is not only bi-directional, but through the use of libraries such as Three.js and WebGL, it’s able to render video output from code running on the microcontroller.
[Gabriel] takes us through some of the capabilities of Gabuino in the video below, and we have to say, it looks pretty impressive. We especially liked the built-in debugging capabilities that let you set breakpoints and examine variables. This plug-and-play approach certainly holds promise for students or beginners, though we think the hardware compatibility will need some work before the project really takes off.
Incidentally, this isn’t the first time [Gabriel] has written some code for the LA104.
Last year we covered his very impressive custom firmware
for the ~$100 USD gadget, which should sweeten the deal considerably if you end up getting one to experiment with Gabuino on. | 16 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416508",
"author": "RÖB",
"timestamp": "2022-01-23T10:52:34",
"content": "It’s impressive and also at the same time disappointing.It needs some “standard” hardware before it will be much wanted. Paying $150 – $300 for a development board in the form of a scope or analyzer is not a ... | 1,760,372,812.133163 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/printing-in-silicone/ | Printing In Silicone | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"silicone"
] | When you think of making something out of silicone, you usually think of using a mold and injecting it with the material. Can you 3D print it? [Kimberly Beckett]
answers that very question
in a recent post. The short answer is yes, but you need specialized printing equipment.
Most consumer or hobby printers use either filament deposition or photoresin. Neither of these processes are good for printing silicone. For one thing, silicone doesn’t melt and reform like a thermoplastic. After all, that is why we like making hotend socks and oven utensils with the material. If you do melt silicone, you get a gooey mess, not a nice fluid you can push through an extruder nozzle. As for resin printing, silicone is resistant to UV so the chances of coming up with UV curable silicone are pretty small.
So how do you print silicone? There are a few methods. Aceo is a technique that is sort of like an inkjet. It deposits a solution of silicone and a binder that activates on exposure to UV. After placing a layer, a UV light activates the binder and you repeat for the next layer. There is also a technique for drawing a layer of silicone liquid and then curing it with a halogen lamp.
There are several companies that make photosensitive resins that mix with silicone. The resulting print is resin impregnated with silicone. A trip through an oven can burn away the resin and leaves a silicone part. Some companies offer this as a service and others make resin for high-end printers.
Of course, you can always produce a mold with your 3D printer and then use that mold to create a silicone piece in
the conventional way
. Or, you can
go full injection molding
on the cheap. | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416478",
"author": "J. Peterson",
"timestamp": "2022-01-23T07:01:49",
"content": "The link to Kimberly Beckett’s post is bogus (just points to your WP admin login)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6416531",
"author": "... | 1,760,372,812.31425 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/flying-sausage-rescues-pooch-drone-pilots-save-the-day/ | Flying Sausage Rescues Pooch, Drone Pilots Save The Day | Jenny List | [
"drone hacks",
"News"
] | [
"dog",
"drone",
"rescue",
"sausage"
] | When we write about drone stories from the United Kingdom, they often have a slightly depressing air to them as we relate tales of unverified air proximity reports closing airports or bungled official investigations that would make the Keystone Kops look like competent professionals.
But here’s a drone story from this rainswept isle sure to put a smile on the face of multirotor enthusiasts worldwide, as Denmead Drone Search And Rescue, an organisation who locate missing pets using drones, enticed lost dog Millie from a soon-to-be-engulfed tidal mudflat by the simple expedient of
dangling a sausage from a drone for the mutt to follow
(Facebook).
Lest you believe that Hackaday have lost their marbles and this isn’t worthy of our normal high standards, let us remind you that
this is not our first flying sausage story
. Behind the cute-puppy and flying meat product jokes though, there’s a serious side. Drones have received such a bad press over recent years that a good news story concerning them is rare indeed, and
this one has garnered significant coverage in the general media
. Maybe it’s too late to reverse some of the reputational damage from the Gatwick fiasco, but at this point any such coverage is good news.
For anyone wondering what lies behind this,
let us take you back to Christmas 2018
. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416246",
"author": "purplepeopleated",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T22:37:21",
"content": "this is how the finished off all the homer clones",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6416251",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2022-01-... | 1,760,372,812.361564 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/this-week-in-security-netusb-http-sys-and-2013s-cve-is-back/ | This Week In Security: NetUSB, HTTP.sys, And 2013’s CVE Is Back | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"HTTP.sys",
"Password Spray",
"This Week in Security"
] | Let’s imagine a worst case situation for home routers. It would have to start with a port unintentionally opened to the internet, ideally in a popular brand, like Netgear. For fun, let’s say it’s actually a third-party kernel module, that is in multiple router brands. This module would then need a trivial vulnerability, say an integer overflow on the buffer size for incoming packets. This flaw would mean that the incoming data would write past the end of the buffer, overwriting whatever kernel data is there. So far, this exactly describes
the NetUSB flaw, CVE-2021-45608
.
Because red teams don’t get their every wish, there is a catch. While the overflow is exceptionally easy to pull off, there isn’t much wiggle room on where the data gets written. There’s no remote code execution Proof of Concept (PoC) yet, and [Max Van Amerongen], who discovered the flaw, says it would be difficult but probably not impossible to pull off. All of this said, it’s a good idea to check your router for open ports, particularly non-standard port numbers. If you have a USB port on your router, check for updates.
Windows HTTP.sys Problem
A
serious problem has been announced
in Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10, with some versions vulnerable in their default configurations. The problem is in how Windows handles
HTTP Trailer packets
, which contain extra information at the end of normal HTTP transfers. There is
a PoC available
that demonstrates a crash. It appears that an additional information leak vulnerability would have to be combined with this one to produce a true exploit. This seems to be a different take on CVE-2021-31166, essentially exploiting the same weakness, and working around the incomplete fix. This issue was fixed in the January patch set for Windows, so make sure you’re covered.
The List of Shame
The US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, maintains
a running list of vulnerabilities
that have been found in use in-the-wild. That’s an interesting list to keep tabs on, as there are some surprises there, like CVE-2013-3900. That one really is a bug from 2013 that is
actively being used in a malware campaign
. It’s a flaw in Microsoft’s file signing routines that allows extra code to be injected into a signed dll without voiding the signature. While a fix was released back in 2013, it was later changed to an optional fix, due to impacts to legitimate software.
Jenkins Security Advisory
The Jenkins project has
published a list of vulnerabilities
, and patches for most of them. Among the unpatched vulnerabilities, one stands out as a potential problem. CVE-2022-23118 is a flaw in the Debian Package Builder Plugin that allows an attacker to run arbitrary
git
commands on the underlying host. It’s not clear exactly how much control over the Jenkins process is needed to take advantage of this, but one could imagine a rogue Debian maintainer using this to compromise the Debian build system.
New Tools To Defeat Lockout
[TheTechromancer], researcher at Black Lantern Security, misses the good old days of password spraying. For the uninitiated, this refers to taking a list of known accounts and a handful of bad passwords, like
Password1!
, and trying each bad password for each account. Just like the birthday paradox, you’ll get far more matches than expected. This success has been its own undoing, being one of the drivers in the push for multi-factor authentication. The other defensive tool interfering with password spraying is what [TheTechromancer] calls Smart Lockout — essentially an authorization system noticing too many requests from a single IP, and blocking that IP for a while.
What I’m trying to say is that we’re frustrated. And when hackers are frustrated, they write code.
This leads to the new open source tools,
TREVORproxy and TREVORspray
. TREVORproxy is a tool to spread those requests out over multiple sources, and it does that with two working modes. The first is SSH tunneling. Rent a few Amazon AWS hosts with public IPs, and set up your SSH credentials to each host. Feed that into TREVORproxy, and it load balances the attack between those hosts. The other technique requires IPv6 support by the target service. Rent a service that can give you an IPv6 subnet, and run TREVORproxy there, informing it about the subnet. It will balance requests across the entire subnet’s IP space. Grab a /64 IPv6 subnet, and you have 18 quintillion addresses to spray from.
Designed to work along-side is TREVORspray, a password sprayer optimized for parallelism, defeating smart lockout, and MFA bypasses where possible. It also includes a
--recon
mode, identifying the interesting logons associated with a domain name. The standard warnings apply, these are powerful tools, and only to be used with permission, or against targets with bug bounty programs that authorize such actions.
Ten Notches on NCC Group’s Security Gun
While definitely a White Hat security organization, NCC Group runs more than its fair share of red-team exercises, and has shared
10 of its wins against development pipelines
. These stories range from the trivial, like a confusing Jenkins plugin configuration that allowed anyone to access the admin UI, to another where crashing a development pipeline exposed development variables, including account credentials. This is one of the good kind of top ten lists on the internet, take a minute to read through it.
You Database Is Leaking
If you are running Safari, that is.
Researchers at FingerprintJS discovered an issue with Safari’s IndexedDB implementation
, finding that the list of database names was pollable from any browser tab. This doesn’t sound like a problem, til you realize that when a site generates a database, it gives it a unique name that identifies the site, and maybe even the user. Head to
safarileaks.com
, particularly if you’re running the Safari browser, and let us know what you find. As of the time of writing, this issue has been fixed in release candidates from Apple, but not rolled out to everyone.
Bits and Bytes
Detecting malware on a machine, just by pointing an antenna at it, and crunching the EMF stats with a Raspberry Pi? It sounded too good to be true, but Tom bit the bullet and
dug into the story
. His conclusion? I won’t spoil it for you, check out his piece!
It’s another
tale from Project Zero, this time about Zoom
. There was quite a process getting a toehold into Zoom’s internal data structure, but a five year old Android package was unintentionally released with debugging symbols. While this one didn’t lead to a full exploit chain, there were still vulnerabilities found and fixed.
SSH is a superpower. Nothing feels quite like living in the matrix like SSHing into a machine many miles away, redirecting ports, and making a connection dance to my tune, jumping through the hops. If you want to brush up your SSH game, note that
The Cyber Plumber’s Handbook is now available for free on GitHub
.
Both Oracle and Cisco have announced multiple security issues, with
Oracle’s advisory containing a whopping 497 issues
, and
Cisco’s topped by a bug ranked 9.6
. That one is an unauthenticated privilege escalation in the Cisco Unified Contact Center Management Portal, allowing anyone admin access to the portal. Ouch. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416534",
"author": "HAL 9000",
"timestamp": "2022-01-23T14:16:37",
"content": "Well, the database leak seems to be present in brave iOS as well…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6416665",
"author": "anonmous fx user",
"t... | 1,760,372,812.397585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/this-end-times-cyberdeck-is-apocalypse-ready/ | This End Times Cyberdeck Is Apocalypse-Ready | Dan Maloney | [
"Cyberdecks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"apocalypse",
"cyberdeck",
"noaa",
"sdr",
"survival"
] | In the cyberdeck world, some designs are meant to evoke a cyberpunk vibe, an aesthetic that’s more lighthearted than serious. Some cyberdecks, though, are a little more serious about hardening their designs against adverse conditions. That’s where something like
the ARK-io SurvivalDeck
comes into play.
Granted, there does seem to be at least a little lightheartedness at play with the aptly named [techno-recluse]’s design. It’s intended to be an “Apocalypse Repository of Knowledge”, which may be stretching the point a bit. But it does contain an impressive amount of tech — wide-band software defined radio (SDR) covering HF to UHF, GPS module, a sensor for air pressure, temperature, and humidity, and a Raspberry Pi 3B running Kali Linux. Everything is housed in a waterproof ammo can; a 3D printed bezel holds an LCD touchscreen and a satisfying array of controls, displays and ports. The lid of the ammo can holds a keyboard, which was either custom-made to precisely fit the lid or was an incredibly lucky find.
There’s a lot to like about this build, but our favorite part is the external dipole for receiving NOAA weather satellite imagery. The ability to monitor everything from the ham bands to local public service channels is a nice touch too. And we have no complaints about the aesthetics or build quality either. This reminds us of
an earlier cyberdeck with a similar vibe
, but with a more civilian flavor.
Thanks to [Kate] for the tip.
[via
Tom’s Hardware
] | 29 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416130",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T12:09:08",
"content": "But can it connect into the artic vault? In case github burns down.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6416140",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2... | 1,760,372,812.46222 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/affordable-hf-loop-antenna-reviewed/ | Affordable HF Loop Antenna Reviewed | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"antenna",
"loop antenna",
"sdr"
] | Modern ham radio operators often face restrictions on antennas. This has made small antennas more popular, despite some limitations. [Tech Minds] reviews the
GA-450 indoor active HF loop antenna
and finds it better than expected. You can see the video review below.
You can’t expect a little antenna to perform as well as giant skyhook. However, for such a small loop covering 3 to 30 MHz, the antenna seems to perform very well. We like that the active part of it has a rechargeable battery. Obviously, you will only want to use this antenna for receiving, but it would be a great pairing for an HF-capable software defined radio (SDR). Even just in the window sill with half gain, it was able to pick up quite a bit of signal on the 40 meter and 20 meter ham bands. According to the video, performance below 7 MHz was lackluster, but it worked nicely at higher frequencies.
The loop is directional and you can rotate the loop on the base to zero in on a particular signal. Of course, if the antenna were up in the air, it might be harder to rotate unless you work out something with a motor. If all you want to do is receive and you have a budget of under $100, this looks like it would be a nice portable option.
You can
build your own
loop and loop-like antennas, of course. Some of them can be
quite portable
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416170",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T14:27:13",
"content": "It is obvious there is no way to tune that antenna: the only adjustment is for preamp gain.Now, it is receive only, and you don’t *need* high antenna efficiency for receive at HF (since environmental noise d... | 1,760,372,814.321349 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/ntp-server-gets-time-from-space/ | NTP Server Gets Time From Space | Bryan Cockfield | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"accuracy",
"clock",
"gps",
"microsecond",
"raspberry pi",
"real time clock",
"rtc",
"time"
] | Cheap GPS units are readily available nowadays, which is great if you have something that needs to be very precisely located. Finding the position of things is one of many uses for GPS, though. There are plenty of ways to take advantage of some of the ancillary tools that the GPS uses to determine location. In this case it’s using the precise timekeeping abilities of the satellites to
build a microsecond-accurate network time protocol (NTP) server
.
GPS works by triangulating position between a receiver and a number of satellites, but since the satellites are constantly moving an incredibly precise timing signal is needed in order to accurately determine location from all of these variables. This build simply teases out that time information from the satellite network and ignores the location data. There are only two parts to this build, a cheap GPS receiver and a Raspberry Pi, but [Austin] goes into great detail about how to set up the software side as well including installing PPS, GPSd, and then setting up the actual NTP server on the Pi.
While this is an excellent way to self-host your own NTP server if you don’t have Internet access (or just want to do it yourself), [Austin] does note that this is probably overkill on timekeeping as far as accuracy goes. On the other hand, the Raspberry Pi has no built-in real time clock of its own, so this might actually be a cost-competitive way of timekeeping even when
compared to something more traditional like a DS3231 RTC module
. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416062",
"author": "Andre",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T06:27:00",
"content": "“GPS works by triangulating position between a receiver and a number of satellites” is technically wrong, GPS uses trilateration.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"c... | 1,760,372,814.272441 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/3d-printing-copper/ | 3D Printing Copper | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"copper 3d printing",
"metal 3d printing",
"selective laser sintering"
] | People really want to 3D print metal, but while true metal printers exist, they still are expensive and out of reach of most hackers. However, even if you can afford an exotic printer or use metal-impregnated polymer, you don’t often see copper as a print material. Copper has high electrical and thermal conductivity which makes it very useful. But that thermal conductivity also makes it very difficult to print using any process that involves heating up the material and copper reflects common lasers used in the 3D printing process. However, a German company, Infinite Flex, is claiming a breakthrough that will allow printers that use a standard IR laser to produce copper parts. The material,
Infinite Powder CU 01
is suitable for selective laser sintering and several other laser-based techniques.
The powder has 99.5% copper and particle sizes of between 10 and 45 microns. There are some copper alloys that reduce thermal conductivity to allow printing, but often the reason you want a copper part is for its thermal properties. A kilogram of the powder will set you back nearly $100, so it isn’t dirt cheap, but it isn’t astronomical, either.
You can
add copper wire
to a print, of course, but that’s not the same thing. There are also methods that work like
electroplating
, but they are usually quite slow.
Of course, to make the powder work you will
need a metal 3D printer
. We do know there are many ways to
print copper
. | 28 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416073",
"author": "Rey",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T08:10:01",
"content": "A kilogram of the powder… (typo)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6416093",
"author": "volt-k",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T09:49:05",
... | 1,760,372,814.648662 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/all-about-mecanum/ | All About Mecanum | Al Williams | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"mechanum",
"mechanum wheel"
] | If you’ve dealt with robots or other wheeled projects, you’ve probably heard of mecanum wheels. These seemingly magic wheels have the ability to move in any direction. If you’ve ever seen one, it is pretty obvious how it works. They look more or less like ordinary wheels, but they also have rollers that rotate off-axis by 45 degrees from the normal movement axis. This causes the wheel’s driving force to move at a 45 degree angle. However, there are a lot of details that aren’t apparent from a quick glance. Why are the rollers tapered? How do you control a vehicle using these wheels? [Lesics] has
a good explanation of how the wheels work
in a recent video that you can see below.
With four wheels, you can have a pair of wheels — one at the front right and one at the back left — that have a net force vector of +45 degrees. Then the other pair of wheels can be built differently to have a net force vector of -45 degrees. The video shows how moving some or all wheels in different directions can move the vehicle in many different directions.
It is easy to confuse mecanum wheels with omniwheels, but they are different. While both have a main wheel with rollers, the omniwheel has rollers at a 90 degree angle to the main axis so they can slide in that direction. These are usually used in a triangular configuration known as
the Kiwi drive
. Mecanum wheels are not without their disadvantages, including cost. However, you can
make your own
. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416025",
"author": "SteveS",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T01:06:02",
"content": "what sort of strange hell happens when you’re on a slippery surface?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6416032",
"author": "Ostracus",
... | 1,760,372,814.376796 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/another-dps5005-alternative-firmware/ | Another DPS5005 Alternative Firmware | Dave Rowntree | [
"hardware",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"hardware",
"power supply",
"programmable power supply",
"stm32"
] | These cheap Chinese-built programmable power supplies are nothing new, we’ve been using them for years. They’re not particularly good power supplies, since current feedback is in software, but for some tasks they’re a great fit and you can’t argue with the price. Alternative firmware projects have also been a thing for a while too, but none we’ve seen have been quite as capable and polished as this
latest DPS firmware project
by [Profi-max.] We’ve not come across the source code yet, but at least the binary image is
freely downloadable
.
The firmware has some interesting features, such as programmable pre-sets intended for battery charging applications. In fact, there is a dedicated battery charge mode screen. We want to warn, however, that charging lithium ion batteries with this might not be at all wise, not in the least because of a lack of protection hardware in place. It would be very easy to destroy the unit or overheat a battery this way! However, if you must do this, there are a few features to help you out, such as a handy ‘counters’ screen showing approximate charge delivered.
Remote programmability is, as usual, via the easily hacked in serial port, with firmware support for Bluetooth serial modules if wired USB serial doesn’t suit. For those who like to mount things differently, the screen can be rotated by holding a key on power-up, or if you hook up a MPU6050 accelerometer/gyro module it will even do it automatically!
To update a stock DPS unit, the only requirements are access to an ST-Link compatible programmer dongle, to target the STM32 SWD programming interface, and the
STM32CubeProgrammer
utility. Open source alternatives to that are also available,
stlink
comes to mind as a good option. Once you have the module PCB popped out of its plastic casing, only three wires need tacking onto a handy set of pads to complete the connection to the programmer dongle. Pretty simple stuff.
If you’re looking for a similar project, with source immediately available, then checkout the
OpenDPS project we covered a few years ago
, and if you’re thinking of going crazy, building a DIY open source electronics lab,
we got you covered
.
Thanks [Luke] for the tip! | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416511",
"author": "volt-k",
"timestamp": "2022-01-23T11:28:33",
"content": "This looks good, the other one was a bit lacking in features. Too bad my DPS5005 just died (the LM321 exploded for some reason when I connected a 5S lipo pack) but will try out the FW as soon as I have it ... | 1,760,372,814.044736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/zhengbang-pick-places-your-confidential-data-in-the-bag-slowly/ | Zhengbang Pick & Places Your Confidential Data In The Bag, Slowly | Arya Voronova | [
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"AliExpress",
"FlyerSMT_HV",
"malware",
"supply chain attack",
"virustotal",
"ZB3245TSS",
"zhengbang"
] | Isn’t it convenient when your pick-and-place machine arrives with a fully-set-up computer inside of it? Plug in a keyboard, mouse and a monitor, and you have a production line ready to go. Turns out,
you can have third parties partake in your convenience by sharing your private information with them
– as long as you plug in an Ethernet cable! [Richard] from [RM Cybernetics] has purchased a ZhengBang ZB3245TSS machine, and in the process of setting it up, dutifully backed up its software onto a USB stick – as we all ought to.
This bit of extra care, often missed by fellow hackers, triggered an antivirus scanner alert, and subsequently netted some interesting results on VirusTotal – with 53/69 result for a particular file. That wasn’t conclusive enough – they’ve sent the suspicious file for an analysis, and the test came back positive. After static and dynamic analysis done by a third party, the malware was confirmed to collect metadata accessible to the machine and send it all to a third-party server. Having contacted ZhengBang about this
mishap
, they received a letter with assurances that the files were harmless, and a
.zip
attachment with replacement “clean” files which didn’t fail the antivirus checks.
It didn’t end here! After installing the “clean” files, they also ran a few anti-malware tools, and all seemed fine. Then, they plugged the flash drive into another computer again… to encounter even more alerts than before. The malware was equipped with a mechanism to grace every accessible
.exe
with a copy of itself on sight, infecting even
.exe
‘s of the anti-malware tools they put on that USB drive. The article implies that the malware could’ve been placed on the machines to collect your company’s proprietary design information – we haven’t found a whole lot of data to support that assertion, however; as much as it is a plausible intention, it could have been a case of an unrelated virus spread in the factory. Surprisingly, all of these discoveries don’t count as violations of Aliexpress Terms and Conditions – so if you’d like to distribute a bunch of IoT malware on, say, wireless routers you bought in bulk, now you know of a platform that will help you!
This goes in our bin of Pretty Bad News for makers and small companies. If you happen to have a ZhengBang pick-and-place machine with a built-in computer, we recommend that you
familiarize yourself with the article
and do an investigation. The article also goes into details on how to reinstall Windows while keeping all the drivers and software libraries working, but we highly recommend you worry about the impact of this machine’s infection spread mechanisms, first.
Supply chain attacks, eh? We’ve seen plenty of these lately, what’s with communities and software repositories being targeted
every now
and
then
. Malware embedded into devices from the factory isn’t a stranger to us, either – at least, this time we have way more information than we did
when Supermicro was under fire
.
Editor’s Note
: As pointed out by our commenters, there’s currently not enough evidence to assert that Zhengbang’s intentions were malicious. The article has been edited to reflect the situation more accurately, and will be updated if more information becomes available.
Editor’s Note Again:
A rep from
Zhengbang showed up in the comments
and claims that this was indeed a virus that they picked up and unintentionally passed on to the end clients. | 30 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416438",
"author": "e",
"timestamp": "2022-01-23T00:22:32",
"content": "Maybe this is a feature, not a bug? Part of their value adding?You get to see how the clones sold on ebay and aliexpress simplified your design for low cost manufacturing.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,372,814.210921 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/underwater-drone-films-is-in-film/ | Underwater Drone Films, Is In Film | Al Williams | [
"drone hacks"
] | [
"drone",
"submarine",
"undersea",
"underwater"
] | Having a drone that can follow you running or biking with a camera isn’t big news these days. But French firm Notilo Plus has an underwater drone that can follow and video an underwater diver. The
Seasam
has been around since 2019, but recently made an appearance in a French film,
The Deep House
about a couple exploring an underwater haunted house, as reported by New Atlas. You can see a video about the drone — and a trailer for the movie — in the videos below.
To follow a diver, the robot uses an acoustic signal from the user’s control unit to find the approximate location of the user. This works even in dark conditions. Once close enough, computer vision zeros in on the diver while a sonar system allows safe navigation.
The control unit can’t steer the drone but it can do things like stop and start the recording or adjust the following distance. It can also modify the position of the drone. You can, however, steer it from the surface with a tablet and a long tether cable or via a tethered buoy that connects to the operator using WiFi. The visual system can track things other than divers, so the drone can automatically keep, say, a section of moving ship in view.
For just under $14,000 you get a 9 kilogram drone that can descend to 100 meters and operate for about 90 minutes on the stock battery. There are battery upgrades available to get that time to four hours, along with other available upgrades. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416422",
"author": "QBot",
"timestamp": "2022-01-22T22:59:29",
"content": "SeaSam?Apple really screwed that name up for them.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6416428",
"author": "Feinfinger (with diabolic laughter)",
"t... | 1,760,372,814.589112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/running-methanol-rc-engines-on-gasoline/ | Running Methanol RC Engines On Gasoline | Lewin Day | [
"Engine Hacks"
] | [
"engine",
"gasoline",
"methanol",
"methanol engine",
"radio control",
"rc engine"
] | Methanol is a popular fuel for small engines used in radio-controlled models, but comes at a higher price than gasoline. It’s also harder to source and can be a mite corrosive, too. Gasoline comes with some benefits, but running it in a methanol engine usually requires some mods. [David] and [Bert] worked together to build a mixture controller
for just this purpose.
The controller uses a solenoid to control the flow of gasoline to a conventional methanol-tuned carburetor for a small RC engine, allowing it to be accurately tuned to run gasoline well across the whole RPM range. Having gone through many revisions, all documented
in a big forum thread
, the latest version uses a Seeduino Xiao controller and a BMP280 pressure and temperature sensor for determining the right fuel/air mixture for the conditions. A small OLED screen can optionally be fitted to help with configuration of the mixture controller.
The system has worked well in testing, with [David] and [Bert] reporting that they have “converted engines as small as 0.3 CID up to large radials with this system.” It’s a promising tool that could be handy to have in the RC modeller’s arsenal.
These tiny engines have other applications too; they can make for
one crazy power drill, that’s for sure! | 33 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416386",
"author": "Dude",
"timestamp": "2022-01-22T19:17:31",
"content": "Methanol is nasty to handle as well. The mean LD50 for humans is 56.2 g and 3 grams ingested will cause blindness.The problem is that methanol is converted into formaldehyde, formate, and formic acid in the ... | 1,760,372,814.55453 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/hackers-fingerprints-laptops-and-stickers/ | Hackers, Fingerprints, Laptops, And Stickers | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"birthday paradox",
"Culture",
"hackers",
"laptops",
"statistics",
"stickers"
] | A discussion ensued about our crazy hacker ways the other night. I jokingly suggested that with as many stickers as we each had on our trusty companion machines, they might literally be as unique as a fingerprint. Cut straight to nerds talking too much math.
First off, you could wonder about the chances of two random hackers having the same sticker on their laptop. Say, for argument’s sake, that globally there are 2,000 stickers per year that are cool enough to put on a laptop. (None of us will see them all.) If a laptop lasts five years, that’s a pool of 10,000 stickers to draw from. If you’ve only got one sticker per laptop, that’s pretty slim odds, even when the laptops are of the same vintage.
Real hackers have 20-50 stickers per laptop — at least in our sample of “real hackers”. Here,
the Birthday Paradox
kicks in and helps us out. Each additional sticker provides another shot at matching,
and
an extra shot at being matched. So while you and I are unlikely to have the same birthday, in a room full of 42 people, it’s 90% likely that
someone
will have their birthday matched. With eight of us in the room, that’s 240 stickers that could match each other. (9999 / 10000) ^ (240 * 210 / 2) = about an eight percent chance of no match, so a better than 90% chance that we’d have at least one matching sticker.
But that doesn’t answer the original question: are our be-stickered laptops unique, like fingerprints or snowflakes? There, you have to match each and every sticker on the laptop — a virtually impossible task, and while there were eight of us in the room, that’s just not enough to get any real juice from the Birthday Paradox. (1/10,000) ^ 30 = something with -120 in the exponent. More than all the atoms in the universe, much less hackers in a room, whether you take things to the eighth power or not.
I hear you mumbling “network effects”. We’ve all gone to the same conferences, and we have similar taste in stickers, and maybe we even trade with each other. Think six degrees of separation type stuff. Indeed, this was true in our room. A few of us had the same stickers because
we gave them to each other
. We had a lot more matches than you’d expect, even though we were all unique.
So while the math for these network effects is over my head, I think it says something deeper about our trusty boxen, their stickers, and their hackers. Each sticker also comes with a memory, and our collected memories make us unique like our laptops. But matching stickers are also more than pure Birthday Paradoxes, they represent the shared history of friends.
Wear your laptop stickers with pride!
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
! | 76 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416333",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-01-22T15:15:18",
"content": "Stickers don’t define you, they reflect you. So don’t use stickers as a way to measure someone’s “hacker quotient”.The only sticker I’ve put on a computer was when I got some free stuff from the Li... | 1,760,372,814.149286 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/online-tool-turns-stls-into-3d-ascii-art/ | Online Tool Turns STLs Into 3D ASCII Art | Dan Maloney | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"3d",
"ascii art",
"javascript",
"model",
"render",
"stl",
"three.js"
] | If you look hard enough, most of the projects we feature on these pages have some practical value. They may seem frivolous, but there’s usually something that compelled the hacker to commit time and effort to its doing. That doesn’t mean we don’t get our share of just-for-funsies projects, of course, which certainly describes
this online 3D ASCII art generator
.
But wait — maybe that’s not quite right. After all, [Andrew Sink] put a lot of time into the code for this, and for its predecessor,
his automatic 3D low-poly generator
. That project led to the current work, which like before takes an STL model as input, this time turning it into an ASCII art render. The character set used for shading the model is customizable; with the default set, the shading is surprisingly good, though. You can also swap to a black-on-white theme if you like, navigate around the model with the mouse, and even export the ASCII art as either a PNG or as a raw text file, no doubt suitable to send to
your tractor-feed printer
.
[Andrew]’s code, which is all up on
GitHub
, makes liberal use of the three.js library, so maybe stretching his 3D JavaScript skills is really the hidden practical aspect of this one. Not that it needs one — we think it’s cool just for the gee-whiz factor.
[via
Twitter
] | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416314",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2022-01-22T12:17:29",
"content": "Somewhat related:VLC player is capable of turning movies into ascii art.When I tried it though my (then) 10 year old PC could not really cope with the calculations.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1... | 1,760,372,814.691455 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/22/detecting-alpha-particles-using-copper-wire-and-high-voltage/ | Detecting Alpha Particles Using Copper Wire And High Voltage | Robin Kearey | [
"Science"
] | [
"alpha radiation",
"radioactivity",
"spark detector"
] | If you want to measure radioactivity, nothing really beats a Geiger counter: compact, rugged, and reasonably easy to use, they’re by far the most commonly used tool to detect ionizing radiation. However, several other methods have been used in the past, and while they may not be very practical today, recreating them can make for an interesting experiment.
[Mirko Pavleski] used easily obtainable components to build one such device known as
an alpha radiation spark detector
. Invented in 1945, a spark detector contains a strong electric field into which discharges are triggered by ionizing radiation. Unlike a Geiger-Müller tube, it uses regular air, which makes it sensitive only to alpha radiation; beta and gamma rays don’t cause enough ionization at ambient pressure. Fortunately, alpha radiation is the main type emitted by the americium tablets found in old smoke detectors, so a usable source shouldn’t be too hard to find.
The construction of this device is very simple: a few thin copper wires are suspended above a round metal can, while a cheap high-voltage source provides a strong electric field between them. Sparks fly from the wires to the can when an alpha source is brought nearby; a series resistor limits the current to ensure the wires don’t overheat and melt.
Although not really practical as a measurement device, the spark detector can nevertheless be used to perform simple experiments with radioactivity. As an example, [Mirko] demonstrates in the video embedded below that alpha particles are stopped by a piece of paper and therefore present no immediate danger to humans. The high voltage present in the device does however, so care must be taken with the detector more than with the radiation source.
We’ve seen several homebrew Geiger counters, some
built with plenty of duct tape
or
with the good old 555 timer
. But you can also
use photodiodes
or even
certain types of plastic
to visualize ionizing radiation. | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416304",
"author": "bbp",
"timestamp": "2022-01-22T10:40:00",
"content": "To say that beta and gamma radiation doesn’t cause enough ionization at ambiend pressures strikes me as wrong. It’s just that an alpha particle is several thousand times more massive, giving it a much greater... | 1,760,372,814.75193 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/sending-pics-to-grandma-no-smartphone-needed/ | Sending Pics To Grandma, No Smartphone Needed | Lewin Day | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"raspberry pi",
"telegram",
"thermal printer"
] | When it comes to keeping in touch with the grandparents, a lack of familiarity with modern technology can get in the way. [palmerabollo] wanted to share photos with his grandmother, but found that it was difficult as she didn’t have a smartphone or an Internet connection to receive photos.
Thus, a custom build for grandma was in order
!
(translated)
To minimise maintenance requirements, the build relies on a thermal receipt printer. Each roll of thermal paper is good for printing off about 150 images before needing a change, so it’s a low-cost, fuss-free solution with no need for ink changeovers.
A Raspberry Pi Zero 2W runs the show, paired with a HAT that provides cellular internet connectivity. Photos are sent over Telegram with some custom Python code
that [palmerabollo] put together.
The system uses the Python “thermalprinter” library, with the Floyd-Steinberg dithering algorithm baked in allowing nice quality even on the simple thermal printer.
It’s a fun build, and lets [palmerabollo] send his grandmother fun photos and messages without requiring any effort on her part. It’s super cute to see the photos stuck up on the refrigerator, too.
There’s plenty of fun to be had with thermal printers,
so don’t be afraid to get stuck in yourself
! Video after the break.
Para minimizar el mantenimiento elegí esta impresora térmica
https://t.co/MPKRMtiStb
, sin tinta. Come rollos de hasta 10 metros de papel (unas 150 fotos por 1 euro) y parecía cómoda la conexión USB aunque al final no la usé.
pic.twitter.com/2xbDRTsHjO
— Guido (@palmerabollo)
January 10, 2022
[Thanks to palmacas for the tip!] | 32 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416297",
"author": "Nitpicker Smartyass",
"timestamp": "2022-01-22T09:25:55",
"content": "Erm … it may be just me, but isn’t there a logic issue with this?Article reads:> she didn’t have a smartphone or an Internet connection to receive photos.and continues with> Photos are sent ov... | 1,760,372,814.870449 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/directional-antenna-3-way/ | Directional Antenna 3-Way | Al Williams | [
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"ham radio",
"phased array",
"radio",
"vertical"
] | If you read old antenna books, you’ll probably see the idea of phased vertical antennas. These use certain lengths of coax to control the phase of a signal going to three verticals in a triangular configuration. Depending on the phasing, you can cause the array of antennas to be directional in one of three directions. [DX Commander] designed
a very modern version
of this antenna and shows the theory behind it in a recent video that you can see below.
It seems another ham built the antenna and a control box for it which he’s sent to [DX Commander] although he hasn’t set it up yet to create an 80 meter directional antenna. We’ll be interested in seeing how it works in practice.
Of course, the phasing delay line and the verticals will be tuned to a specific frequency, so you can’t expect this to be a broadband system. It isn’t small either since the verticals are placed a quarter wavelength apart and you need about the same amount of coax for the phasing cable (accounting for velocity factor).
The control box can select which vertical gets the delay and that controls the direction. You can also switch the delay out completely and wind up with an omnidirectional antenna.
This is probably not going to wind up being
a cheap antenna
, especially on 80 meters. While you don’t often see phased arrays at HF, they are more common
at higher frequencies
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLsf5ZbNEMw | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416271",
"author": "Shirley Marquez",
"timestamp": "2022-01-22T03:22:09",
"content": "ON4UN wrote about phased verticals in his classic book, Low Band DXing, so this isn’t new territory. Not cheap, but no gain antenna for 80 meters is due to the size of the elements. Phased vertica... | 1,760,372,814.806784 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/robot-nerf-alarm-blasts-you-awake-with-foam/ | Robot Nerf Alarm Blasts You Awake With Foam | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"nerf",
"sentry gun"
] | The sentry gun targets [Vinnie] with blasts of foam as he runs through the bedroom to the sounds of Your New Morning Alarm by [Marc Rebillet].
Waking up is hard; sometimes you need more than a little chiming alarm to get you out of bed. When [Vinnie Satriale] started unconsciously switching his alarms off, he went all out,
deciding to build a Nerf sentry blaster to wake him up instead.
A Nerf Rival Nemesis MXVII-10K flywheel blaster is the core of the build, with a 100-round capacity of soft foam balls. Stepper motors are used to control a pan and tilt system to aim the blaster. It’s moved under instruction from a Raspberry Pi that uses machine vision algorithms running on a Coral USB accelerator to track targets in the bedroom. A relay board is then used to activate the blaster’s firing action, blasting any targets until they wake up.
[Vinnie] had plenty of fun during build, also showing the sentry gun off to his coworkers in the office. It’s a hard sentry to dodge, with the machine vision algorithm using a full-body tracking model, so merely covering one’s face won’t be enough to get away.
We’ve seen all kinds of sentry guns over the years, from those
firing rubber bands
to others
spraying jets of water
. Video after the break. | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416264",
"author": "Voltron",
"timestamp": "2022-01-22T01:31:00",
"content": "Is there code or any other design info anywhere?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6416447",
"author": "Christa Ford",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,815.05653 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/apollo-comms-flight-hardware-deep-dive/ | Apollo Comms Flight Hardware Deep Dive | Chris Lott | [
"Radio Hacks",
"Space"
] | [
"apollo",
"Apollo Guidance Computer",
"nasa",
"restoration",
"S-band",
"spacecraft",
"telemetry"
] | You no doubt recall the incredible Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) reverse engineering and restoration project featured on the
CuriousMarc
YouTube channel a few years ago. Well, [Marc] and the team are at it again, this time
restoring the Apollo Unified S-Band tracking and communication system flight hardware
. As always, the project is well documented, carefully explained, full of problems, and is proceeding slowly despite the lack of documentation.
Like the guidance computer, the Unified S-Band system was pretty innovative for its day — able to track, provide voice communications, receive television signals, and send commands to and monitor the health of the spacecraft via telemetry. The system operates on three frequencies, an uplink containing ranging code, voice and data. There are two downlinks, one providing ranging, voice, and telemetry, the other used for television and the playback of recorded data. All crammed into two hefty boxes totaling 29 kg.
So far, [Marc] has released part 9 of the series (for reference, the Apollo Guidance Computer took 27 parts plus 8 auxiliary videos). There seems to be even less documentation for this equipment than the AGC, although miraculously the guys keep uncovering more and more as things progress. Also random pieces of essential ground test hardware keep coming out of the woodwork. It’s a fascinating dive into not only the system itself, but the design and construction techniques of the era. Be sure to check out the series (part 1 is below the break) and follow along as they bring this system back to life. [Marc] is posting various documents related to the project on
his website
. And if you missed the AGC project, here’s
the playlist of videos
, and the team joined us for a
Hackaday Chat back in 2020
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416232",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T21:17:37",
"content": "CQ Magazine had a 2 part article about the Apollo communication system in 1968.QST for June 1972 had an article about Paul Wilson and Dick Knadle receiving a few Apollo flights after 11.QST for Apri... | 1,760,372,815.545195 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/pen-plotter-from-pcb-panels/ | Pen Plotter From PCB Panels | Chris Lott | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"grbl",
"pcb enclosure",
"pen plotter"
] | Hacker [12344321A] has built a
clever open-source pen plotter having a frame made from odd-shaped PCB panels
(Chinese). It holds an ordinary drafting pen and draws on a small writing platform 8 x 8 cm square. This is barely enough space to draw a business card, depending on which country you’re from. The motion appears to be provided by DVD stepper motor head positioning assemblies, and the controller is an ESP32-based GRBL 3-axis board. User control is via WiFi and the plotter can be seen in operation being driven from the user’s smartphone (see video on the project page above).
Linear Motion Assemblies from a DVD player?
This looks like it would be an inexpensive build, and seems sturdy enough despite being literally held together by solder and paper clips. But be forewarned, the project is documented on an open-source hardware sharing site sponsored by EasyEDA called
OSHWHub
— the Chinese equivalent of their similar English-language
OSHWLab
. Hence all the notes are in Chinese, although Google translate can help here. [12344321A] provides all the engineering design files under GPL 3.0 license.
Thanks to [J. Peterson] for finding this project and bringing it to our attention via the tip line. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416230",
"author": "Mirko",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T21:03:25",
"content": "Those linear actuators are sold on AliExpress :)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6416235",
"author": "asdf",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T21:35:57"... | 1,760,372,816.03275 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/casually-chirping-into-the-world-of-lorawan/ | Casually Chirping Into The World Of LoRaWAN | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"internet hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"DASH7",
"LoRaWAN",
"NB-IoT"
] | While wireless communications are unquestionably useful in projects, common wireless protocols such as WiFi and Bluetooth peter out after only a number of meters, which is annoying when your project is installed in the middle of nowhere. Moving to an LTE-based or similar mobile solution can help with the range, but this does not help when there’s poor cell coverage, and it tends to use more power. Fortunately, for low-bitrate, low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) like e.g. sensor networks, there’s a common solution in the form of LoRaWAN, as in
lo
ng-
ra
nge wide area network (WAN).
The proprietary
LoRa
RF modulation technique that underlies LoRaWAN is based on Chirp Spread Spectrum (
CSS
). This modulation technique is highly resistant to channel noise and fading as well as Doppler shift, enabling it to transmit using relatively low power for long distances. LoRaWAN builds on top of the physical layer provided by LoRa to then create the protocol that devices can then use to communicate with other LoRa devices.
Courtesy of global LoRaWAN gateway and software providers such as
The Things Industries
and
ThingSpeak
, it’s possible even as a hobbyist to set up a LoRaWAN-powered sensor network with minimal cost. Let’s take take a look at exactly what is involved in setting up LoRaWAN devices, and what possible alternatives to LoRaWAN might be considered.
No Free RF Lunch
When it comes to picking the appropriate wireless communication protocol for a project, it’s essential to keep in mind that one gets to pick any two of the following high bandwidth, long distance, long battery life. This is evidenced by for example how amazingly quickly one’s smartphone drains its battery when ramping up gigabyte-sized transfers over 5G mmWave, whereas Zigbee manages a paltry 250 kb/s, but can operate for months on a coin cell, or forever using energy harvesting.
LoRa spreading factor comparison (Credit:
Sakshama Ghoslya
)
LoRaWAN has a
best-case data throughput rate
(Adelantado et al., 2017) of a few tens of kilobits per second, depending on the spreading factor (SF). Here the SF is essentially the ratio for how fast the transmitted signal is being sent: a higher SF (up to 12) means a slower transmission and thus lower bandwidth (<1 kbps), but with increased reliability. A lower SF (down to 7) means that the signal is being transmitted faster, thus with higher bandwidth, but with possible loss of reliability.
LoRaWAN does support parity bits, as every fifth bit, and LoRaWAN end devices (‘motes’) generally wait for an acknowledgement from the gateway so that they can retransmit in case of a timeout. Even so, depending on the environment, messages may be lost due to interference, obstructions and competing motes sending data.
LoRa achieves its long-distance performance as mentioned using CSS, which is a form of
spread spectrum
signaling, but different from frequency hopping (FHSS) or direct-sequence spread spectrum (
DSSS
), the latter of which underlies Zigbee and some forms of WiFi (IEEE 802.11). Where CSS differs is that it does not use any special encoding, uses a constant amplitude yet modulates in the frequency domain.
LoRa signaling can thus be identified as ‘chirps’ in the RF spectrum, that either increase in frequency (‘up-chirp’) or decrease (‘down-chip’) within a certain band, either 125 kHz or 500 kHz. These can be used to create symbols that are then used to encode LoRa frames, as in the below image.
A LoRa communication sequence, showing the distinct up- and down-chirp symbols. (Credit:
Sakshama Ghoslya
)
In this sequence we see 8 preamble up-chirp symbols that identify the start of a LoRa frame, following by two down-chirp synchronization symbols. These are then followed by the payload message. The exact duration of each symbol is dependent on the SF chosen.
Adding The Wide Area
As alluded to earlier, LoRaWAN relies on gateways to act as the interface between LoRa-enabled devices and the wider Internet, translating from LoRa to an IP-based protocol and vice versa. The company behind LoRa (Semtech)
covers the details
behind this in their documentation. This includes the security aspect of transmitting the data via LoRaWAN. Assuming end devices are configured with security keys, all traffic between an end device and server can be fully authenticated and encrypted.
Basic LoRaWAN layout. (Credit: Semtech)
Another important aspect with LoRaWAN end devices is that of device classes. Here three distinct classes are identified, which largely depends on their power budget:
class A: these are devices which wake up occasionally to communicate with a server, transmit some data, etc. This could be e.g. a sensor node.
class B: devices that interact with a server on set intervals, allowing it to also respond to requests.
class C: in this category, the device is always powered-on and always communicating.
Just Plug It In
ST B-L072Z-LRWAN1 LoRaWAN/Sigfox development board.
At this point, we should have a clear idea of what the technology behind LoRaWAN entails, and what is needed to set up a LoRaWAN. This raises the question of where exactly we would get a gateway and the other requisite hardware from. Assuming that we’re not looking at setting up a commercial operation here, we are still left with a number of straightforward options to get started.
Essentially the way to go is to purchase some off-the-shelf modules to connect to one’s computing or sensor platform of choice and also create your own gateway, or create an account with one of the open LoRaWANs active in the target region.
Here typing ‘LoRaWAN module’ into one’s search engine of choice gets you a smorgasbord of choice, ranging from
Semtech’s SX1301
to
Murata’s offerings
or one of the dozens of alternatives, obtainable as IC to integrate into your own hardware design, as pluggable module or as entire development board (e.g.
STM32L0-based
). What the best choice is would mostly depend on the device class and whether it’s intended to be an end device or gateway.
With that sorted, the main question is probably whether to run one’s own gateway or not. If yes, then
ThingSpeak
(Ruby-based,
GitHub
) and
The Things Stack
(Go-based,
GitHub
) by The Things Industries are two popular options. If that isn’t your jam, or setting up gateways in the area where you intend to deploy the end devices isn’t feasible, signing up to use the
ThingSpeak’s network
, or
The Things Network
is an option. This comes with online dashboards as well, removing the need for any locally hosted server hardware.
Not The Only Game In Town
Of course LoRaWAN isn’t the only option here. Another common LPWAN option is
Sigfox
, though its reach among hobbyists is at this point somewhat limited.
DASH7
is an interesting, open protocol, which operates just like LoRaWAN in unlicensed bands. Semtech themselves appear to see DASH7 as
complementary
to LoRaWAN, with DASH7’s higher data rates making it more applicable to certain scenarios. Interestingly, Semtech notes that hybrid LoRaWAN and DASH7 devices are already being deployed.
The idea behind this is that sometimes DASH7 is more efficient to use as it can complete a transaction faster with its higher bandwidth, whereas other times LoRaWAN ends up being more energy efficient. This is an aspect that is possibly commonly overlooked in comparisons between these different LPWAN technologies.
Meanwhile,
Wael Ayoub et al. (2018)
identify LoRaWAN, DASH7 and NB-IoT as the three main LPWAN standards.
NB-IoT
(Narrowband IoT) was developed by
3GPP
, with the first specification being frozen in 2016. Unlike the other two standards, NB-IoT uses licensed spectrum. Both NB-IoT and LoRaWAN feature a similar range, though NB-IoT has the advantage of operating in licensed spectrum, meaning potentially less interference from the countless consumer devices that also operate in those bands.
Wrapping Up
Clearly there are more than enough options around for wireless communications to fill a wide range of needs and requirements. At the moment it would seem that LoRaWAN is the obvious LPWAN choice for hobbyists as well as for small commercial deployments, but DASH7 might make sense if you need more bandwidth.
The best part of all of this is probably how easy it is for even those with a modest budget to get started with fun projects that involve leaving sensor and actuator devices around a wide area, enabling exciting options such as farm automation and monitoring. How things will evolve here the coming years will be hard to tell, but with how unstoppable LPWAN appears to be as part of the IoT wave, it’s clear that the options will be increasing rather than decreasing. | 13 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6416245",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-01-21T22:31:18",
"content": "DASH7 is the real winner here because it can be used with dirt-cheap hardware and the spec is open. The spec being open is good because there are multiple implementations, including lightweight ones that ... | 1,760,372,815.384064 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/21/hackaday-podcast-152-555-timer-extravaganza-emf-chip-glitching-3-ways-a-magnetic-mechanical-keyboard-and-the-best-tricorder-ever/ | Hackaday Podcast 152: 555 Timer Extravaganza, EMF Chip Glitching 3 Ways, A Magnetic Mechanical Keyboard, And The Best Tricorder Ever | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they bring you up to speed on the best stories and projects from the week. There’s some pretty unfortunate news for the physical media aficionados in the audience, but if you’re particularly keen on 50 year old integrated circuits, you’ll love hearing about the winners of the 555 Timer Contest. We’ll take a look at a singing circuit sculpture powered by the ESP32, extol the virtues of 3D printed switches, follow one hacker’s dream of building the ultimate
Star Trek
tricorder prop, and try to wrap our heads around how electronic devices can be jolted into submission. Stick around to the end as we take a close look at some extraordinary claims about sniffing out computer viruses, and wrap things up by wondering why everyone is trying to drive so far.
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!
Direct Download
(65 MB)
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
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Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 152 Show Notes:
News This Week:
SGX Deprecation Prevents PC Playback Of 4K Blu-ray Discs
Congratulations Winners Of The 555 Timer Contest!
Giant 555 Timer
Menorah555
Cyclotone – The Mechanical Punk Console Sequencer
What’s that Sound?
If you know what this week’s sound is,
fill out this form for a chance to win a Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
The Eerie Sounds Of Ioalieia: An ESP32/Valve/Analog Hybrid Circuit Sculpture
ESP32 Is The Brains Behind This Art Installation
3D Printed Magnetic Switches Promise Truly Custom Keyboards
Giant 3D Prints Piece-by-Piece
Improving An Already Phenomenal
Star Trek
Prop
Glitch Your Way To Reverse-Engineering Glory With The PicoEMP
Doing The Right Thing The Wrong Way: Dumping STM8 Firmware With 555 Timers
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks:
AI Camera Knows Its S**t
Ultra Cheap PCB Wrenches Make Perfect Kit Accessory
Threeboard: Short On Keys, Long On Documentation
Tom’s Picks:
Acid-Damaged Game Boy Restored
Improve Your Front Panels
Serial Studio One Year On
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Identifying Malware By Sniffing Its EM Signature
Longer Range EVs Are On The Horizon | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,815.275796 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/bringing-the-power-of-edm-to-the-home-shop/ | Bringing The Power Of EDM To The Home Shop | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"EDM",
"Electrical Discharge Machining",
"machining",
"servo",
"stepper",
"tension"
] | When you see something made from metal that seems like it would be impossible to manufacture, chances are good it was made with some variety of electrical discharge machining. EDM is the method of choice for hard-to-machine metals, high aspect ratio hole drilling, and precise surface finishes that let mating parts slip together with almost zero clearance. The trouble is, EDM is a bit fussy, and as a result hasn’t made many inroads to the home shop.
[Action BOX] aims to change that with
a DIY wire EDM machine
. In wire EDM, a fine brass wire is used as an electrode to slowly erode metal in a dielectric bath. The wire is consumable, and has to constantly move from a supply spool through the workpiece and onto a takeup spool. Most of the build shown in the video below is concerned with the wire-handling mechanism, which is prototyped from 3D-printed parts and a heck of a lot of rollers and bearings. Maintaining the proper tension on the wire is critical, so a servo-controlled brake is fitted to the drivetrain, which itself is powered by a closed-loop stepper. Tension is measured by a pair of strain gauges and Arduinos, which control the position of the shaft brake servo and the speed of the motor on the takeup spool.
Unfortunately, in testing this setup proved to live up to EDM’s fussy reputation. The brass wire kept breaking as soon as cutting started, and [Action BOX] never made any actual cuts. There’s certainly promise, though, and we’re looking forward to developments. For more on EDM theory, check out
[Ben Krasnow]’s look at EDM hole-drilling
.
[Alen] sent in the tip for this one. Thanks! | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415965",
"author": "Gratian Crisan",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T21:33:16",
"content": "If you want to see another home built wire EDM setup check out the videos from BAXEDM:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy4kgsAYxcraee8w5SfqXPA/videosHe’s got a working setup with some pretty impres... | 1,760,372,815.437373 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/setup-menu-uses-text-editor-hack/ | Setup Menu Uses Text Editor Hack | Chris Lott | [
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"ANSI escape codes",
"setup",
"usb",
"Volume knob"
] | Many embedded devices that require a setup menu will use a USB serial port which you connect to your favorite terminal emulator. But we recently encountered a generic USB knob that did setup using a text editor, like Notepad or even Vim (although that was a bit ugly). A company called iWit makes
several kinds of USB knobs
which end up in many such products.
These generic USB knobs are normally just plug-and-play, and are used to control your PC’s volume and muting. Some models, like the iWit, the user can
configure the mapping within the device
. For example, knob rotation can be set to generate up and down arrow keys, and knob press could be ENTER. One could do this kind of mapping on the PC, but many of these USB knobs can do it for you. The crux of the setup is this menu (which you can see in action in the first 30 seconds of the video below).
- WINDOWS MODE -
1 Clockwise : Up Key
2 Counterclockwise : Down Key
3 Press : Enter
4 Press+Clockwise : Next
5 Press+Counterclockwise : Previous
6 Long Press : Play/Pause
[RESTORE DEFAULT]
[SAVE & QUIT]
That’s nice, of course, but the surprising point is how the setup menu is implemented in the first place. The knob, already being an HID, spews forth the setup menu as if it were being typed from a keyboard. Turning the knob to select an option generates ANSI escape sequences for up and down cursor movement and somehow highlights the current line. Looking at the stream, you can see that the menus are proceeded with these codes:
ESC [ 4 ~ Private code?
ESC [ 1 ; 2 H Cursor row 1, col 2
ESC [ D Cursor back one column
ESC [ 3 ~ Private code?
and item selection is simply the up and down cursor movement codes:
ESC [ A Cursor up one row
ESC [ B Cursor down one row
This makes sense, if we were talking to a terminal. But it’s not entirely clear how the typical text editor handles ANSI escape sequences. It’s not a big stretch to imagine that up and down cursor codes would be interpreted as arrow keys by either the operating system or the editor itself, but the highlighting remains a bit of a mystery. If you have any ideas, or have done anything similar yourself, let us know in the comments below.
The video below was found on [Nelson Chu]’s
Expresii blog
, an artist who specializes in simulating organic brush strokes in computer graphics systems. The particular knob used in this article was branded DROK, so you might have this capability in your USB knob even though it doesn’t say iWit on the label. If you’d like full control of your USB knob, build your own as we wrote about in
this article from 2020
. | 19 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415945",
"author": "X",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T20:55:30",
"content": "Or do like mbed and make a fake USB drive with fake files. Or make a fake Ethernet adapter and a web server to configure it. Put a dhcp server in there and it’s plug and play. Better yet, do both and put urls ... | 1,760,372,815.332732 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/remoticon-2021-debra-ansell-connects-pcb-in-ways-you-didnt-expect/ | Remoticon 2021 // Debra Ansell Connects PCB In Ways You Didn’t Expect | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"LED Hacks",
"Parts",
"Slider",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"Circuit Sculpture",
"connectors",
"pcb art",
"PCB design"
] | “LEDs improve everything.” Words to live by. Most everything that Debra Ansell of [GeekMomProjects] makes is bright, bold, and blinky. But if you’re looking for a simple string of WS2812s, you’re barking up the wrong tree. In the last few years, Debra has been making larger and more complicated assemblies, and that has meant diving into the mechanical design of modular PCBs. In the process Debra has come up with some great techniques that you’ll be able to use in your own builds, which she shared with us in a
presentation during the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon
.
She starts off with a quick overview of the state of play in PCB art, specifically of the style that she’s into these days: three dimensional constructions where the physical PCB itself is a sculptural element of the project. She’s crossing that with the popular triangle-style wall hanging sculpture, and her own fascination with “inner glow” — side-illuminated acrylic diffusers. Then she starts taking us down the path of
creating her own wall art
in detail, and this is where you need to listen up.
For instance, getting a PCB made with white soldermask — perhaps because you like its reflective qualities — is more expensive than standard green or even black. Debra’s hack? Silkscreen is free. Solid white silk over a black mask looks just like a white PCB to us! She breaks down the retail prices of her materials for us, comparing PCB with acrylic. PCBs end up being about 50% more expensive per square cm than raw acrylic stock, but unless cutting and shaping that acrylic is free, it’s probably a wash. Plus if you have
any
electronics that needs mounting, you might as well just go with the PCB.
The heart of this talk, though, is about something that’s not so high-tech, but is make-or-break for any project that involves multiple working parts: connectors. (Check out her take on
why looking for the right connector is like online dating
!) After working through all the design trade-offs, she comes up with her own.
Spoiler alert: the custom PCBs are connected together with more custom PCBs! The sandwich of acrylic standoffs, pressure connectors, and PCB material ticks all the boxes: mechanical stability, budget friendliness, and good looks.
Debra closes out with an overview of her more recent work. You’ll learn why not to use dollhouse hinges as connectors on a wearable bracelet, the pros and cons of soldering PCBs together versus using custom connectors, how to make a snake out of boards connected by custom slip rings, and even see a brand new design: her Light Tiles 2.0. If you’re not inspired to make something blink, or to make a modular construction from multiple PCBs, we don’t know what it’ll take!
Debra has also
posted up the talk’s slides
if you want to follow along at home. | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415911",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T18:50:12",
"content": "“LEDs improve everything,” is exactly what marketers think. Of course, it has to an ULTRA BRIGHT BLUE LED that is ALWAYS active, just to inform you the damn thing is turned on.*deep breath* I’m going to h... | 1,760,372,815.502401 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/congratulations-winners-of-the-2021-555-timer-contest/ | Congratulations Winners Of The 555 Timer Contest! | Elliot Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"555 timer",
"555 timer contest",
"winners"
] | Sometimes the best inspiration is limitation. The 555 timer does “one thing” — compares a voltage to a couple thresholds and outputs a signal accordingly. It’s two comparators, a voltage ladder, and a flip-flop. And yet, it’s the most sold single chip of all time, celebrating its 50th birthday this year! So when
Hackaday runs a 555 Timer Contest
, hackers of all stripes come out with their best work to show their love for the Little DIP That Could.
The Winners
Far and away the favorite entry was the
Giant 555 Timer
by [Rudraksha Vegad]. Every one of our judges rated it in the top five, and it took top honors twice. On its face, this is a simple “giant 555 in a box” build, but have a look under the hood. Each sub-module that makes up the 555 — comparators, flip-flop, and amplifier — are made from salvaged discrete parts in actual breadboard fashion, soldered to brass nails hammered into wood. As an end product, it’s a nice piece of woodworking, but as a process of creation, it’s a masterwork in understanding the 555 at its deepest level. We should all make one!
The
Menorah555
is a simple design with some very nice tricks up its sleeve. Perhaps the cutest of which is pulling the central candle out and lighting the others with it — a trick that involves a supercapacitor and reed switches. Each of the candle lighting circuits, however, use a 555 timer both for its intended purpose of providing a timed power-on reset pulse, and another 555 is used as a simple flip-flop. It’s a slick design, and a great user interaction.
The
Cyclotone Mechanical Punk Console Sequencer
is a rotating tower of circuit sculpture and noisemakers. This one looks great, is amazingly well documented in the video series, and uses a billion clever little tricks along the way. The 555’s role? Each of the four levels is the classic
Atari Punk Console circuit
.
All three of these projects win a $150 shopping spree at Digi-Key. That’s a lot of timers!
Hello World!
You had one task — blink an LED with the 555. [Sami] made a
PCB of an Audi e-tron
for a departing colleague. What can we say? The LEDs blink with 555s, and the board looks snazzy.
Bandwidth Buster
Turns out that you can make a
4 MHz radio transmitter out of just two LMC555s
. (They’re the fast ones.) Indeed, the circuit’s
only
semiconductors are the two 555s. One creates the carrier frequency, and the other simply inverts the signal. The two of them in tandem form a push-pull amplifier, for “maximum” power. 4 MHz with a 555 oscillator isn’t bad!
Chiptunes
One of the strangest hacks, hands-down, is the
Accordeonator
. It’s made out of a CD drive, and pulling the CD sled in and out turns the drive motor, which is used as a generator to power the whole circuit. Seven buttons connect up timing resistors to the 555, which makes the music. Very cool!
Shouldn’t Have Used a 555
If there are times when you should have, there must also be times when you shouldn’t, right? For instance, you probably shouldn’t use 555s as stepper motor drivers, or as counters, in this
leaping-frog LED sculpture
. A 555 definitely doesn’t have the precise temporal resolution necessary to
glitch an STM8’s read-only protection bit
, right? Certainly you wouldn’t
bit-bang the DMX512 serial protocol
or
make a serial ADC
with a 555? And if you shouldn’t use a 555, does it count if you
turn an ATTiny85 into a drop-in replacement
?
This category didn’t disappoint, and we’re not surprised. Tell Hackaday readers what they can’t do, and they’ll do it!
Art for Art’s Sake
Finally, our judges really liked
CS 555
, a wholly circuit-sculpture discrete 555, and the
Spirit of the ’62 Rambler Nixie Clock
which animates an old car’s dash as if driven by a ghostly force. Of course it’s a 555.
WTF Award
We honestly didn’t know that we needed an honorable mention category for
making your own 20-pin 555-timer based silicon
, but apparently we did. [Adrian Freed] has
a pair of new 555-based IC designs
that include other features on-chip: one with eight output buffers and a counter, and another with the guts of a linear-feedback shift register inside. His demo example?
Blinking a bunch of LEDs
, naturally. We’d love to see more detail about this project in the future.
… and More
Kudos to all entrants in the contest! You should really take some time to browse
all
of the entries
, and not just those that resonated most with us. Because who knows, you might just find yourself stranded on a desert island, with only a crate of 555s on hand, and need to reconstruct modern society.
Thanks again to our sponsor Digi-Key for the prizes and the support! | 25 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415881",
"author": "Orlando Hoilett",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T16:35:01",
"content": "Really cool entries! Congrats to everyone who participated.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6415915",
"author": "Tim",
"timestamp": "... | 1,760,372,815.612961 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/unpicking-the-hype-around-web-3-whats-the-tech/ | Unpicking The Hype Around Web 3, What’s The Tech? | Jenny List | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [] | The buzzword of the moment in the frothier portions of the technology press is inescapable: “Web 3”. This is a collective word for a new generation of decentralised online applications using blockchain technologies, and it follows on from a similar excitement in the mid-2000s surrounding so-called “Web 2” websites that broke away from the static pages of the early Internet.
It’s very evident reading up on Web 3, that there is a huge quantity of hype involved in talking about this Next Big Thing. If this were April 1st it would be tempting to pen a lengthy piece sending up the coverage, but here in January that just won’t do. Instead it’s time to peer under the hype and attempt to discern what Web 3 really is from a technology standpoint. Sure, a Web 3 application uses blockchain technology, often reported breathlessly as “the Blockchain” as though there were only one, but
how
? What is the real technology beneath it all?
Where Did All This Web 3 Stuff Come From Anyway?
“This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” Tim Berners-Lee’s famous sticker on the front of his NeXTcube, the first web server. Binary Koala
CC BY-SA 2.0
.
In its earliest days, the web could be found only in academia, from Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and then from others such as the National Center For Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. In the mid-1990s the vast majority of web sites were served by the NCSA’s HTTPD server software, which served as the basis for the later hugely popular Apache project. Sites from this era were later dubbed Web 1.0, and operated as static HTML pages which could be refreshed only by reloading a page.
The millennium brought us Web 2.0. This is generally taken to refer to a much slicker generation of sites that made use of user-generated content. Behind every such generational shift lies a fresh technology, and if it was the HTTP server for Web 1.0, it was the use of Javascript in the browser to refresh page content on the fly for Web 2.0. This was dubbed AJAX, for Asynchronous Javascript And XML, and though the data transfer is now much more likely to be JSON than XML it remains the way that today’s web sites blur the line between a web page and an app.
From Web servers to crypto miners, a rack of mining rigs in a crypto farm. Marco Krohn,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
And so we come to Web 3, and here we have a problem when it comes to understanding the technology of it all. Blockchain technologies lie at at its very root, but there’s precious little to be said about
how
this happens. We’re told that this will decentralise the holding of data as practiced by traditional monolithic web app providers such as Facebook or Twitter who store everything on their own servers into new Web 3 providers who instead store it through so-called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations on a distributed blockchain. The processing of the blockchain will result in a digital currency, which will provide a monetary incentive for the miners who keep the application running by processing the blockchain, and presumably make a tidy profit for the owners of the DAO.
We Need A Bit More Than “It Uses A Blockchain”.
It’s in that last sentence that we find the problem with Web 3 as it’s portrayed, because while there are doubtless online applications that could use a blockchain for storage, the inclusion of a cryptocurrency sprinkles it with pixie dust and the real story becomes obscured by a cloud of hype from people with a swarm of little Bitcoin symbols buzzing around their vision. Everything becomes a potential vehicle for a Web 3 DAO, even if there’s little information as to what benefits this could confer.
Is a metaphorical glass of this stuff necessary to understand what’s going on? MissouriStateArchives,
Public domain
.
Of course, while for those who’ve drunk enough Kool-Aid it’s obvious that all currently operating websites should move immediately to a blockchain, it’s difficult to see why it would be of any benefit at all to for example a site like Hackaday.
Digging a little further though, we encounter smart contracts. A smart contract is a piece of code which once enacted is executed only when a defined set of conditions are present. They are built into the fabric of some blockchain implementations, and since Ethereum is a well-known example it’s that blockchain which underpins may Web 3 proposals.
As a very simple example, Alice might sell an item to Bob for 1 CryptoUnit to be paid when the item is delivered, and encode the transasction as a smart contract that forms an entry in a block on the CryptoUnit blockchain. When Bob receives the item he places a fresh entry saying so and specifying the contract in the previous entry, and in mining the block containing the fresh entry the code is executed and the required amount is automatically transferred to Alice.
If your comment is that Alice and Bob’s example is a little staged you would of course be correct, but there are plenty of real-world places in which a transaction currently done online via a privately-held centralised service might be done in this way using a blockchain. Perhaps a crowdfunding site could use a smart contract to trigger payments once a campaign had been funded, for example.
Just Because you Can, Should You?
So we’ve taken a stab at finding where the tech lies in Web 3, and come up with a few pointers. The question then is now not what applications might be placed on a blockchain, but whether indeed they
should
be. It’s one that will be answered by a host of Web 3 startups, but we’d expect the process not to be without bumps in the road.
Questions of energy consumption in blockchain processing will not prove easy to bypass, nor will those of vulnerability in what will become a whole new arena for attack vectors. Then there’s the interesting prospect that a much-used blockchain will eventually grow to the point at which its sheer unwieldiness brings its own problems when using it to underpin applications.
At the time of writing the Ethereum blockchain size is still measured (just) in hundreds of gigabytes, but what challenges will be faced in processing smart contracts when it inevitably reaches the hundreds of terabytes, or even petabytes? Even then, technical concerns aside, there’s the evergreen question of what it will mean for blockchain-based services when market fluctuations mean that their cryptocurrencies fall to the point of unprofitability for miners?
It’s clear that while the technical underpinnings for Web 3 are definitely real despite the sometimes overwhelming hype, their immediate benefit from the point of view of an end user is not as clear-cut as AJAX was for Web 2. We don’t want to shoot the idea down in flames, but neither are we quite ready to take a long pull on that Kool-Aid. It will be interesting to be observers over the coming years, and see what the real world makes of services using the technology. | 99 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415846",
"author": "monsonite",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T15:18:35",
"content": "Douglas Adam’s wrote in the 1970s how human civilisation was brought down by putting all our resources into manufacturing shoes……50 years later we might consume our remaining resouces, powering server f... | 1,760,372,815.832026 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/printing-your-own-exoskeleton/ | Printing Your Own Exoskeleton | Matthew Carlson | [
"Engineering",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"3x0",
"DIY exoskeleton"
] | While not quite in a cave, the idea of making your own exoskeleton with limited tools does have a Tony Stark esque vibe. [Andrew Piccinno] is a mechanical engineer
pursuing the dream of 3D printing a full-body exoskeleton called 3X0
. It’s a project he’s been ruminating on since college, but the work really began in earnest about five months ago. Unfortunately, there are too many pictures to include here,
but check out his Instagram
or
makeprojects
for more photos.
To make sure parts fit, [Andrew] started with creating a mesh of his body. After running fifty pictures of himself holding relatively still through some photogrammetry software, he had a decent mesh. While measurements weren’t millimeter-accurate, the relative sizes of everything were reasonably accurate. While the design is modeled with his measurements in mind, all the different pieces are parametric, which in theory would allow someone to tweak the designs to fit their own body.
So far, all the parts have been entirely 3D printed, except for steel balls bearings, gas pistons, and tension bands. The non-3D printed parts are picked to be easy to obtain as the gas piston is just 100 N furniture pistons. The design process includes quite a bit of math, motion study, and simulation to make sure the part that he’s printing will not only fit but move correctly. Many parts, such as the shoulder, are built around a large custom bearing that allows the piece to move correctly with the user’s joints.
While still in the middle of development, [Andrew] has made some serious progress, and we’re looking forward to seeing it completed. The current design is primarily passive with just a few springs and pistons, but he is already looking forward to making it active to the degree that it can augment a user’s motions rather than just taking the load off. It’s clear that [Andrew] believes that exoskeletons are a look into a potential future, and
we couldn’t agree more
. In a similar vein, perhaps the
techniques used in this powered exoskeleton arm on a budget
could be used to power the 3X0? | 23 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415826",
"author": "segipo",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T14:13:27",
"content": "Good intentions, bad idea. In case of an accident his injuries may not be covered by insurance.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6415836",
"a... | 1,760,372,815.894468 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/20/when-a-single-bit-was-enough-into-the-sound-of-the-zx-spectrum/ | When A Single Bit Was Enough, Into The Sound Of The ZX Spectrum | Jenny List | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"1-bit",
"pwm",
"sound",
"ZX Spectrum"
] | It’s normal for a computer in 2022 to come with a fully-featured sound card containing a complete synthesizer as well as high-quality PCM sound recording and playback. It’s referred to as a sound card after the way the hardware first appeared in the world of PCs, but in fact it’s now considered so essential as to be a built-in part of most mainboards. There was a time when computers boasted considerably less impressive sound hardware, and among the chorus of SIDs and AY chips of the perhaps the least well-featured was the original Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Its one-bit sound, a single line on an I/O port, is
the subject of a thorough investigation from [Forgotten Computer]
. It’s a long video which we’ve placed below the break, but for those with an interest in 8-bit music it should make a for a fascinating watch.
For Sir Clive Sinclair the 1-bit audio must have been welcome as it removed the need for an expensive sound chip and kept the Spectrum to its low price point, but on the face of it there was little more it could do than create simple beeps using Sinclair BASIC’s built-in BEEP command. The video gives us an in-depth look at how interleaving and PWM could be used to create much more complex sounds such as the illusion of multiple voices and even sampled sounds. In particular his technique of comparing the audio output with its corresponding pin on the Sinclair ULA shows the effect of the machine’s simple low-pass filter, though the music was often so close to the edge of what the interface could do that aliasing sounds are often very obvious.
As he demonstrates the various ingenious techniques that game and demo developers used to extract performance from such limited hardware that could even try to compete with the more sophisticated machines even at the same time as their code was running whatever was on the screen, it’s difficult not to come away with immense respect for their skills. If you’ve ever experimented with computer audio then you should try hardware this simple for yourself. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415796",
"author": "Dave",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T11:05:03",
"content": "1-bit forum :http://randomflux.info/1bit/Utz and Shiru are absolute guru’s !!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6415817",
"author": "RÖB",
"timest... | 1,760,372,815.936799 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/reverse-engineering-the-sega-mega-drive/ | Reverse Engineering The SEGA Mega Drive | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games",
"Software Development"
] | [
"68000",
"atari",
"atari st",
"dev board",
"development",
"firmware",
"genesis",
"homebrew",
"megadrive",
"motorola",
"retro",
"schematics",
"sega"
] | With the widespread adoption of emulators, almost anyone can start playing video games from bygone eras. Some systems are even capable of supporting homebrew games, with several having active communities that are still creating new games even decades later. This ease of programming for non-PC platforms wasn’t always so easy, though. If you wanted to develop games on a now-antique console when it was still relatively new, you had to jump through a lot of hoops. [Tore] shows us how it would have been done with
his Sega Mega Drive development kit that he built from scratch
.
While [Tore] had an Atari ST, he wanted to do something a little more cutting edge and at the time there was nothing better than the Mega Drive (or the Genesis as it was known in North America). It had a number of features that lent the platform to development, namely the Motorola 68000 chip that was very common for the time and as a result had plenty of documentation available. He still needed to do quite a bit of reverse engineering of the system to get a proper dev board running, though, starting with figuring out how the cartridge system worked. He was able to build a memory bank that functioned as a re-writable game cartridge.
With the hard parts out of the way [Tore] set about building the glue logic, the startup firmware which interfaced with his Atari ST, and then of course wiring it all together. He was eventually able to get far enough along to send programs to the Mega Drive that would allow him to control sprites on a screen with the controller, but unfortunately he was interrupted before he could develop any complete games. The amount of research and work to get this far is incredible, though, and there may be some helpful nuggets for anyone in the homebrew Mega Drive community today. If you don’t want to get this deep into the Mega Drive hardware, though, you can
build a cartridge that allows for development on native Sega hardware instead
. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415777",
"author": "darkspr1te",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T08:26:01",
"content": "the Yellow tab was EA work around for not paying license fee’s to sega,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0qe1FNqtCo,",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id":... | 1,760,372,816.127647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/make-your-python-cli-tools-pop-with-rich/ | Make Your Python CLI Tools Pop With Rich | Matthew Carlson | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"ANSI escape codes",
"cli",
"python",
"terminal"
] | It seems as though more and more of the simple command-line tools and small scripts that used to be bash or small c programs are slowly turning into python programs. Of course, we will just have to wait and see if this ultimately turns out to be a good idea. But in the meantime, next time you’re revamping or writing a new tool,
why not spice it up with Rich?
Rich is a python library written by [Will McGugan] that offers text formatting, colors, graphs, progress bars, markdown, syntax highlighting, charts, and more through the power of ANSI codes. The best part is that it works with macOS, Windows, and Linux. In addition, it offers logging solutions that work out of the box. One of the best features of Rich is the inspect functionality. You can pass in an object, and it will use reflection to print a beautiful chart detailing what exactly the object is, helpful in debugging. The other feature is the traceback, which shows a formatted and annotated snapshot of relevant code on the stack during exceptions.
The source itself is well-written python with comments and typing information. There’s a good chance you’ll pick up a trick or two reading through it. Rich is used to
build Textual
(also by [Will]), which aims to be a GUI API that runs in the terminal. It served as an excellent example of what Rich is capable of. It is incredible how long these protocols have been around. [Will] even
ran Rich on a Teletype Model 33
. If you’re working with a bit more of a constrained environment, why not
bring some color to your Arduino serial terminal? | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415834",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T14:38:20",
"content": "Interesting – I did some console manipulation with Python a while back and thought it should’ve been a travelled path.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id"... | 1,760,372,815.986558 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/monowheel-mayhem-when-good-gyroscopic-precession-goes-bad/ | Monowheel Mayhem: When Good Gyroscopic Precession Goes Bad | Ryan Flowers | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"esc",
"gyroscope",
"gyroscopic precession",
"IMU",
"monowheel",
"motor"
] | Since the dawn of the age of the automobile, motorheads have been obsessed with using as few wheels as possible. Not satisfied with the prospect of being incompletely maimed by a motorcycle, the monocycle was born. Gracing the covers of Popular magazines and other periodicals, these futuristic wheels of doom have transfixed hackers of all kinds. [James Bruton] is one such hacker, and in the video below the break you can see his
second iteration of a 3d printed monowheel
.
[James]’ wonderful monowheel is beautifully engineered. Bearing surfaces, gears, idlers, motors, and yes, twin gyroscopes are all contained within the circumference of the tire. The gyroscopes are actuated by a rather large servo, and are tied together by a gear that keeps their positions in sync. Their job is to keep the monowheel balanced at all times.
But as [James] discovered, the chief difficulty of only having one wheel isn’t lateral balancing. Ask any monocyclist and they’ll assure you that it’s possible. The real trick is balancing the machine fore and aft. Unlike a two wheeled velocipede, the monowheel has nothing to exert torque against save for a bit of gravity.
As [James] found out the hard way, it was within this fore-aft balancing act that the gyroscopic precession reared its ugly head. The concept is explained well in the video. We won’t spoil the surprise ending because the explanation and conclusion are quite good so make sure to watch to the end!
If you’d like to look at [James]’ first version, we
covered it here
. And if you’re the daredevil type, perhaps we can interest in you in a
two stroke human sized monowheel that will probably end in an ER visit
. At least they wore a helmet. Thanks to [Baldpower] for the tip! | 11 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415701",
"author": "peter",
"timestamp": "2022-01-20T00:09:28",
"content": "So cool!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6489081",
"author": "Pi ina z,",
"timestamp": "2022-07-03T23:16:01",
"content": "Jus... | 1,760,372,816.075462 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/extreme-thermal-mods-for-3d-printing-exotic-materials/ | Extreme Thermal Mods For 3D Printing Exotic Materials | Dan Maloney | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"CR-10",
"Creality",
"high temperature",
"liquid cooling",
"peek",
"polyether ether ketone"
] | For general everyday use, there’s nothing wrong with the standard selection of plastics that most 3D printer filaments are available in. PLA, ABS, PETG — they’ve all got their place, and they’re all pretty easy to work with. But if you need to work with more exotic materials, you might need to go to extremes and
modify an off-the-shelf printer for high-temperature work
.
For the team led by [Andreas Hagerup Birkelid] at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the standard menu of printer chow wasn’t up to the jobs they had in mind. They wanted to print using polyether ether ketone, or PEEK, a high-performance thermoplastic with useful mechanical and thermal properties, in addition to chemical resistance. Trouble is, the melting point of PEEK is a whopping 343°C (649°F), making it necessary to turn up the heat — a lot. A standard Creality CR-10 printer was upgraded to withstand not only the 500°C max temperature of the new hot end and 200° printed bed, but also to survive operating in what amounts to an oven — a balmy 135° in a chamber made from IKEA cabinets. That entailed replacing plastic parts with metal ones, upgrading belts, pulleys, and wires, and moving all the electronics outside the enclosure. Even the steppers got special treatment, with water cooling to keep their magnets from reaching the Curie point.
The mods seemed to do the trick, because a Benchy printed in a carbon-fiber PEEK filament came out pretty good. It seems like a long way to go and kind of pricey — $1,700 for the printer and all the mods — but if you have a need to print exotic materials, it’s way cheaper than
a commercial high-temp printer
.
[via
3D Printing Industry
] | 15 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415667",
"author": "Prowler50mil",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T21:32:29",
"content": "Impressive build. How do they manually level the bed? Not sure I want to reach in there with a feeler gauge.I wonder if using a core xy would have been easier to convert. The steppers could be moved ... | 1,760,372,816.178334 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/drill-does-well-in-double-duty-as-well-drilling-drill/ | Drill Does Well In Double Duty As Well Drilling Drill | Ryan Flowers | [
"classic hacks"
] | [
"DIY well",
"drill",
"gound",
"hand drill",
"water",
"water well"
] | There are a large number of methods commercially used to bore a hole into the ground for the sake of extracting drinking water, and the all require big loud equipment. But what if you just want a small well? Do you really have to call in the big guns? [The Working Group on Development Techniques] is a student association at the University of Twente in the Netherlands who shows in the
video below the break
that some simple homemade fixtures and a powerful hand drill are quite enough to do the job!
There’s more to drilling a well than just drilling well
Chief among these fixtures is a swiveling mechanism that serves to hold the drill and its weight, give control over the drill, and inject water into the pipe that the drill bit is attached to. Plans for the swivel are
made available on [WOT]’s website
. What looks to be a DIY drill bit uses commercially available diamond tips for hardness.
What makes the video remarkable is that it discusses every stage of drilling the bore hole, lining it with casing, and then making it suitable for pumping water from. The video also discusses the chemicals and methods involved in successfully drilling the hole, and gives an overview of the process that also applies to commercially drilled wells.
Naturally you’ll want to make sure your drill is corded so that you can drill for long periods, but also so that it doesn’t
grow wings and fly away
! | 18 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415660",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T21:12:47",
"content": "The best part is when he hits the halfway mark and breaks into the chorus of Livin’ On A Prayer.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6415670",
"author":... | 1,760,372,816.235934 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/longer-range-evs-are-on-the-horizon/ | Longer Range EVs Are On The Horizon | Lewin Day | [
"car hacks",
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"battery",
"efficiency",
"electric v",
"engineering",
"range"
] | When electric cars first started hitting the mainstream just over a decade ago, most criticism focused on the limited range available and the long recharge times required. Since then, automakers have been chipping away, improving efficiency here and adding capacity there, slowly pushing the numbers up year after year.
Models are now on the market offering in excess of 400 miles between charges, but lurking on the horizon are cars with ever-greater range. The technology stands at a tipping point where a electric car will easily be able to go further on a charge than the average driver can reasonably drive in a day. Let’s explore what’s just around the corner.
Going Further…
The longest-range version of the Tesla Model S has an EPA-rated range of 402 miles. Something as simple as choosing a different wheel size can cut that by tens of miles, however. Credit: Tesla
The newest EVs on the market have more range than ever before. Under the EPA range test, the latest Tesla Model S can hit 402 miles, while the cutting-edge Mercedes EQS450+ makes it to 350 miles on the same test regime. These long-legged cars are packed with batteries, boasting packs of 100 kWh and 107.8 kWh capacity and operating at 450 V and 400 V respectively.
These two vehicles are two of the longest-range mainstream electric vehicles presently available. Both are able to quick-charge another 200 miles of range in just 20 minutes under the right conditions. Driving at a continuous average speed of 75 mph, either car could easily handle eight hours of driving in a single day with only a short stop to recharge. Interestingly, too, private testing shows the Mercedes itself to be capable of far exceeding its EPA test result, with Edmunds finding it to be the longest range car it’s ever tested with a real-world run netting 422 miles
on a single charge.
Despite this, a tiresome few continue to protest that electric vehicles are simply incapable of taking long trips. With ranges already reaching above 400 miles in premium vehicles, and all manner of lower models capable of 300 miles or more, it’s becoming an increasingly difficult position to defend.
New vehicles only promise to further destroy this argument, though, by posting bigger numbers again. The prime example ready to burst onto the scene is the Lucid Air, the debut car from electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors. In its longest-range trim, the Dream Edition model achieves a EPA-rated 520 miles of range. The company has only just started vehicle deliveries to customers, but the range of the Air is already a leap far beyond that of its rivals.
The futuristic-looking Lucid Air Dream Edition stole Tesla’s crown of having the longest-range EV on the market. Customer deliveries are currently at a trickle as the company ramps up production, however. Credit: Lucid
This huge figure was not achieved by simply using a larger battery; the Lucid Air features a pack only a mite bigger than the competition at 113 kWh. With range a primary selling point for EVs, Lucid are being a bit canny about exactly how they achieved such a figure, with most coverage of the car putting the result down to a focus on “efficiency.” One number does stand out, however, and that’s the fact that the Lucid Air relies on a 924-volt battery architecture.
Running at higher voltage can bring significant advantages. For the same given power in a system, as voltage goes up, current goes down. Resistive losses in conductors are proportional to current squared, these losses go down as voltage increases, meaning efficiency improves.
.
Lower losses means greater range when driving the car. There are also benefits to charging as well; lower heat build up from resistive losses is important when charging batteries that are sensitive to high temperatures. Lucid claims the Air can add 300 miles worth of charge in just 20 minutes when connected to an appropriate DC fast charger of 300 kW or more.
It’s a mark of Lucid’s commitment to its goals; back in 2019, Lucid’s chief technical officer Peter Rawlinson noted the company was aiming to push for a new level of efficiency in electric cars, rather than simply relying on ever-larger batteries. As far as aerodynamics were concerned, the Lucid Air managed an astounding
coefficient of drag
of just 0.21. Overall, Lucid got close to its goal of an energy efficiency of 5 miles per kwh, with the Dream Edition launch model hitting 4.6 miles/kWh in production trim.
And Further Again…
The Mercedes-Benz EQXX Concept utilizes a sleek, streamlined teardrop shape to help minimise energy lost to drag. Among other measures, this helps it achieve an astounding 620 mile range on a sub-100 kWh battery. Credit; Mercedes-Benz
As far as the future is concerned, Mercedes also sees value in the efficiency-first approach. The German automaker recently unveiled
its EQXX Concept
, claiming a 620 mile range from the prototype design which features a battery of under 100 kWH capacity. It’s an efficency in excess of 6.2 miles/kWh, marking a serious leap forward.
Mercedes achieved this by going back to the drawing board and doing everything possible to maximise range. Unlike many of the premium luxury EVs on sale today, the EQXX Concept eschews four-digit horsepower figures and multi-motor setups for a relatively tame 201-horsepower single-motor drive unit. This would make a production model a harder sell, as the market has become accustomed to electric vehicles with ridiculous acceleration figures. A heavy electric vehicle hauling a big battery with only 200 horsepower to propel it along won’t be competing with cars like the Lucid Air or the Tesla Model S Plaid edition, and it could leave buyers cold.
The drag coefficient leaps to a even-more ridiculous figure than the Lucid Air, to an astounding Cd of just 0.17. It’s a small vehicle too, taking up far less space compared to the EQS road car, being closer to the size of a compact sedan. A solar panel on the roof is even pressed into service, helping to power the HVAC and infotainment system, and reportedly can add a whole 15 miles of range to the EQS on a particularly sunny day.
Startup Our Next Energy (ONE) managed a 752-mile drive with a modified Tesla Model S, thanks to a high-capacity 203.7 kWH battery pack of its own design. Credit: YouTube/Our Next Energy
As much as Lucid and Mercedes hope to achieve with their high-minded efficiency focused approach, however, some believe that simpler methods are the way to go instead. A startup by the name of ONE
has done just that
, equipping a Tesla Model S with a battery of its own design of an astounding 203.7 kWh capacity. Just over double the standard capacity of the Model S battery, the startup were able to achieve a range of 752 miles in a long-drive test of its own devising.
The project essentially ignores efficiency improvements entirely. ONE made no mods to the Tesla in this regard, and the system is technically less efficient as a whole, making only 3.69 miles/kWh versus the 4.02 miles/kWh of the stock car in EPA testing. What is astounding is how the team were able to fit a battery pack of double the capacity in the same space as the original pack – marking a huge increase in energy density. The team were reportedly able to do so without much of a weight penalty either. The ONE pack apparently required no active cooling during its drive test (albeit run in cold weather). The production battery that ONE hopes to bring to market, known as “Gemini,” will reportely rely on LiFP (lithium iron phosphate) technology, something already used in many EVs today, and production samples should be available around 2023.
Mystery Gains
As capable as these vehicles are, perhaps the most frustrating part is that the engineering used to achieve these feats remains a little opaque to the public. It’s only when these cars start hitting the market en masse, and getting disassembled by inquisitive engineering teams and individuals, that it will become clear exactly how these improvements to efficiency and energy density are being achieved. Whether it’s exquisitely-prepared motors that cut down on even the tiniest of losses, new high-efficiency semiconductors, or bigger moves like jumping up to work at higher voltage ranges, it all adds up. But the real big gains are much more of a secret weapon that automakers will aim to keep as a competitive advantage for as long as is possible.
At best, we get little hints here and there, pockets of insight when an automaker wants to boast of its achievements. A great example is Tesla, which has invested heavily in some of the most advanced EV motors on the planet.
The company has previously openly discusssed with Car and Driver
how improving motor efficiency by 8 to 10 percent helped it boost overall range by 15 to 18 percent. Other players are typically less forthcoming, choosing to talk in broader terms as to the source of their gains rather than discussing real engineering details. Tesla somewhat stands alone in this area, often going into great detail on its new technologies as a marketing tool, though it tends to announce big things
well before they ever come to market.
In any case, whether by improved efficiency, increasing energy density, or simply by stuffing more batteries into a car, it seems that electric vehicle range will only continue to improve at a rapid rate in coming years. EVs with huge range are just around the corner, and the ones we have today are already posting some serious numbers. Range anxiety may soon be a thing of the past for all but the cheapest, shortest-range EVs, or those with batteries nearing the end of their useful life. It may be that running out of charge becomes as rare for the average EV driver as running out of petrol is for those of us with conventional ICE-powered vehicles. Come what may! | 165 | 29 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415583",
"author": "Stephen",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T18:06:38",
"content": "“when connected to an appropriate DC fast charger of 300kW or more” – and if you charge three cars at that rate, you’re eating nearly a megawatt of power. Where are these chargers going to be situated? No... | 1,760,372,816.615561 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/giving-vintage-synths-new-life-in-a-potentiometer-cleaning-showdown/ | Giving Vintage Synths New Life In A Potentiometer Cleaning Showdown | Maya Posch | [
"Musical Hacks",
"Repair Hacks"
] | [
"analog",
"cleaning",
"potentiometer",
"vintage hardware"
] | As anyone who has ever owned a piece of older equipment that has a potentiometer in it can attest to, these mechanical components do need their regular cleaning ritual. Whether it’s volume knobs on a receiver or faders on a mixer, over time they get crackly, scratchy and generally imprecise due to the oxidation and gunk that tends to gather inside them.
This is your potentiometer caked with gunk.
In this blast from the past,
[Keith Murray] shows a few ways in which fader-style potentiometers can be cleaned
, and how well each cleaning method works by testing the smoothness of the transition over time with an oscilloscope. It’s enlightening to see just how terrible the performance of a grimed-up fader is, and how little a blast of compressed air helped. Contact cleaner works much better, but it’s essential to get all of the loosened bits of gunk out of the fader regardless.
In the end, a soak in isopropyl alcohol (IPA), as well as a full disassembly followed by manual cleaning were the only ones to get the fader performance back to that of a new one. Using contact cleaner followed by blasting the fader out with compressed air seems to be an acceptable trade-off to avoid disassembly, however.
What is your preferred way to clean potentiometers to keep that vintage (audio) gear in peak condition? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks, [Grant Freese], for the tip! | 24 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415569",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T16:33:44",
"content": "If it’s a pot.divider just add a cap on wiper",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6415580",
"author": "Northerndiy",
"timestamp": "2022-... | 1,760,372,816.407325 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/electronic-lead-screws-not-just-for-threading-anymore/ | Electronic Lead Screws – Not Just For Threading Anymore | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"electronic leadscrew",
"ELS",
"encoder",
"lathe",
"leadscrew",
"spindle",
"stepper",
"threading",
"turning"
] | An electronic leadscrew is an increasingly popular project for small and mid-sized lathes. They do away with the need to swap gears in and out to achieve the proper ratio between spindle speed and tool carriage translation, and that makes threading a snap. But well-designed electronic leadscrews, like
this one from [Hobby Machinist]
, offer so much more than just easy threading.
The first thing that struck us about this build was the polished, professional look of it. The enclosure for the Nucleo-64 dev board sports a nice TFT display and an IP65-rated keyboard, as well as a beefy-looking jog wheel. The spindle speed is monitored by a 600 pulses-per-revolution optical encoder, and the lathe’s leadscrew is powered by a closed-loop NEMA 24 stepper. This combination allows for the basic threading operations, but the addition of a powered cross slide opens up a ton more functionality. Internal and external tapers are a few keypresses away, as are boring and turning and radius operations, both on the right and on the left. The video below shows radius-cutting operations combined to turn a sphere.
From [Hobby Machinist]’s to-do list, it looks like filleting and grooving will be added someday, as will a G-code parser and controller to make this into a bolt-on CNC controller. Inspiration for the build is said to have come in part from
[Clough42]’s electronic leadscrew project
from a few years back. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415362",
"author": "SteveS",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T19:47:11",
"content": "Nice panel",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6415432",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T01:42:56",
"content": "I did a little (... | 1,760,372,816.65383 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-tri-lingual-typewriter/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Tri-lingual Typewriter | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"aerodox",
"bluetooth",
"ergodox",
"macropad",
"nRF51822",
"redox",
"solderless",
"solderless circuits"
] | Isn’t it just fantastic when a project finally does what you wanted it to do in the first place? [Simon Merrett] isn’t willing to compromise when it comes to
the Aerodox
. His original vision for the keyboard was a wireless, ergonomic split that could easily switch between a couple of PCs. Whereas some people are more into making layout after layout, [Simon] keeps pushing forward with this same design, which is sort of a mashup between the ErgoDox and the Redox, which is itself a wireless version of the ErgoDox.
The Aerodox has three nRF51822 modules — one for the halves to communicate, one for the control half to send key presses, and a third on the receiver side. [Simon] was using two AA cells to power each one, and was having trouble with the range back to the PC.
The NRFs want 3.3 V, but will allegedly settle for 2 V when times are hard. [Simon] added a boost converter to give each a solid 3.3 V, and the Aerodox became reliable enough to be [Simon]’s daily driver. But let’s go back to the as-yet-unrealized potential part.
The point was to use this keeb on multiple PCs with ease. [Simon] recently found someone’s Bluetooth code for the Mitosis keyboard and adapted it to work on the Aerodox. He’s using
a Gazell link
between the halves, and Bluetooth from the control half back to the PCs. Unfortunately, [Simon] had to revamp the timer interrupts and debouncing scheme that came with emulating the Redox, but it works now and it switches between PCs with the press of a button. Now that [Simon] is nice and comfortable with nRF silicon, we might see an nRF52 version running ZMK next. Time will tell.
Historical Clackers: Tri-lingual Toshiba Typewriter
Image via
This is Colossal
No, that isn’t an ornate roll-top desk — it’s
a tri-lingual typewriter made by Toshiba from 1940-1954
with over 1,000 characters. This bad boy can type in Japanese, Chinese, and English by spinning the cylinder, using the pointer to select the character, and working the lever down below.
This is the second index typewriter that Toshiba produced
. The first was called the Nippon, and came out in 1915. The Nippon worked by selecting an individual character from a tray. In the mid-1950s, Toshiba switched to a Western-style keyboard.
On this one, the BW-2112, the kanji are arranged phonetically down the long edge of the barrel, and the Arabic letters and numbers are in alphabetical and numerical order. As you might guess, it’s a pretty slow process, even if know what you’re doing. But you don’t have to guess what that looks like — just check it out in the video below. Too bad we don’t get to see the inside.
Thanks to [ukezi] for the tip on this one!
ICMYI: Look Ma, No Solder
Do all these crazy inputs make you want to jump in the keeb game? That’s totally understandable. So why not start small?
With 3D printers around, it really couldn’t be any easier to build a custom macropad, especially when you have the shoulders of hackers like [Jan Lunge] to stand on. And
with [Jan]’s build, you don’t even need any solder
.
The key to connectivity here is in the small plastic clip [Jan] designed that snaps in after you’ve run the column wire. Not only does this plastic bit keep both wires held in place, it keeps them separated, too — this is especially good if you plan to use bare wire like [Jan] did.
With a design like this one, it would be easy to dress it up with color, or make it minimal and monotone. Either way, it’s sure to look nice on your desk.
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415363",
"author": "Amiable Ninja",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T19:53:19",
"content": "“Arabic letters”?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6415378",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T2... | 1,760,372,816.901936 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/sgx-deprecation-prevents-pc-playback-of-4k-blu-ray-discs/ | SGX Deprecation Prevents PC Playback Of 4K Blu-ray Discs | Chris Lott | [
"computer hacks",
"News"
] | [
"4K Blu-ray",
"blu-ray",
"drm",
"intel",
"Intel Core",
"SGX",
"Ultra HD Blu-ray"
] | This week Techspot reported that DRM-laden Ultra HD Blu-ray Discs
won’t play anymore on computers using the latest Intel Core processors
. You may have skimmed right past it, but the table on
page 51 of the latest 12th Generation Intel Core Processor data sheet (184 page PDF)
informs us that the Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) have been deprecated. These extensions are required for DRM processing on these discs, hence the problem. The SGX extensions were introduced with the sixth generation of Intel Core Skylake processors in 2015, the same year as Ultra HD Blu-ray, aka 4K Blu-ray. But there have been numerous vulnerabilities discovered in the intervening years. Not only Intel, but AMD has
had similar issues as we wrote about in October
.
This problem only applies to 4K Blu-ray discs with DRM. Presumably any 4K discs without DRM will still play, and of course you can still play the DRM discs on older Intel processors. Do you have a collection of DRM 4K Blu-ray discs, and if so, do you play them via your computer or a stand-alone player? | 72 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415311",
"author": "rampant_car",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T16:36:55",
"content": "Haven’t thought of purchasing or using a Blu-ray disc in years. I have the luxury of speedy internet living in a metro area, but I imagine people in remote-ish locations with new devices might get the... | 1,760,372,816.858361 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/kicad-6-0-what-made-it-and-what-didnt/ | KiCAD 6.0: What Made It And What Didn’t | Dave Rowntree | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Slider",
"Software Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Action Plugins",
"DRC",
"KiCAD",
"KiCAD 6.0",
"pcb",
"schematic"
] | I’ve been following the development of KiCAD for a number of years now, and using it as my main electronics CAD package daily for a the last six years or thereabouts, so the release of KiCAD 6.0 is quite exciting to an electronics nerd like me. The release date had been pushed out a bit, as this is such a huge update, and has taken a little longer than anticipated. But, it was finally tagged and pushed out to distribution on Christmas day, with some much deserved fanfare in the usual places.
So now is a good time to look at which features are new in KiCAD 6.0 — actually
6.0.1
is the current release at time of writing due to some bugfixes — and which features originally planned for 6.0 are now being postponed to the 7.0 roadmap and beyond.
Changes
As is often the case with big updates, most of the largest changes are invisible to the user, and are the result of significant code refactoring in order to create consistent frameworks for the developers to work to, whilst they add new features from the wish list. What we as users see are the changes that this under-the-hood work enables. A feature change often seems ‘easy’ from a user perspective, but requires extensive internal changes and a lot of developer effort behind the scenes. KiCAD is an old project, with three decades of code history, so unpicking a lot of that to build these consistent frameworks for future work has been a monumental undertaking. In a recent Contextual Electronics podcast
interview with KiCAD developer [John Evans]
the burden of this code history was explained in this context in a very helpful way, and you can really get a feel for just how tricky it can be to navigate as a new developer and why this update is so important.
Libraries and Schematic Files
Following on from the S-expression PCB library format KiCAD 5.0 introduced, symbol libraries are now described in the same format. KiCAD 6.0 will make the migration at the touch of a button. This
format is designed to be human readable
, which in turn makes it much easier to write other software that creates or modifies these files.
One useful change is that the dependency upon schematic libraries has been dropped, so once a sheet is completed, you only need the sheet file to open it. No more broken schematic sheets! No more chasing libraries for a handful of symbols, and design reuse is vastly simplified.
These changes, of course, have a downside — once you have opened and migrated a project from KiCAD 5.x, there is no way to go back, so make sure you make a copy first and/or use revision control. That said, so far, I have had no issues that would force me to move back to the previous release.
New Features
Curvy hashed goodness. In all seriousness, this is great news for flex PCB design
The updated or new feature list is so extensive, that simply listing it all here would be quite a long undertaking. As luck would have it, I don’t need to, as [Peter Dalmaris] published a
preview of the changes coming in version 6.0
at the start of the year, when most new features and changes were already rolled out into the ‘nightlies’ for beta testing. The first highlight for me is the big update to the Design Rules Checking (DRC) system, which is now significantly more powerful and configurable, and even allows custom rules per board. This feature has its own special specification syntax, and will take some time to learn, but looks like time well spent. Another greatly improved area is the visibility control side panel, easing control of visible elements and helping produce a clutter-free display as you work between layers.
Curved traces look great. Feel free to argue in the comments about their utility. (Maybe in microwave RF designs?) Hashed zone fills are great for those of us designing flexible circuits, or planes that need to be copper-light for thermal reasons. And while we’re talking about zone fills, there is now a configuration option to allow filleting of corners outside of the zone outline, which makes filleted zones look a lot nicer.
One feature that probably isn’t new to KiCAD 6.0, but I hadn’t noticed before, concerns drag selections. When click-dragging around a bunch of objects, to make a grouped selection, it turns out the tool is direction-sensitive. Dragging from left-to-right only selects items that are completely contained within the box — but the opposite — selecting from right-to-left selects any items the box touches, even partially. I really wish I’d have found this out years ago! Thanks to [Stargirl @thevalkyrie] on Twitter for the heads up on that.
Other big improvements are the unified project setup, with many more options to set PCB properties like stack-up, and at long last, net class definitions at schematic level with customisable colours and styles to improve clarity of design intention. Lastly, there is a new ‘rules file’ import feature for PCB fab definitions and constraints, which will hopefully enable easier setup of board constraints when moving between different manufacturer processes, and reduce the likelihood of the annoying issue of designing a tight board to the wrong rule set. (Never done that myself, oh no.)
The PCB editor has so many updates and design improvements that there is not the space here to do it justice. I suggest reading
the release notes
instead! The short version is that the workflow has been streamlined, tools have been expanded and regrouped and made more visible, and some of KiCAD’s rough edges and other oddities have been smoothed over.
A New Plugin And Content Manager
One very nice feature that has snuck in to release 6.0 at the last minute is the first version of the new
plugin and content manager
. This vastly improves the user experience for adding plugins, with the KiCAD project maintaining its own online repository, and new plugins arriving all the time.
This integrated management will enable much better visibility of community-contributed themes, libraries and software extensions, and will surely mark a new era of KiCAD customisation. At the time of writing, notable plugins include the excellent
InteractiveHtmlBom
, which I use extensively,
KiBuzzard
for your fancy labelling needs, and
KiKit
for panelisation tasks.
The repository is in the early stages, but new component libraries are already popping up there too. It’s isn’t entirely push button, however. If a Python plugin is complex enough to depend up non-default installed modules, then you need to manually invoke the Python package manger
pip
to meet those dependencies. Luckily, at least on windows, there is a special command interpreter menu item with all the Python paths set correctly, so it is a trivial matter to pop open a terminal, invoke
pip
, then crack on with your project. The Python plugins that need manual intervention should prompt you with instructions when they are first installed. Hopefully future versions of the package manager will deal with such issues automatically! Finally, in true open source style, it is easy enough to add additional repositories, so you can disconnect yourself from the official version if you or your organisation has other needs.
Postponed to 7.0
The wish list for KiCAD 6.0 was really big and ambitious, and in order to get something worth using out quicker, a feature freeze was enacted early last year in order to finish off the features that made the cut and iron out the bugs. Many really good features didn’t make enough progress, or relied on other changes before work could start. Regardless, let’s look at a few of the planned new tricks for the next release.
First off, the Python API is going to change. API access to the schematic object is currently not supported, making it impossible to create plugins that manipulate schematics. This will change in release 7.0, but not until the underlying schematic object is refactored to enable it. There is a planned object properties/introspection API which allow a new class of plugins to be created for even more powerful design manipulation. Fingers crossed!
The next big feature again concerns the schematic editor. Orthogonal wire dragging will be implemented, to enable moving symbols around and keeping the connections looking good. Net-ties! We’re going to finally get proper net-tie support!
The PCB editor is planned to get teardrop support, as well as modern features like trace refining. The ability to adjust trace length matching/meandering is also planned. Design reuse will be boosted by support for layout snippets, and there will be better support for pad stacks and more powerful thermal relief control.
The final and most interesting future feature — for me at least — is the planned PCB constraints management system. This is intended to allow constraints to be specified in the schematic and passed into the board editor, in order to constrain placement and layout as well as feed into the DRC system. This will be an epic feature if it actually happens. Details are scarce right now, but rest assured I’ll be tracking it.
So there we have it, a brief overview of where we are and where we’re going in the world of KiCAD. Keep an eye out for future stories and guides about this fantastic tool, as the KiCAD future is bright, and it’s all open source and therefore free from licensing charges.
Need some help finally taking the plunge to move to KiCAD? Then you’re going to want to checkout the
official KiCAD forum
, and drop in to the super active
KiCAD Discord
from time to time. | 56 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415271",
"author": "Per Jensen",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T15:05:18",
"content": "I really hope someone will be able to port these tools to 6.xx soon. I was in the middle of making a PCB where i used the “replicate layout” plugin, and then i updated to 6.xx and i was stuck :/https:/... | 1,760,372,816.998461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/threeboard-short-on-keys-long-on-documentation/ | Threeboard: Short On Keys, Long On Documentation | Matthew Carlson | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"atmega32u4",
"keyboard",
"simavr",
"simulator"
] | As peripherals go, few are hacked on more than keyboards. The layouts, the shapes, the sizes, materials, and even the question of what a keyboard is are all on the table for tinkering. In that vein, [TaylorConor] released his
simplified keyboard called the threeboard on GitHub, having only three keys and replicating a full keyboard.
We’ve covered
keyboards built with chording in mind
,
wrapped around coffee cups
, and
keyboards with joysticks for added speed
. So why cover this one? What makes it different? The execution is superb and is a great example to look at next time you’re making a project you want to show off. The keyboard is just three mechanical switches, two 8-bit binary displays (16 LEDs total), three status LEDs, and three LEDs showing the current layer (four layers). The detailed
user’s manual explains it all
. There is a reliable Atmega32U4 microcontroller and two EEPROM chips at its heart.
Where this project shows off is the testing. It has unit tests, simulated integration tests, and simulated property tests. Since all the code is in C++, unit testing is relatively straightforward. The integration and property tests are via a simulator. Rather than recompiling the code with some new flags, he uses the
simavr AVR simulator
, which means it simulates the same binary file that gets flashed onto the microcontroller. This approach means the design is tested and debugged via GDB. It’s an incredible technique we’d love to see more of in hobby projects. Marketing speak might call this a “digital twin” but the idea is that you have a virtual version that’s easier to work on and has a tighter iteration loop while being as close as possible to the physical version.
[TaylorConor’s] goal was to create a from-scratch microcontroller project with easy-to-read code, fantastic documentation, and best practices. We think he nailed it. So feel free to
run the simulator
or jump right into
building one for yourself
. All the hardware is under a CERN-OHL-P license, and the firmware is under GPLv3. | 8 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415262",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T14:24:54",
"content": "but now he’s got a complicated and brittle toolchain for a very simple project. the parts that make it well-structured and easy-to-develop are more complicated than the project itself. good coding is *ma... | 1,760,372,817.037795 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/i2c-to-the-max-with-attiny/ | I2C To The Max With ATtiny | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"arduino",
"attiny",
"attiny85",
"communications",
"dev board",
"i2c",
"microcontroller",
"platform"
] | The Arduino is a powerful platform for interfacing with the real world, but it isn’t without limits. One of those hard limits, even for the Arduino MEGA, is a finite number of pins that the microcontroller can use to interface with the real world. If you’re looking to extend the platform’s reach in one of your own projects, though, there are a couple of options available. This project from [Bill] shows us
one of those options by using the ATtiny85 to offload some of an Arduino’s tasks using I2C
.
I2C has been around since the early 80s as a way for microcontrollers to communicate with each other using a minimum of hardware. All that is needed is to connect the I2C pins of the microcontrollers and provide each with power. This project uses an Arduino as the controller and an arbitrary number of smaller ATtiny85 microcontrollers as targets. Communicating with the smaller device allows the Arduino to focus on more processor-intensive tasks while giving the simpler tasks to the ATtiny. It also greatly simplifies wiring for projects that may be distributed across a distance. [Bill] also standardizes the build with a custom development board for the ATtiny that can also double as a shield for the Arduino, allowing him to easily expand and modify his projects without too much extra soldering.
Using I2C might not be the most novel of innovations, but making it easy to use is certainly a valuable tool to add to the toolbox when limited on GPIO or by other physical constraints. To that end, [Bill] also includes code for an example project that simplifies the setup of one of these devices on the software end as well. If you’re looking for some examples for what to do with I2C, take a look at
this thermometer that communicates with I2C
or
this project which uses multiple sensors daisy-chained together
. | 28 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415216",
"author": "Chloe",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T09:20:33",
"content": "I would suggest something like an NXP PCA9698DGG, 512 if you really need more GPIO from an Arduino, but each to their own….",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment... | 1,760,372,817.100834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/17/acid-damaged-game-boy-restored/ | Acid-Damaged Game Boy Restored | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Games"
] | [
"acid",
"battery",
"damage",
"game boy",
"game boy color",
"jumper",
"repair",
"restoration",
"smd",
"solder",
"wire"
] | The original Game Boy was the greatest selling handheld video game system of all time, only to be surpassed by one of its successors. It still retains the #2 position by a wide margin, but even so, they’re getting along in years now and finding one in perfect working condition might be harder than you think. What’s more likely is you find one that’s missing components, has a malfunctioning screen,
or has had its electronics corroded by the battery acid from a decades-old set of AAs
.
That latter situation is where [Taylor] found himself and decided on performing a full restoration on this classic. To get started, he removed all of the components from the damaged area so he could see the paths of the traces. After doing some cleaning of the damage and removing the solder mask, he used 30 gauge wire to bridge the damaged parts of the PCB before repopulating all of the parts back to their rightful locations. A few needed to be replaced, but in the end the Game Boy was restored to its former 90s glory.
This build is an excellent example of what can be done with a finely tipped soldering iron while also being a reminder not to leave AA batteries in any devices for extended periods of time. The AA battery was always a weak point for the original Game Boys, so if you decide you want to get rid of batteries of any kind
you can build one that does just that
.
f | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415217",
"author": "Cory",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T09:20:44",
"content": "Amazing work!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6415227",
"author": "Mustakari",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T10:08:33",
"content": "It’s not acid... | 1,760,372,817.14622 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/identifying-malware-by-sniffing-its-em-signature/ | Identifying Malware By Sniffing Its EM Signature | Tom Nardi | [
"computer hacks",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"electromagnetic radiation",
"malware",
"signal analysis",
"spectrogram"
] | The phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is most often attributed to Carl Sagan, specifically from his television series
Cosmos
. Sagan was probably not the first person to put forward such a hypothesis, and the show certainly didn’t claim he was. But that’s the power of TV for you; the term has since come to be known as the “Sagan Standard” and is a handy aphorism that nicely encapsulates the importance of skepticism and critical thinking when dealing with unproven theories.
It also happens to be the first phrase that came to mind when we heard about
Obfuscation Revealed: Leveraging Electromagnetic Signals for Obfuscated Malware Classification
, a paper presented during the 2021 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC). As described in the mainstream press, the paper detailed a method by which researchers were able to detect viruses and malware running on an Internet of Things (IoT) device simply by listening to the electromagnetic waves being emanated from it. One needed only to pass a probe over a troubled gadget, and the technique could identify what ailed it with near 100% accuracy.
Those certainly sound like extraordinary claims to us. But what about the evidence? Well, it turns out that digging a bit deeper into the story uncovered plenty of it. Not only has the
paper been made available for free thanks to the sponsors of the ACSAC
, but the team behind it has
released all of code and documentation necessary to recreate their findings on GitHub
.
Unfortunately we seem to have temporarily misplaced the $10,000 1 GHz Picoscope 6407 USB oscilloscope that their software is written to support, so we’re unable to recreate the experiment in full. If you happen to come across it, please drop us a line. But in the meantime we can still walk through the process and try to separate fact from fiction in classic Sagan style.
Baking a Malware Pi
The best way of understanding what this technique is capable of, and further what it’s
not
capable of, is to examine the team’s test rig. In addition to the aforementioned Picoscope 6407, the hardware configuration includes a Langer PA-303 amplifier and a Langer RF-R H-Field probe that’s been brought to rest on the BCM2837 processor of a Raspberry Pi 2B. The probe and amplifier were connected to the first channel of the oscilloscope as you might expect, but interestingly, the second channel was connected to GPIO 17 on the Pi to serve as the trigger signal.
As explained in the project’s Wiki
, the next step was to intentionally install various rootkits, malware, and viruses onto the Raspberry Pi. A wrapper program was then used that would first trigger the Picoscope over the GPIO pin, and then run the specific piece of software under examination for a given duration. This process was repeated until the team had amassed tens of thousands of captures for various pieces of malware including
bashlite
,
mirai
,
gonnacry
,
keysniffer
, and
maK_it
. This gave them data on what the electromagnetic (EM) output of the Pi’s SoC looked like when its Linux operating system had become infected.
But critically, they also performed the same data acquisition on what they called a “benign” dataset. These captures were made while the Raspberry Pi was operating normally and running tools that would be common for IoT applications. EM signatures were collected for well known programs and commands such as
mpg123
,
wget
,
tar
,
more
,
grep
, and
dmesg
. This data established a baseline for normal operations, and gave the team a control to compare against.
Crunching the Numbers
As explained in section 5.3 of the paper,
Data Analysis and Preprocessing
, the raw EM captures need to be cleaned up before any useful data can be extracted. As you can imagine, the probe picks up a cacophony of electronic noise at such close proximity. The goal of the preprocessing stage is to filter out as much of the background noise as possible, and identify the telltale frequency fluctuations and peaks that correspond to individual programs running on the processor.
The resulting cleaned up spectrograms were then put through a neural network designed to classify the EM signatures. In much the way a computer vision system is able to classify objects in an image based on its training set, the team’s software demonstrated an uncanny ability to pick out what type of software was running on the Pi when presented with a captured EM signature.
When asked to classify a signature as ransomware, rootkit, DDoS, or benign, the neural network had an accuracy of better than 98%. Similar accuracy was achieved when the system was tasked with drilling down and determining the specific type of malware that was running. This meant the system was not only capable of detecting if the Pi was compromised, but could even tell the difference between a
gonnacry
or
bashlite
infection.
Accuracy took a considerable hit when attempting to identify the specific binary being executed, but the system still manged a respectable 82.28%. Perhaps most impressively, the team claims an accuracy of 82.70% when attempting to identify between various types of malware even when attempts were made to actively obfuscate their execution, such as running them in a virtualized environment.
Realistic Expectations
While the results of the experiment are certainly compelling, it’s important to stress that this all took place under controlled and ideal conditions. At no point in the paper is it claimed that this technique, at least in its current form, could actually be used in the wild to determine if a computer or IoT device has been infected with malware.
At the absolute minimum, data would need to be collected on a much wider array of computing devices before you could even say if this idea has any practical application outside of the lab. For their part, the authors say they chose the Pi 2B as a sort of “boilerplate” device; believing it’s 32-bit ARM processor and vanilla Linux operating system provided a reasonable stand-in for a generic IoT gadget. That’s a logical enough assumption, but there’s still far too many variables at play to say that any of the EM signatures collected on the Pi test rig would be applicable to a random wireless router pulled off the shelf.
Still, it’s hard not to come away impressed. While the researchers might not have created the IT equivalent of the
Star Trek
medical tricorder, a device that you can simply wave over the patient to instantly see what malady of the week they’ve been struck by, it certainly seems like they’re tantalizingly close. | 17 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415545",
"author": "osmarks",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T15:20:06",
"content": "Maybe an easier and cheaper method would be to use the CPU’s performance counters. Although that seems obvious enough that I’d be very surprised if someone hasn’t already done/tried that.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,372,817.206042 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/arduino-meets-quantum-computer/ | Arduino Meets Quantum Computer | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"computer hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"quantum computing"
] | Quantum computers aren’t quite ready for the home lab, but since there are ways to connect to some over the Internet, you can experiment with them more easily than you might think. [Norbert] decided to
interface a giant quantum computer to an ordinary Arduino
. Why? Well, that isn’t necessarily clear, but then again, why not? He explains basic quantum computing and shows his setup in the video below.
Using the IBM quantum computer and the open source Qiskit makes it relatively easy, with the Python code he’s using on the PC acting as a link between the Arduino and the IBM computer. Of course, you can also use simulation instead of using the real hardware, and for such a simple project it probably doesn’t matter.
Granted, the demo is pretty trivial, lighting an LED with the state of qubit. But the technique might be useful if you wanted to, say, gather information from the real world into a quantum computer. You have to start somewhere.
We’ve looked at
quantum computers
before. They tell us it is the next big thing, so we want to be prepared.
Qiskit
is one of
several options
available today to make it easier. | 8 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415509",
"author": "Iván Stepaniuk",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T12:36:36",
"content": "Could have used a 555 for that",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6415521",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T13:23:... | 1,760,372,817.248072 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/19/adding-wifi-remote-control-to-home-electronics-be-prepared-to-troubleshoot/ | Adding WiFi Remote Control To Home Electronics? Be Prepared To Troubleshoot | Donald Papp | [
"home entertainment hacks",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"amplifier",
"IR remote",
"marantz",
"wifi",
"wireless remote"
] | [Alex] recently gave a Marantz audio amplifier
the ability to be remotely-controlled via WiFi by interfacing an ESP32 board to a handy port
, but the process highlights how interfacing to existing hardware often runs into little, unforeseeable problems that can sink the project unless solved.
At its core, the project uses an ESP32 and the
ESPAsyncWebServer
project to create a handy web interface that is accessible over WiFi. Then, to actually control the amplifier, [Alex] decoded the IR-based remote signals by watching the unit’s REMOTE ports, which are intended as a pass-through and repeater for IR signals to other Marantz units. This functionality can be exploited;
by sending the right signals to the REMOTE IN port, the unit can be controlled by the ESP32
. With the ESP32 itself accessible by just about any WiFi device, [Alex] gains the freedom to control his amplifier with much greater flexibility than just the IR remote would offer.
Sounds fairly straightforward, but as usual when interfacing to an existing piece of electronics, there were a few glitches. The first was that high and inconsistent latency (from 10 ms to 100 ms) made controlling the amplifier a sometimes frustrating experience, but that was solved by disabling power saving on the WiFi interface. Another issue was that sending signals by connecting a GPIO pin to the REMOTE IN port of the amplifier worked, but had the side effect of causing the amplifier to no longer listen to the IR remote. Apparently, current flowing from the REMOTE port to the ESP32’s GPIO pin was to blame, because adding a diode in between fixed the problem.
The
GitHub repository
holds the design files and code. This kind of project can be pretty complex, because the existing hardware doesn’t always play nice, and useful boards like a modern ESP32 aren’t always available.
Adding a wireless interface to vintage audio equipment has in the past involved etching circuit boards and considerably more parts
. | 32 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415506",
"author": "ytrewq",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T12:13:40",
"content": "A nice solution done the wrong way, IMO. Using a web page makes things easier indeed but adds the need of a web browser (probably among the heaviest mobile apps everywhere) and forces the uC to run a web s... | 1,760,372,817.360128 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/learning-the-ropes-with-a-raspberry-pi-mandelbrot-cluster/ | Learning The Ropes With A Raspberry Pi Mandelbrot Cluster | Tom Nardi | [
"Raspberry Pi",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"cluster",
"kubernetes",
"mandelbrot",
"raspberry pi cluster"
] | You’ve probably heard it said that clustering a bunch of Raspberry Pis up to make a “supercomputer” doesn’t make much sense, as even a middle-of-the-road desktop could blow it away in terms of performance. While that may be true, the reason most people make Pi clusters isn’t for raw power, it’s so they can build experience with parallel computing without breaking the bank.
So while there was probably a “better” way to produce the Mandelbrot video seen below, creator
[Michael Kohn] still learned a lot about putting together a robust parallel processing environment
using industry standard tools like Kubernetes and Docker. Luckily for us, he was kind enough to document the whole process for anyone else who might be interested in following in his footsteps. Whatever your parallel task is, and whatever platform it happens to be running on, some of the notes here are likely to help you get it going.
It’s not
the biggest Raspberry Pi cluster we’ve ever seen
, but the four Pi 4s and the RGB LED festooned enclosure they live in make for an affordable and space-saving cluster to hone your skills on. Whether you’re practicing for the future of software development and deployment, or just looking for something new to play around with,
building one of these small-scale clusters
is a great way to get in on the action. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415459",
"author": "Steven Clark",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T06:24:24",
"content": "Software raytracing might be one of the other things that would work surprisingly well with just a lot of cores. The algorithms scale like searching a tree so if you get the detail high enough it ca... | 1,760,372,817.290591 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/woodworking-blinkenlites-and-ffts-dance-to-the-music/ | Woodworking, Blinkenlites, And FFT’s Dance To The Music | Ryan Flowers | [
"digital audio hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"blinkenlights",
"fft",
"spectrum analyser"
] | We all have that one project on our minds that we’d love to build if we could just find the right combination of time, energy, and knowledge to dive right in. For [Jonathan], that project was
a sound sculpture that’s finally made it from concept to complete
. [Jonathan] describes the sound sculpture as the culmination of a decade of learning, and in a moment you’ll understand why.
The sculpture itself is a beautiful display of woodwork mixed with what appear to be individually addressable LED’s. The varying length of the individual enclosures evokes the idea that the sculpture is somehow involved in the sound production, which is a nice touch.
An Adafruit microphone module feeds detected audio into a PSoC 5 microcontroller. You’d expect that [Jonathan] just used one of the FFT libraries that are available. But you’ll recall that this was the culmination of a decade of learning- why so? Because [Jonathan] went through the process of procuring his own grey hairs by writing his own FFT function. A homebrew FFT function
and
blinkenlites? What’s not to love!
You may also enjoy this discussion of
Sine Waves, Square Waves, and FFT’s with our own Bil Herd
. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415463",
"author": "schobi",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T06:49:59",
"content": "That looks almost like a Spotify Barcode.That would be a fun project to build a physical bar code that can be scanned. With the ability to extend/retract the arms based on currently playing music? The rati... | 1,760,372,817.64109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/a-diy-cad-mouse-you-can-actually-build/ | A DIY CAD Mouse You Can Actually Build | Dave Rowntree | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"3D printable",
"3DConnecxion",
"analog joystick",
"arduino pro micro",
"diy",
"oled",
"Orbion",
"rotary encoder",
"spacemouse"
] | When you spend a lot of time on the computer doing certain more specialised tasks (no, we’re not talking about browsing cat memes on twitter) you start to think that your basic trackpad or mouse is, let’s say, lacking a certain something. We think that something may be called ‘usability’ or maybe ease-of-use? Any which way, lots of heavy CAD users gush over their favourite mouse stand-ins, and one particularly interesting class of input devices is the Space Mouse, which is essentially patented up-to-the-hilt and available only from 3DConnexion. But what about open source alternatives you can build yourselves? Enter stage left,
the Orbion
created by [FaqT0tum.] This simple little build combines an analog joystick with a rotary knob, with a rear button and OLED display on the front completing the user interface.
The idea is pretty straightforward; you setup the firmware with the application you want to use it with, and it emits HID events to the connected PC, replacing the mouse or keyboard input. Since your machine will take input from multiple sources, it doesn’t replace your mouse, it augments it. It may not be very accurate for detailed PCB layout work, but for moving around in a 3D view, or dialling in a video edit, this could be a very useful addition to your workstation, so why not give it a try? The wiring is simple, the parts easily found and cheap, and it’s only a few printed parts! This scribe is already printing the plastics right now, if you listen carefully you might be able to make out the sound of the Lulzbot in background.
There are many other takes on this idea, with varying levels of complexity, like
this incredible build from [Ahmsville]
that sadly doesn’t make the PCBs available openly, and here’s one we covered earlier
mashing the expensive 3DConnexion spacemouse
into a keeb.
Thanks [baldpower] for the tip! | 48 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415427",
"author": "Andrew",
"timestamp": "2022-01-19T01:03:58",
"content": "Hmm. I wonder if it’s been done before?https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/724697I would have loved having a Bitstik (and the software) back in the day, but QCad and a mouse is sufficient now.... | 1,760,372,817.919377 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/ultra-cheap-pcb-wrenches-make-perfect-kit-accessory/ | Ultra Cheap PCB Wrenches Make Perfect Kit Accessory | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"cheap tools",
"KiCAD",
"panelization",
"pcb",
"wrench"
] | Let’s make one thing abundantly clear. We do not, under any circumstances, recommend you replace your existing collection of wrenches with ones made out of PCBs. However,
as creator [Ben Nyx] explains
, they do make for an extremely cheap and lightweight temporary tool that would be perfect for distributing with DIY kits.
This clever open hardware project was spawned by [Ben]’s desire to pack an M3 wrench in with the kits for
an ESP32-based kiln controller he’s developing
. He was able to find dirt cheap screwdrivers from the usual import sites, but nobody seemed to stock a similarly affordable wrench. He experimented with 3D printing them, but in the end, found the plastic just wasn’t up to the task. Then he wondered how well a tiny wrench cut from a PCB would fare.
The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is pretty well. We wouldn’t advise you try to crank your lug nuts down with one, but for snugging up a couple nuts that hold down a control board, they work a treat. [Ben] came up with a panelized design in KiCad that allows 18 of the little wrenches to get packed into a 100 x 100 mm PCB suitable for production from popular online board houses. Manufactured from standard 1.6 mm FR4, they come out to approximately 10 cents a pop.
Since [Ben] has been kind enough to release his design under the MIT license, you’re free to spin up some of these wrenches either for your own kits or just to toss in the tool bag for emergencies. We’d love to see somebody adapt the design for additional sizes of nuts, or maybe figure out some way to nest them to sneak out a couple extra wrenches per board.
We’ve seen plenty of folks make cheap tools for themselves
in the past, but projects that can produce cheap tools in mass quantities is uniquely exciting for a community like ours. | 43 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415391",
"author": "tiopepe123",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T21:20:56",
"content": "and CR2032 + white led power on contact M3 metal",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6415398",
"author": "alola",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T21:... | 1,760,372,817.76551 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/17/parsing-pngs-differently/ | Parsing PNGs Differently | Matthew Carlson | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"parallel computing",
"png",
"software bugs"
] | There are millions of tiny bugs all around us, in everything from our desktop applications to the appliances in the kitchen. Hidden, arbitrary conditions that cause unintended outputs and behaviors. There are many ways to find these bugs, but one way we don’t hear about very often is finding a bug in your own code, only to realize someone else made the same mistake. For example, [David Buchanan] found a bug in his
multi-threaded PNG decoder and realized that the Apple PNG decoder had the same bug
.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an
image format
just like JPEG, WEBP, or TIFF designed to replace GIFs. After a header, the rest of the file is entirely chunks. Each chunk is prepended by a four-letter identifier, with a few chunks being critical chunks. The essential sections are IHDR (the header), IDAT (actual image data), PLTE (the palette information), and IEND (the last chunk in the file). Compression is via the
DEFLATE
method used in zlib, which is inherently serial. If you’re interested, there’s a convenient
poster about the format
from
a great resource we covered a while back
.
Given that DEFLATE is inherently serial, it’s tricky to format the data apropriately. [David] added special sections called pLLD sections (the lowercase first letter means that it can be safely ignored by decoders that don’t support it). These sections let the decoder know that a given IDAT chunk can safely be deserialized concurrently into x pieces. Apple uses a similar trick with its iDOT chunks. However, there
is an issue here
. It is possible for decompress(a+b) != decompress(a) + decompress(b) if a ends halfway through a non-compressed block. Since the DEFLATE method uses a window, concating two sections together can produce different results.
Since there are now two possible interpretations of a given PNG, you can craft a PNG so that when decoded serially, it shows one image, and when decoded in parallel, it shows another. Additionally, [David] found a race condition in desktop safari that results in a slightly different image decoded every time. Here’s the PNG being decoded every frame:
[David] wrote
a little tool on GitHub
to pack two images into one PNG. It reminds us of the
old trick Steganography, where secret data was stashed inside an image.
(Header image courtesy of [PawelDecowski]). | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415188",
"author": "Gregg Eshelman",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T03:47:52",
"content": "Netscape Navigator’s PNG support had a bug where if transparency wasn’t specified, it would select one color to make transparent and set a non-white background color, usually a ‘cream’ or off-white... | 1,760,372,817.686074 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/17/machine-learning-detects-distracted-politicians/ | Machine Learning Detects Distracted Politicians | Donald Papp | [
"Machine Learning",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"distracted",
"keras",
"machine learning",
"mobile phone",
"politicians",
"twitter"
] | [Dries Depoorter] has a knack for highly technical projects with a solid artistic bent to them, and this piece is no exception.
The Flemish Scrollers
is a software system that watches live streamed sessions of the Flemish government, and uses Python and machine learning to identify and highlight politicians who pull out phones and start scrolling. The results? Pushed out live on Twitter and Instagram, naturally. The project started back in July 2021, and has been dutifully running ever since, so by now we expect that holding one’s phone where the camera can see it is probably considered a rookie mistake.
This project can also be considered a good example of how to properly handle confidence in results depending on the application. In this case, false negatives (a politician is using a phone, but the software doesn’t detect it properly) are much more acceptable than false positives (a member gets incorrectly identified, or is wrongly called-out for using a mobile device when they are not.)
Keras
, an open-source software library, is used for the object detection and facial recognition (GitHub repository for Keras is
here
.) We’ve seen it used in everything from
bat detection
to
automatic trash sorting
, so if you’re interested in machine learning applications, give it a peek. | 39 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415156",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2022-01-18T00:17:19",
"content": "I wonder if it can also detect when they are sleeping.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6415675",
"author": "Mari Kona",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,372,817.837694 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/17/ai-camera-knows-its-st/ | AI Camera Knows Its S**t | Al Williams | [
"Software Hacks",
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"dog poop",
"poop",
"posture estimation"
] | [Caleb] shares a problem with most dog owners. Dogs leave their… byproducts…all over your yard. Some people pick it up right away and some just leave it. But what if your dog has run of the yard? How do you know where these piles are hiding? A security camera and
AI image detection is the answer
, but probably not the way that you think.
You might think as we did that you could train the system to recognize the–um–piles. But instead, [Caleb] elected to have the AI do animal pose estimation to detect the dog’s posture while producing the target. This is probably easier than recognizing a nondescript pile and then it doesn’t matter if it is, say, covered with snow.
The dog’s posture indicates both that the event has occurred and suggests where it happened. A map gets a red circle updated on a web page so you can correctly identify the location of the land mines. We were expecting a robot to pick it up, but maybe that’s a project for later in the year.
Although the system is tuned for Twinkie, it probably would work for many other dogs, although we know of at least one dog who has a signature posture but moves through the whole process, so we bet you’d have to retrain for that behavior.
It seems the system would be worth its weight in gold indoors and
connected to your robot vacuum
. We’ve actually seen
something similar
to this before (the video is still there, but the link is dead). | 13 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415114",
"author": "Frankel",
"timestamp": "2022-01-17T21:39:49",
"content": "Who woulda’ thunk it that the advent of useful AI applications is here now? Folding proteins to detecting poop. I’ve seen it all now.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,818.052888 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/17/new-part-news-raspberry-pi-cuts-out-the-middleman/ | New Part News: Raspberry Pi Cuts Out The Middleman | Elliot Williams | [
"News"
] | [
"chip shortage",
"pico",
"pricing",
"raspberry pi",
"rp2040"
] | Raspberry Pi has just announced that they’ll be
selling their RP2040 microcontroller chips by the reel
, directly to you, at a decent discount.
About a year ago,
Raspberry Pi released its first piece of custom silicon, the RP2040 microcontroller
. They’ve have been selling these chips in bulk to selected customers directly, but have decided to open up the same deals to the general public. If you’re looking for 500 chips or more, you can cut out the middleman and save some serious dough.
Because the RP2040 was a clean-slate design, it uses a relatively modern production process that yields many more processors per silicon wafer, and it has been essentially spared from the chip crisis of 2020-2021. According to CEO Eben Upton, they’ve sold 1.5 million in a year, and have wafers in stock for 20 million more. You do the math, but unless you’re predicting the chip shortage to last in excess of 12 years, they’re looking good. | 36 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6415072",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2022-01-17T18:35:04",
"content": "https://direct.raspberrypi.com/Reels of 500 RP2040 chips, with a unit price of $0.80Reels of 3,400 RP2040 chips, with a unit price of $0.70",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{... | 1,760,372,818.120032 |
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