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https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/propel-paper-planes-bisect-sausages-with-electromagnets/ | Propel Paper Planes, Bisect Sausages With Electromagnets | Chris Wilkinson | [
"Science",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"electromagnet",
"linear motor",
"Railgun"
] | Are you
still
launching paper airplanes using your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy! [Tom Stanton] and his homebrew
electromagnetic rail launcher
are sure to bring your paper airplane game into the 21st century.
To be fair, these kinds of linear motors can be used for more than just launching paper airplanes, and can already be found in niche industrial applications, mass transportation systems and roller coasters. And, yes, the potential to leverage electromagnetism in the theater of war is also being vigorously explored by many of the world’s superpowers in the form of Gauss rifles and railguns. In the meantime, the video (after the break) proves that it’s entirely possible to build a rudimentary yet effective linear motor in your makerspace, using relatively basic components and fundamental physics.
In short, these launch systems use electromagnetism and well timed electronics to propel a mass of magnetic material down a straight (or sometimes curved) track. Multiple pairs of coils are placed along the track, with each pair subsequently energized by high current as the payload approaches. By using many coils in succession, the mass and its payload can be accelerated to high speed.
While a homemade rail launcher is unlikely to turn the tides of war, [Tom Stanton] explores their lethal potential with an experiment involving high-speed video and supermarket sausages, with gruesome results.
If you’re looking for more, why not check out our our previous coverage on
electromagnetic weaponry
?
[Thanks to Feinfinger for the tip] | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6399064",
"author": "vib",
"timestamp": "2021-11-15T10:14:58",
"content": "Brilliant! If this tool can bisect sausages, it might be worth using in multiplying earthworms. If one makes a battery of those guns, fast-speed, parallel earthworms bisection becomes possible. Of course, can... | 1,760,372,885.974913 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/hexagonal-mirror-array-hides-hidden-message/ | Hexagonal Mirror Array Hides Hidden Message | Donald Papp | [
"Art",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"hexagonal mirror",
"hidden message",
"mirror array",
"projector",
"proposal"
] | [Ben Bartlett] recently got engaged, and the proposal had a unique bit of help in the form of
a 3D-printed hexagonal mirror array, whose mirrors are angled just right to spell out a message with the reflections
. A small test is shown above projecting a heart, but the real deal was a bigger version reflecting the message “MARRY ME?” into sand at sunset. Who could say no to something like that? Luckily for all of us, [Ben] shared all the details of what went into designing and building such a thoughtful and fascinating device.
Mirrors on the 3D-printed array are angled just right to reflect light into a message.
Essentially, the array of mirrors works a bit like a projector. Each individual reflection can be can be thought of as a pixel, and the projected position of each can be modified by the precise angle of each mirror. With the help of some Python code, [Ben] calculated the exact angles needed to spell out “MARRY ME?” and generated the necessary 3D model. A smaller-scale test (shown in the header image above) was successful, and after that it was just a matter of printing the array and gluing on some mirrors.
Of course, that’s the short version. In practice there were quite a few troublesome issues that demonstrated the value of using early tests to discover hidden problems. For one thing, mirror angle and alignment is crucial, which meant that anything that could affect the shape of the array was a potential problem. Glue that expands or otherwise changes shape as it dries or cures could slightly change a mirror’s angle, so cyanoacrylate (CA) glue was preferred. However, the tiniest bit of CA glue will mess up a mirror’s surface in a hurry, so care was needed during assembly.
The gleaming hexagonal mirrors are reminiscent of the
James Webb Space Telescope
.
Another gotcha was when [Ben] suddenly realized, twenty hours into printing the final assembly, that the message needed to be reversed! As designed, the array he was printing would project “?EM YRRAM” and this wasn’t caught during testing because the test pattern (a heart) was symmetrical. Fortunately there was time to correct the error and start again, but it was close. [Ben]’s code has an optional visualization function, which was invaluable for verifying that things would actually turn out as expected. As it happens, the project took right up to the last minute to complete and there wasn’t quite time to check everything 100% before the big moment, but it all turned out alright. What’s life without a little mystery and danger, anyway?
The pictures are great, but you won’t regret taking the time to read through the project page (don’t miss the
annotated Python code
) because [Ben] goes into just the right level of detail. The end result looks fantastic, and makes an excellent keepsake with a charming story. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6399031",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-15T04:18:09",
"content": "What a great hack!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6399044",
"author": "Oopsitsaflame",
"timestamp": "2021-11-15T... | 1,760,372,885.855214 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/hackaday-links-november-14-2021/ | Hackaday Links: November 14, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links",
"Slider"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | If you’re an infrastructure dweeb, it’s hard to drive past an electrical substation and not appreciate the engineering involved in building something like that. A moment’s thought will also make it hard to miss just how vulnerable a substation is to attack, especially those located way out in the hinterlands. And now we’re learning that late year, someone in Pennsylvania noticed this vulnerability and acted on it by
attacking a substation with a commercial drone
. Rather than trying to fly explosives over the substation fence, the attacker instead chose to dangle a copper wire tether under the drone, in an attempt to cause a short circuit. The attempt apparently failed when the drone crashed before contacting any conductors, and the attacker appears to have been ignorant of the extensive protective gear employed at substations that likely would have made a successful attack only a temporary outage. But it still points to the vulnerability of the grid to even low-skill, low-cost attacks.
We’ve probably all had the experience of using someone’s janky app and thinking, “Pfft! I could write something better than this!” That’s what a bunch of parents of school-age kids in Sweden thought, and they went ahead and did exactly that. Unfortunately,
it didn’t turn out quite the way they expected
. The problem app was called Skolplattform, which was supposed to make it easy for Stockholm’s parents to keep track of their kids’ progress at school. The app, which cost 1 billion Swedish Krona to develop, is by all accounts a disaster. But some frustrated parents managed to reverse engineer the API and build a new, better one on top of it. This resulted in
Öppna Skolplattformen
, an open-source app that actually works. Not to be upstaged, the city of Stockholm accused the parents of cyber crimes and data breaches. They also engaged the parents in an “API war”, constantly changing their system to nerf the new app and forcing the parents to rewrite it. In the end, the parents won, with Stockholm changing its position after a police report found that all data being accessed were voluntarily made public by the city. But it’s still a cautionary tale about the dangers of one-upping The Man.
Sam Battles is in a bit of a moral bind
, and it’s something that others in our community may run into. Sam is perhaps better known as “Look Mum, No Computer” on YouTube, and as the proprietor of the
“This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete”
showcase of retro technology in England. He’s also an avid builder of analog synthesizers, including a world-record synth with a thousand oscillators called the “Megadrone.” He’d like to tackle another build to try to break his own records, but in a time of fragile supply chains and other woes too numerous to mention, doing so would likely require the world’s entire supply of some components. Hence the dilemma: do any of us as hobbyists have a moral obligation to tread lightly when it comes to component selection? It’s an interesting question, and one that’s sure to engender strong opinions, which of course we encourage you to share in the comments section. Please just try to keep it civil.
Remember wardriving? If you were around in the early days of the 802.11 standard, you’ll probably recall how wardriving was a popular way to find open-access WiFi hotspots. While today we call using other people’s computers “The Cloud,” back then it was often the only way to get a connection. You’d think that wardriving would have been killed off by the pervasive connectivity of cell phone networks, but that’s hardly the case, at least for
security research purposes
. A security researcher built a warwalking rig into a backpack and toured neighborhoods in Tel Aviv, and discovered that 44% of people used their cell phone number as their WiFi password. He did this by collecting 5,000 password hashes and using a GPU cracking tool called hashcat to look for passwords matching the Israeli phone number schema, of which there were 2,200. A further comparison of the non-cell-number hashes against the rockyou.txt list of common passwords led to another 900 passwords. So perhaps you should reconsider your approach if you’re using a password like these.
And finally, a little trip down computer memory lane for any Microsoft employees who were onboarded in the early 1990s. Chances are good that they needed to endure
this 1994 orientation film
that covers the history of Microsoft and the glories of working in Redmond in the pre-Windows 95 days. Aside from the usual snark that attends glimpses of haircuts and fashions back in the olden times, the film is an interesting glimpse into where Microsoft saw itself in the developing computer culture. There are some dubious parts, like claiming — perhaps inadvertently — that Bill Gates and Paul Allen invented languages like Basic, Fortran, and Cobol. But it’s still pretty cool to look at what things were like at Microsoft before it became the behemoth it is today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmW4JjR2-_8 | 21 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398991",
"author": "Barriageloon",
"timestamp": "2021-11-15T00:11:57",
"content": "The History Guy recently did a video of the British doing a balloon based attack on Nazi Europe’s power grid using surplus balloons trailing wires. It apparently had some success.https://www.youtube... | 1,760,372,886.037973 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/forget-radio-transmitting-with-neutrons/ | Forget Radio! Transmitting With Neutrons | Al Williams | [
"Science"
] | [
"communication",
"neutron",
"on off keying",
"radiation"
] | Throughout history, people have devised ways to send information across long distances. For centuries we relied on smoke signals, semaphores, and similar physical devices. Electricity changed everything. First the telegraph and then radio transformed communications. Now researchers at the University of Lancaster have demonstrated another way to send wireless data without using electromagnetic radiation. They’ve harnessed
fast neutrons from californium-252 and modulated them with information
with 100% success.
The setup was interesting. The radioactive material was encased in a cubic meter steel tank filled with water. A pneumatic system can move the material to one edge of the tank which allows fast neutrons to escape. A scintillating detector can pick up the increased neutron activity. It seems like it is akin to using what hams call CW and college professors call OOK (on off keying). You can do that with just about anything you can detect. A flashlight, knocking on wood, or — we suppose — neutrons.
We wondered what the practical application of this might be. The paper suggests that the technique could send data through metal containment structures like those of a nuclear reactor or, perhaps, a spacecraft where you don’t want anything unnecessarily breaching the containment. After all, neutrons cut through things that would stop a conventional radio wave cold.
It seems like you only have to prove you can detect something to make this work — it really doesn’t matter what it is you are detecting. It seems like it would be much harder to do more
advanced types of modulation
using neutrons. Maybe this is why we don’t hear aliens. They are all
Morse code
operators with neutron-based telegraphs. | 50 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398954",
"author": "LordNothing",
"timestamp": "2021-11-14T21:14:59",
"content": "neutrons are one thing but when you can reliably detect neutrinos and modulate the emissions of same, then you could do through planet communications and get the best possible ping times while elimina... | 1,760,372,885.937089 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/tiny-talisman-warns-wearer-about-uv-exposure/ | Tiny Talisman Warns Wearer About UV Exposure | Dan Maloney | [
"Art",
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"attiny84",
"coin cell",
"jewelry",
"metalworking",
"TTP223",
"uv",
"uv index",
"UV-A",
"UV-C",
"VEML6075"
] | Given how important our Sun is, our ancestors can be forgiven for seeing it as a god. And even now that we know what it actually is and how it works, it’s not much of a reach to think that the Sun pours forth evil spirits that can visit disease and death on those who bask too long in its rays. So
an amulet of protection against the evil UV rays
is a totally reasonable project, right?
As is often the case with [mitxela]’s projects, especially
the more bedazzled ones
, this one is approximately equal parts electronics and fine metalworking. The bulk of the video below focuses on the metalwork, which is pretty fascinating stuff. The case for the amulet was made from brass and sized to fit a CR2032 coin cell. The back of the amulet is threaded to act as a battery cover, and some fancy lathe work was needed there. The case was also electroplated in gold to prevent tarnishing, and lends a nice look when paired up with the black solder mask of the PCB.
On the electronics side, [mitxela] took pains to keep battery drain as low as possible and to make the best use of the available space, choosing an ATtiny84 to support a TTP223 capacitive sensing chip and a VEML6075 UV sensor. The touch sensor allows the wearer to wake the amulet and cycles through UV modes, which [mitxela] learned were not exactly what the sensor datasheet said they were. This required a few software hacks, but in the end, the amulet does a decent job of reporting the UV index and looks fantastic while doing it. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398939",
"author": "Mike",
"timestamp": "2021-11-14T19:46:06",
"content": "” Sun pours forth evil spirits ” Ya ok…. Time to put the crack pipe down.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6398944",
"author": "Gravis",
... | 1,760,372,886.095028 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/13/a-one-servo-mechanical-seven-segment-display/ | A One-Servo Mechanical Seven-Segment Display | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"7 segment",
"cam",
"digit",
"display",
"follower",
"linkage",
"mechanical",
"servo",
"seven segment"
] | The seven-segment display may be a bit prosaic after all these years, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to spice it up. Coming up with a mechanical version of the typical photon-based display is a popular project, of which we’ve seen plenty of examples over the years. But
this seven-segment display
is quite a mechanical treat, and a unique way to flip through the digits.
With most mechanical displays, we’re used to seeing the state of each segment changed with some kind of actuator, like a solenoid or servo. [Shinsaku Hiura] decided on a sleeker design using a 3D-printed barrel carrying one cam for each segment. Each hinged segment is attached to an arm that acts as a follower, riding on its cam and flipping on or off in a set pattern. Which digit is displayed depends on the position of the barrel, which is controlled with a single servo and a pair of gears. It trades mechanical complexity for electrical simplicity and overall elegance, and as you can see from the video below, it’s pretty snappy.
We think the best part of this build is figuring out the shape of the cams. We wonder how they compare to the cam profiles in
[Greg Zumwalt]’s mechanical display
; it uses two separate discs with grooves, but the principle is pretty much the same.
Thanks to [Jan Derogee] for the tip. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398777",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T18:30:24",
"content": "This is a furby-esque design. It would only be closer by linking multiple digits to flip through the time using a cheap-o geared motor and a current sensor to detect when a digit flipped.",
"parent_id... | 1,760,372,885.756342 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/13/peek-behind-the-curtains-conference-badge-design/ | Peek Behind The Curtains: Conference Badge Design | Elliot Williams | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Remoticon",
"badgelife",
"badges",
"conferences"
] | In the before-times, back when we could have in-person Hackaday Supercons, there was always the problem of the badge. Making a few hundred small electronic thingies, for a smart but broad range of hackers, is tricky. We always want it to do
something
all on its own, but also ideally to allow enough free range that the motivated badge hacker can make it into something exquisite. Add in the fact that some attendees are hardware types and some are software types, and toss in a price constraint too. Oh, and it has to look good. Tough problem.
Here’s one extreme solution: the badge at the first Supercon. Faced with essentially zero budget and a tight time constraint, the Hackaday team punted — and produced a prototype board, but had tons of parts on hand for everyone to draw from. And
the Hackaday crowd delivered
. This was the badge that demonstrates
what happens if you leave everything open
.
Contrast with the 2018 Belgrade and Supercon badges, which were essentially the same except for color. Here, the hardware interface was limited to a 9-pin header, but the badge itself was
a fully functional microcomputer
, complete with keyboard and screen.
Most of the hacks
were written in the native BASIC, though a few hearty souls played around with the alternative CP/M system. This was
our most software badge
.
Our last in-person badge, the 2019 Supercon badge, was free rein for both hardware and software hackers. The whole thing was based on an FPGA,
with completely custom gateware written by Sprite_tm running RISC-V, but based loosely on the Z80 architecture
. This was probably also the badge with the highest hurdle to hackers, but you all came through with
inventive hardware add-ons
, but also a team that came through with a custom Linux OS running on this never-before-seen virtual environment, enabled by a hardware SDRAM cartridge hack.
And finally, even before the global supply crisis, even a tight-knit conference like ours could stock-out the world’s supply of a given component. The untold story of
the 2016 Belgrade badge
is that Voja Antonic bought out the world’s supply of Kingbright 8×8 common-cathode LED matrixes, and had to redesign the board in the last minute to incorporate the common-anode parts too. (Or was it vice-versa?) Lesson learned, the 2016 Supercon badge
traded out the LED modules for discrete LEDs
. Not gonna stock out on red LEDs.
So that’s a long-winded introduction to
Thomas Flummer’s unofficial Remoticon 2 badges
. With the parts crisis and a virtual conference, you’re on your own to source the badge. Splitting the freedom vs. in-built functionality problem like Samson, he’s got two boards — one a breadboard and the other fully populated. And like all his badges, they both look great. If you manage to get one made by
Remoticon
next week, be sure to show it off in the Bring-a-Hack. And if you don’t get it in time, bring it by in person to the 2022 Supercon!
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
! | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6399075",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-15T10:51:35",
"content": "Those new badges look as slick … as a pancakeB^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6399204",
"author": "The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren",
"time... | 1,760,372,885.796043 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/13/using-vhdl-to-generate-discrete-logic-pcb-designs/ | Using VHDL To Generate Discrete Logic PCB Designs | Lewin Day | [
"FPGA",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"ASIC",
"fpga",
"verilog",
"vhdl"
] | VHDL and Verilog are hardware description languages, used to describe and define logic circuits. They’re typically used to design ASICs and to program FPGAs, essentially using software to define hardware. However, [Tim] has done something altogether quite creative, creating tools to take VHDL and Verilog
and spit out PCB designs for discrete logic.
Yes, you read that correctly. The basic idea is to take VHDL source code, and then make a PCB layout that implements the desired logic using resistor-transistor logic. From there, the PCB design files can be shipped off to a manufacturer for pick-and-place assembly at a fraction of the cost of producing a bespoke ASIC.
The drawbacks are obvious; tons of individual discrete parts are required, the size penalty is hilariously bad, and power usage is almost certainly orders of magnitude higher than doing the same logic on an ASIC or even FPGA. Oh, and everything’s much slower, too.
However, as an academic exercise or simply for fun, it’s an awesome bit of work. The idea that one can define a complicated logic circuit and have a PCB implementing the logic whipped up by automated tools is amazing, and we absolutely want to see more of this type of thing.
We’ve seen similar work done with VHDL synthesis into 74-series logic design. If you’ve been developing your own fancy digital-logic-fu,
be sure to drop us a line!
[Thanks to Yann Guidon for the tip!] | 36 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398740",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T12:11:46",
"content": "And look at his GitHub project too !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6398741",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T12:20:28",
"cont... | 1,760,372,886.174399 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/13/gimballed-omnirotor-goes-over-great-obstacles/ | Gimballed Omnirotor Goes Over Great Obstacles | Ryan Flowers | [
"drone hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"coaxial",
"gimbal",
"gimballed",
"obstacle course",
"omnirotor",
"Search and Rescue"
] | What can drive on the ground, hop in the air, and continuously move its coaxial rotor assembly without ever having to reset its position? The answer is [New Dexterity]’s
Omnirotor All-Terrain Platform
.
Although still very much a prototype, the video below the break shows that the dexterity claimed by Omnirotor isn’t just a lot of hype. Weaving through, around, and over obstacles is accomplished with relative ease by way of a coaxial rotor configuration that’s sure to turn some heads.
Omnirotor’s unique design lends to its agility
While not novel in every aspect, the Omnirotor’s strength comes from a combination of features that are fairly unique. The coaxial rotors are fully gimballed, and as such can be moved to and from any direction from any other direction. In other words, it can rotate in any axis infinitely without needing to return to a home position. Part of this magic comes from a very clever use of resources: The battery, speed controllers, and motors are all gimballed as one. This clever hack avoids the need for large, heavy slip rings that would otherwise be needed to transmit power.
Adding to the Omnirotor’s agility is a set of wheels that allow the craft to push itself along a surface, presumably to decrease power consumption. What if an obstacle is too difficult to drive around or past? The Omnirotor takes to the air and flies over it. The coaxial rotors are caged, protecting them from the typical rotor-snagging dangers you’d expect in close quarters.
[New Dexterity] has Open Sourced the entire project, with the
Omirotor design
,
Firmware
, and even the
benchmarking platform
available on Github so that others can share in the fun and iterate the design forward even further.
You might also enjoy this
tetrahedron based omnirotor
, or another
omnirotor that knows how to play fetch
. Really.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398728",
"author": "Zach",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T10:24:13",
"content": "I’m no aerospace expert but wouldn’t a flying device whose source of thrust is located in its center of mass have a lot of trouble carrying any form of useful payload ?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,372,886.267217 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/the-spiced-cider-must-flow/ | The Spiced (Cider) Must Flow | Matthew Carlson | [
"cooking hacks",
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"cider",
"cider press",
"grinder"
] | A fresh-squeezed glass of orange juice with breakfast seems like a trope that’s straight from a late 1980s sitcom. Making orange juice is easy; press until the liquid comes out. Apple juice (and, by extension, apple cider) is the same principle but requires much more force to squeeze out the juice. So what if you, like [Peter], have 900 lbs (408.2 kg for those metrically minded) of apples that you want to make cider out of? The obvious solution is to
create a somewhat automated homemade cider press with lasers
.
An earlier effort to make 25 gallons of cider took several full days of struggle for four people, so [Peter] knew he had to plan better next year. [Peter’s wife] milled and glued red oak into a large, sturdy frame that could press down with proper force and not break. [Peter] reached out to the local metal shop to fabricate a stainless steel tray with a custom drain. The cider basket itself and the pressboard were maple with waterproofing oil.
However, just because you can press apples, doesn’t mean you’re ready to make cider. They still need to be washed, cut, and ground into a pulp. A ramp was fashioned that it could be set in a truck bed with sprayers to wash the apples as they rolled by. A laser circuit with an LM393 opamp and a photoresistor allowed the sprayers to only activate when there was actually an apple to spray. Apple grinders are tricky as they need to survive the drop of several one-pound balls while staying at a reasonable speed. The grinder dispenses the pulp into a mesh nylon bag in a 5-gallon bucket, ready to be pressed. For the curious reader, 900lbs of apples yielded 60 gallons of delicious cider.
If you’re looking for a smaller scale press,
here’s a cider press that’s a little simpler to make
. | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398714",
"author": "genixia",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T07:37:12",
"content": "Those looking to build an apple mill for smaller quantities should also consider a new stainless steel garbage disposal unit. A bit of plywood and a 2×4 makes a tray to mount it on. Sit it on sawhorses ... | 1,760,372,886.222215 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/exploring-the-healing-power-of-cold-plasma/ | Exploring The Healing Power Of Cold Plasma | Tom Nardi | [
"Medical Hacks",
"Science"
] | [
"electrode",
"helium",
"high voltage",
"plasma",
"Plasma Channel"
] | It probably won’t come as much surprise to find that a blast of hot plasma can be used to sterilize a surface. Unfortunately, said surface is likely going to look a bit worse for wear afterwards, which limits the usefulness of this particular technique. But as it turns out, it’s possible to generate a so-called “cold” plasma that offers the same cleansing properties in a much friendlier form.
While it might sound like science fiction, prolific experimenter
[Jay Bowles] was able to create a reliable source of nonthermal plasma for his latest
Plasma Channel
video
with surprisingly little in the way of equipment. Assuming you’ve already got a device capable of pumping out high-voltage, all you really need to recreate this phenomenon is a tank of helium and some tubing.
Cold plasma stopped bacterial growth in the circled area.
[Jay] takes viewers through a few of the different approaches he tried before finally settling on the winning combination of a glass pipette with a copper wire run down the center. When connected to a party store helium tank and the
compact Slayer Exciter coil he built last year
, the setup produced a focused jet of plasma that was cool enough to touch.
It’s beautiful to look at, but is a pretty light show all you get for your helium? To see if his device was capable of sterilizing surfaces, he inoculated a set of growth plates with bacteria collected from his hands and exposed them to the cold plasma stream. Compared to the untreated control group the reduction in bacterial growth certainly looks compelling, although the narrow jet does have a very localized effect.
If you’re just looking to keep your hands clean, some soap and warm water are probably a safer bet. But this technology does appear to have some fascinating medical applications, and as [Jay] points out, the
European Space Agency has been researching the concept for some time now.
Who knows? In the not so distant future, you may see a similar looking gadget at your doctor’s office. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time
space-tested tech came down to us Earthlings
. | 22 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398711",
"author": "KVG",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T06:36:54",
"content": "Just in time for a project at work that could use something like this.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6398715",
"author": "Joseph Eofd",
"timest... | 1,760,372,886.519647 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/a-guide-to-designing-a-custom-rc-controller/ | A Guide To Designing A Custom RC Controller | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"controller",
"photogrametry",
"radio control"
] | These days, there are tons of RC controllers out there of all shapes and sizes. However, if you want to build something with just the right amount of buttons and sticks for your application, you might want to design something yourself.
That’s precisely what [Sebastian] did.
The project actually began some time ago, with [Sebastian] sharing his process for building a custom ergonomic enclosure through the use of clay and photogrammetry,
which we’ve covered before
.
Inside that shapely housing, the build relies on a STM32 microcontroller, hooked up to a series of potentiometers, buttons, and a thumbstick (more potentiometers). A NRF24L01 module is used to handle the radio transmission side of things.
Overall, [Sebastian] has produced a great guide to designing a custom RC controller from the ground up, rather than simply instructing one how to replicate his own build. Armed with these skills, any maker should be able to whip up their own entirely bespoke controllers. Video after the break. | 5 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398693",
"author": "rpavlik",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T00:32:29",
"content": "I love that housing design, looks really cool. In a way it kind of looks like a Razer Hydra controller with some extra inputs, but that’s not too surprising since a Hydra can serve as a model for a pretty... | 1,760,372,886.308773 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/m5paper-gets-open-source-weather-display-firmware/ | M5Paper Gets Open Source Weather Display Firmware | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"firmware",
"M5Paper",
"open source",
"weather display"
] | We know you like soldering irons, we’re quite fond of them ourselves. But the reality is, modular components and highly capable development boards allow the modern hardware hacker to get things done with far less solder smoke then ever before. In fact, sometimes all you need to finish your project is the right code.
Case in point, check out the slick electronic paper weather display that
[Danko Bertović] shows off in the latest
Volos Projects
video
. While it certainly fits the description of a DIY project, he didn’t have to put any of the hardware together himself. The M5Paper is an ESP32 development kit designed around a crisp 4.7″, 960 x 540 e-paper panel that includes everything from environmental sensors to an internal 1150 mAh battery. To make your handheld e-paper dreams come true, the only thing you need to provide is the software.
The weather display code provided by [Danko] should certainly get you going in the right direction. Now don’t get us wrong, there’s certainly no shame in just flashing his code to the device and plunking it on your desk. It’s a gorgeous looking interface, and we all know that a
sprinkling of open source code is often all it takes to make a standard consumer device extraordinary
. But by using the code he’s provided as a launching point, you can take this turn-key device and really make it your own. | 25 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398510",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-12T10:39:33",
"content": "Don’t get me wrong, the guy did a good job, but sometimes it would be interesting to see eink project revolving around something else than weather displays and crypto trackers..",
"parent_id": null,
"... | 1,760,372,887.036568 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/three-dimensional-design-yields-compact-seven-segment-hex-displays/ | Three-Dimensional Design Yields Compact Seven-Segment Hex Displays | Adam Zeloof | [
"hardware",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"cpu",
"microcontroller",
"pic",
"seven segment display"
] | Computers, from the simplest to the most complex, aren’t very useful if they can’t provide feedback to a user. Whether that interface takes the form of a monitor, a speaker, or a simple LED, there’s almost always some kind of output. One of the most ubiquitous is the ever-present seven-segment display. They’re small, they’re easy to use, and, perhaps most important, they’re cheap.
While the displays themselves are relatively compact, they often require some sort of driver circuitry — something that translates a digit into voltage at the correct pins. These drivers can take up valuable space, especially on a breadboard, and can sometimes make using seven-segment displays cumbersome. Thankfully, [John Lonergan] has a great solution:
driver boards that sit completely beneath the displays
. His dual seven-segment hex display project was born out of necessity — he needed it for
the breadboard CPU SPAM-1
, which was getting a bit too bulky. Each module is two seven-segment displays atop a small PCB. Beneath the displays lives an 8-bit PIC microcontroller, which acts as a driver for both of the displays.
It’s so easy to restrict ourselves to thinking in two dimensions when working on electronic design — even designing multilayer PCBs often feels like working on several, distinct two-dimensional areas rather than one three-dimensional one. The concept of stacking components to save space, while fairly straightforward to implement, is a great example of the kind of problem-solving we love to see here at Hackaday. Of course, if you like the idea of 3D circuit design, you have to check out
some of these incredible circuit sculptures we’ve featured in the past
. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398478",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2021-11-12T06:22:07",
"content": "It’s a recurring subject !https://hackaday.io/project/8270-pictiland more generally :https://hackaday.io/list/116456-hexadecimal-displays",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
... | 1,760,372,886.945079 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/palm-os-reincarnate/ | Palm OS: Reincarnate | Matthew Carlson | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"operating system",
"os",
"PalmOS",
"programming",
"pumpkinOS",
"raspberry pi"
] | [pmig96] loves PalmOS and has set about on the arduous task of
reimplementing PalmOS from scratch, dubbing it Pumpkin OS
. Pumpkin OS can run on x86 and ARM at native speed as it is not an emulator. System calls are trapped and intercepted by Pumpkin OS. Because it doesn’t emulate, Palm apps currently need to be recompiled for x86, though it’s hoped to support apps that use ARMlets soon. Since there are over 800 different system traps in PalmOS, he hasn’t implemented them all yet.
Generally speaking, his saving grace is that 80% of the apps only use 20% of the API. His starting point was a script that took the headers from the PalmOS SDK and converted them into functions with just a debug message letting him know that it isn’t implemented yet and a default return value. Additionally, [pmig96] is taking away some of the restrictions on the old PalmOS, such as being limited to only one running app at a time.
As if an x86 desktop version wasn’t enough, [pmig96]
recompiled Pumpkin OS to a Raspberry Pi 4
with a ubiquitous 3.5″ 320×480 TFT SPI touch screen. Linux maps the TFT screen to a frame buffer (dev/fb0 or dev/fb1). He added a quick optimization to only draw areas that have changed so that the SPI writes could be kept small to keep the frame rate performance.
[pmig96] isn’t
the only one trying to breathe some new life into PalmOS
, and we hope to see more progress on PumpkinOS in the future. | 26 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398451",
"author": "Ken",
"timestamp": "2021-11-12T03:18:24",
"content": "I like the “not implemented yet” technique – I’m certain he didn’t invent it, but for a project like this it keeps him from wasting time implementing calls that will never be used.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,887.201718 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/ledboy-is-a-retro-modern-handheld-game/ | LEDBOY Is A Retro-Modern Handheld Game | Lewin Day | [
"Games"
] | [
"game",
"gaming",
"gaming console",
"handheld",
"handheld gaming console"
] | Back in the 1970s, there were a few LED-based games on the market that were quickly superseded by the rise of LCDs and other fancier technologies. However, [grossofabian] wanted to recreate that classic style of game but with more modern hardware. The result is the LEDBOY, a colorful handheld game
built in tribute to that era.
The handheld is based around the ATtiny 1614 microcontroller, driving a 10×10 array of NeoPixel Nano 2427 LEDs, named for their small 2.4 mm x 2.7 mm form factor. They’re RGB, too, so there’s lots of wonderful colors to play with.
Wrapped up in a neat enclosure with a rechargeable 130 mAh lithium-ion battery and some simple tactile buttons, it’s a tidy little handheld game console. Add in the CH340C chip for USB to serial duties, and it’s easy to program with the Arduino IDE, too.
Code is available on Github for those keen to take a closer look. Amusingly, the project bears a striking resemblance to a similarly-named build we featured
just under 12 years ago
. Time is a flat circle, and the video, my friends, is after the break. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398430",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-12T01:00:46",
"content": "Mattel handheld football and baseball were LED games of the late 1970s.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6398519",
"author": "Sean Patrick Huberty",
... | 1,760,372,886.980623 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/build-your-own-hv-capacitors/ | Build Your Own HV Capacitors | Al Williams | [
"how-to",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"capacitor",
"high voltage",
"hv capacitor"
] | Finding high voltage capacitors can be tricky. Sure, you can buy these capacitors, but they are often expensive and hard to find exactly what you want. [RachelAnne] needed some low-value variable capacitors that would work at 100 kV.
So she made some
.
Instead of fabricating the plates directly, these capacitors use laminations from a scrap power transformer. These usually have two types of plates, one of which looks like a letter “E” and the other just like a straight bar. For dielectric, the capacitors use common transparency film.
As you might expect, she had to strip off the insulating varnish where the contact was to be made with the plates. The moving mechanism uses a toy car tire as a handle to make sure it is insulated. The screw moves one set of plates in and out while the other side remains fixed.
For more capacity, it would help to use a thinner dielectric. The transparency film is about 100 microns thick and there are several sheets in between each plate. According to the post, there are 400 microns of dielectric and 600 microns air gap, so that’s a millimeter gap between each plate. Of course, the voltage capacity depends on the gap and the dielectric constant, so too thin and you might need a better dielectric to handle the high voltage.
We’ve certainly seen
homemade high voltage caps
before. You can also
make your own supercapacitors
, but they probably aren’t going to take 100 kV. | 28 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398377",
"author": "Moryc",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T21:13:16",
"content": "Back in early 2000’s in Poland we made HV capacitors by taking two rolls of garden foil (the kind that is used for simple greenhouses) and roll of aluminum foil. One unwinds the garden foil roll, covers it ... | 1,760,372,886.810942 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/motorcycle-rally-computer-goes-open-source/ | Motorcycle Rally Computer Goes Open Source | Adam Zeloof | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"gps",
"motorcycle",
"racing",
"Rally"
] | Motorcycle rally racing is a high-speed, exciting, off-road motorsport that involves zipping across all types of terrain on two wheels. While riding, it’s extremely important for riders to know what’s coming up next — turns, straightaways, stream crossings, the list goes on. Generally, this is handled by a roadbook — a paper scroll that has diagrams of each turn or course checkpoint, along with the distances between them and any other pertinent information. Of course, this needs to be paired with a readout that tells you how far you’ve traveled since the last waypoint so you’re not just guessing. This readout usually takes the form of a rally computer, a device that can display speed, distance traveled, and course heading (and some of the fancier ones have even more data available).
A roadbook with commercially-available rally computers
Frustrated with the lackluster interface and high cost associated with most rally computers on the market, [Matias Godoy] designed his own back in 2017, and was quick to realize he had a potential product. After several iterations he brought his idea to market with a small initial run, which sold out in a few hours!
He then took some time to reflect on the successful campaign. He decided that rather than continue to churn out units, he would open-source the design to make it available to everybody and see what the community could come up with. He
published all of his design files to GitHub
, and wrote up a
wonderful blog post documenting the entire design process, from inspiration and early prototypes to his decision to go open source
.
[Matias]’s project, the Open Rally Computer (formerly the Baja Pro) packages neatly in a CNC-machined case and features a nice high-visibility LCD display, a built-in GPS receiver, and an ergonomic handlebar-mounted remote. The data is crunched by an ESP32 microcontroller, which also allows for WiFi-enabled OTA updates. The end result is a beautiful and useful device that was clearly designed with great care. Love the idea but not a rally racer? If street bikes are more your thing then fear not because
there’s an open source digital dashboard out there for you too
. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398411",
"author": "geocrasher",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T23:40:23",
"content": "This is SUCH a slick project, and there’s so much to unravel with it. The human and project management side of it is also quite fascinating. Very well done, Matias!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,372,887.08568 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/so-whats-up-with-all-these-crazy-event-networks-then/ | So. What’s Up With All These Crazy Event Networks Then? | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Network Hacks",
"Rants",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"network",
"wi-fi",
"wireless",
"wpa2"
] | As an itinerant Hackaday writer I am privileged to meet the people who make up our community as I travel the continent in search of the coolest gatherings. This weekend I’ve made the trek to the east of the Netherlands for the ETH0 hacker camp, in a camping hostel set in wooded countryside. Sit down, connect to the network, grab a Club-Mate, and I’m ready to go!
Forget the CTF, Connecting To WiFi Is The Real Challenge!
There no doubt comes a point in every traveling hacker’s life when a small annoyance becomes a major one and a rant boils up from within, and perhaps it’s ETH0’s misfortune that it’s at their event that something has finally boiled over. I’m speaking of course about wireless networks.
While on the road I connect to a lot of them, the normal commercial hotspots, hackerspaces, and of course at hacker camps. Connecting to a wireless network is a simple experience, with a level of security provided by WPA2 and access credentials being a password. Find the SSID, bang in the password, and you’re in. I’m as securely connected as I reasonably can be, and can get on with whatever I need to do. At hacker camps though, for some reason it never seems to be so simple.
Instead of a simple password field you are presented with a complex dialogue with a load of fields that make little sense, and someone breezily saying “Just enter hacker and hacker!” doesn’t cut it when that simply doesn’t work. When you have to publish
an app
just so that attendees can hook up their phones to a network, perhaps it’s time to take another look .
The unexpectedly long Wi-Fi config screen of a typical hacker camp.
So what exactly am I complaining about and what does it all mean? Here’s a screenshot of the offending dialogue, in all its verbose glory.
At the top is a pulldown: WiFi security. This defines what type of network it is, and on my Ubuntu system it has the full range of security types from ‘None’ for an open network to “WPA3” for the most recent security standard. Most wireless networks in use today have WPA2 security, and this one is no exception. It has “WPA & WPA2 Enterprise”, which means that it follows the fancy version of WPA2 which uses a signed certificate to authenticate the access point. By contrast those other networks use “WPA Personal”, meaning that the client automatically trusts any access point following the same SSID and password combo, without requiring a certificate.
This use of WPA2 enterprise security makes sense for the security conscious administrator even if it’s annoying for the end user to configure, and as it turns out it’s the next pulldown labelled “Authentication” that’s the annoying one on my system. By default it shows “Tunnelled TLS” as its sprotocol, where it turns out that the hacker camp networks use “Protected EAP (PEAP)”. This is a protocol that protects the initial key exchange against a third party eavesdropping on packets and hijacking the connection.
The Network Giveth Security, And Then Taketh It Away
There are a few options for identity, domain, and certificate authentication servers, but the next important setting is a checkbox: “No CA certificate is required”. This is both important and infuriating, because going back to the point earlier about WPA2 Enterprise requiring a signed certificate, it appears to dispense with that entirely making the whole point of all this annoying configuration meaningless.
So if you use a protocol that requires a certificate to authenticate the access point and then do without the certificate, where is the benefit? I am no networking guru, but as far as I can see it lies in PEAP protecting my key exchange. Since my access point isn’t authenticated using a certificate there is nothing to stop a malicious third party setting up a rogue access point and capturing my connection anyway, so that benefit seems marginal.
I started this investigation from a standpoint of being annoyed at arcane WiFi set-ups, and assuming I understand the configuration correctly I have ended it unsure whether there is any benefit to the end user of having it in the first place. If you’re a wireless networking guru then please weigh in down in the comments, I’d really like to know.
Meanwhile I have a suggestion. Most camps have two networks, the WPA2 Enterprise one described above, and an open “insecure” one with no encryption and sometimes precious little between client and the wider internet. Can I suggest that they also have a network running WPA2 Personal, like every Starbucks, and leave the extra configuration for the 1337? It would save *so* much confusion!
(Editor’s note: If you’re wondering what’s up with the porta-potty full of network gear,
it’s a long story
. But the short version is, cheap and easy weatherproof housing.)
Header image, SHA 2017 Datenklo, Mitch Altman,
CC BY-SA 2.0. | 21 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398347",
"author": "Perry Harrington",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T18:49:40",
"content": "I really have to ask “what’s the point” when all of my connections are TLS encrypted.Yes, you can sniff the TLS and get the SNI to know what I am connecting to, so what?The battlefield is in the ... | 1,760,372,887.263048 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/rolling-your-own-long-range-iot-sensor-network/ | Rolling Your Own Long-Range IoT Sensor Network | Tom Nardi | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Wireless Hacks"
] | [
"802.15.4",
"CC1312",
"FT232",
"IoT",
"Wireless sensor"
] | Homebrew wireless sensors are nothing new around these parts: grab an ESP8266, hang a BME280 from the I2C pins, and you’re just a few lines of code away from joining the Internet of Things on your own terms. Builds like this are so cheap and easy that they make an excellent first project for folks looking to get into the electronics game, but what if you’re looking for something a bit more bespoke?
In that case, you could follow in the footsteps of
[Discreet Mayor] and put together a custom modular architecture for long-range wireless sensors
. The core of the system is a breakout board for the Texas Instruments SimpleLink CC1312 wireless MCU which features a simple 2×11 header connector. This allows the module to either be plugged into a larger board or have a small sensor PCB attached directly to it.
Rather than using WiFi or requiring some existing radio infrastructure, the boards automatically create a private network using the IEEE 802.15.4 standard at a range of up to 600 meters. A dedicated receiver isn’t necessary, to pull data off the network, one of the CC1312 boards simply gets connected to a computer through a simple FT232 adapter.
[Discreet Mayor] has already created a number of projects that use these custom radios for communication,
from a pool monitoring system
to a
temperature sensor for the BBQ
. That portable battery operated devices are able to use this common communications backbone just as well as mains powered static devices is a testament to the work that went into the firmware to make it as robust and efficient as possible.
Like the idea of long-range private networks, but less enthusiastic about having to come up with your own hardware? Not to worry. Over the summer, Espressif announced that they’re working on
an ESP32 variant that includes support for IEEE 802.15.4
. Just as soon as this chip shortage is over, we might even get to see the thing. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398404",
"author": "localroger",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T23:24:59",
"content": "My experience is that ESP32 and ESP8266 modules using the peer to peer ESPNow protocol have better range and are more reliable than actual Zigbee hardware used by some of the manufacturers we represent... | 1,760,372,887.304976 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/scientific-honesty-and-quantum-computings-latest-theoretical-hurdle/ | Scientific Honesty And Quantum Computing’s Latest Theoretical Hurdle | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"Rants",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"fermions",
"majorana",
"quantum computing",
"rants",
"topological quantum computing"
] | Quantum computers are really in their infancy. If you created a few logic gates with tubes back in the 1930s, it would be difficult to predict all the ways we would use computers today. However, you could probably guess where at least some of the problems would lie in the future. One of the things we are pretty sure will limit quantum computer development is error correction.
As far as we know, every quantum qubit we’ve come up with so far is very fragile and prone to random errors. That’s why every practical design today incorporates some sort of
QEC
— quantum error correction. Of course, error correction isn’t news. We use it all the time on unreliable storage media or communication channels and high-reliability memory. The problem is, you can’t directly clone a qubit (a quantum bit), so it is hard to use traditional error correction techniques with qubits.
After all, the whole point to a qubit is we don’t measure it until the end of the computation which, like Schrödinger’s cat, seals its fate. So if you were to “read” a bunch of qubits to form a checksum or a CRC, you’d destroy their quantum nature in the process making your computer not very useful. You can’t even copy a bit to use something like triple redundancy, either. There seems to be no way to practically duplicate a qubit.
Peter Schor came up with an answer. Instead of copying a qubit directly, the computer can spread a logical qubit across nine actual qubits. It is then possible to determine if there has been a single physical qubit error using a
complicated algorithm
. Later research has dropped the number of qubits required down to five which appears to be the theoretical limit.
Imagine if your 32-bit CPU could only handle six bits. That’s less than an old 8080. So imagine the excitement in 2018 when scientists announced that they found a class of topological qubits based on Majorana zero-mode (MZM) quasiparticles — these are fermions that are their own antiparticles. Many experts feel like topological qubits are the future of practical quantum computers because instead of encoding information in fragile quantum states, a topological computer is immune to the random errors that plague current quantum computers.
The Majorana Announcement
Delft University of Technology announced they’d generated MZMs in indium antimonide nanowires. The next year Microsoft, a company that wants to back topological quantum computing architecture, opened a research center on the school’s campus.
Sounds great, right? A researcher from the University of Pittsburgh read about the advance in the journal
Nature
, a well-respected scientific journal. He and a partner in Australia had been doing similar work and asked for the raw data from the Delft group.
What they found was surprising. Some of the Delft paper didn’t seem right and it seemed possible some graphs had been manipulated. Data that didn’t support the conclusion had been excluded for no apparent reason, and processing all the data told a different story. The head of the Delft project looked at the data again and in 2021 asked
Nature
to retract the paper and published an apology.
According to an article in Quanta
, an independent committee concluded that the paper wasn’t deliberately fraudulent, but noted: “The authors had simply fooled themselves by zooming in only on the results that showed them what they hoped to see.”
The Review Process is Itself Quite Challenging
You’d like to think peer review would catch things like this, but the truth is, there aren’t that many peers at this depth of research. Peer review isn’t always so great, anyway. There have been several famous cases of people submitting random or nonsense papers to journals and having them published. Even
Nature
has had falsified
papers accepted
before and not
just one time
, either. On the opposite side of the scale, Enrico Fermi’s breakthrough paper on beta decay was rejected along with several other papers that would — in retrospect — turn out to be significant and even lead to Nobel prizes.
Even medical journals may have as much
as 25% false information according to papers
that, of course, themselves could be false. So how can a journal know if ground-breaking work is accurate? And how can we know if what a journal prints is accurate? Or even what any random person chooses to say considering that you don’t really need a journal to reach the world anymore. In a world where we increasingly depend on scientific results that we don’t have the knowledge and equipment to verify, this is a very important question.
A Matter of Trust
If you think about it, society, in general, depends on, among other things, trust. I trust that my employer will pay me and when I spend money at the store, they trust that the government is backing that money so they’ll be able to buy more supplies and pay their workers. Imagine if checking out at the grocery involved someone testing your gold to make sure it was authentic and weighing it to see if their scale agreed with yours.
But even if that were the case, those verifications are relatively simple. Quantum computing is on the bleeding edge of several disciplines and the domain knowledge needed to confirm new findings is vanishingly rare. How do you verify error correcting qubit techniques? How can prototype quantum computer performance be independently benchmarked? Many are forecasting that quantum computing is the next big thing. In the run up to that possibility, it’s important to look at each new announcement with a critical eye and to learn about individual researchers and research groups to better know where the trustworthy findings and verifications are coming from.
Need some help getting up to speed on how computing is expanding into the quantum world? We know of at least one effort to
homebrew a trapped-ion quantum computer
(which is not topological). If you want a 90-minute intro to the field, have a look at
this Microsoft video
. You can also take the
Hackaday U class
taught by Dr. Kitty Yeung
, who incidentally is now a Senior Quantum Architect at Microsoft. The first video is below. | 25 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398317",
"author": "Hellion666",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T16:04:31",
"content": "It depends on the problem/solution?One example that is often discussed is factoring large numbers and possibly breaking encryption.If the QC generates only a few possible solutions that can be easily c... | 1,760,372,887.1422 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/trying-and-mostly-failing-to-3d-print-a-hydrofoil/ | Trying And (Mostly) Failing To 3D Print A Hydrofoil | Matthew Carlson | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"boat",
"hydrofoil"
] | [Sam Barker] had a boring dingy that he wanted to spice up a bit, so
he resolved to 3D print a hydrofoil wing for it so that it could fly across the water.
(Video, embedded below.)
With a large wing designed and sliced into several pieces, and a total print time of 200 hours, [Sam] was ready to glue the foil wing together when he realized his scale was way off and the wings were far too large for his boat. With some hacking, [Sam] was able to use a single wing across the bottom of the ship. [Tom Stanton] came over to help with fiberglassing, and they were ready for a test.
As you might have guessed from the title, the test wasn’t particularly successful. Swapping the engine on the boat for a more potent motor gave the lift he needed in the front, but without a back foil, it was a wheelie rather than what [Sam] hoped for. Back at home, they printed a second wing and went back for a second test. The boat would start to lift out the water, but the shaft of the engine lifted out of the water, sending him back down. Unfortunately, a downpour cut the test short.
Not to be defeated entirely, [Sam] connected it to a much larger boat once the weather cleared and pulled his dingy along behind. To [Sam’s] credit, they did get some solid foiling, and the ship
did
lift out of the water until the wings sheared off from the stress. All in all, an entertaining story of engineering while racing against the weather.
We admire [Sam’s] ambition, and if you’re thinking about building a whole hydrofoil, we suggest
starting with a smaller RC model and scaling up from there
. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398352",
"author": "Alex99a",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T19:22:31",
"content": "Ship?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6398371",
"author": "Brad",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T20:52:46",
"content": "Looks lik... | 1,760,372,887.343116 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/11/the-game-of-life-moves-pretty-fast-if-you-dont-use-stop-motion-you-might-miss-it/ | The Game Of Life Moves Pretty Fast, If You Don’t Use Stop Motion You Might Miss It | Matthew Carlson | [
"FPGA",
"Games"
] | [
"conways game of life",
"fpga",
"game of life"
] | Munged Ferris Bueller quotes aside, Conway’s Game of Life is the classic cellular automata that we all reach for. The usual approach is to just iterate over every cell in the grid, computing the next state into a new grid buffer. [K155LA3] set out to turn that on its head by
implementing Game Of Life in the hardware of an FPGA
.
[K155LA3]’s version uses
Chisel
, a new HDL from the Berkley and RISCV communities. Under the hood, Chisel is Scala with some custom libraries that know how to map Scala concepts onto hardware. In broad strokes, Verilog and VHDL are focused on expressing hardware and then added abstraction on top of that over the year. Chisel and other newer HDL languages focus on expressing high-level general-purpose elements that get mapped onto hardware. FPGAs already map complex circuits and hardware onto LUTs and other slices, so what’s another layer of abstraction?
The FPGA chosen for this project is a Digilent Arty A7 with a VGA Pmod to turn the RGB444 into analog signals to actually display. What’s impressive about [K155LA3]’s implementation is just how fast it is. Even running at 60 frames per second it’s almost as fast as the monitor can handle. Of course, most computers lying around you could simulate a 60 x4 8 grid at 60 fps. Next, instead of connecting the grid logic to the 60 Hz VGA clock, he connects it to the 100 MHz board external oscillator. Now each pixel in each frame displayed contains over a million generations.
Unfortunately, even this small grid of 60×48 takes up 90% of the LUTs on the Artix-7. In the future, we’d love to see an even larger FPGA hardware implementation capable of
handling grids that could hold whole computers in them
. And naturally, this isn’t the first
FPGA version of the Game Of Life here at Hackaday
. | 12 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398220",
"author": "RÖB",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T09:19:37",
"content": "LOL it’s all LUTs. 90% on an Artix 7.Dare I say – too much parallelization.If the VGA has to go out sequentially at a fixed rate then it makes sense to use address multiplexed serial processing and a much muc... | 1,760,372,887.474978 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/8floppy-on-your-pc/ | 8″ Floppy On Your PC? | Al Williams | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"8 inch floppy disk",
"floppy",
"floppy disk",
"trs80"
] | We should probably have a new metric for measuring mass storage performance: bytes per pound. An old IBM tape drive from the S/360 days, for example, could hold almost 6 megabytes of data. It also weighed more than a typical refrigerator. Today, a tiny postage-stamp-sized card can hold gigabytes of data and weighs — at most — a few ounces. Somewhere in the middle is the old 8 inch floppy drive. At its peak, you could cram about 1.2 megabytes on it, but even with the drive you could lift it all in one hand. These disks and their descendants ruled the computing world for a while. [Adrian asks the question:
can you use an 8″ floppy drive on a PC
? The answer is in the video below.
He didn’t do it on a lark. [Adrian] is getting ready to restore a TRS-80 Model II so he wanted to create some 8″test floppies. But how do you marry a 40-something-year-old drive to a modern computer? He had a few drives of unknown condition so there was nothing to do but try to get them working.
The 8 inch floppy connector isn’t even the same as a 5.25 inch connector which PCs do support. However, electrically, the drives are the same, so if you can make the mechanical connection, a conventional floppy controller will do the job.
Been a while since we’ve seen a big drive like this. We had forgotten that the spindle motor ran on AC wall current and required a start capacitor. Some surgery on a donor cable from an old word processor made the connection. Sure enough, the BIOS on a PC recognized the drive, although the geometry for a disk like this wasn’t in the BIOS choices.
A long video, but fun to watch those giant old drives working and [Adrian’s] process of working through his issues. Of course, these days, you can read a
floppy with a Raspberry Pi
or — for the stout at heart — try an
oscilloscope
. | 52 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398175",
"author": "Joshua",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T06:29:55",
"content": "Thank you for this article!I saw the video a few days ago already, but it’s cool that it’s mentioned here.From what I can tell, the ‘issue’ with 8″ diskette drives is (or was) that they were made for the o... | 1,760,372,887.733594 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/linux-on-the-windows-11-desktop/ | Linux On The Windows 11 Desktop | Roger Cheng | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"linux",
"Wayland",
"windows",
"Windows 11",
"windows subsystem for Linux",
"wsl",
"x11"
] | A month ago Microsoft officially released Windows 11. One of its features is the ability to run Linux GUI applications side by side as peers to normal Windows desktop apps.
[Jim Salter] of
Ars Technica
took a closer look
and declared it works as advertised.
This is an evolution of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which has existed for a few years but only in command-line form. Linux being Linux, it was certainly possible to put visuals onscreen, but doing so required jumping through some hoops and dealing with limitations. Now “WSLg” gives a smoother and more accessible experience.
While tremendously valuable for those who need it, WSLg is admittedly a niche feature. The circumstances will be different for different needs. Around these parts, one example is letting us work with pieces of proprietary Windows software (such as low level hardware drivers or hardware-specific dev tools) while still retaining Linux tools for the rest of our workflow.
It’s also interesting to take a peek behind the scenes for an instructive look at bridging two operating systems. A Microsoft blog post
describes the general architecture
, where we were happy to see open-source work leveraged. And by basing this work on Wayland, it is more forward-looking than working with just X11.
The bad news is that WSLg is limited to Windows 11, at least for now. WSL users on Windows 10 will have to continue jumping through hoops (We
described one method using X11
.) And opening this door unfortunately also opened the door to
security issues
, so there’s still work ahead for WSL. | 38 | 19 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398159",
"author": "linux101",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T04:31:09",
"content": "I’m proud to have zero windows-10 and windows-11 experience",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6398399",
"author": "Steve Leach",
"ti... | 1,760,372,887.851558 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/arduino-piano-tuner-is-pitch-perfect/ | Arduino Piano Tuner Is Pitch Perfect | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"dds",
"piano",
"piano tuning"
] | [JanHerman] knows that tuning musical instruments is all about precision and that precision is measured in a logarithmic unit called a cent. A cheap tuner unit might be accurate to 1.5 cents which sounds good until you look at one for ten times the price and find it is accurate to 0.1 cents. So you can spend $800 for precision or $60 for something less. [Jan] decided to build something better and cheaper
using a 32-bit Arduino
and a DDS frequency generator chip on a breakout board.
Oddly enough, the device doesn’t have a display. Instead, it generates a precise frequency and couples it to the piano using a transducer. You tune the string to the corresponding note. The post has a lot of detail about how piano tuning works.
If you know about the chromatic scale, the equal temperament system, and how many cents are in an octave, you might want to skip the first section. We didn’t though. If we learned any of that in childhood piano classes, we’ve forgotten it.
For those whose quest for precision isn’t that critical, note that the difference between two notes can be as little as 0.3316 Hz. It is interesting that the final design isn’t the first one [Jan] attempted and there is an explanation of why the first design wasn’t successful.
The final design calls for a 24-position rotary switch which is tough to find. We might have opted for a rotary encoder and a display or even some LEDs to make a cheap alternative. As it was, the cheap switch used caused problems and required a replacement and very careful soldering.
We’ve seen self-tuning pianos and the use of an oscilloscope for tuning, but those links are long dead. More recently, we’ve seen
an old piano hacked for ragtime
and if you decide you are giving up on piano lessons, you can always
convert your instrument into a workbench
. | 16 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398157",
"author": "Assad Ebrahim",
"timestamp": "2021-11-11T04:18:43",
"content": "Very cool! And nicely written up too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6398666",
"author": "Marcelo",
"timestamp": "2021-11-1... | 1,760,372,887.904045 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/low-cost-computer-gesture-control-with-an-i2c-sensor/ | Low-Cost Computer Gesture Control With An I2C Sensor | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"Digispark",
"gesture control",
"i2c",
"sensor",
"usb hid"
] | Controlling your computer with a wave of the hand seems like something from science fiction, and for good reason. From
Minority Report
to
Iron Man
, we’ve seen plenty of famous actors controlling their high-tech computer systems by wildly gesticulating in the air. Meanwhile, we’re all stuck using keyboards and mice like a bunch of chumps.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. As
[Norbert Zare] demonstrates in his latest project
, you can actually achieve some fairly impressive gesture control on your computer using a $10 USD PAJ7620U2 sensor. Well not
just
the sensor, of course. You need some way to convert the output from the I2C-enabled sensor into something your computer will understand, which is where the microcontroller comes in.
Looking through the provided source code, you can see just how easy it is to talk to the PAJ7620U2. With nothing more exotic than a
switch case
statement, [Norbert] is able to pick up on the gesture flags coming from the sensor. From there, it’s just a matter of using the Arduino Keyboard library to fire off the appropriate keycodes. If you’re looking to recreate this we’d go with a microcontroller that supports native USB, but technically this could be done on pretty much any Arduino. In fact, in this case he’s actually using the
ATtiny85-based Digispark
.
This actually isn’t the first time we’ve seen somebody
use a similar sensor to pull off low-cost gesture control
, but so far, none of these projects have really taken off. It seems like it works well enough in the video after the break, but looks can be deceiving. Have any Hackaday readers actually tried to use one of these modules for their day-to-day futuristic computing? | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398686",
"author": "purplepeopleated",
"timestamp": "2021-11-12T23:37:36",
"content": "don’t lie lose.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6398689",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T00:01:23",
"content": "M... | 1,760,372,887.952462 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/centaur-costume-features-drinks-cooler-and-walking-legs/ | Centaur Costume Features Drinks Cooler And Walking Legs | Lewin Day | [
"Beer Hacks"
] | [
"beer",
"cooler",
"drink",
"drinks"
] | Let’s say it’s Halloween, and you’re a big fan of centaurs. At the same time, you want to be easily able to store your drinks on ice and always have them to hand. Well, this costume from [David Yakos]
might be the one for you.
Construction is simple. Two small bike wheels were fitted to the cooler using bits of a broken chair, and the other end of the cooler is simply fitted around the wearer’s waist with a strap.
The rear centaur legs are carved out of foam board, and attached to the rear wheels with a bolt through the spokes. The top of each leg is attached to a rod, which slides into the frame holding the wheels on. It keeps the top of the legs roughly where they should be but lets them move, allowing the legs to “walk” as the wheels rotate.
It’s not exactly an advanced build, but we simply love the idea of costumes that
keep drinks cold all night
. Hiding the cooler as a centaur’s body is really just the icing on the cake. Of course, if you’ve got your own costume design for keeping your beverages chilled and frosty,
do let us know
. Video after the break. | 4 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398695",
"author": "jibé",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T01:40:13",
"content": "[facepalm]…and funny !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6398704",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T03:27:38",
"content": "Not wha... | 1,760,372,887.649723 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/halloween-game-lets-you-shoot-zombies-with-a-laser-powered-crossbow/ | Halloween Game Lets You Shoot Zombies With A Laser-Powered Crossbow | Robin Kearey | [
"Games",
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"halloween",
"Jetson Nano",
"laser pointer",
"zombies"
] | Suppose you were looking for all the essential elements to make a great Halloween-themed shooting game. Zombies? Check. Giant “lasers”? Check. Crossbows shooting forks? We’ve got you covered. Check out “
Fork The Zombies
“, which was set up by [piles.of.spam] to entertain the neighborhood kids this Halloween.
The game is played on a big screen, which shows a horde of angry zombies marching toward the player, who has to shoot as many as possible before they reach the front of the screen. The weapon provided is a crossbow; when the trigger is pulled, a fork is launched and hopefully skewers one of the ghouls. The game was written using an open-source engine called
Urho3D
, which takes care of all the hard-core 3D and physics work, allowing the user to focus on designing the gameplay and visuals.
To give the game a bit more of a physical feel, [piles.of.spam] made an actual crossbow for the player to wield. Its handle was cut from a scrap piece of wood, using a band saw for the general shape and a CNC machine for the delicate cut-outs that hold a laser pointer, an ESP32 and a microswitch-based trigger. The laser shines onto the game screen, while the ESP32 sends out a data packet over WiFi when the trigger is pulled.
The location of the shot is tracked using a clever trick: a webcam is pointed at the screen, with a red color filter in front. This way, it only sees the red laser dot moving across the screen. The resulting image is processed using the Python OpenCV library, which provides functions to convert the relative motion of the pointer on the screen to an absolute position along the playing field.
The computing hardware consists of a pair of Jetson Nano boards, which sport quad-core ARM A57 CPUs as well as powerful graphics hardware to generate the game’s visuals. The end result is impressive, especially given the fact that all of this was designed and built in just three weeks. It was apparently a great hit with its intended audience, as visitors queued to try their hand at shooting the hungry zombies.
Laser pointers are an obvious tool for creating shooting games: we’ve seen ones with
a single round target
, a set of
shapes set up around you
, and even
metal cans that fall over and stand up again
. But if you need to protect yourself in case of an actual zombie apocalypse, a
slingshot that shoots knives
might be more useful. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6399165",
"author": "JoJo",
"timestamp": "2021-11-15T20:12:06",
"content": "That is pretty slick…might have to try something like that on my PC to play some House of the Dead!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,887.775381 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/hackaday-podcast-144-jigs-jigs-jigs-faberge-mic-paranomal-electronics-and-a-60-tube-nixie-clock/ | Hackaday Podcast 144: Jigs Jigs Jigs, Fabergé Mic, Paranomal Electronics, And A 60-Tube Nixie Clock | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys get caught up on the week that was. Two builds are turning some heads this week; one uses 60 Nixie tube bar graphs to make a clock that looks like the sun’s rays, the other is a 4096 RGB LED Cube (that’s 12,288 total diodes for those counting at home) that leverages a ton of engineering to achieve perfection. Speaking of perfection, there’s a high-end microphone built on a budget but you’d never know from the look and the performance — no wonder the world is now sold out of the microphone elements used in the design. After perusing a CNC build, printer filament dryer, and cardboard pulp molds, we wrap the episode talking about electronic miniaturization, radionic analyzers, and Weird Al’s computer.
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
(55 MB)
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 144 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
That sound was Teenage Mutant Ninja Nurtles: Turltes in Time, Sewer Surfin’ theme song
[OliveGarden] was randomly drawn from 10 correct responses and wins the shirt!
New This Week:
This Week in Security
has news of a PS5 master key dump
32C3: Running Linux On The PS4
Nintendo Switch Gets Internal Trinket Hardmod
Playstation 3 Hacking – Linux Is Inevitable – pagetable.com
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Cheap DIY Mic Sounds (And Looks) Damn Good
Pulp-Molding: A Use For Cardboard Confetti
Most FDM Printers Are Also Filament Dryers (with A Little Help)
This $0 Filament Drybox Needs Nearly No Parts
Not Your Average Nixie Tube Clock
DIY CNC Uses Lots Of 3D-Printed Parts
Big RGB LED Cube You Can Build Too
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
Streamline Your SMD Assembly Process With 3D-Printed Jigs
Development Of Magnetic Locking Idea Shows Great Progress
Pokemon Time Capsule
Mike’s Picks:
Flip-Dot Oscilloscope Is Flippin’ Awesome
The Metabolizer Is Turning Trash Into Treasure Even Faster Now
Reballing And A Steady Hand Makes A Raspberry Pi 800
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Teardown: Analog Radionic Analyzer
Plus:
Weird Al’s Monster Battlestation Is Now Just A Reasonably Fast PC
Smaller Is Sometimes Better: Why Electronic Components Are So Tiny | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398694",
"author": "CMH62",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T01:35:20",
"content": "Loved the story on the Weird Al video. Somehow, that specific song and video had escaped my radar screen … thx for highlighting it!I still remember being in high school long ago and a kid coming to class w... | 1,760,372,888.126594 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/automated-air-cannon-shoots-smoke-rings/ | Automated Air Cannon Shoots Smoke Rings | Lewin Day | [
"classic hacks"
] | [] | Air cannons are fun, and became a part of mainstream culture with the popular Airzooka toy. Of course, cocking and firing the Airzooka gets tiring after a while, and they’re kind of a little small. This build from [1alembic]
delivers on both those counts.
Cool, huh?
The result is a bigger air cannon that repeatedly fires all by itself. The cannon itself is built out of a trash can with the bottom cut out. It’s then fitted with a diaphragm made out of a heavy-duty trash bag covered in duct tape for added strength. Latex hose is then installed inside the trash can, attached to the diaphragm. Thus, the diaphragm can be pulled back, and when released, it’s pulled forward, creating a rush of air through the trash can which generates a vortex ring just like the smaller Airzooka.
The automation of the cannon is beautifully simple. A string is attached to the back of the diaphragm, and wrapped around a rod so it can be wound up. This allows a wiper motor to turn the rod via a set of gears, pulling the diaphragm back.
However, the drive gear on the wiper motor has half its teeth missing. The system is then set up so that once the diaphragm is pulled right back, the drive gear gets to the missing teeth, allowing the winder rod to spin back freely as the diaphragm shoots forward, firing the air cannon. The cycle then repeats as the drive gear re-engages the winding mechanism.
Paired with a smoke machine, the air cannon will whirr away, firing beautiful smoke rings at regular intervals until it’s switched off. It’s an elegant thing that we’d love to leave set up at a party to add some atmosphere. We’ve seen other air cannons built
with some real fire-power, too
. Video after the break. | 13 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398605",
"author": "Dustin Evans",
"timestamp": "2021-11-12T16:25:37",
"content": "Is the fog machine automated as well? i was looking for a way to trigger a fog machine via an arduino or something similar.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"... | 1,760,372,888.090951 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/this-week-in-security-unicode-strikes-npm-again-and-first-steps-to-ps5-crack/ | This Week In Security: Unicode Strikes, NPM Again, And First Steps To PS5 Crack | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"0-day",
"REvil",
"This Week in Security"
] | Maybe we really were better off with ASCII. Back in my day, we had space for 256 characters, didn’t even use 128 of them, and we took what we got. Unicode opened up computers to the languages of the world, but also opened
an invisible backdoor
. This is a similar technique to last week’s Trojan Source story. While Trojan Source used right-to-left encoding to manipulate benign-looking code, this hack from Certitude uses Unicode characters that appear to be whitespace, but are recognized as valid variable names.
const { timeout,ㅤ} = req.query;
Is actually:
const { timeout,\u3164} = req.query;
The extra comma might give you a clue that something is up, but unless you’re very familiar with a language, you might dismiss it as a syntax quirk and move on. Using the same trick again allows the hidden malicious code to be included on a list of commands to run, making a hard-to-spot backdoor.
The second trick is to use “confusable” characters like ǃ, U+01C3. It looks like a normal exclamation mark, so you wouldn’t bat an eye at
if(environmentǃ=ENV_PROD){
, but in this case,
environmentǃ
is a new variable. Anything in this development-only block of code is actually always enabled — imagine the chaos that could cause.
Neither of these are ground-breaking vulnerabilities, but they are definitely techniques to be wary of. The authors suggest that a project could mitigate these Unicode techniques by simply restricting their source code to containing only ASCII characters. It’s not a
good
solution, but it’s a solution.
More REvil Arrests
Apparently making yourself an enemy of the whole Western world is a good way to get arrested,
as REvil members are continuing to learn
.
Operation GoldDust
has netted seven arrests this year, the most recent in Romania. This is the same law enforcement effort that has resulted in
the No More Ransom project
.
Breaking the PS5
We haven’t heard anything from Fail0verflow for a while, but they’re back with
new work targeting the PS5
. They’ve found the root encryption keys for the system. This isn’t quite as big a deal as it originally seemed, as the signing key would still be needed to run custom software on the device. What this should allow is decrypting the device firmware, and then looking for bugs in the bootloader and firmware, potentially leading to a PS5 jailbreak in the future. If you’ve been hoping for a homebrew scene for the PS5, your time may be coming.
Translation: We got all (symmetric) ps5 root keys. They can all be obtained from software – including per-console root key, if you look hard enough!
https://t.co/ulbq4LOWW0
— fail0verflow (@fail0verflow)
November 8, 2021
NPM Again
Last week, the
coa
and
rc
packages temporarily updated to versions containing malicious code. The timing, and nearly identical added code, indicates that it was the same individual or group behind both packages. While the malware seemed to be non-functional on some systems, it should be assumed that anywhere these malicious versions were deployed is compromised. At a combined 20 million weekly downloads for these two packages, there are sure to be many compromises, even given the short time the malicious packages were available on the 4th. NPM was hosting the malicious version of
coa
for one hour and twelve minutes. The
rc
package pushed the malicious update a couple hours later, and it’s unclear how long that version was available.
The malicious code was run using a preinstall script, which seems to be the common vector for these hacks. There have been suggestions that install scripts should be disabled by default. While that would prevent these very simple attacks, it wouldn’t actually protect against the underlying problem. Supply chain attacks are a growing problem, but they seem to be particularly problematic in the world of full-stack JavaScript. If the popularity of
node.js
and
npm
are to continue, we will need a better solution to this pernicious problem.
Palo Alto and Disclosure
Researchers at Randori have discovered a pair of vulnerabilities in Palo Alto firewalls, which chained together can result in full device compromise with no prior authorization required. The attacks are an HTTP-request-smuggling vulnerability that leads to a buffer overflow. The overflow is normally not exploitable, but the request-smuggling allows an attacker to reach the vulnerable code. The flaws were fixed in version 8.1.17, and versions 9.0+ were never vulnerable. An in-depth analysis is due in December, but there’s another interesting angle to this story. Randori’s researchers found the bugs in November 2020, and didn’t disclose them until September 2021 — nearly a year later.
What did they do during that time? Apparently
they used this and other 0-day vulnerabilities
to perform red-team penetration tests for their clients. The motivation seems to be that a real attack is likely to use 0-days, and to really test a company’s defense-in-depth, unknown attacks have to be part of the equation. What do you think? Good idea or unethical? | 33 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398582",
"author": "Thomas R McNeill",
"timestamp": "2021-11-12T15:28:14",
"content": "You can test a 0 day on your clients and report it the same time. It isn’t like they can fix it immediately which gives you plenty of time to test defenses.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth":... | 1,760,372,888.19433 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/12/is-this-12-layer-pcb-coil-the-next-step-in-ferrofluid-displays/ | Is This 12-layer PCB Coil The Next Step In Ferrofluid Displays? | Dave Rowntree | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"electromagnet",
"ferrofluid",
"fetch"
] | [Applied Procrastination] is in the business of vertical ferrofluid displays, but struggles somewhat with the electromagnets available off the shelf and the proliferation of wiring that results. [Carl Bugeja] is in the business of making PCB coils, both with rigid and flex PCB substrates, so when the
opportunity for a collaboration arose
, [AP] jumped at the opportunity.
As [Simen from AP] mentions in the video after the break, they had considered using a large PCB with embedded coils for
Fetch
their ferrofluid display unit, but the possible magnetic field was just too weak, and attempting to crank up the amps, just overheats them. Some improvements were made, first sticking the coil PCB to a small disk of ferrous metal, which doubled up as a handy heatsink. Next, he tried adding a permanent magnet, which added a bit of bias field. Alone this was not enough to hold the ferrofluid in place, but with the coil powered, it was starting to look encouraging.
Much more progress was made when [Carl] sent over a new design of his, a 12-layer PCB coil. This obviously had a much larger field, but still not enough without the extra boost from permanent magnet.
[Simen] currently doesn’t think the PCB approach is quite there yet, and is looking for help to source PCB-mounted electromagnets of the wired variety. We would imaging prototyping with such a large 12-layer PCB would be rather prohibitively expensive anyway.
[not tip thanks] | 21 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398526",
"author": "none",
"timestamp": "2021-11-12T12:18:58",
"content": "[Applied Procrastination][AP][Simen from AP][Simen][Carl Bugeja][Carl]pick one and stick to it?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6398536",
"aut... | 1,760,372,888.249242 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/those-bullet-effects-in-terminator-2-werent-cgi/ | Those Bullet Effects InTerminator 2Weren’t CGI | Donald Papp | [
"classic hacks",
"Weapons Hacks"
] | [
"cgi",
"special effects",
"stan winston",
"T2",
"terminator"
] | Remember
Terminator 2
? Guns were nearly useless against the murderous T-1000, played by Robert Patrick. Bullets fired at the “liquid metal” robot resulted only in a chrome-looking bullet splash that momentarily staggered the killing machine. The effects were done by Stan Winston, who died in 2008, but a video and short blurb shared by the Stan Winston School of Character Arts revealed, to our surprise and delight, that
the bullet impact effects were not CGI
.
How was this accomplished? First of all, Winston and his team researched the correct “look” for the splash impacts by firing projectiles into mud and painstakingly working to duplicate the resulting shapes. These realistic-looking crater sculpts were then cast in some mixture of foam rubber, and given a chromed look by way of vacuum metallizing (also known as
vacuum deposition
) which is a way of depositing a thin layer of metal onto a surface. Vacuum deposition is similar to electroplating, but the process does not require the object being coated to have a conductive surface.
These foam rubber splash patterns — which look like metal but aren’t — were deployed using a simple mechanical system. A variety of splashes in different sizes get individually compressed into receptacles in a fiberglass chest plate. Covering each is a kind of trapdoor, each held closed by a single pin on a cable.
To trigger a bullet impact effect, a wireless remote control pulls a cable, which pulls its attached pin, and the compressed splash pattern blossoms forth in an instant, bursting through pre-scored fabric in the process. Sadly there are no photos of the device itself, but you can see it in action in the testing video shared by the Stan Winston School, embedded below.
When you’re done checking out the video, maybe take a peek at
this fan’s effort to create a T-800’s arm
.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by StanWinstonSchool (@stanwinstonschool) | 25 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398918",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2021-11-14T16:07:56",
"content": "Fascinating!I had no idea that those were practical effects!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6398921",
"author": "Bort",
"timestamp": "20... | 1,760,372,888.352917 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/stardew-valley-preferences-bot-is-a-gift-to-the-player/ | Stardew ValleyPreferences Bot Is A Gift To The Player | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Games"
] | [
"Arduino Leonardo",
"computer vision",
"Lattepanda",
"lcd screen",
"opencv",
"Stardew Valley",
"video game automation"
] | It seems like most narrative games have some kind of drudgery built in. You know, some tedious and repetitious task that you absolutely must do if you want to succeed. In
Stardew Valley
, that thing is gift giving, which earns you friendship points just like in real life. More important than the giving itself is that each villager has preferences — things they love, like, and hate to receive as gifts. It’s a lot to remember, and most people don’t bother trying and just look it up in the wiki. Well, except for Abigail, who seems to like certain gemstones so much that she must be eating them. She’s hard to forget.
[kutluhan_aktar]’s villager gift preferences bot
is a fun and fantastic use of OpenCV. This bot uses a LattePanda Alpha 864s, which is a single-board computer with an Arduino Leonardo built in. It works using template matching, which is basically a game of
Where’s Waldo?
for computers.
Given a screenshot of each villager in various positions, the LattePanda recognizes them among a given game scene, then does a lookup of their birthday and preferences which the Leonardo prints on a 3.5″ LCD screen. At the same time, it alerts the player with a buzz and big green LED. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.
In
Animal Crossing
, the drudgery amounts to pressing the A button while catching shooting stars.
That’s not a huge problem for a Teensy
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6399125",
"author": "Sophie",
"timestamp": "2021-11-15T16:40:17",
"content": "Bit OTT a solution 😂 there’s a mod called ‘look up anything’ where you can hover over anyone/thing and click F1 to see all the info, including their favourite gifts, what time/season/weather to catch that... | 1,760,372,888.287988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/14/arcade-machine-pack-and-play/ | Arcade Machine Pack And Play | Matthew Carlson | [
"Games",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"3d printed",
"arcade",
"arcade cabinet",
"hidden",
"raspberry pi",
"secret"
] | There’s something about the large imposing wooden box of an arcade machine that lends a confident presence to a room. The problem with a tall and heavy box is that it takes up quite a bit of space and readily draws the eye. So [Alexandre Chappel]
set out to avoid that and build an arcade machine that could hide in plain sight
.
Extra points awarded for neat wiring on the inside.
The idea is a wooden box hung on the wall that folds up when not in use. [Alex] starts with Baltic birch plywood cut into the panels. Next, he applies edge banding (a thin veneer with some glue on the backside) so that all the exposed edges look like natural wood. Next, a screen hole is routed into the face frame, allowing an LCD monitor to sit snuggly in. A combination of pocket holes and biscuits allows [Alex] to assemble everything with no visible screws or fasteners.
With the help of a 3D printer, he quickly fabricated a locking mechanism to keep the front panel attached when it folds up. The hinge is also 3D printed. The typical Raspberry Pi 4 powers this particular machine. Two french cleats hold the box onto the wall, and once the system is on the wall, we have to say it looks incredible.
If you’re looking for a smaller but more traditional arcade cabinet, why not
take a look at this arcade cabinet for toddlers
? Or, if you loved the solid wood look of the hidden arcade,
this full-sized solid oak cabinet would be something you would enjoy
. Video after the break. | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398990",
"author": "HackJack",
"timestamp": "2021-11-14T23:28:29",
"content": "Nice idea. But I wonder if this build can withstand the abuse of 2 arcade players at the same time.BTW, I found similar products:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07R686S11,https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W33JHP1M... | 1,760,372,888.51668 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/13/prototyping-your-way-to-better-prototypes/ | Prototyping Your Way To Better Prototypes | Kristina Panos | [
"classic hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"cardboard",
"chipboard",
"paper pulp",
"prototype"
] | If you’ve ever made a prototype of something before making the “real” one or even the final prototype, you probably already know that hands-on design time can’t be beat. There’s really no substitute for the insight you will glean from having a three-dimensional thing to hold and turn over in your hands for a full assessment. Sometimes you need to prototype an object more than once before investing time, money, and materials into making the final prototype for presentation.
This is [Eric Strebel]’s second video in series about making an eco-friendly wireless phone charger. He made a paper prototype in the first video, and
in this follow-up, he refines the idea further and makes a chipboard version of the charger
before the final molded paper pulp prototype. The main advantage of the chipboard version is to design the parts so that each one will be easier to pull from its mold in a single piece without any undercuts.
By building the chipboard version first, [Eric] is able to better understand the manufacturing and assembly needs of this particular widget. This way, he can work out the kinks before spending a bunch of time in CAD to create a 3D-printed mold and making the paper pulp prototype itself. He emphasizes that this process is quite different from the 2.5D method of laser-cutting a single piece of chipboard and folding it up into a 3D object like it was a cereal box, which is likely to hide design issues. Be sure to check out the video after the break.
We think this prototype is quite nice-looking, and believe that everything deserves good design. Why should a wireless charger be any different? [Eric] has prototyped in a lot of media, but he seems especially skilled in the art of foam core board.
Start with the masterclass
and you’ll have a better appreciation for
his foam armored vehicle
and
one of the many ways he smooths out foam parts
. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398865",
"author": "GrizzlyAdams",
"timestamp": "2021-11-14T06:25:07",
"content": "“Eco Friendly” and “Wireless Phone Charger” are mutually exclusive things. Wireless phone chargers by their nature are wasteful of electricity, with at least 30% of energy being wasted (Qi’s own doc... | 1,760,372,888.561102 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/13/bluetooth-rc-car-packs-in-a-few-sensors/ | Bluetooth RC Car Packs In A Few Sensors | Lewin Day | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bluetooth",
"robot",
"seeed wio terminal"
] | Have you ever been walking around the house, desperate to know the ambient temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure? Have you ever wanted to capture that data with a small remote-controlled platform? If so, this project from [TUENHIDIY] will be exactly
what you’ve been looking for.
The little remote-control car is built around a Seeed Wio Terminal. This is a microcontroller platform that comes with a screen already attached, along with wireless hardware baked in and Grove connectors for hooking up external modules. Thus, the car adds a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor, along with a BMP280 air pressure sensor using the Grove connectors.
Driving the car is done via a Blynk smartphone app that communicates with the Wio Terminal. Small DC motors at each wheel are driven via a DFRobot quad-motor shield. With the built-in screen, the RC car displays commands received from the smartphone app, as well as the temperature, humidity and pressure in the immediate environment.
We really like the simple PVC-based chassis design, and it’s a straightforward project that demonstrates how to build a Bluetooth-controlled car. Data collected by the sensors is also visible on the smartphone app, so if you need to sample conditions in the next room without getting off the couch, you could do that pretty easily.
Projects like these are a good way to get familiar with working with motors and sensors. It’d be a great base for simple robotics development, too. We’ve featured builds from [TUENHIDIY] before, too, l
ike this great rotary plotter that can draw on bottles
. Video after the break. | 4 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398857",
"author": "Needleroozer",
"timestamp": "2021-11-14T04:45:17",
"content": "Last link is bad:https://hackaday.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=445889&action=editShould behttps://hackaday.com/2020/11/11/rotary-plotter-draws-on-bottles/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"... | 1,760,372,888.601066 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/13/improving-a-mini-lathe-with-a-few-clever-hacks/ | Improving A Mini-Lathe With A Few Clever Hacks | Dan Maloney | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"carriage",
"engraving",
"lathe",
"machining",
"metalwork",
"milling",
"mini lathe",
"tools"
] | Like many budget machinists, the delightfully optimistically named [We Can Do That Better] had trouble with some of the finer controls on his import mini-lathe. But rather than suffer through it,
he chose to rectify the machine’s shortcomings
and in the process, teach everyone a bunch of great tips.
[We Can Do That Better]’s lathe retrofit focused on the carriage handwheel, which appears to lack proper bearings and wobbles around in a most imprecise manner. On top of that, the gearing of the drive made for an unsatisfying 19 mm of carriage travel per revolution of the handwheel. A single gear change made that an even 20 mm per rev, which when coupled with a calibrated and indexed handwheel ring greatly simplifies carriage travel measurements.
While the end result of the build is pretty great in its own right, for our money the best part of the video is its rich collection of machinist’s tips. The use of a wooden dowel and a printed paper template to stand in for a proper dividing head was brilliant, as was using the tailstock of the lathe to drive an engraving tool to cut the index lines. We’ve seen the use of a Dremel tool mounted to the toolpost to stand in for a milling machine before, but it’s always nice to see that trick used. And the mechanism for locking the dial to the handwheel was really clever, too.
Considering a mini-lathe? As encouraging as [We Can Do That Better]’s experience may be, it might be wise to take
a deep dive into the pros and cons of such a machine
. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398851",
"author": "The Gambler",
"timestamp": "2021-11-14T04:09:01",
"content": "ok interesting work and well done I will give it to them for that. However at this point just put a cheap set of chinese glass scales on it for a DRO. the resolution will be better and imho be way m... | 1,760,372,888.658024 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/13/opengl-machine-learning-runs-on-low-end-hardware/ | OpenGL Machine Learning Runs On Low-End Hardware | Tom Nardi | [
"Software Hacks"
] | [
"machine learning",
"neural network",
"opengl",
"opengl es",
"shader"
] | If you’ve looked into GPU-accelerated machine learning projects, you’re certainly familiar with NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture. It also follows that you’ve checked the prices online, and know how expensive it can be to get a high-performance video card that supports this particular brand of parallel programming.
But what if you could run machine learning tasks on a GPU using nothing more exotic than OpenGL?
That’s what [lnstadrum] has been working on for some time now
, as it would allow devices as meager as the original Raspberry Pi Zero to run tasks like image classification far faster than they could using their CPU alone. The trick is to break down your computational task into something that can be performed using OpenGL shaders, which are generally meant to push video game graphics.
An example of X2’s neural net upscaling.
[lnstadrum] explains that OpenGL releases from the last decade or so actually include so-called
compute shaders
specifically for running arbitrary code. But unfortunately that’s not an option on boards like the Pi Zero, which only meets the OpenGL for Embedded Systems (GLES) 2.0 standard from 2007.
Constructing the neural net in such a way that it would be compatible with these more constrained platforms was much more difficult, but the end result has far more interesting applications to show for it. During tests, both the Raspberry Pi Zero and several older Android smartphones were able to run a pre-trained image classification model at a respectable rate.
This isn’t just some thought experiment,
[lnstadrum] has released an image processing framework called
Beatmup
using these concepts that you can play around with right now. The C++ library has Java and Python bindings, and according to the documentation, should run on pretty much anything. Included in the framework is a simple tool called
X2
which can perform AI image upscaling on everything from your laptop’s integrated video card to the Raspberry Pi; making it
a great way to check out this fascinating application of machine learning
.
Truth be told, we’re a bit behind the ball on this one, as
Beatmup
made its first public release back in April of this year. It might have flown under the radar until now, but we think there’s a lot of potential for this project, and hope to see more of it once word gets out about the impressive results it can wring out of even the lowliest hardware.
[Thanks to Ishan for the tip.] | 16 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398821",
"author": "M",
"timestamp": "2021-11-13T22:02:36",
"content": "Pytorch, one of the two most popular machine learning toolkits, is slowly picking up support for running on top of the vulkan graphics API. The support is intended for running machine learning models on android... | 1,760,372,888.838627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/kinetic-log-splitter-gets-the-job-done-kinetically/ | Kinetic Log Splitter Gets The Job Done Kinetically | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"firewood",
"log",
"Log splitter",
"wood"
] | Swinging an axe to split firewood is great exercise and a wonderful way to blow off steam. However, if you’re not a muscled-up Hollywood character that needs to do some emotional processing, it can get pretty dull. Building a powered log splitter could make the work less strenuous,
as [Made in Poland] demonstrates.
(Video, embedded below.)
The build relies on a big electric motor, which is connected to a set of gears via a big belt drive. Those gears subsequently drive a rack forward when engaged via a lever, which pushes a log towards a splitter blade. The blade itself is a beautifully simple thing, being made out of a flat piece of steel bar carved up with a saw to form a pointy wedge.
The machine is remarkably effective, and greatly reduces the effort required to split even large 30 and 45 cm logs, as demonstrated in the video. We’ve featured a rundown
on a few different designs before, too
. Video after the break. | 37 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398080",
"author": "I didn't do it.",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T21:09:44",
"content": "Nope.The work required to get wood up onto this contraption is greater than that required to put wood onto a low stump and swing a splitting maul.A Polish labor saving device indeed.But a good add... | 1,760,372,888.783676 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/the-hackaday-remoticon-2-badge-an-exercise-in-your-own-ingenuity/ | The Hackaday Remoticon 2 Badge: An Exercise In Your Own Ingenuity | Jenny List | [
"cons"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Remoticon",
"badge",
"badgelife"
] | The twin challenges of the pandemic and now the semiconductor shortage have been particularly hard on the designers of event badges, as events have been cancelled and uncertain supply issues render their task impossible. When an event goes virtual, how do you even
start
to produce a badge for it? Make the badge and rely on enough stalwarts buying one? Or maybe produce a badge that’s a fancy take on a prototyping board?
For Hackaday Remoticon 2021, [Thomas Flummer]
has produced a novel take on the second option by distributing a badge as a set of KiCAD files
that can either be ordered from a PCB fab as a prototyping board or used as the canvas for a PCB to use whatever components are to hand. To demonstrate this, he’s produced an example badge that’s a MicroMod carrier.
So if you’d like to chase the full Remoticon experience with a badge there should still be enough time to order a set of boards, but to design your own electronics you’ll need to get a move on. What you might build upon it is up to you, but if you have an ESP32 module lying around you might wish to consider cloning the SHA2017 badge or its successors with the
badge.team
platform.
We’ve seen Thomas’ work before more than once on these pages, most notably as the man behind the
BornHack
badges. | 7 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398075",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T20:31:56",
"content": "So, I can use the board with 0.1″ (2.54mm) hole spacing for SAO.bis connectors.A 555 (or 558) should solder on easily enough too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"com... | 1,760,372,888.700585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/sulfur-hexafluoride-the-nightmare-greenhouse-gas-thats-just-too-useful-to-stop-using/ | Sulfur Hexafluoride: The Nightmare Greenhouse Gas That’s Just Too Useful To Stop Using | Maya Posch | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"fluorinated gases",
"global warming",
"sf6",
"sulfur hexafluoride"
] | Sulfur hexafluoride (SF
6
) is not nearly as infamous as CO
2
, with the latter getting most of the blame for anthropogenic climate change. Yet while measures are being implemented to curb the release of CO
2
, for SF
6
the same does not appear to be the case, despite the potentially much greater impact that SF
6
has. This is because when released into the atmosphere, CO
2
only has a global warming potential (
GWP
) of 1, whereas that of methane is about 28 over 100 years, and SF
6
has a GWP of well over 22,000 over that same time period.
Also of note here is that while methane will last only about 12.4 years in the atmosphere, SF
6
is so stable that it lasts thousands of years, currently estimated at roughly 3,200 years. When
we touched upon
sulfur hexafluoride back in 2019 in the context of greenhouse gases, it was noted that most SF
6
is used for — and leaks from — high-voltage switchgear (mechanical switches), transformers and related, where the gas’ inert and stable nature makes it ideal for preventing and quenching electrical arcing.
With the rapid growth of highly distributed energy production in the form of mostly (offshore) wind turbines and PV solar parks, this also means that each of these is equipped with its own (gas-filled) switchgear. With SF
6
still highly prevalent in this market, this seems like an excellent opportunity to look into how far SF
6
usage has dropped, and whether we may be able to manage to avert a potential disaster.
Best at Not Doing Anything
Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) skeletal formula with dimensions.
What makes SF
6
such an excellent, one-stop shop choice for quelling electrical arcs and insulating high-voltage electrical system is because of its stability. Generally, it does not readily interact with other substances, which leads to its properties of being colorless, non-flammable and non-toxic. Unfortunately, this lack of chemical reactivity also means that it can hang around in e.g. the Earth’s atmosphere for a very long time.
Although SF
6
occurs naturally, the overwhelming majority is produced by humans, for use in industrial processes and medicine, but primarily in high-voltage electrical systems as a
dielectric gas
. The main purpose of a dielectric gas here is to increase the breakdown voltage so that higher voltages can be used in less space, generally relative to air.
For when some arcing does occur, the purpose of the gas should also be to quench the arcing, which is where SF
6
shines. Although a small part of the gas may be broken down into the toxic S
2
F
10
(disulfur decafluoride), most breakdown products will quickly reform into SF
6
, which makes it a low-maintenance choice for switchgear. Especially for gear that ends up being installed somewhere remote and relatively inaccessible, this is a very helpful property.
Because SF
6
is non-toxic and has a high molecular weight, it has also found use as an inverse party gag to helium: where helium’s low molecular density makes for an increase in perceived pitch when speaking through a helium-filled medium, breathing in SF
6
will significantly lower the pitch of one’s voice until the gas has been expelled from the person’s airways.
Gases Want to Be Free
The growth of sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) in Earth’s atmosphere during years 2000 – 2020. (credit: AGAGE)
An unfortunate side-effect of our planet’s gaseous atmosphere is that any gases which escape from containment, or which are released through human activity end up joining said atmosphere. How concerned we should be about this depends on the gas in question. When
CFCs
were found to be rapidly eroding the Earth’s ozone layer, this made it crucial to immediately eliminate any significant release of this gas. This was accomplished via the
Montreal Protocol
, which saw a rapid cessation of most uses of CFCs.
In the case of SF
6
, it would seem fair to ask just what the scope of the threat is. To assess this we can look at
AGAGE’s data
. This is the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment, which keeps track of a wide range of gases in the atmosphere. Their findings are that the amount of SF
6
has significantly increased since 2000, increasing from about 4 ppt (parts per trillion) to around 10 ppt by 2020, with a linear increase becoming noticeable around 1970. Pre-industrial troposphere levels were roughly
around 54 ppq
(parts per quadrillion).
As over 80% of the SF
6
that is produced is used in the electrical power industry, this is also not surprisingly the biggest source of leaks. Much of this is due to the distributed nature, instead of the gas being used in a closely monitored industrial process, items like switchgear are located literally around the world, in deserts, at the top of wind turbines and in the middle of fields. When being installed, repaired or decommissioned, switchgear can also be damaged, with SF
6
gas escaping into the atmosphere.
Top-down inversion emission estimate for western Europe (2013–2018). (Credit: Simmonds et al., 2020)
In a 2020 study based on the AGAGE findings titled
The increasing atmospheric burden of the greenhouse gas sulfur hexafluoride (SF
6
)
,
Simmonds et al.
cover the past 40 years of measurements. They note five main source of SF
6
leakage:
Electrical power industry
Magnesium industry
Aluminium industry
Electronics industry
SF
6
production itself
As for the major SF
6
-emitting countries, these were deduced from measurements to be primarily China and South Korea in East-Asia, and Germany in Western Europe. In the case of Germany semiconductor producers are suspected of being major contributors.
As for high-voltage gas-insulated switchgear (GIS), these use as mentioned >80% of the annual production of SF
6
, with medium-voltage GIS another 10%. These GIS tend to have a lifespan of 30-40 years, with new SF
6
-based GIS being installed even today, each of which will suffer some level of leakage during normal operation due to the imperfect nature of seals. In the magnesium, aluminium, and semiconductor industries, leaks have been gradually reduced over time, but are still a significant source.
In 2018, global emissions of SF
6
were
9.0±0.4
Gg yr
−1
, with
2018 CO
2
emissions
being 33.1 Gt (33,100,000 Gg). Taking into account the much higher GWP (22800) of SF
6
, this makes its 2018 emissions equivalent to about 205,200 Gg, or 0.6% of annual CO
2
emissions. While not an astounding number, we must take into account here that so far the emissions of SF6 are increasing year over year. Any SF
6
-based GIS or similar installed today will be adding to this total for the next decades, while contributing to global warming for a longer period than the industrial era so far.
Alternatives
Clearly, replacing SF
6
and generally preventing it from leaking into the atmosphere is a good thing, then. Perhaps ironically, SF
6
previously replaced the use of oil in switchgear due to toxic and otherwise harmful substances, and some of the suggested replacements for SF
6
are themselves not as benign as this gas. Where possible, one of the best options is a vacuum, with a high vacuum providing very high dielectric insulation.
Maintaining a high vacuum is not easy, especially not over years, leading to alternatives ranging from plain air, CO
2
, and various fluoride-based substances. Recently
Owens et al. (2021)
as researchers at 3M published a study on two SF6 alternatives which 3M sells commercially. Their commercial names are Novec 4710 ((CF
3
)
2
CFCN) and Novec 5110 ((CF
3
)
2
CFC(O)CF
3
), both being fluoronitrile and fluoroketone mixes.
The idea is that such mixes are added to CO
2
or air inside the GIS, to improve the dielectric properties. In this configuration, Novec 5110 with air mixture looks pretty decent, with a (100-year) GWP of <1, but Novec 4710 with CO
2
mixture has a GWP of 398, which is better, but not great. SF6 also showed an overall better cold weather performance, down to -38 °C, compared to -27 °C for Novec 4710/CO
2
, and 0 °C for Novec 5110/air.
US sulfur hexafluoride market. (Source:
Grand View Research
)
This highlights the complexity in replacing SF
6
in GIS applications, as each part of an electrical grid has different temperature ranges and other factors that would be a particular SF
6
alternative more attractive. With SF
6
being relatively cheap, universally applicable, and its use so far unencumbered within the electrical power industry — even within the EU’s
F-gases
regulations — it’s little wonder that the
SF
6
market keeps growing
year over year.
Not Just SF
6
The
fluorinated gases
have in common that they tend to be man-made, popular in industry and other applications, and have a high GWP. They include HFCs, PFCs, SF
6
and NF
3
. Of these, HFCs are popular in refrigeration, where they replace the previously popular CFCs, along with a number of other gases. Through their production, use and eventual decommissioning, a significant amount of these gases end up in the atmosphere, where they contribute to the specter of anthropogenic global warming.
Looking at the popularity of these gases, the difficulty in finding replacements, and the push to produce more and ever cheaper refrigerators, wind turbines, and distributed power systems, it seems unlikely that we’ll be seeing a major change here. Meanwhile every day sees more of SF
6
-based GIS and kin being installed in the world’s rush to decarbonize and expand the electrical grid, where they’ll continue to be a problem for decades to come.
Although this is a perhaps depressing perspective, some hope can be gained from the way the world came together to banish CFCs when it was clear that they formed an existential threat to all life on this Earth. Here is to hoping that we can do that a few more times. | 75 | 22 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398048",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T18:22:36",
"content": "So, I guessed I missed the part about _how_ SF6 contributes to AGW.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6398063",
"author": "PRN",
"timesta... | 1,760,372,889.250624 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/a-breathtaking-circuit-sculpture-clock/ | A Breathtaking Circuit Sculpture Clock | Dan Maloney | [
"Art",
"clock hacks"
] | [
"Circuit Sculpture",
"clock",
"digital",
"led"
] | Here at Hackaday, we pride ourselves on bringing you the very freshest of hacks. But that doesn’t mean we catch all the good stuff the first time around, and occasionally we get a tip on an older project that really should have been covered the first time around.
This remarkable circuit sculpture clock
is a perfect example of one that almost got away.
[Gislain Benoit] creation is called “The Tower” for good reason: it’s built inside what amounts to a giant glass test tube. Inverted and adorned with MDF discs, the Pyrex tube stands 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, and is absolutely stuffed with electronic goodness. There are more than 2,100 discrete components mounted inside on a helical framework of carefully bent wires, forming a vertical sculpture that displays the time on three separate pairs of seven-segment displays. All the diode-transitor logic circuits are built from discrete components; nary a chip was used, and to spice things up, [Gislain] used LEDs in place of regular diodes everywhere in the circuit. The result is a constant light show as the clock goes through its paces.
The whole thing looks amazing, and even the power supply at the base works in the overall presentation. The design is a bit of a departure from [
Gislain]’s previous circuit sculpture clock
, but it’s just as beautiful, and equally as mind-boggling in terms of construction difficulty.
Thanks to [Maarten] for the belated tip on this one. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398047",
"author": "Chris",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T18:16:32",
"content": "This looks stunning, I wish I could see a video!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6398049",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T... | 1,760,372,888.883057 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/nfc-performance-its-all-in-the-antenna/ | NFC Performance: It’s All In The Antenna | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Radio Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"antenna",
"NFC",
"NFC tag",
"radio",
"RF",
"tuned circuit",
"vna"
] | NFC tags are a frequent target for experimentation, whether simply by using an app on a mobile phone to interrogate or write to tags, by incorporating them in projects by means of an off-the-shelf module, or by designing a project using them from scratch. Yet they’re not always easy to get right, and can often give disappointing results. This article will attempt to demystify what is probably the most likely avenue for an NFC project to have poor performance, the pickup coil antenna in the reader itself.
A selection of the NFC tags on my desk
The tags contain chips that are energised through the RF field that provides enough power for them to start up, at which point they can communicate with a host computer for whatever their purpose is.
“NFC” stands for “Near Field Communication”, in which data can be exchanged between physically proximate devices without their being physically connected. Both reader and tag achieve this through an antenna, which takes the form of a flat coil and a capacitor that together make a resonant tuned circuit. The reader sends out pulses of RF which is maintained once an answer is received from a card, and thus communication can be established until the card is out of the reader’s range.
Very Few NFC Tags And Readers Are On The Same Frequency
For the majority of tags likely to be experimented by Hackaday readers the RF frequency is 13.56 MHz, and the RF emissions are supposed to be in the magnetic field plane rather than the electric field. There’s nothing complex about the antennas, indeed it’s easy enough to make one yourself by winding a suitable coil and tuning it with a small variable capacitor. The RF properties of the antenna can be explored with instruments as simple as a signal generator and an oscilloscope, or if you’re a radio amateur old enough to have picked one up, a dip meter. For the purposes of this article I’m using a NanoVNA because of its extreme convenience, and I’ve set it to measure SWR on port 1 with a sweep between 10 MHz and 20 MHz. I’m loosely coupling it to the NFC antennas I’m testing by means of an RF pickup coil, one turn of wire about 10mm diameter soldered to a coaxial connector and secured with a bit of glue. When I place the pickup coil over an NFC tag, I’m rewarded with a sharp peak on the VNA from infinity down to near 1:1 SWR. This works well with most reader coils and with lower power NFC tags that simply contain a memory chip, but my VNA doesn’t provide enough energy to measure those tags with higher power integrated circuits such as bank cards, a public transport card, or my passport.
My quick RF pickup coil
The VNA shows a clear SWR dip for an NFC tag
Immediately, the VNA pinpoints one of the problems inherent to mass-produced NFCs, that the resonant frequency is rarely exactly on 13.56 MHz. In writing this article I found that both cards and readers appear to resonate anywhere between 13.5 and 15 MHz, with the majority being measured at about 14 MHz. In practice most readers provide more than enough energy so the tag can still be energised despite the resulting inefficiency, but for any NFC tag system to work at maximum efficiency it should have both reader and tag adjusted to resonate at the 13.56MHz frequency of communication.
The Simple But Clever Tech In Your Bank Card
Here’s what’s going on inside your bank card. The variable capacitor is shown at top centre, and the chip is sitting in its pick-up coil on the left.
Most tags, and the cheapest reader modules, have very little effort put in to tuning them to resonance, but one of the more interesting tags I examined for this piece, a bank card subjected to a teardown by a hackerspace friend, shows a very clever approach to automated tuning. A bank card is a standard chip card made from two laminated layers of plastic, with the chip contacts appearing in the front face. Upon dismantling it can be seen that the chip and its contacts are on a small piece of plastic about 10 mm by 10 mm that can be lifted clear of the card.
This module can be read by a card reader, but only when it is placed directly on the antenna rather than with any part of the whole card in proximity to the reader as would happen in a shop. To ensure the small chip module can be energised by a reader over the whole surface of the card, the rear half of the card is a printed circuit board that is simply a tuned circuit with a large coil and an ingenious variable capacitor made from a row of small PCB plates. The coil is half-and-half round the edge of the card and closely round the chip, allowing it to pick up the field over a large area and couple the resulting energy closely into the chip. It’s tuned during manufacture by cutting a trace connecting the capacitors, at a guess this will be an automated process. Measuring its resonance it turns out to be a little higher than 13.56 MHz, but since that measurement was made on a dismantled card with no chip in place it’s likely that the resonant point will have been moved upwards.
Tuning An NFC Reader For Maximum Smoke
A pair of cheap NFC reader modules. The one on the left has been modified to provide resonance at 13.56 MHz.
Turning to the readers, the more expensive devices have a built-in variable capacitor and will have been factory-tuned to 13.56 MHz, while the cheap modules normally have a fixed capacitor and resonate at a higher frequency. Experience with these cheaper modules suggests that they will usually interact with the simpler cards such as the ubiquitous MiFare Classic, but that they are unable to provide enough energy to power the smarter cards such as the MiFare DESfire tags. Adjusting the antenna on the module for resonance at 13.56 MHz improves the efficiency to the extent that the higher-power tags can be read, for example in the picture is a cheap reader module prepared by a hackerspace friend. He used an RF pickup coil and an oscilloscope to measure the amplitude of the 13.56 MHz carrier, and adjusted the tuned circuit until a point of maximum amplitude had been reached. In this case he wound his own coil and removed wire from it turn by turn to find the maximum, but the same result could just as easily be done with the PCB coil and a small trimmer capacitor. This cheap reader now works with DESfire cards that previously required a far more expensive module, making the process well worth the effort.
So while much of the technological magic in an NFC tag lies in its digital electronic package it’s worth remembering that making it all work is still a firmly analogue antenna. A bit of old-fashioned RF tweaking work with your ‘scope and a signal generator can transform their performance for the better. | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398037",
"author": "Martin Sivak",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T17:15:26",
"content": "The cheap readers sometimes have unsuitable components too. The rated frequency and rated current of the coils is the first thing to check. Ermok described that few years ago herehttps://forum.mikroe... | 1,760,372,888.940657 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/hacked-punch-out-controlled-with-actual-punches/ | Hacked Punch-Out Controlled With Actual Punches | Dave Rowntree | [
"Games",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"emscripten",
"fceux",
"MoveNet",
"nes",
"posture",
"USB CopyNES"
] | In a slightly safer departure away from jetpack roller-skating and flinging around bolts of lightning, [Ian Charnas] has been hacking retro video games. After a lot of hard work [Ian] has managed to
add pose estimation to control the character in the NES boxing game “Punch-Out.”
Surely he can’t get hurt doing that? No, but since it wasn’t fair to hurt the poor suffering characters, without taking any damage himself, he added electric-shock feedback to give the game a bit more, ahem,
punch
. See, you can get hurt playing video games!
By starting with
Google MoveNet
, which is a pre-baked skeletal tracking model which can run in a browser using TensorFlowJS, he defined some simple heuristics for the various boxing moves usually performed with the game controller. Next, he needed to get the game. Being a all-round good guy, [Ian] bought an original copy of the game cartridge to obtain the license, then using the
USB CopyNES
from RetroUSB, dumped out the game binary for the next step.
Emulation of the NES hardware was chosen, taken care of by
FCEUX
, in order to run the game and the posture model on the same machine. This simplified the control of the game, since it would be somewhat more work to have it run on the original NES. By using
emscripten
, FCEUX was cross-compiled to WebAssembly, and so both the game and control side are both in the land of JavaScript. To be honest, after playing the game a little, [Ian] found it far too fast to be playable with posture control, as opposed to much faster button pressing, so some game hacking was required. Emulation made this much easier.
It took [Ian] around two months of disassembling the game binary, and figuring out the game logic around the characters in order to slow them down enough to make it playable, but he did manage it. You can be the judge, since he bought a bunch more cartridges to unlock more license copies,
you can play it too
. Just don’t add the electric-shock part, nobody needs to be administered electric shock therapy from a two inch high bright orange Mike Tyson! | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6398002",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T15:06:23",
"content": "Just put thumbtacks inside the gloves, you’ll get painful feedback with every punch.Or, in keeping with Hackaday commenters…Just put a few DIP 555 chips in the gloves, you’ll get painful feedback with every p... | 1,760,372,889.045316 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/10/3d-printed-absolute-encoder-is-absolutely-wonderful/ | 3D Printed Absolute Encoder Is Absolutely Wonderful | Adam Zeloof | [
"hardware",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"actuator",
"knob",
"robotics",
"rotary encoder"
] | When you need to record the angle of something rotating, whether it’s a knob or a joint in a robotic arm, absolute rotary encoders are almost always the way to go. They’re cheap, they’re readily available, and it turns out
you can make a pretty fantastic one out of a magnetic sensor, a zip tie, and a skateboard bearing
.
When [Scott Bezek] got his hands on a AS5600 magnet sensor breakout board, that’s just what he did. The sensor itself is an IC situated in the middle of the board, which in Scott’s design sits on a 3D-printed carrier. A bearing mount sits atop it, which holds — you guessed it — a bearing. Specifically a standard 608 skateboard bearing, which is snapped into the mount and held securely by a zip tie cinched around the mount’s tabs. The final part is a 3D-printed knob with a tiny magnet embedded within, perpendicular to the axis of rotation. The knob slides into the bearing and the AS5600 reads the orientation of the magnet.
Of course, if you just wanted a rotary knob you could have just purchased an encoder and been done with it, but this method has its advantages. Maybe you can’t fit a commercially-available encoder in your design. Maybe you need the super-smooth rotation provided by the bearing. Or maybe you’re
actually building that robotic arm
— custom magnetic encoders like this one are extremely common in actuator design, and while the more industrial versions (usually) have fewer zip ties, [Scott]’s design would fit right in. | 25 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397949",
"author": "none",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T10:46:34",
"content": "It’s a 3D printed knob, not a 3D printed encoder. But you knew that…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397951",
"author": "Moryc",
"tim... | 1,760,372,889.310589 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/ibm-pcjr-from-1984-keeps-todays-clocks-running-in-sync/ | IBM PCjr From 1984 Keeps Today’s Clocks Running In Sync | Robin Kearey | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"IBM PCjr",
"SNTP",
"time server"
] | We’ve gotten used to the fact that the clocks on our internet-connected computers and smartphones are always telling the right time. Time servers, provided by a variety of government agencies as well as tech giants, provide them with the exact time and date thanks to accurate atomic clocks and the clever Network Time Protocol (NTP). But it wasn’t always like this: back in the 1990s when many computers didn’t have an internet connection, we had to adjust our computers’ clocks manually. Go back one more decade, and many PCs didn’t even have a battery-backed clock at all; you either set the proper date and time when the computer booted, or just lived with the fact that all new files were timestamped 01-01-1980.
[Michael Brutman] decided to mix today’s world of network time synchronization with the old world of batteryless PCs, and built an
SNTP Time Server that runs on a DOS PC
. He tried it with two different hardware setups: a 40 MHz 386 PC from 1993, and the (in)famous IBM PCjr from 1984. A standard GPS module serves as an accurate time reference; these units can often be directly connected to old hardware thanks to the eternal RS-232 standard.
Simply having an accurate clock was not enough though: the original IBM hardware had its internal clock only updated every 55 milliseconds, which is not fast enough for a proper NTP server. [Michael] therefore had to tweak the hardware clock’s update rate, taking care not to overload the CPU with too many interrupts. The slow CPU and limited memory anyway required him to implement the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP), a stripped-down version of the more common NTP, which leaves out some of the more complex features that deal with synchronizing multiple servers. The network interface is handled by [Michael]’s own
mTCP package
, which is a TCP/IP stack designed for DOS machines with limited memory.
Tests comparing the DOS time server to the one run by Google showed an offset of no more than a few milliseconds, which should be just fine for keeping all PCs on your home network in sync. Although using an old PC is not the most practical way to run your own time server, [Michael]’s blog post is a fascinating deep dive into the finer points of PC clock architecture and network time synchronization approaches. We’ve seen a time server
implemented on ESP8266 hardware
before; but you could also dispense with the (S)NTP protocol entirely and directly
connect a GPS module to your Raspberry Pi
for accurate timing. | 33 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397914",
"author": "irox",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T06:47:51",
"content": "Files? With timestamps?You were lucky. We lived with writing timestamps on the inlay of the audio cassette we kept in a shoebox.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"co... | 1,760,372,889.37505 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/faster-ipa-recycling-for-your-resin-print-workflow/ | Faster IPA Recycling For Your Resin Print Workflow | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"alcohol",
"alum",
"aluminum sulfate",
"aluminum sulphate",
"IPA",
"recycling",
"resin"
] | If you’ve printed with photopolymer resins, you know that you need alcohol. Lots of alcohol. It makes sense that people would like to reuse the alcohol both to be environmentally responsible and to save a little money. The problem is that the alcohol eventually becomes so dirty that you have to do something. Given time, the polymer residue will settle to the bottom and you can easily pour off most of the clean liquid. You can also use filters with some success. But [Makers Mashup] had a different idea. Borrowing inspiration from water treatment plants, he found
a chemical that will hasten the settling process
. You can see a video of his process below.
The experimentation started with fish tank clarifier, which is — apparently — mostly alum. Alum’s been used to treat wastewater for a long time. Even the ancient Romans used it for that purpose in the first century. Alum causes coagulation and flocculation so that particles in the water wind up sinking to the bottom.
It isn’t as simple as just adding alum to the waste liquid. To encourage particles to coagulate, real waste treatment plants agitate the water and that is required here, too. For best results, the video says to mix a solution of alum and distilled water and then stir the alcohol, resin, and solution together, rapidly at first and then more slowly.
After a 45 minute stir, you’ll need to let it all settle for a few hours, but you can see large clumps forming almost immediately. In the video, he uses a magnetic stirring rig, but he also points out that if you have a wash station, it can do the same job. In fact, if you don’t have a wash station, this might be the justification you need to buy one!
One important note: the tests were done with pure aluminum sulfate (the right name for alum). If you buy alum at the store, it is likely to have potassium or other additives and that might change the results or even the safety of this procedure.
If you want to build a
magnetic stirring machine
, we’ve seen several homebrew units. If you wonder if you are diluting your alcohol with this procedure, you could
test the proof of the resulting liquid
. | 30 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397909",
"author": "Eldowr",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T05:13:15",
"content": "I’m unreasonably sad that this has nothing to do with hoppy beers…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397924",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
... | 1,760,372,889.436398 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/most-fdm-printers-are-also-filament-dryers-with-a-little-help/ | Most FDM Printers Are Also Filament Dryers (with A Little Help) | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"dryer",
"drying",
"filament dryer"
] | If you’ve printed with an FDM printer, you probably know there are many interrelated factors to getting a good print. One key item is the dryness of the filament. When you first crack your plastic open, it should be dry. Most filament is packed in a sealed bag with desiccant in it. But if you have the filament out for a while, it soaks up moisture from the air and that causes lots of problems. [Design Prototype Test] has built and bought filament dryers before, but now he would like to point out that
every FDM printer with a heated bed can act as a filament dryer.
You can see the details in the video below.
It turns out that the idea isn’t original, but it doesn’t seem to be one that has caught on. What the video shows though, is to take the idea and run with it. A 3D printed support sits on the bed and accepts a cheap PC fan. The whole affair gets boxed up with cardboard and can dry the filament.
The first test worked well, although the support was made of PLA and didn’t survive well. An ABS support tower was the answer. We hoped there were STL files for the support, but, apparently, they are only available to the channel’s supporters. However, a few minutes in any CAD program should let you duplicate the support easily.
The video mentions that the cover box could probably use more insulation. We would have been tempted to line the box inside and out with cork which is easy to work with and a great insulator. If your printer has a heated build chamber, you wouldn’t need the box anyway.
The video wraps up with how to store filament so you don’t get moisture in it to start with. He mentions vacuum chambers and reptile heaters. We’ve used a sealed container and few pounds of unused crystal kitty litter which is just a cheap way to buy silica gel.
We saw [Richard Horne]
building a dry box
years ago.
Food dehydrators
seem to work well, too. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397885",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-11-10T01:39:05",
"content": "I’ve used the food dehydrator before. It didn’t work. It just deformed the filament and made it wavy to the point that it would jam my bowden tube. Maybe lower temp and longer drying time was the solution, b... | 1,760,372,889.479543 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/streamline-your-smd-assembly-process-with-3d-printed-jigs/ | Streamline Your SMD Assembly Process With 3D-Printed Jigs | Adam Zeloof | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"jig",
"pcb assembly",
"smd",
"soldering",
"stencil"
] | Your brand-new PCBs just showed up, and this time you even remembered to order a stencil. You lay the stencil on one of the boards, hold it down with one hand, and use the other to wipe some solder paste across…. and the stencil shifts, making a mess and smearing paste across the board. Wash, rinse (with some IPA, of course), repeat, and hope it’ll work better on the next try.
A PCB jig generated by OpenSCAD
Maybe it’s time to try
Stencilframer, a 3D-printable jig generator created by [Igor]
. This incredibly useful tool takes either a set of gerbers or a KiCad PCB file and generates 3D models of a jig and a frame to securely hold the board and associated stencil. The tool itself is a Python script that uses OpenSCAD for all 3D geometry generation. From there, it’s a simple matter to throw the jig and frame models on a 3D printer and
voilà!
– perfectly-aligned stencils, every time.
This is a seriously brilliant script. Anyone whose gone through the frustration of trying to align a stencil by hand should be jumping at the opportunity to try this out on their next build. It could even be paired with an
Open Reflow hot plate
for a fully open-source PCB assembly workflow. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397849",
"author": "Ghent The Slicer",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T21:28:12",
"content": "Very nice project. I used to make 3D printed jigs to hold through hole connectors and stuff while I’m soldering the other side, but modeling these by hand takes time.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,891.400889 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/this-0-filament-drybox-needs-nearly-no-parts/ | This $0 Filament Drybox Needs Nearly No Parts | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"desiccant",
"drybox",
"filament"
] | All 3D printer filament benefits from being kept as dry as possible, but some are more sensitive to humidity than others. The best solution is a drybox; a sealed filament container, usually with some desiccant inside. But in a pinch,
[Spacefan]’s quick and dirty $0 drybox solution
is at least inspiring in terms of simplicity.
The only added part is this 3D-printed fitting.
[Spacefan]’s solution uses a filament roll’s own packing materials and a single 3D-printed part to create a sealed environment for a single roll. The roll lives inside a plastic bag (potentially the same one it was sealed in) and filament exits through a small hole and 3D-printed fitting that also uses a bit of spare PTFE tubing. The box doubles as a convenient container for it all. It doesn’t have as much to offer as
this other DIY drybox solution
, but sure is simple.
While we appreciate the idea, this design is sure to put a lot of friction on the spool itself. It will be a lot of extra work to pull filament off the spool, which needs to turn inside a bag, inside a box, and that extra work will be done by the 3D printer’s extruder, a part that should ideally be working as little as possible. The re-use of materials is a great idea, but it does look to us like the idea could use some improvement.
What do you think? Useful in a pinch, or needs changes? Would adding a spindle to support the spool help? Let us know what you think in the comments. | 20 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397819",
"author": "MW",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T19:48:24",
"content": "Looks to me like this design will put a bit of a strain on the extruder and/or filament. Kudos for the attempt though. I hope it doesn’t cause any issues for him. Myself, I’ll use one of the plastic container ... | 1,760,372,891.166934 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/nasas-new-moon-missions-are-happening-really-soon/ | NASA’s New Moon Missions Are Happening Really Soon | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"Artemis",
"artemis mission",
"artemis program",
"nasa",
"orion",
"space",
"Space Launch System"
] | NASA first landed a human on the moon back in 1969, and last achieved the feat in December 1972. In the intervening years, there have been few other missions to Earth’s primary natural satellite. A smattering of uncrewed craft have crashed into the surface, while a mere handful of missions have achieved a soft landing, with none successful from 1976 to 2013.
However, NASA aims to resume missions to the lunar surface, albeit in an uncrewed capacity at this stage. And you won’t have to wait very long, either. The world’s premier space agency aims to once again fly to the Moon
beginning in February 2022
.
The first mission will be known as Artemis-1. It serves as a flight test for the broader Artemis program, which is NASA’s effort to return humans to the Moon. It will mark the first flight of NASA’s
long-awaited Space Launch System
, as well as the first flight of a non-development Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle (MPCV) capsule. Launching from Kennedy Space Center, the mission duration will be a full 25 and a half days, with the Orion craft spending six of those in Lunar orbit.
NASA reported that the spacecraft was stacked up successfully on October 20. The vehicle was assembled in the aptly named Vehicle Assembly Building, and is the first super heavy-lift spacecraft to be built there
since Apollo 17 in 1972
.
Thus, Artemis-1 will be the beginning of a new era for NASA as it attempts to replicate its glorious past achievements. Let’s take a look at the hardware they’ll use to do so.
Space Launch System
An artist’s impression of the Space Launch System stacked up on the launch pad. Credit: NASA, public domain
The Space Launch System is NASA’s new super-heavy lift rocket. It aims to serve roughly the same purpose as the Saturn V known so well for its role in the Apollo program.
The rocket’s first stage, also known as the core stage, runs four RS-25 rocket engines burning cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen, previously seen serving as the Space Shuttle Main Engine. Early examples of the Space Launch System will use refurbished Space Shuttle engines, before NASA transitions over to the simplified RS-25E design for future builds. The engines will be treated as expendable in Space Launch System flights.
Two solid-fuel booster rockets also assist the first stage, reusing casings from the boosters used on the old Space Shuttle. The boosters have had a redesign with new avionics and some other modifications, and will eliminate the parachute recovery system previously used. Instead, the boosters will be allowed to crash to Earth, similarly being treated as expendable.
The upper stage of the rocket is termed the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS). It’s based on the Delta IV launch system, but has been stretched and upgraded to human-rated specification for use in future crewed flights. The ICPS runs a single RL10 engine running on cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen, and is responsible for orbital injection as well as trans-lunar injection duty.
Standing 111 meters high, and 8.4 meters in diameter, the Space Launch System is almost identical in height to the Saturn V but around 1.5 meters slimmer. The later Block 2 models are intended to carry approximately 130,000 kg to lower-earth orbit, comparable to the the Saturn V’s capabilities to loft 140,000 kg to the same region.
Despite the similarities, the Space Launch System does outperform its predecessor in some areas. The Block 1 vehicle that flies next year will develop 39.1 MegaNewtons of thrust, a full 15% greater than that of the Saturn V. It’s still less than the 45.4 megaNewtons promised by the Soviet N1 of the 1960s, however the N1 never flew successfully.
The Space Launch System has faced
significant controversy
during its development period. Literally being built out of old Space Shuttle parts doesn’t say much for its high-tech credentials. Indeed, the launcher’s performance specs are hardly surprising given that its main stage rocket engines rely on designs first drawn up in the 1970s.
However, NASA needs a big rocket if it’s ever going to return to the Moon, let alone chase its longer-term goals of establishing a permanent presence there and a visit to Mars. A successful unmanned flight will do a lot to re-establish the agency’s profile as a force in the space industry.
Orion
The Orion spacecraft, being lowered on to the Space Launch System at the Vehcile Assembly Building. Credit: NASA, public domain
The Orion capsule is a spacecraft that will serve as the crewed module in NASA’s Artemis program. It’s designed primarily to sit atop the Space Launch System, complete with a tower launch escape system to separate the vehicle in the event of an emergency.
Only the Orion Crew Module returns to Earth. Designed as a truncated cone with a blunt spherical end, the basic design is similar to the Apollo CSM that took astronauts to the moon back in 1969. However, Orion is slightly larger in diameter, with reportedly 50% more volume, and room for four to six astronauts inside. The Crew Module is designed to support long-duration crewed missions of up to 21 days duration. Total weight of the crew module is approximately 8500 kg. Recovery of the Orion Crew Module is via splashdown, with parachutes used to slow the rate of descent as in prior designs.
The Orion spacecraft has many modern amenities however, which differentiate it from the earlier Apollo designs. It features a full glass cockpit derived from systems used on the Boeing 787, as well as autodocking capability to handle rendezvous with other spacecraft.
Orion sports an AJ-10 hypergolic rocket engine as its primary propulsion. Six custom engines from Airbus are used for the reaction control system, along with eight R-4D-11 engines as well.
It bears noting that Orion will not be used for lunar landing, however. Instead, current plans involve the Orion spacecraft docking with a specially-designed SpaceX Starship, known as the Human Landing System, in lunar orbit. Astronauts would then transfer to the Starship for lunar landing, and would return to the Orion craft for the journey back to Earth.
Mission Goals
Cubesats sitting in the Orion stage adapter. Credit: NASA, public domain
The mission will serve as a full test of the combination of the Space Launch System and the Orion module. The aim is that the successful Artemis-1 mission will be followed by a crewed launch for Artemis-2, which will follow in late 2023. Artemis-3 is then intended to land on the moon sometime in 2024, though given delays thus far, it’s expected that this timeline may be pushed out further.
Main payloads for the mission include the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment, which aims to measure radiation doses that could be absorbed by tissue in the regions of space beyond lower-earth orbit. It will also test the
AstroRad radiation vest
developed by StemRad, which aims to protect bone marrow and vital human organs from radiation in space. This will be achieved with two female mannequins designed for medical imaging tests, one wearing the vest, and the other unprotected. It’s hoped this data will help inform spacecraft design for further deep-space missions, such as an eventual landing on Mars.
The Artemis-1 mission will also carry many secondary payloads.
Ten CubeSats will travel on the mission
, including BioSentinel, which will take a living microorganism beyond lower-earth orbit to study the effects of space radiation. Others include the Lunar IceCube, which will search for water ice on the Moon, as well as LunIR, which will do surface studies of the Moon using spectroscopy and thermography.
Overall, Artemis-1 is a mission that will be a huge milestone for NASA in terms of getting back to the capability it had in the 1960s. Given the fraught political and economic environment on Earth, it’s been a difficult road for the agency, and a manned mission to the Moon, let alone Mars, still seems like a far-off possibility. Artemis-1 could be the stepping stone that gets humanity to believe, once again. | 40 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397814",
"author": "Will",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T19:19:46",
"content": "“Literally being built out of old Space Shuttle parts doesn’t say much for its high-tech credentials.”That’s what happens when your budget gets decimated",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies... | 1,760,372,891.301776 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/not-your-average-nixie-tube-clock/ | Not Your Average Nixie Tube Clock | Dan Maloney | [
"clock hacks"
] | [
"clock",
"ESP-8266",
"fpga",
"IN-9",
"nixie",
"radial"
] | When it comes to Nixie clocks, we all pretty much know what to expect: a bunch of Nixies with some RGB LEDs underneath, a wooden case of some sort, and maybe some brass gears or fittings for that authentic steampunk look. It’s not that we don’t appreciate these builds, but the convergent designs can be a little much sometimes. Thankfully,
this 60-tube Nixie clock
bears that mold, and in a big way.
The key to [limpkin]’s design is the IN-9 Nixie, which is the long, skinny tube that used to show up as linear indicators; think bar graph displays on bench multimeters or the VU meters on mixing boards. [limpkin] realized that 60 on the tubes could be arranged radially to represent hours or minutes, and potentially so much more. The length of the segment that lights up in the IN-9 is controlled by the current through the tube, so [limpkin] designed a simple driver for each segment that takes a PWM signal as its input. The job of a 60-channel, 14-bit PWM controller fell to an FPGA. An ESP8266 — all the rage five years ago when he
started the project
— took care of timekeeping and control, as well as driving a more traditional clock display of four 7-segment LEDs in the center of the clock face.
The custom PCB lives in a CNC-machined MDF wood face; the IN-9s shine through slots in the face, while the seven-segment display shows through a thinned area. It looks pretty cool, and there are a lot of display options, like the audio spectrograph shown in the video below. We’re glad [limpkin] decided to share this one after all this time. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397790",
"author": "That kid",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T17:29:10",
"content": "realized that 60 on the tubesrealized that 60 onf the tubes",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397791",
"author": "That kid",
"times... | 1,760,372,891.521546 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/teardown-analog-radionic-analyzer/ | Teardown: Analog Radionic Analyzer | Tom Nardi | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"air variable capacitor",
"alternative medicine",
"fraud",
"snake oil",
"variable capacitor"
] | Have you ever looked up a recipe online, and before you got to the ingredients, you had to scroll through somebody’s meandering life story? You just want to know how many cans of tomato paste to buy, but instead you’re reading about cozy winter nights at grandma’s house? Well, that’s where you are right now, friend. Except instead of wanting to know what goes in a lasagna, you just want to see the inside of some weirdo alternative medicine gadget. I get it, and wouldn’t blame you for skipping ahead, but I would be remiss to start this month’s teardown without a bit of explanation as to how it came into my possession.
So if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’ll tell you a story about an exceptionally generous patron, and the incredible wealth of sham medical hokum that they have bestowed upon the Hackaday community…
A Troublesome Burden
Imagine you’re in the unenviable, but for many of us inevitable, position of having to put a family member’s affairs in order. Beyond the emotional difficulty, the logistical aspects of the task can be daunting. Especially when said family member, at great expense and over the course of several decades, amassed a very unusual collection of equipment.
These devices are mysterious, to say the least. Many don’t have any obvious brand or model markings, and the reams of documentation that accompany them are unlike any manual you’ve ever seen. It’s clearly technical data, of a sort, but none of it makes any sense. Each document, ranging from handwritten notes on scraps of paper to professionally bound books, is a jumble of technobabble. Even after reading several pages, its meaning seems just outside your perception. You understood the individual words well enough, but for as little as you got from the combinations they were placed in by the author, it all might as well have been written in Sanskrit.
Then one day, while searching online for more information about one of the devices, you stumble upon a website you’ve never heard of before. It’s an odd looking site, with white text on a black background, and a skull and crossbones at the top of each page. Actually, on closer inspection, those aren’t bones at all. In any event, the
entry this site has for the “Magnetic Wave Tester” seems promising
. Rather than describing it with the admirational babbling you’ve seen elsewhere, it gets examined with scientific skepticism. The end conclusion is that it’s a harmless enough gadget, even functional on some basic level, but one that’s ultimately been designed for a singular purpose: to separate people from their money.
Perhaps, you think, these are just the sort of people who could be entrusted with the collection. Rather than throw it all away, you could pack up the whole lot and send it along so that each piece could be meticulously analyzed and exposed for what it really is. Maybe in the end, some good could actually come of it all.
Otherworldly Treasure
When I agreed to take on this collection from our anonymous patron, I could hardly have imagined the scale of the undertaking. Due to their considerable size and weight each box completed the cross-country journey in its own time, and each time a new one arrived, I was sure it must be the last. All told, there’s enough material here that even if I did a teardown on a new pseudoscience gadget each month, it would take us years to get through them. But we’ve got to start somewhere, so let’s launch into the unknown with this radionic analyzer.
What is a radionic analyzer, you may ask? We get our answer from
Kelly Research Technologies
, a company that manufactures a what appears to be a modern clone of this device that they’ve imaginatively called the
Kelly Personal Instrument
. They give a succinct explanation of the device’s function right at the top of the manual:
Well, that sounds handy. Don’t know about you, but I’ve always found engineering the fabric of reality to be a bit of a chore. If this gadget can really help get things cooking at the subatomic level, then honestly, the integrated broadcast circuitry is just icing on the cake. With features like this, Kelly Research is almost giving the things away at $1,500 a pop.
I mean, come on. It’s not like we’re going to open it up to find a largely empty box with a bunch of random wires inside. Right?
What Did You Expect?
In all seriousness, what else could it have been? With the Magnetic Wave Tester, there was at least a chance that the device offered some level of functionality. But when the manufacturer’s own description of the unit says it can broadcast reality at the subatomic level, all reasonable expectation goes out the window.
But still, it’s not like the device is just filled with sand or contained a bunch of crystals wrapped in aluminum foil. There’s identifiable components here, and somebody has gone through the trouble of wiring it all up. So does it actually do anything? Well, even though the manual assures the user that their new radionic analyzer is a free energy device that doesn’t require any external power to function (seriously), it does note that plugging the unit’s AC adapter into the wall does speed up the whole becoming one with the cosmos thing.
Sure enough, if we power it up and fiddle with the switches and dials, the LEDs will blink at different rates. So let’s take a closer look and see what’s happening under the hood.
Analyzing the Analyzer
Inside the analyzer, the stars of the show are clearly the four variable capacitors. These are actually very nice units, and though I couldn’t find any identifying markings on them to confirm, they give me the impression of being vintage. Interestingly the manual claims the device utilizes “custom-made parallel plate mechanical capacitors”, and while I sincerely doubt they were custom made, there’s no question they were expensive. Spinning the dials certainly
feels
nice, but for the price, I should hope so.
Looking closely at the color coded wiring, we can see they have indeed been connected to the double pole double throw (DPDT) switches as described by the text on the front panel of the unit. That is to say that the four capacitors have been isolated into two banks, and that they can not only be independently connected or disconnected from the ground side of the circuit, but that you can select between the left and right capacitors using the polarity switches.
A master class in wire management
But what is the rest of the circuit doing? Beyond the “intensity” potentiometer, the indicator LEDs, and a coil that looks suspiciously like an old roll of magnet wire, there’s nothing else on the front panel. Logically, the secret to the device’s operation must be on the small PCB mounted inside the case.
It’s a simple little board with only a single IC on it, an LM3909N. Perhaps it’s some kind of subatomic transducer? No, far from it. A quick check of the datasheet confirms what many in the audience probably already guessed: it’s a chip designed to flash LEDs.
So just to be clear: not only is the single piece of legitimate circuity in this device a bare bones PCB that does nothing but flash the LED indicator on the front panel, but they couldn’t even be bothered to use a 555.
Scaled Down Sidekick
I think any reasonable person already knows what we’ll find in the smaller box, which according to the manual is the “sample well” where you’re supposed to put your crystals and such. But just so nobody can accuse us of cutting corners, let’s get it over with.
Oh look, what a surprise. It’s another LED blinker, and this time they’ve run the ground side through what appears to be a coil wrapped around a PVC coupling and a scrap of lamp cord. Enough said there, I think.
A Shameful Display
We’ve really gotten this series off to an auspicious start, haven’t we? While there was never any question that such a preposterous device would be anything but snake oil, I expected a bit more effort. Beyond the few high quality components, the internal construction of this device is abysmal. Between the lamp cord, heavy handed application of hot glue, and general disarray of the wiring, you’d think this was somebody’s first go with the soldering iron.
In terms of functionality, at best we can say that the device seems designed in such a way that it could be considered the most fanciful variable capacitor ever constructed. Additionally, attaching the oscilloscope between the output and ground plugs on the front of the unit did show a mad cacophony of low-amplitude analog noise, likely interference being picked up by the tangle of wires and coils within the box.
Of course, it occurs to me that the device may be working exactly as its manufacturer intended. Further, that if pressed, we would be told that the fact we can’t divine the purpose or function of the machine’s internals is the product of our own feeble understanding of subatomic technology. In other words, serious discourse simply isn’t possible when dealing with equipment like this. At best, we can simply shine a light into the darkness, and let the rational observer make their own conclusions. | 67 | 24 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397761",
"author": "Bryant Underwood",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T15:28:41",
"content": "Thanks for this great work. A terrific public service. About 35 years ago, I did a similar teardown for a family member that paid a crazy amount for one of these devices. The version I opened ... | 1,760,372,891.742161 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/flip-dot-oscilloscope-is-flippin-awesome/ | Flip-Dot Oscilloscope Is Flippin’ Awesome | Adam Zeloof | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"ESP32",
"flip-dot",
"oscilloscope"
] | Oscilloscope displays have come a long way since the round phosphor-coated CRTs that adorned laboratories of old. Most modern scopes ship with huge, high-definition touch screens that, while beautiful, certainly lack a bit of the character that classic scopes brought to the bench. It’s a good thing that hackers like [bitluni] are around to help remedy this. His contribution takes the form of what may be both
the world’s coolest and least useful oscilloscope: one with a flip-dot display
.
Yup — a flip-dot display, in all it’s clickedy-clacky, 25×16 pixel glory. The scope can’t trigger, its maximum amplitude is only a couple of volts, and its refresh rate is, well, visible,
but
it looks incredible
. The scope is controlled by an ESP32, which reads the analog signal being measured. It then displays the signal via an array of driver ICs, which allow it to update the dots one column at a time by powering the tiny electromagnets that flip over each colored panel.
Even better, [bitluni] live-streamed the
entire
build. That’s right, if you want to watch approximately 30 hours of video covering everything from
first actuating a pixel on the display
to
designing and assembling a PCB to drive it
, then you’re in luck. For the rest of us, he was kind enough to make a much shorter summary video you can watch below. Of course, this scope doesn’t
run
Doom
like some others,
but its probably only a matter of time
.
Thank to [Zane Atkins] for the tip! | 6 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397736",
"author": "jcwren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T12:19:14",
"content": "That’s pretty cool :) Maybe he could add a link to the Youtube video in the README.md file on GitHub.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6397739",
"... | 1,760,372,891.478767 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/09/development-of-magnetic-locking-idea-shows-great-progress/ | Development Of Magnetic Locking Idea Shows Great Progress | Dave Rowntree | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Magnetic levitation",
"Magnetic Locking"
] | No matter how its done, with whatever level of fakery, magnetic levitation just looks cool. We don’t know about you, but merely walking past the tackiest gadget shop, the displays of levitating and rotating objects always catches our eye. Superconductors aside, these devices are pretty much all operating in the same way; an object with a permanent rare-earth magnet is held in a stable position between a pair of electromagnets one above and one below, with some control electronics to adjust the field strength and close the loop.
But, there may be another way, albeit a rather special case, where a magnet can not only be levitated, but
locked in place using a rotating magnetic field
. The video shows a demonstration of how the mass of a magnet can be used to phase lock it against a rotating field. In essence, the magnet will want to rotate to align with the rotating magnetic field, but its mass will mean there is a time delay for the force to act and rotation to occur, which will lag the rotating magnetic field, and if it is phased just so, the rotation will be cancelled and the magnet will be locked in a stable position. Essentially the inertia of the magnet can be leveraged to counteract magnet’s tendency to rapidly rotate to find a stable position in the field.
Whilst the idea is not new, Turkish experimenter [
Hamdi Ucar
] has been working on this subject for some time (checkout his
YouTube channel
for a LOT of content on it), even going as far as to publish a
very detailed academic paper on the subject
. With our explanation here we’re trying to simplify the subject for the sake of brevity, but since the paper has a lot of gory details for the physicists among you, if you can handle the maths, you can come to your own conclusions.
Thanks [keith] for the tip! | 18 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397706",
"author": "Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T09:23:06",
"content": "Thought provoking, great timing for this post, Thanks for bringing this to our attention :-)Fwiw. Been working on a lesser known aspect of electro-magnetism in relation to to... | 1,760,372,891.219763 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/pokemon-time-capsule/ | Pokemon Time Capsule | Matthew Carlson | [
"Games",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"FRAM",
"gameboy",
"nvram",
"pokemon",
"sram"
] | The precious Pokemon we spent hours capturing in the early nineties remain trapped, not just by pokeballs, but within a cartridge ravaged by time. Generally, Pokemon games before the GameBoy Advance era had SRAM and a small coin cell to save state as NVRAM (Non-volatile random access memory) was more expensive. These coin cells last 10-15 years, and many of the Pokemon games came out 20 years ago. [9943246367] decided to
ditch the battery and swap the SRAM for a proper NVRAM on a Pokemon Yellow cartridge, 23 years later
.
The magic that makes it work is a FRAM (ferroelectric random access memory) made by Cypress that is pin-compatible with the 256K SRAM (made by SK Hynix) on the original game cartridge PCB. While FRAM data will only last 10 years, it is a write-after-read process so as long as you load your save file every 10 years, you can keep your Pokemon going for decades. For stability, [9943246367] added a 10k pull-up on the inverted CE (chip enable) pin to make sure the FRAM is disabled when not in use. A quick test shows it works beautifully. Overall, a clever and easy to have to preserve your Pokemon properly.
Since you’re replacing the chip, you will lose the data if you haven’t already. Perhaps you can use
[Selim’s] Pokemon Transporter
to transport your pokemon safely from the SRAM to the FRAM. | 17 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397678",
"author": "Josiah David Gould",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T06:27:51",
"content": "This is quite similar to the mod for Sega Saturns to replace the SRAM with FRAM since the battery tends to die very very quickly in that console.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,372,891.351675 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/south-korean-kslv-2-nuri-rocket-almost-orbits/ | South Korean KSLV-2 Nuri Rocket Almost Orbits | Chris Lott | [
"News",
"Space"
] | [
"KSLV",
"Nuri",
"rockets",
"south korea"
] | There was a bit of excitement recently at the Naro Space Center on Outer Naro Island, just off the southern coast of the Korea Peninsula. The domestically developed South Korean
Nuri rocket
departed on its inaugural flight from launch pad LB-2 at 5pm in the afternoon on Thursday, 21 Oct. The previous launch in the KSLV-2 program from this facility was in 2018, when a single-stage Test Launch Vehicle was successfully flown and proved out the basic vehicle and its KRE-075 engines.
This final version of the three-stage Nuri rocket, formally known as Korean Space Launch Vehicle-II (KSLV-2), is 47.2 m long and 3.5 m in diameter. The first stage is powered by a cluster of four KRE-075 sea-level engines having 3 MN of thrust. The second stage is a single KRE-075 vacuum engine with 788 kN thrust, and the final stage is a KRE-007 vacuum engine with 69 kN thrust (all these engines are fueled by Jet-A / LOX). In this maiden flight, the first two stages performed as expected, but something went wrong when
the third stage shut off prematurely and failed to gain enough velocity
to put the 1400 kg dummy satellite into orbit.
A committee formed to investigate the flight failure convened this week, and
issued a statement after a preliminary review of the collected telemetry data
. So far, all indications point to a drop in oxidizer tank pressure in the third stage. This could be the result of a leak in the tank itself or the associated plumbing. They will also investigate whether a sensor or other failure in the tank pressurization control system could be at fault. A second launch is currently scheduled for May of next year. Check out [Scott Manley]’s video below the break, where he discusses the launch itself and some history of South Korea’s space program. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397673",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T05:11:54",
"content": "Now this is one Korean rocket test that I can support. ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397679",
"author": "daveboltman",
"timest... | 1,760,372,891.11127 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/visualizing-audio-with-an-lcd-vu-meter/ | Visualizing Audio With An LCD VU Meter | Adam Zeloof | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"lcd arduino",
"sound reactive",
"VU meter"
] | We all love seeing data represented in pretty ways — whether it’s necessary or not. Take VU meters for example. They’re a super useful tool for audio editors to balance signals, but they also look
really
cool, even if you’re only listening to music. Who didn’t use a Winamp skin with a built-in VU meter back in the day? Even after the demise of everyone’s favorite media player, we still see these great graphs popping up all over the place.
Most recently, we’ve seen VU meters circle back around to have a bit of a retro vibe in
this awesome Arduino-controlled LCD VU meter built by [mircemk]
. Based on the
KTAudio VU Meter project
, it features an ultra-wide LCD, audio input, and volume knob, all tidily wrapped up in a case whose color scheme that can only conjure images of the famed
Altair 8800
, or an old Tektronix oscilloscope. The LCD itself is fairly responsive — but you can judge for yourself in the video below. The signature fading that so commonly accompanies screen refreshes on LCDs such as this one really adds to the retro effect.
You may just need one of these displays on your desk — after all, while you may not need to know how loud each audio channel is, don’t you at least want the information available?
Just in case.
Bar graph display a bit too modern-looking for you? Well then you should check out
[mircemk]’s OLED version that displays dual analog meters. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397632",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T00:26:14",
"content": "Nice!But I would have liked it even more if the Gain control, instead of going to 100 percent, would have gone to 11!B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "... | 1,760,372,891.438448 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/reballing-and-a-steady-hand-makes-a-raspberry-pi-800/ | Reballing And A Steady Hand Makes A Raspberry Pi 800 | Jenny List | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"bga",
"memory",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi 800"
] | The all-in-one Raspberry Pi 400 computer is a capable device, but those seeking its maximum power may be disappointed by its 4 GB of memory. When the Pi 4 and Compute Module 4 have double that figure, surely the Pi 400 could catch up! A reddit user called [Pi800] rose to the challenge by
replacing the 4 GB chip from the Pi 400 with the 8 GB chip from a Pi Compute Module
, resulting in the so-called Pi 800, a working 8 GB all-in-one Pi.
As a piece of work it’s a deceptively straightforward yet extremely fiddly piece of soldering that requires a steady hand for even the most skilled of solderers. What takes it beyond the norm though is the reballing process. A ball-grid-array chip has a grid of small balls of solder on its underside that make the contacts, and these melt when it is soldered so require replacement before reworking. This is normally done with a template of carefully aligned holes to line up balls of solder in a stream of hot air, but lacking the template in this case the job was done by hand, laboriously ball by ball. A soldering task we’d hesitate to take on ourselves, so we’re impressed.
The result is an 8 GB all-in-one Pi, and it’s honestly not beyond the realms of possibility that an official version of this mod could be a future Raspberry Pi product. Perhaps we’ll wait for that, but should you be impatient then at least it’s possible to roll your own. It’s certainly
not the first BGA memory swap we’ve brought you
. | 41 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397591",
"author": "William Moore",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T21:06:13",
"content": "Mb and not GB?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397616",
"author": "Elliot Williams",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T22:04:45",
... | 1,760,372,891.821333 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/last-call-for-hackaday-remoticon-shirts/ | Last Call For Hackaday Remoticon Shirts | Mike Szczys | [
"contests"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Remoticon",
"shirt",
"t-shirt"
] | Hackaday conferences have a long history of excellent T-shirt designs and this year’s Remoticon is no different. If you want one of your own, you need get on that before Friday. The only way to score on is to
buy one of the
T-Shirt + General Admission
tickets
by November 11th — it gets you into all of the conference events just like the free ticket, but also scores you a shirt. (Shipping within the US is free, international delivery costs an additional $10.) What you see above is the actual test print, modeled by Aleksandar Bradic who designed this and all of the shirt from past Hackaday conferences.
Of course the most important thing is that you don’t miss Remoticon, and there is a free ticket which will remain available through the end of the conference, but you can help us with the logistics by getting one now.
The
full list of speakers and the schedule
is now available on the conference website. We’re delighted to have Elecia White, Keith Thorne, and Jeremy Fielding present keynote talks, and 16 additional speakers on a range of hardware-related topics. (This is notable: we originally planned for a single day of talks but were blow away by all the proposals and doubled the speaking slots!)
You can’t quite rub elbows with all your friends from afar, but you can certainly spend time together in the conference Discord, during the Hacker Trivia (form teams if you like!), at the Bring-a-Hack inside Gather Town, and at the afterparty which will include a live set from DJ Jackalope.
Everyone Who Bought a Shirt, Read This!
If you bought a shirt and have
already claimed it
using the code we emailed to you, thank you, you are all set.
If you already
bought a shirt but haven’t claimed it
, check your email. You need to respond to the Google form we sent you. If you bought a T-shirt ticket and didn’t get an email from us,
let us know
. All shirts need to be claimed by November 15th! Gogogo!
If you plan to order your shirt right now
, here’s what will happen. Buy your ticket following the link at the top of this article. We will email you a poll question about domestic or international shipping because we have to use two different ordering interfaces for these — logistics are hard. We will then email you a redemption code and link where you can choose your size and shipping address.
We Appreciate The Patience All of You Have Shown
Thank you to everyone for your amazing patience through this process. We wanted to replicate the experience of walking into Supercon and getting a shirt at the check-in table. Shipping logistics made that a bit harder, but everyone involved has been super awesome about it and that feels really good. See you at Remoticon a week from Friday! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397685",
"author": "Unfocused",
"timestamp": "2021-11-09T07:48:28",
"content": "Will there be an .ICS calendar feed available for the talk schedule?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6397910",
"author": "Comedicles",
"tim... | 1,760,372,891.860841 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/own-the-night-with-this-ludicrously-bright-diy-flashlight/ | Own The Night With This Ludicrously Bright DIY Flashlight | Dan Maloney | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"aluminum",
"COB",
"cree",
"flashlight",
"led",
"machining"
] | If you’re a flashlight person, you know that there’s little you would do to get the brightest, most powerful, most ridiculous flashlight possible. You might even decide to
build yourself a ludicrously powerful flashlight
, like [Maciej Nowak] did.
If you choose the DIY route, be warned that it’s probably not going to be a simple process, at least if you follow [Maciej]’s lead. His flashlight is machined out of aluminum rounds, all turned down on the lathe to form the head of the flashlight. The head is made from three parts, each of which acts as a heat sink for the five 20-Watt CREE XHP70 LED modules. The LEDs are mounted with care to thermal considerations, and wired in series to DC-DC converter that provides the necessary 30 V using a battery pack made from four 21700 Li-ion cells. The electronics, which also includes a BMS for charging the battery and a MOSFET switching module, form a tidy package that fits into the aluminum handle.
The video below shows that the flashlight is remarkably bright, with a nice, even field with no hotspots. Given the 45-minute useful life and the three-hour recharge time, it might have been nice to make it so anywhere from one to five of the LEDs could be turned on at once. Some interesting effects might be had from switching the LEDs on sequentially, too.
Given the proclivities of our community, it’s no surprise that this is hardly the first powerful flashlight we’ve seen.
This one
broke the 100-Watt barrier with a single COB LED, while
this ammo-can version
sports an even higher light output. Neither of them looks much like a traditional flashlight, though, which is where [Maciej]’s build has the edge. | 27 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397575",
"author": "Dan",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T19:35:12",
"content": "two of these would make for some great (off-road) fog lights",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6397578",
"author": "johnrpm",
"timestamp": "2021-11... | 1,760,372,892.010504 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/linux-fu-automatic-header-file-generation/ | Linux Fu: Automatic Header File Generation | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Linux Hacks",
"Skills",
"Slider"
] | [
"fossil",
"header file",
"Linux Fu",
"makeheaders"
] | I’ve tried a lot of the “newer” languages and, somehow, I’m always happiest when I go back to C++ or even C. However, there is one thing that gets a little on my nerves when I go back: the need to have header files with a declaration and then a separate file with almost the same information duplicated. I constantly make a change and forget to update the header, and many other languages take care of that for you. So I went looking for a way to automate things. Sure, some IDEs will automatically insert declarations but I’ve never been very happy with those for a variety of reasons. I wanted something lightweight that I could use in lots of different toolsets.
I found an older tool, however, that does a pretty good job, although there are a few limitations. The tool seems to be a little obscure, so I thought I’d show you what
makeheaders
— part of the
Fossil
software configuration management system. The program dates back to 1993 when [Dwayne Richard Hipp] — the same guy that wrote SQLite — created it for his own use. It isn’t very complex — the whole thing lives in one fairly large C source file but it can scan a directory and create header files for everything. In some cases, you won’t need to make big changes to your source code, but if you are willing, there are several things you can do.
The Problem
Suppose you have two C files that cooperate. Let’s say you have A.c and B.c. Inside the A file, you have a simple function:
double ctof(double c)
{
return (9.0*c)/5+32.0;
}
If you expect to use this inside file B, there needs to be a declaration so that when you compile B, the compiler can know that the function takes a single double argument and returns a double. With ANSI C (and C++) you need something like:
double ctof(double c);
There’s no actual programming, just a note to the compiler about what the function looks like. This is what you call a prototype. Normally, you’ll create a header file with the prototype. You can include that header in both A.c and B.c.
The problem is when you change the function in A.c:
double ctof(double c1, int double c2)
{
return (9.0*(c1+c2))/5+32.0;
}
If you don’t change the header to match, you’ll have problems. Not only that, but you need to make the same change. If you make a mistake and mark the arguments as floats in the header, that won’t work either.
The Program
Assuming you’ve installed the software, you can simply run it passing all the C and H files you want it to scan. Usually, the glob *.[ch] will do the trick. You can also use it with .cpp files and even a mix. By default, this will pull all the global variable declarations and global functions you define into a series of header files.
Why a series? The program makes an odd assumption that makes sense once you think about it. Since the headers are automatically generated, it doesn’t make sense to reuse the headers. Instead, each source file gets its own customized header file. The program puts in what is necessary and in the right order. So A.c will use A.h and B.c will use B.h. There won’t be any cross-dependency between the two headers. If something changes, you simply run the program again to regenerate the header files.
What Gets Copied?
Here’s what
the documentation
says gets copied into header files:
When a function is defined in any .c file, a prototype of that function is placed in the generated .h file of every .c file that calls the function. If the “static” keyword of C appears at the beginning of the function definition, the prototype is suppressed. If you use the “
LOCAL
” keyword where you would normally say “
static
”, then a prototype is generated, but it will only appear in the single header file that corresponds to the source file containing the function. However, no other generated header files will contain a prototype for the static function since it has only file scope. If you invoke makeheaders with a “-local” command-line option, then it treats the “
static
” keyword like “
LOCAL
” and generates prototypes in the header file that corresponds to the source file containing the function definition.
When a global variable is defined in a .c file, an “
extern
” declaration of that variable is placed in the header of every .c file that uses the variable.
When a structure, union, or enumeration declaration or a function prototype or a C++ class declaration appears in a manually produced .h file, that declaration is copied into the automatically generated .h files of all .c files that use the structure, union, enumeration, function or class. But declarations that appear in a .c file are considered private to that .c file and are not copied into any automatically generated files.
All #defines and typedefs that appear in manually produced .h files are copied into automatically generated .h files as needed. Similar constructs that appear in .c files are considered private to those files and are not copied. When a structure, union, or enumeration declaration appears in a .h file, makeheaders will automatically generate a typedef that allows the declaration to be referenced without the “
struct
”, “
union
” or “
enum
” qualifier.
Note that the tool can tell when a header is one it produces, so you don’t have to exclude them from the input files.
A C++ Example
For things like C++ classes — or anything, really — you can enclose a block of code inside a special preprocessor directive to make the tool process it. Here’s a very simple example I used to test things out:
A few things to notice. First, the include for test.hpp will grab the generated header file specific to this file. The
INTERFACE
directive wraps the code that should be in the header. At compile time,
INTERFACE
will equal zero, so this code won’t compile twice.
The member functions declared outside of the
INTERFACE
section have
PUBLIC
in front of them (and could, of course, have
PRIVATE
or
PROTECTED
, as well). This will cause the tool to pick them up. Finally, notice that there is a global variable and a global function at the bottom of the file.
Notice that when using
PUBLIC
or the other keywords that you omit the functions from the declaration. The only reason the example has some functions there is because they are inline. If you put all the functions outside the interface section of the file, the generated header will correctly assemble the class declaration. In this case, it will add these functions to the ones that are already there.
The Generated Header
The header seems pretty normal. You might be surprised that the header isn’t wrapped with the usual preprocessor statements that prevent the file from being included more than once. After all, since only one file will include the header, that code is unnecessary.
Here’s the file:
Notice that
INTERFACE
gets set to zero at the end, which means in the source file, the interface portion won’t get compiled again. For C source, the tool also generates typedefs for things like structures. For C++ this is unnecessary, of course. You can see the byproduct of having some declarations in the interface section and some in the implementation section: there is a redundant public tag. This is harmless and wouldn’t appear if I had put all the code outside the interface section.
There’s More
There’s more that this versatile tool can do, but you can read the documentation. There’s a flag that dumps information about your code you can use for documentation purposes. You can build hierarchies of interfaces. It also can help you mix C++ and C code. The tool is smart enough to handle conditional compilation. Note, though, that the C++ support doesn’t handle things like templates and namespaces. You have the source, though, so you could fix that if you like. There are some other limitations you should read about before you adopt this for a big project.
Will you try a tool like this or are you happy with manually handling headers? C++ can even
target web pages
. Or, use it for
shell scripts
, if you dare. | 22 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397563",
"author": "PWalsh",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T18:32:04",
"content": "The header is part of your documentation. It’s a good place to put module descriptions, list the class-local variables, list the public function calls, and put any usage notes. Also a copyright notice of s... | 1,760,372,892.338 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/heavy-copper-pcb-hack-chat/ | Heavy-Copper PCB Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"Hack Chat"
] | Join us on Wednesday, November 10 at noon Pacific for the
Heavy Copper PCBs Hack Chat
with
Mark Hughes
and Greg Ziraldo!
For as useful as printed circuit boards are, they do seem a little flimsy at times. With nothing but a thin layer — or six — of metal on the board, and ultra-fine traces that have to fit between a dense forest of pads and vias, the current carrying capacity of the copper on most PCBs is somewhat limited. That’s OK in most cases, especially where logic-level and small-signal currents are concerned. But what happens when you really need to turn up the juice on a PCB?
Enter the world of heavy-copper PCBs, where the copper is sometimes as thick as the board substrate itself. Traces that are as physically chunky as these come with all sorts of challenges, from thermal and electrical considerations to potential manufacturing problems. To help us sort through all these issues, Mark and Greg will stop by the Hack Chat. They both work at quick-turn PCB assembly company
Advanced Assembly
, Mark as Research Director and Greg as Senior Director of Operations. They know the ins and outs of heavy-copper PCB designs, and they’ll share the wealth with us.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, November 10 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
. | 23 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397546",
"author": "WereCatf",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T17:13:38",
"content": "Huh. I had never realized that these were a thing. I mean, in hindsight it’s obvious that they’d be a thing, but it’s just not something that had ever occurred to me.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth"... | 1,760,372,892.267746 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/adafruit-avrprog-grows-updi-interface-support/ | Adafruit AVRProg Grows UPDI Interface Support | Dave Rowntree | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"embedded",
"UPDI"
] | Making a small number of things with an embedded application is pretty straightforward, you usually simply plug in a programmer or debugger dongle (such as an AVRISP2) into your board with an appropriate adaptor cable, load your code into whatever IDE tool is appropriate for the device and hit the program button. But when you scale up a bit to hundreds or thousands of units, this way of working just won’t cut it. Add in any functional or defect-oriented testing you need, and you’re going to need a custom programming rig.
Adafruit have a fair bit of experience with building embedded boards and dealing with the appropriate testing and programming, and now they’ve updated their
AVR Programming library
to support the latest devices which have moved to the
UPDI (Unified Programming and Debug Interface) programming interface
. UPDI is a single-wire bidirectional asynchronous serial interface which enables programming and debugging of embedded applications on slew of the new AVR branded devices from Microchip. An example would be the
AVR128DAxx
which this scribe has been tinkering with lately because it is cheap, has excellent capacitive touch support, and is available in a prototype-friendly 28-pin SOIC package, making it easy peasy to solder.
The library is intended for use with the Arduino platform, so it should run on a vast array of hardware, without any special requirements, so making a custom programming jig out of hardware lots of us have lying around is not a huge hassle.
Adafruit provide a few application examples in the project GitHub to get you going, such as
this ATTiny817 example
that wipes the flash memory, sets appropriate fuses and drops in a bootloader.
The UPDI code was taken from the
[brandanlane’s] portaprog
which is hosted on the
TTGO T-Display
ESP32 board from Chinese outfit LilyGo, which is also worth checking out.
A little while ago we saw how the AVR Multitool,
the AVRGPP learned to speak UPDI
, and since we’re on programming interfaces, its possible to get the
cheap-as-chips USBasp to speak TPI as well
. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397540",
"author": "Viktor",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T16:32:54",
"content": "They still use fuses :D I remember the pain associated with them :D",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397903",
"author": "WestfW",
"t... | 1,760,372,892.0624 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/smaller-is-sometimes-better-why-electronic-components-are-so-tiny/ | Smaller Is Sometimes Better: Why Electronic Components Are So Tiny | Robin Kearey | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Parts",
"Slider"
] | [
"antennas",
"capacitors",
"discrete components",
"inductors",
"miniaturization",
"moore's law",
"resistors",
"transistors"
] | Perhaps the second most famous law in electronics after Ohm’s law is
Moore’s law
: the number of transistors that can be made on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. Since the physical size of chips remains roughly the same, this implies that the individual transistors become smaller over time. We’ve come to expect new generations of chips with a smaller feature size to come along at a regular pace, but what exactly is the point of making things smaller? And does
smaller
always mean
better
?
Smaller Size Means Better Performance
Over the past century, electronic engineering has improved massively. In the 1920s, a state-of-the-art AM radio contained several vacuum tubes, a few enormous inductors, capacitors and resistors, several dozen meters of wire to act as an antenna, and a big bank of batteries to power the whole thing. Today, you can listen to a dozen music streaming services on a device that fits in your pocket and can do a gazillion more things. But miniaturization is not just done for ease of carrying: it is absolutely necessary to achieve the performance we’ve come to expect of our devices today.
A module from a 1950s IBM 700 computer. Note the enormous size of all components. Credit: autopilot, CC BY-SA 3.0
One obvious benefit of smaller components is that they allow you to pack more functionality in the same volume. This is especially important for digital circuits: more components means you can do more processing in the same amount of time. For instance, a 64-bit processor can, in theory, process eight times as much information as an 8-bit CPU running at the same clock frequency. But it also needs eight times as many components: registers, adders, buses and so on all become eight times larger. So you’d need either a chip that’s eight times larger, or transistors that are eight times smaller.
The same thing holds for memory chips: make smaller transistors, and you have more storage space in the same volume. The pixels in most of today’s displays are made of thin-film transistors, so here it also makes sense to scale them down and achieve a higher resolution. However, there’s another, crucial reason why smaller transistors are better: their performance increases massively. But why exactly is that?
It’s All About the Parasitics
A diagram illustrating the parasitic capacitances of a transistor. Credit: Michel Bakni, CC BY-SA 4.0
Whenever you make a transistor, it comes with a few additional components for free. There’s resistance in series with each of the terminals. Anything that carries a current also has self-inductance. And finally, there’s capacitance between any two conductors that face each other. All of these effects eat power and slow the transistor down. The parasitic capacitances are especially troublesome: they need to be charged and discharged every time the transistor switches on or off, which takes time and current from the supply.
The capacitance between two conductors is a function of their physical size: smaller dimensions mean smaller capacitances. And because smaller capacitances mean higher speed as well as lower power, smaller transistors can be run at higher clock frequencies and dissipate less heat while doing so.
Capacitance is not the only effect that changes when you scale down a transistor: lots of weird quantum-mechanical effects pop up that are not apparent for larger devices. In general however, making transistors smaller makes them faster. But there’s more to electronics than just transistors. How do other components fare when you scale them down?
Not So Fast
In general, passive components like resistors, capacitors and inductors don’t become much better when you make them smaller: in many ways, they become worse. Miniaturizing these components is therefore done mainly just to be able to squeeze them into a smaller volume, and thereby saving PCB space.
Resistors can be reduced in size without much penalty. The resistance of a piece of material is given by
, where
l
is the length,
A
the cross-sectional area and
ρ
the resistivity of the material. You can simply scale down the length and cross-section and end up with a resistor that’s physically smaller, but still has the same resistance. The only downside is that a physically small resistor will heat up more compared to a larger one when it dissipates the same amount of power. Therefore, small resistors can only be used in low-power circuits. The table shows how the maximum power rating of SMD resistors goes down as their dimensions are reduced.
Metric
Imperial
Power rating (W)
2012
0805
0.125
1608
0603
0.1
1005
0402
0.06
0603
0201
0.05
0402
01005
0.031
03015
009005
0.02
Small, smaller, smallest: tiny resistors compared to a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil lead. Credit:
Rohm Semiconductor
Today, the smallest resistors you can buy are
metric 03015
size (0.3 mm x 0.15 mm). With a power rating of just 20 mW, they’re only used in circuits that dissipate very little power and are extremely constrained in volume. An even smaller metric 0201 package (0.2 mm x 0.1 mm) has been announced, but is not in production yet. But even when they do show up in manufacturer’s catalogs, don’t expect them to pop up everywhere: most pick-and-place robots are not accurate enough to handle them, so they will likely remain a niche product.
Capacitors can be scaled down as well, but this reduces their capacitance. The formula for calculating the capacitance of a parallel-place capacitor is
, where
A
is the area of the plates,
d
is the distance between them, and
ε
is the dielectric constant (a property of the material in the middle). If you miniaturize a capacitor, which is basically a flat device, you have to reduce the area and therefore the capacitance. If you still want to pack a lot of nanofarads in a small volume, the only option is to stack several layers on top of each other. Thanks to advances in materials and manufacturing, which also enable thin films (small
d
) and special dielectrics (with larger
ε
), capacitors have shrunk in size significantly over the past few decades.
An idealized parallel-plate capacitor. Credit: inductiveload,
public domain
The smallest capacitors available today are packaged in the ultra-small
metric 0201
package: just 0.25 mm x 0.125 mm. Their capacitance is limited to a still useful 100 nF with a 6.3 V maximum operating voltage. Again, these packages are so tiny that advanced equipment is needed to process them, limiting their widespread adoption.
For inductors, the story is a bit trickier. The inductance of a straight coil is given by
, where
N
is the number of turns,
A
is the cross-sectional area of the coil,
l
is its length and
μ
is a material constant (the magnetic permeability). If you scale down all dimensions by half, you halve the inductance as well. However, the resistance of the wire remains the same: this is because the wire’s length and cross section are both reduced to a quarter of their original value. This means you end up with the same resistance for half the inductance, and therefore you’ve halved the quality (Q) factor of your coil.
Almost invisible: three 0201 (metric) capacitors. Image credit:
Murata Electronics
The smallest commercially available discrete inductors are in the
imperial 01005
size (0.4 mm x 0.2 mm). These go up to 56 nH, with several Ohms of resistance. Inductors in the ultra-small metric 0201 package were announced
back in 2014
but apparently never brought to market.
There have been some efforts to get around the inductor’s physical limitations by using a phenomenon called
kinetic inductance
, which can be observed in
coils made of graphene
. But even that gives an improvement of perhaps 50%, if it can be made in a commercially viable way. In the end, coils simply don’t miniaturize very well. But this doesn’t have to be a problem if your circuits work at high frequencies. If your signals are in the GHz range, then a coil of a few nH is often enough.
It’s Not Just the Components
This brings us to another thing that has been minaturized over the past century, but which you might not notice right away: the wavelengths we use for communication. Early radio broadcasts used medium wave AM frequencies around 1 MHz, with a wavelength of about 300 meters. The FM band centered around 100 MHz, or three meters, became popular around the 1960s, while today we mostly use 4G communications around 1 or 2 GHz, about 20 cm. Higher frequencies mean more capacity to transmit information, and it’s because of miniaturization that we have cheap, reliable and power efficient radios working at these frequencies.
Shrinking wavelengths enabled shrinking antennas, since their size is directly related to the frequency they need to transmit or receive. The fact that mobile phones today don’t need long protruding antennas is thanks to the fact that they exclusively communicate at GHz frequencies, for which the antennas only need to be around one centimeter long. This is also why most phones that still contain an FM receiver require you to plug in your headphones before using it: the radio needs to use the headphone’s wires as an antenna to get enough signal strength out of those meter-long waves.
As for the circuits connected to our tiny antennas, they actually become easier to make when they’re smaller. This is not just because the transistors become faster, but also because
transmission line
effects are less of an issue. In a nutshell, when a piece of wire is longer than about one tenth of a wavelength, you need to take the phase shift along its length into account when designing your circuit. At 2.4 GHz this means that just one centimeter of wire already affects your circuit; quite a headache if you’re soldering discrete components together, but not a problem if you’re laying out circuits on a few square millimeters.
How Low Can You Go?
It has become a bit of a recurring theme in tech journalism to either predict the
demise of Moore’s law
, or to show how
those predictions are wrong
time and again. The fact remains that the three players still competing at the cutting edge of this game — Intel, Samsung and TSMC — keep on squeezing ever more functionality into each square micron, and are planning several improved generations of chips into the future. Even if the strides they make at each step may not be as great as they were two decades ago, miniaturization of transistors continues nonetheless.
As for discrete components however, it seems like we’ve reached a natural limit: making them smaller doesn’t improve their performance, and the smallest components currently available are smaller than the vast majority of use cases need. There doesn’t seem to be a Moore’s law for discretes, but if there were one, we would love to see how far one could push the
SMD Soldering Challenge
.
Header image: Jon Sullivan,
public domain
. | 34 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397515",
"author": "Gravis",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T15:32:32",
"content": "Smaller is better but at a certain point you are just doing microfabrication the hard way.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397536",
"author... | 1,760,372,892.149812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/the-raspberry-pi-cm4-begets-a-form-factor/ | The Raspberry Pi CM4 Begets A Form Factor | Jenny List | [
"hardware"
] | [
"compute module 4",
"Radxa CM3",
"raspberry pi"
] | It has become the norm for single-board computers to emerge bearing more than a passing resemblance to the Raspberry Pi, as the board from Cambridge sets the hardware standard for its many competitors. This trend has taken an interesting new turn, as a new board has emerged that doesn’t sport the familiar 40-pin connector of the Pi Model B, but the more compact from factor of the Compute Module 4.
The Radxa CM3
sports a Rockchip RK3566 quad core Cortex-A55 running at 2.0 GHz, and is to be made available in a variety of memory specifications topping out at 8 GB. It is hardware compatible with the Pi CM4, and should be usable with carrier boards made for that module.
We’ve
looked at the CM4 as the exciting face of the Raspberry Pi
because the traditional boards have largely settled into the same-but-faster progression of models since the original B+ in 2014. The compute module offers an accessible way to spin your own take on Raspberry Pi hardware, and it seems that this new board will only serve to broaden those opportunities. Radxa are the company behind the Rock Pi series of more conventional Raspberry Pi clones, so there seems every chance that it will reach the market as promised.
Will it make sense to buy one of these as opposed to the Pi CM4? On paper it may have some hardware features to tempt developers, but like all Pi clones it will have to bridge the software gap to be a real contender. The Raspberry Pi has never been the fastest board on the market at any given time, but it has gained its position because it comes with a well-supported and properly updated operating system. For this board and others like it that will be a tough standard to match.
Curious as to what the first Raspberry Pi form factor clone was? We think it’s
the SolidRun Carrier-one from 2013
.
Via
CNX Software
. | 34 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397473",
"author": "Andrew Copland",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T12:07:47",
"content": "I think you mean 8 GB instead of 8 MB",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397528",
"author": "Jenny List",
"timestamp": "2021-1... | 1,760,372,892.402567 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/08/adding-brakes-to-actuated-fingers/ | Adding Brakes To Actuated Fingers | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"brake",
"electrical muscle stimulation",
"ems",
"exoskeleton",
"finger",
"hand",
"robot",
"sign language",
"university of chicago"
] | Building exoskeletons for people is a rapidly growing branch of robotics. Whether it’s improving the natural abilities of humans with added strength or helping those with disabilities, the field has plenty of room for new inventions for the augmentation of humans. One of the latest comes to us from a team out of the University of Chicago who recently demonstrated a method of
adding brakes to a robotic glove which gives impressive digital control
(PDF warning).
The robotic glove is known as DextrEMS but doesn’t actually move the fingers itself. That is handled by a series of electrodes on the forearm which stimulate the finger muscles using Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS), hence the name. The problem with EMS for manipulating fingers is that the precision isn’t that great and it tends to cause oscillations. That’s where the glove comes in: each finger includes a series of ratcheting mechanisms that act as brakes which can position the fingers precisely enough to make intelligible signs in sign language or even play a guitar or piano.
For anyone interested in robotics or exoskeletons, the white paper is worth a read. Adding this level of precision to an exoskeleton that manipulates something as small as the fingers opens up a brave new world of robotics, but if you’re looking for something that operates on the scale of an entire human body, take a look at this
full-size strength-multiplying exoskeleton
that can help you lift superhuman amounts of weight. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397474",
"author": "Tisp",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T12:08:49",
"content": "I wanted to do this for my thesis! To bad I couldn’t ffindthe materials (parts) to do it. So we had to do a radio controlled (by Wi-Fi) toy car with a camera and stuff. Proyects like this have been featured ... | 1,760,372,892.199837 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/07/flip-chip-kicad-templates/ | Flip-Chip KiCad Templates | Chris Lott | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"DEC",
"flip-chip",
"KiCAD",
"PDP-8"
] | We like retro-computing and we like open source standards that allow easy project sharing. Vintage DEC computer enthusiast [Jay Logue] combines both of these
in his recent project on GitHub
, where he shares several KiCad templates for making your own Flip-Chip modules. Although named after the semiconductor packaging technique we are familiar with today, DEC Flip-Chips were introduced in 1964 as a modular electronics packaging system. These were used in many of DEC’s Programmable Data Processor (PDP) computers, beginning with the PDP-8 in 1965. DEC also had a Digital Laboratory Module family, which was a roll-your-own custom electronic system. The
1968 Digital Logic Handbook
shows the available modules, and has the look and feel of the
TTL Cookbook
book which would come along six years later.
Flip-Chips came in a variety of sizes over the years: single-, double-, and quad-, and hex-height boards having standard- and extended-length. The PCB’s have 18 gold-plated fingers on one edge, later extended to 36 fingers double-sided, which plug into a backplane. Interconnections were typically wire-wrapped. A single height board is 127 x 62 mm (5 x 2-7/16 inches) with a labeled extractor bracket on one end. [Jay]’s repository has templates for five of the most popular variations, and making other sizes should be straightforward using these templates as a starting point.
While we pack a lot more functionality in similarly-sized circuit boards these days, many systems still use a modular design not unlike the Flip-Chips from over 50 years ago. Do you have any recollections of using Flip-Chips, or are you using them today? Let us know in the comments below. | 13 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397437",
"author": "k-ww",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T06:40:11",
"content": "Back in the late ’60s / early ’80s, I had discovered IBM module connectors on Canal Street [NYC], and standardized my boards [hand etched] using that format. I end drilled some1/4 rods to use as un & wrapp... | 1,760,372,892.458393 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/07/got-anything-to-talk-about-these-dutch-hackers-want-you-to-say-it-to-them/ | Got Anything To Talk About? These Dutch Hackers Want You To Say It To Them | Jenny List | [
"cons"
] | [
"call for participation",
"cfp",
"hacker camp",
"MCH2021"
] | As we head into another Northern Hemisphere pandemic winter and hope that things won’t be quite as bad this year, next summer seems an extremely long time away in the future. But it will be upon us sooner than we might think, and along with it will we hope come a resumption of full-scale hacker camps. One of the biggest will be in the Netherlands, where MCH 2022 will take lace at the end of July, and if you’re up to casting your minds ahead far enough for that then
they’re inviting submissions to their Call for Participation
. Their events are always a memorable and relaxed opportunity to spend a few days in the sun alongside several thousand other like-minded individuals, so we’d urge you to give it some consideration.
If you’ve never delivered a conference talk before then it can be a daunting prospect, but in fact a hacker camp can be an ideal place to give it a first try. Unlike a more traditional technology conference where most of the attendees file into the auditorium, at hacker camps there is so much else on offer that many talks are delivered to only that sub group of attendees for whom the subject is of real interest. So there is less of the huge auditorium of anonymous crowds about it, and more of the small and friendly crowd of fellow enthusiasts. The great thing about our community is that there are as many different interests within it as there are individuals, so whatever your product, specialism, or favourite hobby horse might be, you’ll find people at a hacker camp who’d like to hear what you have to say.
If you’re still seeking inspiration, of course you might find it
by looking at the schedule from SHA
, the last Dutch camp. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397443",
"author": "Sebastius",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T07:12:42",
"content": "And if presenting is not your thing, you can contribute to the camp in various other ways such as helping to organize it or as a volunteer doing various shifts. We have many vacancies in the organisatio... | 1,760,372,892.530939 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/07/hackaday-links-november-7-2021/ | Hackaday Links: November 7, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"baloon",
"geolocation",
"hackaday links",
"Hubble",
"Jack Skellington",
"Jet Pack Man",
"observatory",
"solar",
"Starlink",
"uv"
] | More trouble for Hubble this week as
the space observatory’s scientific instruments package entered safe mode again
. The problems started back on October 25, when the Scientific Instrument Command and Data Handling Unit, or SI C&DH, detect a lack of synchronization messages from the scientific instruments — basically, the cameras and spectrometers that sit at the focus of the telescope. The issue appears to be different from
the “payload computer glitch”
that was so widely reported back in the summer, but does seem to involve hardware on the SI C&DH. Mission controller took an interesting approach to diagnosing the problem: the dusted off the NICMOS, or Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, an instrument that hasn’t been used since 1998. Putting NICMOS back into the loop allowed them to test for loss of synchronization messages without risking the other active instruments. In true hacker fashion, it looks like the fix will be to change the software to deal with the loss of sync messages. We’ll keep you posted.
What happened to the good old days, when truck hijackings were for things like cigarettes and booze? Now it’s graphics cards, at least according to
a forum post
that announced the theft of a shipment of EVGA GeForce RTX 30-series graphics cards from a delivery truck. The truck was moving the cards from San Francisco to the company’s southern California distribution center. No word as to the modus operandi of the thieves, so it’s not clear if the whole truck was stolen or if the cards “fell off the back.” Either way, EVGA took pains to note that receiving stolen goods is a crime under California law, and that warranties for the stolen cards will not be honored. Given the purpose these cards will likely be used for, we doubt that either of these facts matters much to the thieves.
Remember “Jet Pack Man”? We sure do, from a series of reports by pilots approaching Los Angeles International airport
stretching back into 2020
and popping up occasionally. The reports were all similar — an object approximately the size and shape of a human, floating aloft near LAX. Sightings persisted, investigations were launched, but nobody appeared to know where Jet Pack Man came from or what he was flying. But now it appears that
the Los Angeles Police may have identified the culprit
: one Jack Skellington, whose street name is the Pumpkin King. Or at least a helium balloon version of the gangly creature, which is sure what an LAPD helicopter seems to have captured on video. But color us skeptical here; after all, they spotted the Halloween-themed balloon around the holiday, and it’s pretty easy to imagine that the hapless hero of Halloween Town floated away from someone’s front porch. More to the point,
video that was captured at the end of 2020
doesn’t look anything like a Skellington balloon. So much for “case closed.”
Speaking of balloons, here’s perhaps a more productive use for them — lifting a solar observatory up above most of the atmosphere.
The Sunrise Solar Observatory
is designed to be lifted to about 37 km by a balloon, far enough above the Earth’s ozone layer to allow detailed observation of the Sun’s corona and lower atmosphere down into the UV range of the spectrum. Sunrise has already flown two successful missions in 2009 and 2013 which have netted over 100 scientific papers. The telescope has a one-meter aperture and automatic alignment and stabilization systems to keep it pointed the right way. Sunrise III is scheduled to launch in June 2022, and aims to study the flow of material in the solar atmosphere with an eye to understanding the nature of the Sun’s magnetic field.
And finally, what a difference a few feet can make.
Some future Starlink customers are fuming
after updating the location on their request for service, only to find the estimated delivery date pushed back a couple of years. Signing up for Starlink satellite service entails dropping a pin on a map to indicate your intended service location, but when Starlink put a new, more precise mapping app on the site, some eager pre-order customers updated their location to more accurately reflect where the dish will be installed. It’s not clear if the actual location of the dish is causing the change in the delivery date, or if just the act of updating an order places you at the bottom of the queue. But the lesson here may be that with geolocation, close enough is close enough. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397393",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T01:10:35",
"content": "Hey, if “balloons” is good enough for Roswell, then it’s good enough for “Jet Pack Man”.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6397406",
"author": "Lo... | 1,760,372,892.496988 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/07/halloween-hack-requires-minimum-code-produces-maximum-fun/ | Halloween Hack Requires Minimum Code, Produces Maximum Fun | Adam Zeloof | [
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"blockly",
"ESP32",
"Espruino",
"halloween",
"nodered",
"raspberry pi"
] | Every year, [Conor O’Neill] hacks something together to spook and entertain trick-or-treaters who happen by his home on Halloween. He’s noticed a pattern — every year the project involves a mess of code, often slapped together using different frameworks and languages. Attempting to alleviate that, and maybe make things a bit more friendly to beginners who understandably find code-intensive project daunting, this year he set out to write as little code as possible.
Rather than take the electronics-only route, which would undoubtedly include a few 555 timers and some other classics,
[Conor] elected to stick with higher-level embedded boards, including fan-favorites such as an ESP32 and a Raspberry Pi, while still trying to keep code to a minimum.
Thanks to the visual languages Espruino Blockly and NODE-RED, he only needed to write a couple lines of “traditional code,” as he calls it: a simple JavaScript HTTP request. The project itself consisted of an ultrasonic sensor hooked up to an ESP32, which would detect when children approached the door. The ESP32 used Espruino visual scripting to notify a Raspberry Pi when it sensed motion. The Raspberry Pi would play some spooky sounds, and coordinate with some old conference badges to turn on some lights and trigger a fog machine. The Pi also used a service called
Tines
to send a door notification via Telegram.
Okay, so this is still by no means simple, but it is interesting how much can be done without writing much code (and the end result was great!). [Conor] says he’s been building similar Halloween projects every year for the last ten or so, and it shows —
we wrote about another one of his haunted doorbells back in 2015
. We’re looking forward to seeing what he cooks up next year, and we hope you’ll have some awesome automated Halloween decorations as well! | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397357",
"author": "Arthur Mezins",
"timestamp": "2021-11-07T22:30:42",
"content": "Seriously? Who would do such an outrageous thing when kids are expected? Adults — … maybe, but KIDS? Maybe a cat, dog, or even lion “roar”, but no, this ain’t cool dude.",
"parent_id": null,
... | 1,760,372,892.581648 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/07/diy-wunderwaffe-and-others-make-up-this-open-source-arsenal/ | DIY Wunderwaffe And Others Make Up This Open-Source Arsenal | Kristina Panos | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"how-to"
] | [
"call of duty",
"model",
"prop",
"prop building",
"vacuum tubes",
"wunderwaffe"
] | Unless you stay up all night and have a dozen printers going, it’s probably way too late to make
one of these beautiful prop weapons
designed by [Andrew] of The Ray Gun Project in time for Halloween. Most of them are from Call of Duty: Zombies, though there is an awesome little disco grenade from Fortnite as well.
All of the projects are fantastic, but we chose to highlight the Wunderwaffe DG-2 from COD: Zombies because, well, vacuum tubes. For those unfamiliar with the ‘waffe’s operation, those vacuum tubes act as ammo magazines. Once they’re empty, you power them down with that big red switch and eject them one at a time with the lever, just like in the game.
Inside is a Feather M0 Express that runs the RGB LEDs and uses a Hall effect sensor to read magnets in the quick-change ammo magazine. You can see how it works in the demo video after the break.
There are BOMs for several of the prop weapons, along with assembly drawings and support forums for anyone who wants to build their own. Don’t feel like gathering all the bits and bobs yourself? [Andrew] is selling hardware packs for the ray gun, but you’ll have to scrounge the parts yourself if you want to build the Wunderwaffle.
Are you a Grinch who wants to keep kids off of your lawn?
Scare ’em off with a giant NERF gun
. | 17 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397326",
"author": "mjrippe",
"timestamp": "2021-11-07T18:32:01",
"content": "So this will take nearly a year to print? ;)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397403",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-11-08T0... | 1,760,372,892.989854 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/07/annoy-yourself-into-better-driving-with-this-turn-signal-monitor/ | Annoy Yourself Into Better Driving With This Turn Signal Monitor | Dan Maloney | [
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"ble",
"bmw",
"canbus",
"car",
"IMU",
"nano",
"turn signal"
] | Something like 99% of the people on the road at any given moment will consider themselves an above-average driver, something that’s as statistically impossible as it is easily disproven by casual observation. Drivers make all kinds of mistakes, but perhaps none as annoying and avoidable as failure to use their turn signal.
This turn signal monitor
aims to fix that, through the judicious use of negative feedback.
Apparently, [Mark Radinovic] feels that he has a predisposition against using his turn signal due to the fact that he drives a BMW. To break him of that habit, one that cost him his first BMW, he attached Arduino Nano 33 BLEs to the steering wheel and the turn signal stalk. The IMUs sense the position of each and send that over Bluetooth to an Arduino Uno WiFi. That in turn talks over USB to a Raspberry Pi, which connects to the car’s stereo via Bluetooth to blare an alarm when the steering wheel is turned but the turn signal remains untouched. The video below shows it in use; while it clearly works, there are a lot of situations where it triggers even though a turn signal isn’t really called for — going around a roundabout, for example, or navigating a sinuous approach to a drive-through window.
While [Mark] clearly built this tongue firmly planted in cheek, we can’t help but think there’s a better way — sniffing the car’s CANbus to determine steering angle and turn signal status comes to mind. This
great workshop on CANbus sniffing
from last year’s Remoticon would be a great place to start if you’d like a more streamlined solution than [Mark]’s.
[via
Tom’s Hardware
] | 44 | 18 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397301",
"author": "CampGareth",
"timestamp": "2021-11-07T15:41:20",
"content": "“even though a turn signal isn’t really called for — going around a roundabout, for example”Rules in your country may vary. In the UK you should use your indicators at least once while on a roundabout,... | 1,760,372,892.802146 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/05/diy-cnc-uses-lots-of-3d-printed-parts/ | DIY CNC Uses Lots Of 3D-Printed Parts | Al Williams | [
"cnc hacks"
] | [
"cnc",
"grbl"
] | There are probably almost as many DIY CNC designs as there are DIY CNCs. And there’s nothing wrong with that! We really liked [maxvfischer’s] documentation on
GitHub
for a machine he made based on a design by [Ivan Miranada].
In addition to a complete bill of materials, there are Fusion 360 files and very good instructions. There are several tips that seemed like they would help even if you were building similar machines.
The machine uses HTD5M belts instead of the more prevalent lead screw design. Everything slides on MGN12H slides. There are detailed photographs covering not just the tricky parts but even how to extend the stepper motor wires.
The original design used a Makita RT0700C for the spindle, but [max] couldn’t find one of those, but found a similar version with the same dimensions.
The only tip we would add is to be careful using taps in a handheld drill. (Don’t ask us how we know that.) A drill press is safer, or you can even use a tap handle and do it the old-fashioned way.
The firmware is
grbl
on an Arduino, and there are complete instructions for setting that up, too. We were amazed at the number of pictures included along with the detailed description. If you were ever afraid you couldn’t duplicate a CNC project, this might be the one to tackle.
There are, of course,
cheaper and simpler options
with fewer capabilities. Some are even almost free
courtesy of the local dumpster
. | 21 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397002",
"author": "BrightBlueJim",
"timestamp": "2021-11-05T21:02:32",
"content": "NICE documentation. I also especially like that it doesn’t use expensive extrusions. Yeah, a little more work drilling, but it’s obviously a labor of love.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,372,892.720569 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/05/eth0-autumn-2021-tiny-camp-manages-covid-precautions-indoors/ | ETH0 Autumn 2021: Tiny Camp Manages COVID Precautions Indoors | Jenny List | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider"
] | [
"COVID",
"eth0",
"hacker camp"
] | It’s tempting despite news of stubbornly higher-than-ideal COVID infection figures, to imagine that just maybe the world might be returning to some semblance of pre-pandemic normality. Where this is being written we’re a largely vaccinated population long out of lockdown, and though perhaps some of the pandemic pronouncements of our politicians are a bit suspect we’re cautiously able to enjoy most of life’s essentials. Visiting the supermarket and having a beer might be one thing, but the effect of the pandemic is still being felt in our community’s gatherings.
BornHack went ahead this summer
, but the headline MCH hacker camp was put off until 2022 and the upcoming CCC Congress in Germany
is once more to be a virtual event.
But some events manage to put together the right mix of precaution and size. Such was the case with ETH0, a hacker camp which I was happy to attend last weekend.
Can A COVID-Safe Hacker Camp Go Indoors?
A quick pit stop at a Dutch supermarket for a COVID test.
Into this uncertain world of real-world hacker events stepped the Dutch organisation
ETH0
with their autumn weekend camp in an indoor camping barn in a village near the German border on the eastern side of the country. It may not be the largest of events but it’s still a challenging move to host a gathering in late 2021, so how did they manage? I made the trip to this pleasant part of Europe aflame with the turning leaves of a mild late autumn, to find out
We had been warned to expect an event at which pandemic precautions had been taken seriously, and this was immediately evident on arrival as all attendees had to produce a European QR code proof of vaccine and take a lateral-flow COVID test before being allowed entry. Once inside the precautions continued, this was a masks-on event at which the doors and windows were left open to assure ventilation, so we were in for a weekend wrapped up against the chill of the evening. To make extra-certain we repeated the test on day two, a precaution which fortunately revealed no infected attendees. It was in this respect an event like no other, however it’s understood that not all attendees were in robust enough health to risk exposure so when considered in terms of protecting them it made sense.
Retrocomputers, Pixelflood, and Socialising
In what has been an unusual year by any measure, this event had something in common with BornHack 2021 before it. The atmosphere was less of feverish hacking and signature projects, and more of a rare chance to escape our bubbles, meet friends, and socialise in an atmosphere of Club-Mate, camaraderie, and playing with tech. Standing around a roaring bonfire in the dark eating toasted sandwiches and drinking Grolsch beer with one’s friends is just what’s needed when the world around you has more stress than it should.
The web, as seen by a Pentium luggable.
ChaosPost had made it, along with a huge array of postcards.
There seemed to be a strong showing among the retrocomputer enthusiasts, with unexpectedly an emphasis on PC hardware from the 386 to Pentium era. Trying to surf 2021’s web on a Pentium luggable running Windows 95 was much more fun than it sounds for example, a reminder of how much what would have been an object of extreme desire in the mid-90s has aged. As it turns out, it’s surprisingly difficult to find any remotely recent browser that supports that OS, so for future reference
Web Rendering Proxy
is your friend.
A PowerPC Pixelflooding a PowerPC logo.
As might be expected there was a pixelflood server running, and a lively group settled down to do battle over display real-estate. The sight of an elderly PowerBook G4 holding its own against the big guns keeping a PowerPC logo on the screen was something to behold, but as is so often the case there was plenty to learn about extracting the most performance from a given piece of network code by talking to the participants. The event had attracted a good cross-section of visitors from several European countries who brought plenty of distractions, and unusually for a hacker camp it hadn’t assembled a programme of talks. Given the small size of the event this was less of an omission than it might have at first seemed, so for once we’re not bringing you a list of highlights.
So at the end of a relaxed weekend we parted company, and I set off on my journey home as an itinerant scribe. Another hacker event had beaten the pandemic, and I consider myself lucky to have made it. My thanks to the ETH0 orga and my fellow attendees, and let’s hope as 2022 rolls around the world regains some of its pre-pandemic form. | 13 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396960",
"author": "donclark (@donclark)",
"timestamp": "2021-11-05T17:28:40",
"content": "Could you provide a link to the lighted ball in the main photo please?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6396962",
"author": "Sebastiu... | 1,760,372,893.22203 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/05/hackaday-podcast-143-more-magnesium-please-robot-bicep-curls-malamuds-general-index-and-are-you-down-with-emc/ | Hackaday Podcast 143: More Magnesium Please, Robot Bicep Curls, Malamud’s General Index, And Are You Down With EMC? | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts",
"Slider"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams catch up on a week’s worth of hacks. Get a grip on robot hands: there’s an eerily human one on offer this week. If you’re doing buck/boost converter design, the real learning is in high-frequency design patterns that avoid turning your circuits into unintentional radiators. Those looking for new hobbies might want to take up autonomous boat racing. We saw a design that’s easy enough to print on the average 3D printer — and who
doesn’t
want to build their own jet boat? We’ll wrap up the episode by digging into magnesium sources, and by admiring the number of outfits who are rolling their own silicon these days.
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
(50 MB)
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 143 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
Tell us your answer for this week’s “What’s that sound?”
. Next week on the show we’ll randomly draw one name from the correct answers to win a rare Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.
News This Week:
The complete
Hackaday Remoticon schedule and speaker info
is all up on the conference website.
If you want a T-shirt, you need to get your ticket by Thursday the 11th. Free conference tickets will remain available through the 20th.
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Taking A Stroll Down Uncanny Valley With The Artificial Muscle Robotic Arm
Artificial Muscles Robotic Arm, Real Copy of Human Arm – YouTube
Waterjet-Powered Speedboat For Fun And Research
737 thrust reversers, spoilers, and flaps in down position – YouTube
Modified Toggle Switches Grace Hyper-Detailed Cockpit Simulator Panels
Malamud’s General Index: Research Gist, No Slap On The Wrist
This Smart Watch Keeps An Eye On Ambient CO2 Levels
watchy-cases/Armadillonium at main · sqfmi/watchy-cases · GitHub
Watchy by SQFMI
EMC Tutorial Puts You In The Loop
Quick Hacks:
Mike’s Picks
Muggle Uses E-Paper For Daily Prophet Replica
Janksy Robot Paints Murals One Dot At A Time
Raspberry Pi Reads What It Sees, Delights Children
Elliot’s Picks:
Flying Blind: Taking Flight Simulation To A New Level In Accessibility
Hardware Project Becomes Successful Product For Solo Developer
Handwriting Robots Are Sending Snail Mail
Can’t-Miss Articles:
The Pi Zero 2 W Is The Most Efficient Pi
Remoticon Video: From Zero To ASIC; How To Design In Silicon
opentapeout conference
Magnesium: Where It Comes From And Why We’re Running Out | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,893.068675 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/05/homebrewed-voice-assistant-keeps-an-eye-on-air-quality/ | Homebrewed Voice Assistant Keeps An Eye On Air Quality | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"voice assistant"
] | Voice assistants are now available from a wide variety of companies, however, [7402] didn’t like the idea of these devices sending data off to the cloud for potentially-nefarious purposes. Thus, the goal became to build a home voice assistant that worked entirely offline,
and that’s precisely what [7402] achieved.
The system had limited goals compared to commercial competitors. [7402] was more than happy to deal with a limited vocabulary of understanding as a trade off for privacy. It’s all built around a Raspberry Pi Zero, which runs the Julius speech recognition library. Ultrasonic sensors are used to only activate the device when a person leans in and directly addresses the system.
Capabilities include reporting on the weather, switching light on and off, and advising users of air quality readings from the local authorities. Feedback to the user is via text-to-speech as well as flashing LEDs. The latter are used to create a quirky, retro “thinking” animation to indicate the system is processing, and has indeed heard a spoken command.
It’s a neat build, and one that covers most of the good things that commercial cloud devices are capable of anyway. As a bonus, no smartphone apps are required, nor will private companies impact the system’s functionality as it relies on no external servers to operate.
We’ve seen similar builds before too,
such as this GlaDOS-themed voice assistant.
Video after the break. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396983",
"author": "Olivier",
"timestamp": "2021-11-05T19:11:11",
"content": "Pretty cool! :DI’ve been trying to figure out how to make my google home mini into something thats not connected to google (as it already has decent microphones and wifi connectivity and a few more useful... | 1,760,372,893.03316 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/05/this-week-in-security-the-battle-against-ransomware-unicode-discourse-and-shrootless/ | This Week In Security: The Battle Against Ransomware, Unicode, Discourse, And Shrootless | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"ransomware",
"shrootless",
"This Week in Security",
"unicode"
] | We talk about ransomware gangs quite a bit, but there’s another shadowy, loose collection of actors in that arena.
Emsisoft sheds a bit of light
on the network of researchers and law enforcement that are working behind the scenes to frustrate ransomware campaigns.
Darkside is an interesting case study. This is the group that made worldwide headlines by hitting the Colonial Pipeline, shutting it down for six days. What you might not realize is that the Darkside ransomware software had a weakness in its encryption algorithms, from mid December 2020 through January 12, 2021. Interestingly, Bitdefender released a decryptor on January 11. I haven’t found confirmation, but the timing seems to indicate that the release of the decryptor triggered Darkside to look for and fix the flaw in their encryption. (Alternatively, it’s possible that it was released in response the fix, and time zones are skewing the dates.)
Emsisoft is very careful not to tip their hand when they’ve found a vulnerability in a ransomware. Instead, they have a network of law enforcement and security professionals that they share information with. This came in handy again when the Darkside group was spun back up, under the name BlackMatter.
Not long after the campaign was started again, a similar vulnerability was reintroduced in the encryption code. The ransomware’s hidden site, used for negotiating payment for decryption, seems to have had a vulnerability that Emsisoft was able to use to keep track of victims. Since they had a working decryptor, they were able to reach out directly, and provide victims with decryption tools.
This changed when the link to BlackMatter’s portal leaked on Twitter. It seems like many people hold ransomware gangs in less-than-high regard, and took the opportunity to inform BlackMatter of this fact, using that portal. In response, BlackMatter took down that portal site, cutting off Emsisoft’s line of information. Since then, the encryption vulnerability has been fixed, Emisoft can’t listen in on BlackMatter anymore, and they released the story to encourage BlackMatter victims to contact them. They also suggest that ransomware victims always contact law enforcement to report the incident, as there may be a decryptor that isn’t public yet.
And finally, the latest news is that
BlackMatter is shutting down
. The notice calls out Law Enforcement action as part of the reason for shutting down, and mentions the “latest news”. It’s speculated that this is a reference to
the October 26th arrests
in Ukraine and Switzerland.
AtomSilo and LockFile
Avast has released a decryptor
that covers both the AtomSilo and LockFile ransomware programs. This is based on the work of [Jiří Vinopal]. It’s a simple tool that backs up the encrypted files, and then attempts to decrypt them. Winner.
To FTP, or Not To FTP?
Google has been plotting the removal of the FTP protocol from Chrome for a long time, and with version 95,
they have finally finished that task
. There is no longer a flag to re-enable FTP, and the code has been purged from the project. For what it’s worth, Firefox has also disabled FTP support. The rational for the change is to eliminate an attack surface, and remove code maintenance on the little-used feature. Google points out there there are very good dedicated FTP clients that we should be using.
Hidden In The Unicode
[Nicholas Boucher] and [Ross Anderson] have presented
a paper detailing a really unique Unicode attack
(
PDF
). This isn’t our first time looking at how Unicode can cause security problems, and won’t be our last. The problem here is the Unicode characters that mark text as left-to-right and right-to-left. The blocks created by those characters can be nested, resulting in some unexpected results. Let’s take a look:
bool isAdmin = false;
/* begin admins only */ if (isAdmin) {
printf("You are an admin.\n");
/* end admins only */ }
The magic is in the comments. Here’s what the compiler sees, but the Unicode expanded into mnemonics:
/*RLO } LRIif (isAdmin)PDI LRI begin admins only */
printf("You are an admin.\n");
/* end admins only RLO } LRI*/
Since editors will respect the Unicode control characters, manual code review will miss the trickery. Because the characters are inside comments, the compiler will ignore them and compile the program as it is actually written. The real danger here is when this technique is combined with other supply chain attack techniques.
A typical first patch for a new coder is to clean up whitespace and comments. This introduces the possibility that such a patch is malicious, and you can’t tell without looking at it with a hex editor. The authors make a trio of mitigation suggestions: compiler warnings, formal language rules disallowing such schenanigans, and visible Unicode characters in text editors and related tools.
The Rust language
has already taken action
on this issue. The latest version, 1.56.1, contains a compiler lint that rejects the potentially problematic Unicode characters. Github has also
rolled out a warning when these characters are detected
. While the new attention is welcome, do note that
this has been a known problem for a while
.
Spoofing Amazon to RCE Discourse
[joernchen]
has published a flaw in the discourse web application
. Discourse has an exposed endpoint,
/webhooks/aws
, that results in a call to
open()
, which is known to be dangerous to call with untrusted data. The protection here is that the supplied data must be signed by a signing certificate provided by Amazon, as this endpoint is specifically for AWS’s Simple notification service. At first glance, it seems bulletproof.
The problem is that the PEM certificate used for validation is specified by the incoming data. A regex verifies that the url of that certificate is actually at Amazon. Ruby’s OpenSSL certificate parsing function is willing to ignore extra XML, so long as it finds a valid certificate embedded in the data it’s given.
So, all an attacker needs to do is to host a PEM certificate at the right place in their Amazon AWS settings, and specify a URL that will embed that cert. Discourse checks the
.pem
URL, validates that it matches the regex, and happily confirms that the request matches that certificate, thereby running attacker provided code. The flaw has been fixed in 2.7.9, and the latest 2.8.0 beta. If you’re running Discourse, go make sure you have this update.
Microsoft Breaks macOS
In what must be just a bit of Schadenfreude,
Microsoft has announced a vulnerability that they discovered in macOS
. This could allow an attacker to bypass Apple’s poorly named System Integrity Protection (SIP). SIP in this case isn’t a VoIP protocol, but a technique preventing even a root user from making certain modifications to a system. SIP is also referred to as rootless in some places. Rootless bypasses have been found before. For instance, if a kernel driver has a vulnerability, running code in the kernel context will automatically defeat this protection.
The new bypass is painfully simple. When Apple signed packages are installed, they are done in a super-root context. Some packages run a post-install script, which runs using the
zsh
shell. When
zsh
is invoked, it runs
/etc/zshenv
script automatically. Is the problem obvious yet? Push your jailbreak code into
zshenv
, install a package, and the system runs it automatically. Well played. | 20 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396938",
"author": "preamp.org",
"timestamp": "2021-11-05T14:20:36",
"content": "Does that mean that FTP is now darknet? B^)",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6396958",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2021-11-... | 1,760,372,893.170086 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/05/the-metabolizer-is-turning-trash-into-treasure-even-faster-now/ | The Metabolizer Is Turning Trash Into Treasure Even Faster Now | Kristina Panos | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"3D printed trash",
"metabolization",
"plastic",
"recycling",
"trash"
] | Do you remember [Sam Smith]’s Metabolizer from a few years back? In case you’ve forgotten,
this baby takes trash and turns it into printed plastic objects
, and it’s solar-powered to boot. Although the Metabolizer didn’t win the 2018 Hackaday Prize, [Sam] and his machine won many achievements that year, including the Open Hardware Challenge. It’s fantastic to see the project still improving.
To recap, the sun hits the solar panels and charge up the battery bank. Once there’s enough power to start the reaction, it gets dumped into a heating element that turns biomass into biochar. This smoke is cooled, collected, refined, and fed into a small gas generator, which produces DC power to run a 3/4-horsepower shredder and the trash printer.
[Sam] likens this beast to a Rube Goldberg machine in that it performs an overly-complicated chain reaction to do a simple task. We certainly see his point, but we think that this machine is worth so much more than those classic machines, which tend to do nothing useful at all and tend to consume many resources in the process. On the contrary, the Metabolizer’s chain reaction starts with sunshine and ends with useful objects that keep plastic out of landfills. Honestly, it’s more akin to a compost heap with a PhD in Biology and a handful of steroids and a 3D printer attached.
Unfortunately, [Sam] couldn’t get a prototype working in time for the Prize, and he turned to
Patreon
to gain support after the $1,000 ran out. Three years and a ton of improvements later, [Sam] has a working prototype that’s cheaper, more efficient, and easier to build. But can it be built relatively easily by someone other than [Sam]?
Consider the gauntlet thrown down
.
Not happy with your standard-style compost pile?
You need a DIY trommel to sift out the bad stuff
. | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396907",
"author": "eckythump",
"timestamp": "2021-11-05T12:09:20",
"content": "Interesting. I wonder how the efficiency of converting the paper/cardboard input to liquid fuel to generate electricity compares with just burning it instead (and generating electricity using a steam tu... | 1,760,372,893.114585 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/05/battle-robot-uses-carbon-fiber-to-save-weight/ | Battle Robot Uses Carbon Fiber To Save Weight | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [] | ZAP! The saw is capable of delivering high-voltage discharges to damage its foes.
Combat robots come in all shapes and sizes, with regulating authorities often using weight limits to create a level playing field for competitors. [Hans Jørgen Grimstad] is building a robot to compete in a 4 kg class, and made some interesting design decisions to that end.
4 kg is not a lot of weight to play with. When considering the motors needed to propel the robot and the batteries needed to run everything, there’s then precious little weight left for weapons systems and armor plating.
Thus, in an effort to make the most of the weight limitations, [Hans] decided to use carbon fiber for the robot’s outer shell. The method used is a simple wet layup in a mold. We’d be supremely interested to see how this armor holds up in competition, versus more typical choices like aluminium and steel.
Other interesting features include a belt-driven saw, which [Hans] tests with his hands mere inches away and the robot’s motors powered up. Don’t do this if you value your fingers. This is paired with a high-voltage discharge taser module. When the saw gets close to another robot, it may cause sparks to jump to the enemy, damaging its electronics in the process. It’s something we haven’t seen too often, as such measures are actually banned in some contests.
Diehard enthusiasts in the battle robot community will likely have fierce opinions on many points of the design; have it out in the comments. It’s certainly not the first carbon-fiber bot, but it’s nice to see the fancy material being thrown in the ring.
We’ve seen other designers innovate, too, such as this remarkably successful
walking robot build.
Video after the break. | 9 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396884",
"author": "ThisGuy",
"timestamp": "2021-11-05T09:13:31",
"content": "I don’t think CFC is a good choice for armour like that. It’s not the greatest in terms of shatter/impact resistance. I think possibly a layup including one or more layers of aramid fibers would probably ... | 1,760,372,893.310666 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/07/this-robot-cant-keep-its-eyes-off-the-money/ | This Robot Can’t Keep Its Eyes Off The Money | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"money",
"opencv",
"robot"
] | Some say there’s no treasure quite as valuable as the almighty dollar. [Norbert Zare] likes alt-rock soundtracks on Youtube videos and robots obsessed with money,
so set about building the latter.
The project is fundamentally a simple one. A Raspberry Pi 3B+ is outfitted with a Pi Camera, and set up to control twin servo motors attached to a simple pan/tilt assembly. The Pi runs OpenCV set up in a face-tracking mode. This allows the robot to readily track money in its field of view, as the vast majority of money out there has someone’s face on it. OpenCV is used to detect where the money is in the field of view, and guide the Pi’s camera towards the cash.
It’s a neat repurposing OpenCV’s face detection algorithm, and that’s much faster than training your own money-tracking system. However, it seems like the robot would also track regular human faces, too. Perhaps it could be optimised to do a color check, such that only greyscale or green faces were followed by the robot.
Does the project do anything useful or important? Arguably no, but if a robot can be this obsessed with money, perhaps we all can learn something. Alternatively, it might just have served as a useful project for [Norbert] to learn about programming and mechatronics projects. Either way, we dig it.
Code is on Github for the curious.
Using OpenCV in this way has become common over the years. If you want to detect cats, however, maybe consider
giving Tensorflow a try.
Video after the break. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397280",
"author": "paulvdh",
"timestamp": "2021-11-07T13:16:55",
"content": "Euro’s don’t have faces on them.They just have ugly bridges.Before the Euro’s we had beautiful banknotes here in the Netherlands. Lighthouses, Snipes and other birds.Gosh, It’s only now that I realize tha... | 1,760,372,893.262694 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/07/heathkit-im-13-vtvm-repair/ | Heathkit IM-13 VTVM Repair | Al Williams | [
"Repair Hacks",
"Teardown"
] | [
"heathkit",
"vacuum tube voltmeter",
"voltmeter",
"vtvm"
] | If you are under a certain age, you might not know the initialism VTVM. It stands for vacuum tube voltmeter. At first glance, you might just think that was shorthand for “old voltmeter” but, in fact, a VTVM filled a vital role in the old days of measuring instruments. [The Radio Mechanic]
takes us inside a Heathkit IM-13 that needed some loving
, and for its day it was an impressive little instrument.
Today, our meters almost always have a FET front end and probably uses a MOSFET. That means the voltage measurement probes don’t really connect to the meter at all. In a properly working MOSFET, the DC resistance between the gate and the rest of the circuit is practically infinite. It is more likely that a very large resistor (like 10 megaohms) is setting the input impedance because the gate by itself could pick up electrostatic voltage that might destroy the device. A high resistance like that is great when you make measurements because it is very unlikely to disturb the circuit you are trying to measure and it leads to more accurate measurements.
We take that for granted today, but a typical voltmeter in the old days was just a meter with some resistors in front of it. While a good meter would have relatively high resistance, it wasn’t as high as a FET. However, with a tube amplifier, a VTVM could also show a very high resistance and still make good measurements. The Heathkit meter used a dual tube as an amplifier along with some input resistor dividers to provide an 11 megaohm input. There was also a rectifier tube switched in to make AC measurements. In the end, the amplifier drove a conventional analog meter, but that load was isolated from the device under test so its relatively low resistance wasn’t important.
The repair seemed pretty simple, but it was fun to see the inside of one of these. Compare it to
a digital meter today
and it seems very strange, doesn’t it? If you want to read more about how VTVMs were used, there’s
a copy of a 1951 Sylvania book
about them online. Some people still
prefer meters that move
and, we admit, for certain tasks they beat even a digital bargraph. | 16 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397285",
"author": "Col_Panek",
"timestamp": "2021-11-07T13:59:07",
"content": "Well, that took me back thirty years.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397298",
"author": "Fred Love",
"timestamp": "2021-11-07T1... | 1,760,372,893.361334 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/06/spam-1-is-a-well-documented-discrete-cpu-with-an-impressive-software-library/ | SPAM-1 Is A Well-Documented Discrete CPU With An Impressive Software Library | Robin Kearey | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"74xx",
"breadboard",
"CHIP-8",
"discrete cpu"
] | Here at Hackaday we love projects that are so well-documented that you can spend days reading up on what the designer has achieved. [John Lonergan] didn’t disappoint when he designed
the SPAM-1
, an 8-bit CPU built from discrete logic gates. His detailed log contains a wealth of information on such things as designing opcodes, optimizing program counter logic, running a digital simulation, as well as his thoughts on microcode design. The sheer volume of it may be a bit off-putting to beginners, so it might be best to start with the
video series
that describes the architecture and goes into detail on several sub-blocks.
The design has changed a bit since [John] first started on the project, as he decided to add more and more features, but the final result is a well-thought out architecture that keeps the simplicity needed for discrete hardware but still has enough features to keep it interesting for seasoned CPU aficionados. The instruction size is rather large (48 bits) to simplify the instruction decoding at the expense of larger code size. Conditional jump instructions are not present; instead, all instructions have an optional control flag to make them conditional, a feature inspired by the ARM instruction set.
Once the design was mature enough, [John] modelled the entire thing in Verilog and simulated his design to verify correct operation and to check the timings, estimating it to be workable up to 5 MHz or so. A large stack of breadboards and DIP chips from the 74xx series then brought the design to life.
Not content with simply designing, simulating and implementing a custom CPU in hardware, [John] also spent significant effort on the software side of things, writing an assembler and even a C-like compiler for the SPAM-1 platform. And if that wasn’t enough, he also added an emulator for the classic CHIP-8 language, which allows it to run existing programs like Pong and Tetris. Input and output for all this software is mostly through a UART connection to a PC. A VGA interface is still on [John]’s to-do list, but he did build an adapter to
connect a classic NES controller
to the system.
The SPAM-1 is a worthy addition to the long list of discrete-logic CPUs we’ve seen here, such as
this breadboard computer running a UNIX-like OS
or
this minimalistic one
. If you’d like to see one that implements an existing instruction set, try this
homebrew RISC-V computer
. | 16 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397230",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2021-11-07T05:09:21",
"content": "Whew! Just in time to save humanity from the forever chip shortage.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6397256",
"author": "Anders Nielsen",
"time... | 1,760,372,893.602519 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/06/solar-cells-half-off/ | Solar Cells, Half Off | Al Williams | [
"News",
"Solar Hacks"
] | [
"photovoltaic",
"silicon",
"solar cell",
"Solar Cells",
"solar energy"
] | A company named Leap Photovoltaic claims they have a technology to
create solar panels without silicon wafers
which would cut production costs in half. According to [FastCompany] the cells are still silicon-based, but do not require creating wafers as a separate step or — as is more common — acquiring them as a raw material.
The process is likened to 3D printing as silicon powder is deposited on a substrate. The design claims to use only a tenth of the silicon in a conventional cell and requires fewer resources to produce, too.
This sounds a lot like
amorphous silicon cells
which have been around for a while. We assume the trick is they’ve found a cheaper way to produce them using off-the-shelf equipment. These cells are typically lower in performance than crystalline cells. We don’t know if Leap has a way to improve the solar cell’s output.
Where can you get them? Not so fast. Plans are to have pilot production in 2023 with widespread availability by 2024. If the cells do produce less power per unit area, their success will depend on cutting costs so that a bigger unit is cheaper than a smaller crystalline panel. Even then, in some applications surface area matters.
The again,
not all solar cells use silicon at all
. You can even
make some of them yourself
. | 34 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397216",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-11-07T02:39:16",
"content": "And then there’s solar film.https://powerroll.solar/unique-solar-film/",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397219",
"author": "Brian",
... | 1,760,372,893.55278 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/06/cheap-diy-mic-sounds-and-looks-damn-good/ | Cheap DIY Mic Sounds (And Looks) Damn Good | Adam Zeloof | [
"hardware",
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"audio",
"diy",
"microphone",
"music",
"sound",
"usb mic"
] | As any musician, podcaster, or youtuber will be quick to tell you, there’s no substitute for a good microphone. They’ll also be quick to tell you all about their favorite microphone, why it’s better than all the others, and how much it cost (oh, and how
round
it sounds, whatever that means). But what if you could build your own that sounds as good, if not better, and do it for only $30?
That’s what [Matt] from DIY Perks set out to discover when he
built his DIY USB-C Microphone.
He was able to source the same microphone capsule that can be found in his high-end, $600 CAD E100S, and built a simple pre-amplifier that bumps its quiet output up to line-level. He even connected it to the mic module with some custom cable made from two tiny enameled wires that won’t transmit bumps and vibrations, wrapped inside desoldering braiding which acts as a shield. He fed the output from the pre-amp into a cheap USB audio interface and
voilà!
— top-notch sound for next to nothing. Make sure you check out the video below to hear a comparison between the mic and its professional counterparts.
Of course, sounding good isn’t quite enough. [Matt] wasn’t satisfied until the piece looked the part as well, which is why he encased the mic module in custom-bent brass mesh shielding and tubing (which also helps to reduce electrical interference). The brass cage sits suspended via rubber o-rings on a beautiful bent brass mount, which sits atop an articulated brass arm of [Matt]’s own design. Finally, the arm is mounted to a wood and brass enclosure that also serves to house the electronics.
And, in true open-source fashion, the video description is full of links to parts, schematics, and templates in case you want to build one of these beauties for yourself. Between this fantastic build and
this other, super-overkill scratch-built USB microphone we featured earlier in the year,
there has never been a better time to
make yourself a mic you won’t have to trade your car for.
Thanks to [RichV] and [BaldPower] for the tip! | 30 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397204",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2021-11-06T23:43:18",
"content": "Typo?viola? (not voilà?)Maybe a string quartet for the microphone?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6397213",
"author": "Ren",
"timest... | 1,760,372,893.828965 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/06/tiny-wake-up-light-is-hugely-bright/ | ‘Tiny Wake-Up Light Is Hugely Bright | Kristina Panos | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Lifehacks"
] | [
"7805",
"artificial sunlight",
"attiny 2313",
"sunrise light"
] | Let’s face it — waking up is rough no matter what time of year it is. But the darkness of fall and winter makes it so much worse. In the past, [Maarten] has used music with increasing volume, but depending on the setup, it can be dodgy if you want to hear a different song each day and don’t have all your files volume-leveled.
Wake Up Bright
is the latest in a line of wake-up widgets [Maarten] has made to help rouse them in the morning. Their write-up covers all ideas they’ve had on the subject over the years, as well as the electronics, firmware, debugging, and all the upgrades made after using it for awhile.
Slowly brightening an LED doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. [Maarten] originally used an Atmel 90S2313 AVR and later upgraded to an ATtiny 2313, which was easy because the two are pin-compatible. The 2313 outputs PWM, which duty-cycles the LED to create a nice fade-in of white light that is way more gentle than that classic 1980s alarm clock buzz-beep.
Over time, this project went from one IKEA enclosure to another. We really like the newer one, which looks like it was designed for people to hack into a wake-up light.
Our eyes perceive brightness increases logarithmically, but PWM is linear. We can get around this by multiplying the PWM value by some factor every so often, but the problem is that this AVR never learned its multiplication tables. So how, then? [Maarten]’s answer is byte shifting using a 16-bit register — one byte for PWM, and the other as a scratch pad to do logarithmic math. [Maarten] multiplies the 16-bit register by 1/256 every couple of seconds, which results in a logarithmic increase of brightness. It’s calculated for a 15-minute sunrise, which required some experimentation to get right.
Whereas [Maarten] started with a 3 W RGB LED, the current version has three 10 W LEDs and uses a power supply from an old monitor. Daylight Saving Time is coming to an end in the US, and it’s gonna get worse quickly. Lucky for you, this project is completely open source down to the firmware.
You think that 1980s alarm clock buzz-beep is bad?
How about some repeated slaps to the face to wake up? | 26 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397184",
"author": "Jan Helebrant (@jhelebrant)",
"timestamp": "2021-11-06T20:18:27",
"content": "I have bough wake-up light alarm clock some time ago but that time it only offered FM radio or sound and I also wanted some sound of increasing volume. For a long time I used the cloc... | 1,760,372,893.768548 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/06/groovin-with-a-gesture-controlled-mp3-player/ | Groovin’ With A Gesture-Controlled MP3 Player | Adam Zeloof | [
"Arduino Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"gesture control",
"mp3 player"
] | Touchscreens are great, but they’re not always the perfect solution. Trying to operate one with gloves on (even alleged “touchscreen-friendly” ones) can be cumbersome at best, and if the screen is on a publicly-shared device, such as a checkout kiosk it can easily become a home for bacteria, viruses and all sorts of other nasty stuff.
That’s what [Norbert Zare] was thinking when he built his
gesture-controlled MP3 player.
It uses a PAJ7620U2 gesture sensor to register a few intuitive hand motions including finger twirls to control the volume, hand swipes to skip forward and backwards, and a flat hand to play and pause the song. It even has a motorized knob and cute cutout music notes that move to provide some visual feedback for the gestures, which you can see in-action in the video below. If this seems familiar, it’s because on Tuesday we took a look at the camera-based,
glance-to-skip-tracks controller he built
.
To actually play some music, he gutted an old MP3 player and hooked the solder pads from the control buttons up to an Arduino, which reads gesture information from the sensor and emulates the MP3 player’s buttons by setting the appropriate pins to HIGH and LOW. Finally, he topped the whole thing off with an LCD screen and a case.
The great thing about [Norbert]’s approach is that it isn’t just limited to an MP3 player — it can be extended to replace the buttons on pretty much any device. Because the Arduino only needs to be connected to the button inputs of the device, it should be relatively easy to adapt most existing tactile interfaces to be touch-free. Paired with this
gesture-tracking macro keyboard we saw earlier in the year,
the days of actually having to touch our tech may soon be behind us. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397157",
"author": "Mark A Jones",
"timestamp": "2021-11-06T17:27:57",
"content": "To bad it doesn’t know the song that is playing :( That is my top requirement for an MP3 Player, then how much of the song is left to play, then misc info like release year, album title etc.",
"p... | 1,760,372,893.705109 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/04/prepare-for-wildfire-season-with-an-air-quality-monitor/ | Prepare For Wildfire Season With An Air Quality Monitor | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"air quality",
"coretex",
"Feather",
"meter",
"oled",
"pollution",
"raspberry pi",
"rp2040"
] | For some reason, wildfire seasons in Australia, North America, and other places around the world seem to happen more and more frequently and with greater and greater fervor. Living in these areas requires special precautions, even for those who live far away from the fires. If you’re not sure if the wildfires are impacting your area or not,
one of the tools you can build on your own is an air quality meter like [Costas Vav] shows us in this latest build
.
The air quality indicator is based around an Adafruit Feather RP2040 which is in turn based on the 32-bit Cortex M0+ dual core processor. This makes for a quite capable processor in a small package, and helps accomplish one of the design goals of a rapid startup time. Another design goal was to use off-the-shelf components so that anyone could easily build one for themselves, so while the Feather is easily obtained the PMS5003 PM2.5 air quality sensor needed to be as well. From there, all of the components are wrapped up in an easily-printed enclosure and given a small (and also readily-available) OLED screen.
[Costas Vav] has made all of the files needed to build one of these available, from the bill of materials to the software running on the Pi-compatible board to the case designs. It’s a valuable piece of technology to have around even if you don’t live in fire-prone areas. Not only can wildfire smoke travel across entire continents but simple household activities such as cooking (especially with natural gas or propane) can decimate indoor air quality.
You can see that for yourself with an army of ESP32-based air quality sensors
. | 12 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396864",
"author": "PMTwoPointFiveGrump",
"timestamp": "2021-11-05T06:24:20",
"content": "There have been a lot of these PM2.5 projects recently. This one looks very nice other than maybe the lack of external charging? I must have missed it because it would have to be there.BUT. ... | 1,760,372,893.668519 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/04/brain-implant-offers-artificial-vision-to-the-blind/ | Brain Implant Offers Artificial Vision To The Blind | Al Williams | [
"Medical Hacks",
"News",
"Science"
] | [
"blind",
"blindness",
"brain prosthesis",
"sight",
"vision",
"visual cortex"
] | Nothing makes you appreciate your vision more than getting a little older and realizing that it used to be better and that it will probably get worse. But imagine how much more difficult it would be if you were totally blind. That was what happened to [Berna Gomez] when, at 42, she developed a medical condition that destroyed her optic nerves leaving her blind in a matter of days and ending her career as a science teacher. But thanks to science [Gomez] can now see, at least to some extent. She volunteered after 16 years to have a penny-sized device with 96 electrodes implanted in her visual cortex. The research is in the
Journal of Clinical Investigation
and while it is a crude first step, it shows lots of promise and uses some very novel techniques to overcome certain limitations.
The 96 electrodes were in a 10×10 grid with the four corner electrodes missing. The resolution, of course, is lacking, but the project turned to a glasses-mounted camera to acquire images and process them, reducing them to signals for the electrodes that may not directly map to the image.
After a few weeks to settle, the electrodes could cause bright spots to appear to the patient. However, she also randomly saw bright spots before the surgery, so the first task was to teach her to distinguish between the normal flashes and the ones from the electrodes. In the end, the patient was able to differentiate horizontal from vertical lines and identify some letters.
The processing is not only necessary to accommodate the low resolution, but also to overcome some limitations in the electrodes. For example, activating two neighboring electrodes at once tended to create a single spot a little brighter than the normal spot. In addition, only 88 of the electrodes caused visualization in the patient, so any scheme had to map around the “dead pixels.”
While we don’t think brain prosthesis design is a wise area for hacking, it does point to future possibilities as science learns more about how to feed input right to our brains. Imagine a VR headset that could just draw images on your visual cortex, bypassing lenses and your eyeballs.
There have been many attempts to provide
some level of sight to the blind
. If you don’t have the stomach for brain surgery, you can always focus on
accessibility devices
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396841",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2021-11-05T02:57:25",
"content": "I just watched a video about this technology the other day. This looks like a very promising tech, especially with the prospect of future improvements.What an amazing time to be alive!",
"parent_i... | 1,760,372,894.128703 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/04/back-to-the-office-ergo-brings-a-bit-of-home-sweet-home/ | Back-to-the-Office Ergo Brings A Bit Of Home Sweet Home | Kristina Panos | [
"Peripherals Hacks"
] | [
"diy keyboard",
"keyboard",
"one-piece split keyboard",
"split keyboard"
] | We sure do love a good one-piece split keyboard, and it’s not just because you never have to worry about the halves drifting too far apart throughout the day, though that’s a big plus. For one thing, the angles are always just right without having to mess with anything, so muscle memory gets you back to the home row every time. Usually, the only thing missing from these mono-block splits is the num pad.
Well, not on the SuperLyra
.
This is [Malevolti]’s back-to-the-office build, and it’s sure to start a few conversations. While we don’t have a lot of details, there will be plenty forthcoming on the
Black Cat Plasticworks website
. As soon as next year, [Malevolti] plans to sell fully-assembled SuperLyras, kits, and bare-bones PCBs. We really appreciate that it allows for either MX-type switches or Chocs, depending on the hot swap sockets installed.
As much as we love the Maltron-esque num pad in the middle, we imagine that it would be more comfortable to use if it were canted at 45° angle relative to the user’s dominant hand. Fortunately, some enterprising redditor had the same idea. They’ve already mocked this up in Photoshop and are
inviting comments on another thread
.
Want to go split, but don’t know which is right for you?
Check out this Split Keyboard Finder
. | 12 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396850",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-11-05T04:11:20",
"content": "Certainly an improvement from the days of ergonomic keyboards using only membrane switches.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6396851",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,893.877775 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/04/big-rgb-led-cube-you-can-build-too/ | Big RGB LED Cube You Can Build Too | Dave Rowntree | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"LED cube",
"PD9823",
"rgb",
"Teensy 4.0"
] | LED cubes are really nothing new, many of us consider the building of a good sized one almost an electronics rite of passage that not so many manage to find the time or have the skill to pull off. It’s our pleasure to
draw your attention to a lovely build
, showing all the processes involved, the problems and the solutions found along the way.
Building a small cube is somewhat of a trivial affair, especially without considering PWM colour mixing, however as simple maths will illustrate, as you increase the number of LEDs on each side, the total number will quickly get quite large. More LEDs need more power and increase control complexity considerably. A larger matrix like this 16 x 16 x 16 LED build, has a total of 4096. This would be a nightmare to drive with plain RGB LEDs, even with cunning multiplexing, but luckily you can buy indexable LEDs in a through-hole package similar to the ubiquitous WS2812-based SMT LEDs you see around. These are based on the PD9823 controller, which can be programmed as if they were a WS2812, at least according to
this analysis
. Now you can simply chain a column of LEDs, with the control signal passed from LED to nearest neighbour.
Early on in the video build log, you will note there are four power supply modules needed to feed this juice. If we assume each LED consumes 60 mA on full-white (the data for
this product link
shows a peak value of 100 mA) that is still a total of 246 A or around 1 kW of power. The video does shows a peak power measurement of around this figure, for the whole array on full white, so the maths seems about right.
Control is via a Teensy 4.0 using the FlexIO function of the IMXRT1060RM CPU, and a bunch of 74AHCT595 shift registers giving 32 channels of up to 1000 LEDs per channel if needed. Roughly speaking, using the DMA with FlexIO, the Teensy can drive up to 1 Million LED updates per second, which works out about 32 channels of 100 LEDs per channel updated at 330 frames/sec, so plenty of resource is available. All this is with almost no CPU intervention, freeing that up for handling the 2.4-inch LCD based UI and running the animations, which looks pretty darn slick if you ask us. You can checkout the description of the firmware in the firmware section of the
GitHub project
. 3D printed jigs allowed for bending and clipping the LEDs leads as well as fixing and aligning the LED column units, so there really is enough detail there to allow anyone so inclined reproduce this, so long as you can swallow the cost of all those LEDs.
For a different approach to LED cubes, checkout this
sweet panel based approach
, and here’s a
really small 4x4x4 module for those with less space to spare
.
Thanks [Keith] for the tip! | 35 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396779",
"author": "Darren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-04T20:28:25",
"content": "A small fortune for the LEDs alone.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6396781",
"author": "J.Cook",
"timestamp": "2021-11-04T20:35:39",
"con... | 1,760,372,894.037406 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/04/3d-printed-braiding-machine-will-show-you-the-ropes/ | 3D-Printed Braiding Machine Will Show You The Ropes | Kristina Panos | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"braiding machine",
"maypole braider"
] | A maypole braider, aka a circular braider, is a type of horn gear braider that makes braided tubes, like one of those woven finger traps or that lovely bit of gutted paracord that’s jazzing up your otherwise boring DIY USB cable. They are called so because the action mimics the motion of a group of maypole dancers bobbing and weaving around each other in an intricate choreography that results in an equally intricate pole decoration job.
Maypole braiders like [kmatch98]’s are responsible for all kinds of ropes, cords, and other braided goods like fly-fishing lines
. They use three or more bobbins, each loaded up with a single strand of yarn.
One of the most important parts of braiding anything, including hair, is maintaining tension on the braid as you go. Here, each bobbin rides inside a bobbin carrier, which performs a number of tasks — it holds the bobbin in place, releases yarn when it’s supposed to, and maintains tension on the yarn while skating a figure eight around the track.
This mesmerizing machine consists of spur gears, a frame with a figure 8 track, a pair of horn gears, and a foot — a guide on the bottom of the bobbin that rides along in the track. Early on, [kmatch98] made a fidget spinner version to visualize the basic function. He studied pictures of commercial bobbin carriers and managed to not only reverse engineer them, but improve the design by eliminating one of the two springs and replacing it with gravity. The remaining spring is used for the bobbin release.
Surprisingly, this isn’t the first plastic braiding machine we’ve featured.
Here’s one made of freakin’ LEGO
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6396810",
"author": "CityZen",
"timestamp": "2021-11-04T22:01:28",
"content": "I was unable to see how a cable or other thing-to-be-braided could pass through this mechanism, so I googled maypole braiders and I see that a complete braiding machine would need not just two gears, but ... | 1,760,372,894.082324 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/04/three-more-remoticon-speakers-complete-the-lineup/ | Three More Remoticon Speakers Complete The Lineup | Kristina Panos | [
"cons",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Remoticon",
"presenters",
"Remoticon",
"talks"
] | You know, it’s hard to believe, but
Hackaday Remoticon 2021
is just two weeks away. Every year, we work hard to make the ‘con a little better and brighter than the one before it, and this year is no exception. We’ve already got a star-studded list of keynote speakers, and our list of inspiring talks seems to get longer and more exciting every week. With todays announcement of three more speakers, that list is complete and available along with their scheduled times on
the official Remoticon website
.
Come and see what we’ve got in store for you on Friday, November 19th and Saturday, November 20th. Remoticon admission is absolutely free this year, unless you want a t-shirt to commemorate the event for a paltry $25. Tickets are still available — in fact, they’ll be available right up until Remoticon Day One on the 19th, but if you want a shirt you’ll need to grab one of those tickets by a week from today.
Go get yours now!
Okay, let’s get on to today’s announcement of the speakers!
Jay Bowles
A Dip Into the Plasmaverse
Ball bearings vs. high voltage!
Plasma isn’t just the stuff in your blood that’s worth more than a stale chocolate chip cookie down at the donation center. It’s the fourth state of matter, and it can be achieved with high voltage, high heat, or strong electromagnetic fields. Does science get any cooler than invisible control over objects? We think not.
Jay Bowles is certainly no stranger to these pages. Who could forget the
handheld exciter wand
or
the time Jay piped power using only water and ball valves?
To say that Jay is passionate about plasma physics is an understatement — he believes it is the key to the future.
This high-energy talk is sure to spark your interest, whether it’s the electronic levitation demonstration that involves Jay’s body and 80,000 volts, or the part where Jay gets up close and personal with fire to control and influence it using 100,000 volts, or the bit where he teaches your new favorite winter party trick — drawing in fog and/or mist by merely pointing at it. We’re pretty charged up for this one!
Colin O’Flynn
Upskilling Your Hardware Security Work
There’s a lot more to hardware hacking than just the 101-level stuff of serial consoles and dumping SPI flash. Although the other stuff may seem daunting at first, Colin O’Flynn’s talk will demystify topics like side channel power analysis and fault insertion.
Far from being some inaccessible lecture, this talk will focus on experimentation along with the tools and basic knowledge required to actually get something going. Colin is going to show how to do it with tools you probably already have, like an oscilloscope, a spare Arduino, and a handful of discrete components.
Colin will be using his own creation, the ChipWhisperer (
second prize winner
in the inaugural Hackaday Prize), and referencing the Hardware Hacking Handbook, which is a new guide he wrote with Jasper van Woudenberg. Colin will demonstrate where to poke and prod to get that piece of hardware to spill its secrets, and he’ll reveal the locations of some free and/or inexpensive educational info.
Hash Salehi
Smart Meter Hacking
Remember when you’d occasionally see someone traipsing through your yard with a clipboard, because they were coming to read the electromechanical meter? Like so many other things, power meters went smart sometime in the last 25 years.
Hash is reverse-engineering smart power meters, doing everything from demystifying undocumented wireless protocols to dumping the microcontrollers’ firmware. Since these meters are meant to stay in place for a decade or more, that leaves plenty of time to gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on, and how vulnerable all that information criss-crossing the neighborhood may be.
There’s plenty for the community to uncover from these black boxes, since there isn’t much publicly-available information about them. Hash will be presenting his latest research into smart meters and will discuss the tools he uses to reverse engineer them.
So Many Speakers!
This fourth and final round of talks, which brings our total to sixteen, plus our three keynote speakers.
We’ve set up a handy site with all the speakers and their subjects
so you don’t have to keep sifting through Hackaday articles for conference announcements.
Combine all of this awesomeness with
Hacker Trivia
, the Bring-A-Hack social hour, and of course, the Hackaday Prize ceremony and closing blowout party, and the weekend is going to be unforgettable! We may even have a few more surprises up our sleeves. Who knows? Don’t wait any longer —
go get your ticket! | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397055",
"author": "Unfocused",
"timestamp": "2021-11-06T05:39:32",
"content": "Is there an .ICS calendar file available for the talk schedule?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,894.208722 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/04/spooky-winners-of-the-halloween-hackfest-contest/ | Spooky Winners Of The Halloween Hackfest Contest | Kristina Panos | [
"contests",
"Holiday Hacks"
] | [
"halloween",
"Halloween Hackfest",
"winners"
] | It was a tight race, but the results of
the Halloween Hackfest contest
are in. We asked you to scare up a terrifying build in one of three categories, and as usual, you didn’t disappoint! These three hackers have each won a $150 shopping spree at Digi-Key to fund their future frights.
Best Undead Tech: 3-Axis Skull Mod for a 12-Foot Skeleton
Nelson Bairos
[Nelson] has been in the Halloween-based animatronics business for more than a decade, but always gets beaten to the punch when it comes to doing the really fun stuff like making things move and speak. Once [Nelson] got their hands on a 12-foot skeleton from the big box hardware store,
it was time for the gloves to come off and the fun to begin
.
The three axes of movement come from a rotation servo, a tilt servo, and a nod servo, all of which are connected to each other and the skeleton with 3D-printed supports. Lucky for us, [Nelson] documented this first build quite nicely and provided the 3D models, should you suddenly get the urge to go see if they have any of these magnificent skeletons left on clearance.
Best Haunted Smart House: Safety Coffin Grave Bell
Glen Atkins
What’s scarier than the undead? How about people who were buried alive, whether accidentally or not. Can you imagine hanging around in a graveyard, innocently doing tombstone rubbings or some ritualistic sacrifice when suddenly you hear someone ringing a bell and/or a terrified, muddled voice screaming for help?
[Glen Atkins]’
Safety Coffin Grave Bell
build forgoes the body part, but in the dark, it’s easy to let your imagination run wild. It looks like a bell on a post, but pass too close and the ultrasonic rangefinder detects unsuspecting trick-or-treaters and gives them a scare by frantically ringing the bell with a big servo hidden inside. We hope they brought spare underwear.
Best Crazy Costume: Computer Head
Skye Rutan-bedard
[Skye] won a lot of people over last year with their computer head costume that featured a lone blinking eye and a voice. What those people didn’t know was that it suffered from three big problems: it had poor ergonomics from a heavy monitor shell, the blinkenlights matrix used to display emotions was underutilized, and using a keyboard proved to be an inconvenient UI for running the voice. This year, [Skye]
set out to fix all the problems and make the costume even more awesome and comfortable
to wear.
The brain of this computer head costume is a Raspberry Pi 4. As for [Skye]’s actual head, it is safely enclosed inside a hard hat that’s epoxied to the inside of the case. A wide range of emotions dance across the 16×16 RGB LED matrix that looks great behind some mirrored film, and they go great with the new voice method — [Skye] speaks softly into a small microphone, and the Raspi uses Mozilla’s DeepSpeech to repeat whatever they say in a robotic British accent.
Hack-y Halloween
Congratulations to all the winners, and a big thank you to
all 45 entrants
for your hair-raising hacks. Thank you also to Adafruit and Digi-Key for sponsoring this contest. We hope you had a great Halloween! | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,894.170017 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/06/separating-ideas-from-words/ | Separating Ideas From Words | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"copyright",
"general index",
"ideas",
"newsletter"
] | We covered
Malamud’s General Index
this week, and Mike and I were talking about it
on the podcast
as well. It’s the boldest attempt we’ve seen so far to open up scientific knowledge for everyone, and not just the wealthiest companies and institutions. The trick is how to do that without running afoul of copyright law, because the results of research are locked inside their literary manifestations — the journal articles.
The Index itself is composed of one-to-five-word snippets of 107,233,728 scientific articles. So if you’re looking for everything the world knows about “tincture of iodine”, you can find all the papers that mention it, and then important keywords from the corpus and metadata like the ISBN of the article. It’s like the searchable card catalog of, well, everything. And it’s freely downloadable if you’ve got a couple terabytes of storage to spare. That alone is incredible.
What I think is most remarkable is this makes good on figuring out how to separate scientific ideas from their prison — the words in which they’re written — which are subject to copyright. Indeed, if you look into
US copyright law
, it’s very explicit about not wanting to harm the free sharing of ideas.
“In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.”
But this has always been paradoxical. How do you restrict dissemination of the papers without restricting dissemination of the embodied ideas or results? In the olden days, you could tell others about the results, but that just doesn’t scale. Until today, only the richest companies and institutions had access to this bird’s eye view of scientific research — similar datasets gleaned from Google’s book-scanning program have trained their AIs and seeded their search machines, but they only give you
a useless and limited peek
.
Of course, if you want to read the entirety of particular papers under copyright, you still have to pay for them. And that’s partly the point, because the General Index is not meant to destroy copyrights, but give you access to the underlying knowledge
despite
the real world constraints on implementing copyright law, and we think that stands to be revolutionary.
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
! | 11 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397167",
"author": "eckythump",
"timestamp": "2021-11-06T17:57:51",
"content": "Scientific literature is slowly getting to the point where all papers will be provided completely free (both to read and to publish) in one way or another. Either as preprints (Arxiv or similar), or dr... | 1,760,372,894.255458 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/06/3d-printed-fan-mount-keeps-server-gpu-cool-in-desktop-case/ | 3D-printed Fan Mount Keeps Server GPU Cool In Desktop Case | Robin Kearey | [
"computer hacks"
] | [
"active cooling",
"gpu",
"Nvidia Tesla"
] | Most readers of Hackaday will be well aware of the current shortages of semiconductors and especially GPUs. Whether you’re planning to build a state-of-the art gaming PC, a mining rig to convert your kilowatt-hours into cryptocoins, or are simply experimenting with machine-learning AI, you should be prepared to shell out quite a bit more money for a proper GPU than in the good old days.
Bargains are still to be had in the second-hand market though. [Devon Bray] chanced upon a pair of Nvidia Tesla K80 cards, which are not suitable for gaming and no longer cost-effective for mining crypto, but ideal for [Devon]’s machine-learning calculations. However, he had to make a
modification to enable proper thermal management
, as these cards were not designed to be used in regular desktop PCs.
The reason for this is that many professional-grade GPU accelerators are installed in rack-mounted server cases, and are therefore equipped with heat sinks but no fans: the case is meant to provide a forced air flow to carry away the card’s heat. Simply installing the cards into a desktop PC case would cause them to overheat, as passive cooling will not get rid of the 300 W that each card pumps out on full load.
[Devon] decided to make a proper thermal solution by 3D printing a mount that carries three fans along with an air duct that snaps onto the GPU card. In order to prevent unnecessary fan noise, he added a thermal control system consisting of a Raspberry Pi Pico, a handful of MOSFETs, and a thermistor to sense the GPU’s temperature, so the fans are only driven when the card is getting hot. The Pi Pico is of course way more powerful than needed for such a simple task, but allowed [Devon] to program it in MicroPython, using more advanced programming techniques than would be possible on, say, an Arduino.
We love the elegant design of the fan duct, which enables two of these huge cards to fit onto a motherboard side-by-side. We’ve seen people working on the opposite problem of
fitting large fans into small cases
, as well as designs that
discard the whole idea of using fans
for cooling. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397109",
"author": "Cricri",
"timestamp": "2021-11-06T12:25:06",
"content": "Considering he’s stacking 2 card side by side, instead of each card having an individual shroud with 40mm fans, he could probably have pushed more air by creating a single intake shroud with 2 (potentially... | 1,760,372,894.363681 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/06/louisville-slugger-puts-this-bass-on-base/ | Louisville Slugger Puts This Bass On Base | Kristina Panos | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"string bass",
"string trimmer",
"trimmer line"
] | One of the most recognizable instruments in both jug band and American folk music has got to be the washtub bass. Also known as gutbuckets, these instruments tend to use an old broom for a neck and usually have a single string.
We would argue that the design of
[goaly]’s single-string double gutbucket
owes something to the double bass of the violin family as well, with its figure eight shape. On top of those tubs is a plywood soundboard, which is screwed into a series of wood blocks around the lip of the tubs.
For the combination neck and fretboard, [goaly] called up a vintage Louisville Slugger, which is way more interesting than some old broom handle. [goaly] extended the backbone through the body with scrap lengths of 2″x2″, and this spine runs through both tubs and acts as a peg on the bottom. In lieu of a tailpiece, the string is tied to a board that the player secures with their foot.
Although [goaly] experimented with steel cable, clothesline rope, nylon rope, and paracord first, the string is made from weed whacker trimmer line. At the top, the string is attached through the neck — it’s held down with a couple of bent fender washers and pulled taut with a wingnut. We love that [goaly] even fashioned a wooden tool to make it easy to turn the wingnut. And we also love the DIY bridge, which looks like a little person.
There are a couple of ways to make sounds with this thing. Fretting and plucking work, of course, but so does bending the whole thing backward to change the pitch. For a good time, do both. We think it sounds nice and thump-y, and it even makes great percussive sounds on the front and back. Check it out in action after the break.
Don’t have a washtub?
A wheelbarrow works too, and it comes with its own stand
. | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397156",
"author": "Ren",
"timestamp": "2021-11-06T17:23:20",
"content": "I made a similar tool to tighten the wing used for a toilet seat. The wingnuts were in a “hollow” that prevented me from getting a good grip with a pliers.So, I drilled a hole in one end of a thick dowel and... | 1,760,372,894.31943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/11/05/unique-pomodoro-timer-displays-quotes-while-you-work/ | Unique Pomodoro Timer Displays Quotes While You Work | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"books",
"e-ink",
"e-ink display",
"elixir",
"Nerves platform",
"pomodoro",
"raspberry pi",
"the pomodoro technique"
] | [zorbash] came up with a great side project while designing a way to read notes and highlighted sections from e-books without having to use Good Reads or the Amazon tool:
build a gadget to display a parade of quotes from favorite authors and their books
. The project is called Brain because it’s built on an IoT platform called Nerves.
As a bonus, the gadget functions as a Pomodoro timer of sorts — that’s the time management method where you work for 25-minute periods and take 5-minute breaks in between, with a longer break every four Pomodoros. Brain displays a quote for 25 minutes and then flashes the screen to draw [zorbash]’s attention to the fact that time is up. We think this is a nice, unobtrusive way to do things. There are no breaks built in, but that’s just how [zorbash] rolls.
The quotes are fetched using
Bookworm
, a script [zorbash] wrote that’s available on GitHub. It uses a Raspberry Pi 2 B, an SD card to store the JSON’d quotes, and a Wi-Fi dongle to allow the fetching. If you’re wondering about the enclosure, it’s made of clay.
If you like your Pomodoro timers a little more physical,
here’s one that starts as soon as you plug it in to a USB port
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6397107",
"author": "Pokka",
"timestamp": "2021-11-06T12:07:00",
"content": "If you’re doing pomodoro then you don’t have time to read silly quotes.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6397153",
"author": "Tom",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,372,894.397824 |
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