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https://hackaday.com/2021/08/25/diy-wigglegram-camera-lens-sends-a-message-to-big-photo/ | DIY Wigglegram Camera Lens Sends A Message To Big Photo | Kristina Panos | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"camera lens",
"Canon SLR",
"disposable cameras",
"quadrascopic camera",
"stereograph",
"stereopticon images",
"wigglegram"
] | Have you ever heard of a wigglegram? They are made by shooting multiple pictures at once using multiple lenses, and the the resulting stitched-together ‘gram is kind of a gif version of a stereographic image. It looks 3D, and it — well, it wiggles. The ones with a boomerang effect (i.e. a good loop) are especially prized.
Wigglegrams are often produced with Nishika quadrascopic cameras, which have naturally climbed in price to address the growing demand. Nishikas have four lenses and create four separate half-frame images by splitting the four photos across two frames of film. In contrast,
[Joshua]’s DIY eye uses three plastic lenses from disposable film cameras to put three images onto a single frame of film
.
The only real drawback is that the camera has to be close to the subject because the three lenses are so tightly packed. Another drawback is that there is no viewfinder while using this lens. There have to be divider walls between the three lenses to keep the images separate, and these walls have to extend all the way into the camera body. The Canon A-1’s viewfinder mirror does not allow for this, so [Joshua] pushed it up out of the way.
[Joshua]’s initial design approach to finding the ideal lens distance from the film plane was to do a bunch of calculations, but he ended up Goldilocks-ing it and iterating a bunch of times until it was just right. If you have a Canon SLR and want to build one of these,
you’re in luck as far as the STLs go
.
What else can you do with a bunch of old disposable cameras?
Build your own flash, of course
.
[via
r/functionalprint] | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6375126",
"author": "Glen Kleinschmidt",
"timestamp": "2021-08-26T01:33:19",
"content": "Hmm, I guess that I could grab a few frames from any moving-camera video I’ve shot and fill my hard drive with enough wigglegrams to drive me dizzy – no special hardware needed.Is this really a ... | 1,760,372,973.096723 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/25/pokemon-time-machine-lets-you-really-catch-em-all/ | Pokemon Time Machine Lets You Really Catch ‘Em All | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks",
"Nintendo Hacks"
] | [
"game boy",
"Game Boy Link Cable",
"Link Cable",
"pokemon"
] | Since 1996 the Pokemon series of games has moved through eight distinct generations, which roughly parallel the lineage of Nintendo’s handheld gaming systems. While the roster of “pocket monsters” has been updated steadily, players have had the option of bringing captured Pokemon from the older games into the newer releases. But there’s always been a gap in this capability. Due to hardware differences, the Game Boy and Game Boy Color generations of games were physically unable to communicate with the titles released for the Game Boy Advance.
But soon, that may no longer be the case.
[Selim] is hard at work on
Lanette’s Poke Transporter
, a hardware and software solution for bringing Pokemon from the first and second generation games onto the third generation GBA games. Once they’ve been loaded there, players can move the creatures all the way up into the contemporary Pokemon games via official means.
The first Pokemon to make the generational leap.
The project was started in July of 2020, with [Selim] first focusing on the logistical challenges of bringing such early Pokemon into the newer games. Because so much changed between the different generations, there are many sanity checks that need to be made during the transfer. For example, the moves and techniques that the creatures are able to learn isn’t necessarily consistent between these early entries into the series. But after about a year of effort, the software side worked reliably on emulated games, and it was time to start thinking about the hardware.
Ultimately, [Selim] wants to create a physical device into which players can insert their Pokemon cartridges and trigger an automatic transfer. The code is already able to read and write to the cartridges, and has been ported over to Arduino so it doesn’t need a computer to run. A few prototype PCBs have been created, and beyond the inevitable bodges, it seems like they’re functional. There’s still breadboards and jumpers for as far as the eye can see, but this is the first step towards producing a dedicated Pokemon “time machine” that can transport them from the late 1990s to the present day.
With [stacksmashing] recently showing that the
Raspberry Pi Pico is fast enough to emulate the Game Boy’s “Link Cable” accessory
, and the
protocol for trading Pokemon over the wire fairly well understood
, we wonder if one day this technique couldn’t be done in real-time between linked handhelds. If you can make two copies of
Tetris
connect to each other over the Internet, it seems like you’d have enough time to fiddle with a Charizard’s stats. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6375071",
"author": "Gilliam Vespa",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T20:24:40",
"content": "trade all your uber pokemons to the device, receive nothing but ratatas back from it.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6375074",
"auth... | 1,760,372,972.711812 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/25/this-modular-differential-probe-shows-great-attention-to-detail/ | This Modular Differential Probe Shows Great Attention To Detail | Dave Rowntree | [
"hardware",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"differential probe",
"pcb",
"spark gap"
] | [Petteri Aimonen] presents for us a
modular differential probe
, as his entry into the 2021 Hackaday Prize.
This project shows a simple and well polished implementation of a differential-to-single-ended preamplifier, which allows a differential signal to be probed and fed to an oscilloscope via a BNC cable.
PCB Spark gap for primary ESD protection
It implements a classic instrumentation amplifier, where we have two amplifier stages. The first gives us the options for a gain of either 1 or 10, if we need it, with the second stage having a gain of 2.
The remaining circuit is a power supply to generate the necessary dual-rail supplies to feed the opamps. There is a lot of filtering on those output rails as well as on the USB power input side to try keep all that switched-mode power supply noise out of the signal path.
There are a couple of interesting design choices including the use of PCB material for the long removable probe arms, that integrate PCB spark gaps to offer a first defence against ESD reaching the more delicate parts of the system.
Why This Is Useful
There are two main classes of signals we electronics engineers care about: single-ended and differential-mode.
With the first kind, the signal is carried on a single wire, which is defined as being referenced to the common system ground. Current flows along the wire and returns to its source along the path of least resistance, at least at low frequencies. At higher frequencies, the path of least inductance is more relevant. This is all well and good, so long as you design the PCB correctly.
Coupling from adjacent wires due to mutual capacitance and inductance, as well as noise in the reference ground all conspire to mangle the signal we want to pass down the wire.
As the frequencies increase, and especially if you’re dealing with sharp edges, with all that extra odd-harmonic power, things start to get bad real fast. The way we deal with this is by utilising
differential-mode signalling
. This is where instead of a single wire, referenced to some notion of ground, we send the signal down a pair of wires, where the voltage
difference
between the wires forms the signal. Any external noise that leaks into the pair, will (hopefully!) affect both wires equally, forming what we call a common-mode component. When you look at the difference, this common mode noise disappears. (Our own [Bil Herd]
covered this some time ago
.)
When probing a circuit, it pays to have the right kind of probe as well as an understanding of the effect the probe will have on the circuit in operation. If you have a single-ended signal and you want to view it on your scope, your choice is either a passive or active probe. Usually some kind of passive probe will be most available. These commonly come in 50 Ω and 1 MΩ versions, and you need to be careful to use the correct probe type for your application.
For probing differential signals, it is possible to use a pair of probes, one for each signal wire, and then utilise the scope’s math difference function to show the signal. This is quite often a desperate measure, and what you really want is a differential front-end in hardware. You need a differential active probe.
The circuit may be simple, but don’t underestimate how much tweaking it needs to have good performance – a little slip with the PCB layout, as the author describes, caused some annoying resonances which can be hard to track down.
The project is still under active development, with the author showing the process as the project progresses, but its looking pretty good already, if you ask us.
Sources can
found on his GitHib
, which uses all Open Source tools, so its pretty accessible too.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 14 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6375047",
"author": "Drone",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T19:28:43",
"content": "Umm… we need this why? There are at least two channels, A and B, on an oscilloscope. Certainly on an oscilloscope capable of 100 MHz. So just invert channel B then enable A + B mode. Voila, a built-in diffe... | 1,760,372,972.657393 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/wood-and-glue-scale-kayak-is-super/ | Wood And Glue Scale Kayak Is Super | Michael Shaub | [
"News"
] | [] | While we don’t feature many woodworking projects here, we always love learning from people who really know their stuff in any medium. [Brian Oltrogge] showed us a hands-off way to shape aluminum with this
3D print sand-casting project
and now brings us a very hands-on kayak project.
We have seen kayaks made from
plastic wrap
and
3D printed parts
, and in the video after the break, [Brian Oltrogge] is building a scale model to validate a wood kayak design created with Rhino 3D and Grasshopper. Besides being a joy to watch the craft of the project, the video is full of great hacks. The “buck” that the wood is formed over sits on CNC cut stands that slot into it. The thickness of three layers of laminated veneer fits the 1:4 scale model perfectly representing 3/4” plywood, and the laser-cut parts use the exact pattern that the final full-size CNC will.
There are also some great tool hacks hidden in the video. [Brian Oltrogge] tells us about a
spiral scroll saw blade
that can cut in any direction, but as a bonus tip, we also can see a clamp compressing the saw while the blade is tensioned. Watch the video through the end to see some clever wall-mounting brackets too.
The video doesn’t tell us what a Stitch & Glue boat is or how the full-scale will be assembled. To find out more about that, see this charmingly odd
vintage film from Chesapeake Light Craft
.
Thanks for the tip [Keith Olson] | 7 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374637",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T09:39:42",
"content": "Certainly a thing of beauty, as I’m sure will be said for the full sized version also. No doubt he’ll appreciate it even more, cutting the pieces by hand, unless he happens to have the utility of a laser c... | 1,760,372,973.041566 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/wooden-monowheel-build-is-simplicity-itself/ | Wooden Monowheel Build Is Simplicity Itself | Dave Rowntree | [
"Misc Hacks",
"Transportation Hacks"
] | [
"monowheel",
"wooden"
] | Monowheels are nothing new, first being patented in the middle of the 19th century, but never really went mainstream due to, well, quite a lot of obvious issues. We’ve got problems with forward visibility, stability, steering, especially at speed, and the hilariously-named ‘gerbiling’ where the rider can spin around inside the wheel akin to a gerbil in a wheel. Fun times! But obviously that didn’t stop [The Q] from adding to the monowheel corpus by
building one out of wood
.
Sometimes people take on these projects simply for a laugh, like this
bright orange one
we covered a while back. Sometimes they’re powered by a motor, be it electric or internal combustion. Some are hand-cranked, some are pedal-powered, its all been tried.
[The Q] is no stranger to interesting wooden builds, and this video from a year ago shows him building a very simple direct-pedal-drive monowheel. The vast majority of the structure is wood, glued and screwed the old-fashioned way, with a bit of metalwork where necessary. We particularly like the simple counterweight solution which doubles up as a parking brake. It may look a little ungainly, but we can’t think of a simpler solution that would make much sense.
The build video after the break is six and half minutes of well executed videography for your viewing pleasure. | 9 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374616",
"author": "Fosselius",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T07:34:38",
"content": "Awesome build, I wonder if it will turn if you tilt/lean to the side? looks quite heavy..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6374643",
"author": "... | 1,760,372,972.599328 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/nothing-should-cloud-the-build-of-this-wieldy-weather-widget/ | Nothing Should Cloud The Build Of This Wieldy Weather Widget | Kristina Panos | [
"home hacks",
"Microcontrollers"
] | [
"ESP8266",
"forecast",
"touch screen",
"weather"
] | Weather is one of those things that seems to be endlessly interesting to hackers. We may decry the notion that weather can be accurately predicted two days out, much less seven, but if there’s an extended forecast available, by gosh we’re gonna take a gander at it.
So why pick up your phone or open a browser tab every time you want to check the temperature?
If you’re so into it, you should build a desktop weather widget
. [opengreenenergy] has written a great guide to a tidy build of this classic and oh-so-useful project that covers everything from the soldering to obtaining an API key. Inside is an ESP8266 and a 2.8″ touch screen display that shows localized conditions via Open Weather Map. The main screen shows the time, date, current weather, 7-day forecast, and the moon phase for each day, and subsequent screens go into further detail. It’s informative without being busy.
We love the streamlined look of
the snap-fit enclosure
. This may be a fairly simple project, but the build as designed is challenging due to the space constraints inside. Check out the video after the break, which features the venerable Stickvise.
What? You’ve never heard of the Stickvise? You must be new around here.
Allow me to introduce you two
. | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374608",
"author": "Flotsam",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T05:39:07",
"content": "Bonus points for using ‘wieldy’ in a headline. An underappreciated word.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374673",
"author": "Ren",
... | 1,760,372,973.319615 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/automatic-nut-sorter-for-a-tidy-workspace/ | Automatic Nut Sorter For A Tidy Workspace | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"nut",
"nuts",
"sorting"
] | We all have that one drawer or box full of random hardware. You don’t want to get rid of anything because as soon as you do, that’s the one thing you’ll need. But, honestly, you’ll be lucky to find what you need in there, anyway. Enter [Mr. Innovative’s]
nut sorting machine
. As you can see in the video below, it will make order out of the chaos, at least for nuts.
You might think the device would need optical recognition software or some other high-tech mechanism. But, in fact, it is nothing more than a motor with a speed controller. The sorting is done by a plastic piece built like stairs. When a nut is too tall to fit under the next step, it slides out into the output hopper. You could probably turn the whole thing with a crank and no electricity at all if you wanted to.
Drilling out the shaft required a bit of machine tool usage, so this might not be a great weekend project without a lathe. Like many of the commenters on the video mentioned, we probably wouldn’t have used a rod holder as a rotating bearing, either, but for as little as something like this would probably operate, it is likely to last a fair amount of time. It would be easy to replace it or even affix a shaft to the motor with a coupler, sidestepping several issues.
Apparently, the device isn’t perfect. You do get some missorts. We imagine that’s from a larger nut pushing a smaller nut on the way to the hopper. The Thingiverse files seem to be missing, but this is something you’d probably adapt to your own design, anyway.
It isn’t as automated, but we’ve seen a gadget that can help
sort drill bits
, too. Sometimes you want to
sort little parts by color
, too. | 28 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374541",
"author": "Andy Pugh",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T23:22:43",
"content": "I leave disappointed. Sorting nuts by height seems like a partial solution at best.My bucket of nuts has metric, UNC, UNF, BSF and both BS190 (large hex) and BS1083 (small-hex) Whitworth. With BS190 bei... | 1,760,372,972.775131 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/school-surplus-laptop-bios-hacked-to-remove-hardware-restrictions/ | School Surplus Laptop BIOS Hacked To Remove Hardware Restrictions | Ryan Flowers | [
"computer hacks",
"laptops hacks"
] | [
"bios",
"flash",
"reverse engineering",
"right to repair",
"soic8",
"UEFI"
] | Why did [Hales] end up
hacking the BIOS on a 10 year old laptop left over from an Australian education program
? When your BIOS starts telling you you’re not allowed to use a particular type of hardware, you don’t have much of a choice.
Originally [Hales] planned on purchasing a used Lenovo X260 to replace his dying laptop, but his plans were wrecked. A pandemic-induced surge in demand that even the used laptop market caused prices to bloat. The need for a small and affordable laptop with a built in Ethernet port led to the purchase of a Lenovo Thinkpad x131e. Although the laptop was older than he liked, [Hales] was determined to make it work. Little did he know the right-to-repair journey he was about to embark on.
Problems first arose when the Broadcom WiFi adapter stopped working reliably. He replaced it, but the coaxial antenna cable was found to be damaged. Even after replacing the damaged cabling, the WiFi adapter was still operating very poorly. Recalling past problems with fickle Broadcom WiFi adapters, it was decided that an Intel mPCIe WiFi adapter would take its place. When power was re-applied, [Hales] was shocked to find the following message:
Unauthorized network card is plugged in – Power off and remove the miniPCI network card
And this is where things got interesting. With off the shelf SOIC8 clips and a CH340 programmer, [Hales] dumped the BIOS from the laptop’s flash chip to another computer and started hacking away. After countless hours of researching, prodding, hacking, and reverse engineering, the laptop was useful once again with the new Intel WiFi adapter. His site documents in great detail how he was able to reverse engineer the BIOS over the course of several days.
But that’s not all! [Hales] was also able to modify the hardware so that his slightly more modern mPCIe WiFi adapter would come back on after the computer had been put in Hibernation. It’s an elegant hack, and be sure to
check [Hales’] site to get the full
details. And at the end, there’s a nice Easter egg for anybody who’s ever wanted to make their laptop boot up with their
own
logo.
We applaud [Hales] for his fine efforts to keep working equipment out of the landfill. We’ve covered many
hacks that had similar goals in the past
. Do you have a hack you’d like to share? Submit it via the
Tips Line
. | 50 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374486",
"author": "MinorHavoc",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T20:23:54",
"content": "Very cool hack and very nice work! The chance of bricking a laptop messing with the BIOS always seems high.On thing–I think the 1802 Wi-Fi card error was (is?) a standard “feature” of Lenovo laptop BI... | 1,760,372,972.875547 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/redefine-robots-is-the-newest-hackaday-prize-challenge/ | Redefine Robots Is The Newest Hackaday Prize Challenge | Mike Szczys | [
"contests",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Robots Hacks",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"redefine robots"
] | Roboticists and automation enthusiasts, start your engines. This 2021 Hackaday Prize challenge is made just for you! It’s
the Redefine Robots challenge
and it calls for a softer, more utopian side of what tomorrow’s automated future can be.
The promise of robots has always been one of making our lives better. But so far we still don’t have a robot assistant sitting next to us ready to lend a hand. That’s where you come in! Whether it’s a physical, nuts-and-bots robot or a 1’s and 0’s software bot, create something that people can see and interact with in their day-to-day lives in ways that make sense and make us feel good about where technology is going.
We make fun of the robot that’s been brought into the world to pass the butter, but honestly if that’s something someone needs help with, isn’t a robot a pretty good solution? That’s what [Michael Roybal] thought way back during the 2016 Hackaday Prize when
he designed Zizzy the robot to zip around a tabletop
, assisting people with limited mobility.
In the same year, [Mike Rigsby] was working on
a little bot whose purpose was to wander around interacting with people
. A robot companion (dare we say pet?) is one way to keep up interactivity for people spending long periods of time alone. Along the same lines is
the EMOJO chatbot
already entered in this year’s contest that seeks to deliver a digital companion onscreen.
Assistive robots aren’t the only ones to shine here. Consider some labor savers, like
pick-and-place robots that help you build electronics
. Does that reinvent robots? Maybe, maybe not, but
getting a 3D printer to do your solder for you
sure does. Think of how revolutionary robot vacuums were for people who own both hardwood floors and cats. Those bots are around humans all the time and seem normal now. What’s next automation to get this introduction into everyday life?
Ten finalists from this round will win $500 and be shuttled onto the final round judging in October for a chance at the $25,000 Hackaday Prize and four other top prizes. Start your project page on Hackaday.io and use the drop-down in the left sidebar to enter it into
the 2021 Hackaday Prize
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374464",
"author": "Rabs",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T19:27:38",
"content": "I want one of those egg-and-spoon-race robots!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374478",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T20... | 1,760,372,973.152529 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/drone-hits-plane-and-this-time-its-a-real-police-one/ | Drone Hits Plane — And This Time It’s A Real (Police) One! | Jenny List | [
"Current Events",
"drone hacks",
"News",
"Slider"
] | [
"Buttonville",
"collision",
"drone",
"multirotor"
] | Over the years we’ve brought you many stories that follow the world of aviation as it struggles with the arrival of multirotors. We’ve seen phantom drone encounters cause panics and even shut airports, but it’s been vanishingly rare for such a story to have a basis in evidence. But here we are at last with a drone-aircraft collision story that involves a real drone. This time there’s a twist though, instead of one piloted by a multirotor enthusiast that would prompt a full-on media panic, it’s
a police drone that collided with a Cesna landing at Toronto’s Buttonville airport
. The York Regional Police craft was part of an operation unrelated to the airport, and
its collision with the aircraft on August 10th was enough to make a significant dent in its engine cowling
. The police
are reported to be awaiting the result of an official investigation in the incident
.
This is newsworthy in itself because despite several years and significant resources being devoted to the problem of drones hitting planes, demonstrable cases remain vanishingly rare. The machine in this case being a police one will we expect result in many fewer column inches for the event than had it been flown at the hands of a private multirotor pilot, serving only to heighten the contrast with coverage of previous events
such as the Gatwick closure lacking any drone evidence
.
It’s picking an easy target to lay into the Your Regional Police over this incident, but it is worth making the point that their reaction would have been disproportionately larger had the drone not been theirs. The CTV news report mentions that air traffic regulators were unaware of the drone’s presence:
NAV Canada, the country’s air navigation service provider, had not been notified about the YRP drone, Transport Canada said.
Given the evident danger to aviation caused by their actions it’s not unreasonable to demand that the officers concerned face the same penalties as would any other multirotor pilot who caused such an incident. We aren’t holding our breath though.
Header image: Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine,
CC0
. | 70 | 20 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374432",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T18:19:50",
"content": "Irresponsible and stupid as it would be, it would be great to really prove the point and have that same collision, or a near miss caught on camera – so much the same evidence with a private pilot… See j... | 1,760,372,973.26989 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/celebrate-mrna-vaccine-with-this-badge-that-blinks-the-nucleotide-code/ | Celebrate MRNA Vaccine With This Badge That Blinks The Nucleotide Code | Jim Heaney | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"attiny",
"attiny 1617",
"Covid-19",
"mRNA vaccine"
] | To celebrate getting his second vaccine dose [Paul Klinger] combined two of our favorite things — blinking lights and wearable tech —
to create an awesome mRNA vaccine badge
.
The badge, which is designed to be worn like a pendant, will slowly blink through all 4,000 nucleotides of the Moderna vaccine over the course of 10 minutes. Watch the video after the break to see it in action. Don’t worry if you got the Pfizer vaccine, you can use the interface button on the back of the badge to change over to Pfizer’s mRNA sequence instead. There’s even a handy legend on the badge, identifying the lipids in case your microbiology skills are a bit rusty.
On the reverse side of the board, you will find a handful of current limiting resistors, a CR2032 battery holder, and the ATtiny1617 microcontroller that runs everything. To assist in converting the mRNA sequence into LED pulses, [Paul] wrote a Python script that will automatically import the nucleotide string from the standard
.fasta
file and store each nucleotide in just 2 bits, allowing the entire sequence to fit in the program memory of the microcontroller.
This isn’t [Paul’s] first RNA-related project; he originally developed the aforementioned Python script to compress the entirety of the COVID-19 sequence, containing over 30,000 nucleotides, into program memory for his
Virus Blinky project, that we featured last year
.
[via
r/electronics
] | 20 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374793",
"author": "dan",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T23:08:34",
"content": "cool project, but something something anti science juice",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6374799",
"author": "Greg A",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T2... | 1,760,372,973.379921 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/fail-of-the-week-learning-how-not-to-silver-solder/ | Fail Of The Week: Learning How Not To Silver Solder | Dan Maloney | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Boiler",
"metalwork",
"oxyacetylene",
"silver solder",
"soldering",
"steam",
"steam engine"
] | Sure, there are subtleties, but by and large it’s pretty easy to pick up soldering skills with a little practice. But wait! Not all soldering is created equal, and as [Quinn Dunki] learned,
silver soldering is far harder to get right
.
Granted, the job [Quinn] is working on is much more demanding than tacking some components to a PCB. She has been building a model steam engine, a task fit to put anyone’s machining skills to the test. And a steam engine needs a boiler, which is where the silver soldering comes in. As she explains in the video below, silver soldering, or “hard” soldering, uses solder that melts at a much higher temperature than “soft” solders like we’re used to in electronics. That’s a big advantage in the heat and pressure of a boiler, but it does pose some problems, many of which [Quinn] managed to discover as she tried to assemble her copper beast.
It turns out that heating a big hunk of copper evenly without burning off the flux actually isn’t that easy, though you can’t say she didn’t give it the old college try. In the process, she managed to share a number of tidbits that were really interesting, like the fact that drawing acetylene from a tank too fast can be dangerous, or that model steam boilers have to be certified by qualified inspectors. In the end, her boiler couldn’t be salvaged, and was put to the saw to determine the problem, which seems to be her initial choice of heating with oxyacetylene; after that initial failure, there was little she could do to save the boiler.
As [Quinn] says, “Failure is only failure if you don’t learn from it.” And so it may be a bit unfair to hang “Fail of the Week” on this one, but still — she has to go back to the beginning on the boiler. And we already know that
model steam engines aren’t easy
. | 26 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374758",
"author": "h2odragon",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T20:38:13",
"content": "Put the whole assembly on a charcoal grill or hot plate and then try heating specific points with a torch? That looks like *really complicated* and picky soldering compared to anything I know; which was... | 1,760,372,973.446343 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/sparkpad-sparks-joy-for-streamers/ | Sparkpad Sparks Joy For Streamers | Kristina Panos | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"arduino",
"arduino pro micro",
"ESP32",
"macro keyboard",
"stream deck"
] | The best streamers keep their audience constantly engaged. They might be making quips and doing the funny voices that everyone expects them to do, but they’re also busy reading chat messages aloud and responding, managing different scenes and transitions, and so on. Many streamers use a type of macro keyboard called a stream deck to greatly improve the experience of juggling all those broadcasting balls.
Sure, there are dedicated commercial versions, but they’re kind of expensive. And what’s the fun in that, anyway? A stream deck is a great candidate for DIY because you can highly personalize the one you make yourself. Give it clicky switches, if that’s what your ears and fingers want. Or don’t. It’s
your
macro keyboard, after all.
[Patrick Thomas] and [James Wood] teamed up to build
the perfect stream deck
for [James]’ Twitch channel. We like the way they went about it, which was to start by assessing a macro pad kit and use what they learned from building and testing it to design their ideal stream deck. The current version supports both the Arduino Pro Micro and the ESP32. It has twelve key switches, a rotary encoder, an LED bar graph, and an OLED screen for choosing between the eight different color schemes.
If you’d rather have dynamic screens instead of cool keycaps,
you can do it cheaper by making non-touch screens actuate momentaries
.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 2 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374876",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T08:59:41",
"content": "LCD basedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2x1G_fa4G8",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6374909",
"author": "Apothecorey",
"timestamp... | 1,760,372,974.027787 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/know-audio-amplifier-nuts-and-bolts/ | Know Audio: Amplifier Nuts And Bolts | Jenny List | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"home entertainment hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"amplifier",
"audio",
"class a",
"class ab",
"class B",
"class-d"
] | As we’ve followed a trail through Hi-Fi and audio systems from the listener’s ear towards the music source, we’ve reached the amplifier. In our previous article we gave a first introduction to distortion and how some amplifier characteristics can influence it, and here we’ll continue along that path and look at the amplifier itself. What types of audio amplifier circuits will you encounter, and what are their relative merits and disadvantages?
A Few Amplifier Basics
Horowitz and Hill’s Transistor Man
If you know anything about a transistor, it’s probably that it’s a three terminal device whose output pin forms part of a potential divider whose state is dependent on what is presented to its input pin.
The Art of Electronics
had it as a cartoon of a man standing inside a bipolar transistor and adjusting a variable resistor between collector and emitter while watching an ammeter on the base.
Properly biased in its conducting range, a transistor can behave as a linear device, in which the potential divider voltage moves in response to the input in a linear relationship, and thus the voltage on the output is an amplified version of the voltage on the output. This is the simplest of transistor amplifiers, and because different types of amplifier are referred to by lettered classes, it’s known as a class A amplifier.
The class A amplifier’s linearity makes it a good choice for the audio designer seeking low distortion, but it comes with a disadvantage. The potential divider action means that it is always passing current whatever state it may be in, thus the transistor must always be able to dissipate that power as heat. This gives the class A amplifier significant inefficiency, and thus one that is powerful enough to drive a loudspeaker must also emit the same power it delivers to the speaker, but as heat. Thus class A power amplifiers require extra cooling lest they get uncomfortably hot, and consume unnecessary power. There are class A audio power amplifiers on the market, but they remain unusual.
Having Your Cake And Eating It: The Class AB
A theoretical Class AB amplifier. The diodes ensure that the transistors are in their class A conducting region around the centre point. Fvultier,
CC BY-SA 4.0
.
The class A’s inefficiency comes from its transistors conducting continuously, it’s quite possible to reduce the bias to the point at which the transistors are in the off position but conduct only when a signal appears and pushes them in to conduction. This type of amplifier is referred to as a class B amplifier, and it typically only amplifies a portion of the incoming waveform. It solves the class A’s inefficiency but introduces a significant distortion to its output, which is why you will not encounter it in a simple form as an audio amplifier except perhaps in some very early tube radios.
Given that a class B circuit can amplify half of the waveform cycle without distortion, an obvious progression is to combine two of them; one to amplify the upper half of the cycle and another the lower half.The idea is that the complete amplified waveform can be reconstructed from the two amplifiers, and yield a low-distortion and efficient result.
This works to an extent, but such a circuit still retains some distortion because the point at which the two waveforms meet is almost impossible to achieve without some kind of break, and this little glitch is known as
crossover distortion
. The solution to this problem comes in clever biasing, that operates the transistors in class B over almost all of their range but gives them enough bias to work in class A over its midpoint at which the two halves of the amplifier hand over from one to the other. This arrangement is referred to as a class AB amplifier, it delivers very low distortion alongside the all-important power efficiency, and forms the vast majority of analogue Hi-Fi amplifiers.
You might expect us to now move to the next letter of the alphabet and describe the class C amplifier here, but instead the final audio configuration is a class D amplifier. (Class C amplifiers are on-off squarewave amplifiers that have high efficiency but huge distortion. They’re no good for audio but find a use in RF power amplifiers, where LC circuits filter out the resulting harmonics.)
A Fully Digital Audio Amplifier: Class D
Most Hackaday readers will be familiar with the idea of pulse width modulation, the act of varying the energy delivered to a load by sending it pulses with a variable ratio of on-time to off-time. This is how many microcontrollers produce a pseudo analogue output for linear control of LED brightness or motor speed, to name but two examples. Given a high enough switching frequency PWM can be used to encode rapidly-changing analogue signals such as audio, and thus a PWM stream can be fed to a high power buffer to produce an audio output.
A basic Class D amplifier. Rohitbd,
CC BY-SA 3.0
.
A practical class D amplifier uses PWM in this way, with its output transistors simply working a high-speed switches. There’s a passing similarity to a class C amplifier, but the difference is that the class D switches at many times the signal frequency while the class C operates at its signal frequency. The class D amplifier produces a high-power PWM pulse train, which is converted into high-power audio to drive a speaker by means of a low-pass filter network. The advantage of a class D amplifier is that it can deliver extreme efficiency, meaning that it can be built smaller and lighter than a linear circuit and with less need for heat management.
There are a few further classes of amplifier which are worth mentioning, classes E and F which are more RF amplifiers that rely on pulsing resonant LC networks with short pulses to derive an output, and classes G and H which are variations on a class AB amplifier with a PSU that varies to minimise standing current. You may encounter ICs that offer classes G and H, but from an audio point of view they can be considered as simply more efficient versions of a class AB amplifier.
We’ve taken a look at the circuit topologies behind the amplifiers you will find in your Hi-Fi system, and also in every audio-producing device you own. So then, the question is: which is better, class A, class AB, or class D? The answer to that isn’t cut-and dried, as the performance of an amplifier depends not necessarily on its principle but upon how its designer has executed it. It’s possible to make audio amplifiers in all of the above topologies that are either truly awful or exquisite-sounding, so perhaps it’s best not to get too hung up on it. A class A amplifier gives you bragging rights and keeps your house warm, a class AB amplifier is what you’ll find in most Hi-Fi separates, and a class D amplifier will be lighter and cooler. Amplifiers: there, we fixed it! | 31 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374746",
"author": "Mike Avison",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T19:35:32",
"content": "I’m just wondering if anyone could explain how to calculate output impedance for a class AB amplifier, or link to a good explanation understandable to the level of people reading this article. Also , ... | 1,760,372,973.706325 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/game-boy-advance-sp-case-mod-adds-battery-capacity-and-modern-interfaces/ | Game Boy Advance SP Case Mod Adds Battery Capacity And Modern Interfaces | Robin Kearey | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"game boy",
"Game Boy Advance SP",
"GBA hack",
"GBA SP"
] | While there’s nothing quite like running retro games on their original hardware, using older consoles in today’s day and age can be a hassle due to incompatibilities with modern chargers and headphones. [tito] and [kyle] worked together to
update Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance SP
with a whole bunch of new features, tightly packed inside a 3D-printed replacement backshell. (Video, embedded below.)
The original 600 mAh battery has been replaced with a 1600 mAh pack for several hours of additional screen time. A Qi standard wireless power module as well as a USB-C connector allows charging the battery without carrying the original mains adapter. A Bluetooth module enables the use of wireless headphones, and a 3.5 mm jack enables classic earbuds as well, a feature lost when the SP replaced the original GBA.
The new backshell fits exactly on the original console, making it about 10 mm thicker. Although this makes it slightly less portable, it is apparently more comfortable to hold for those with big hands. The new functionality is implemented using off-the-shelf circuit boards, connected together with flying wires that are soldered to the required points on the GBA’s circuit board. The original connectors and switches remain in place and functional, and the entire operation can be undone if you want to return the device to its original state.
Others have
added USB charging
to the original GBA, or even
stretched
that handheld to become twice as wide. But adding significant new functionality previously required replacing the handheld’s
entire contents
. | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374700",
"author": "Ragnarok700",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T16:24:50",
"content": "More battery! Yes! :D Kinda thinking of doing (at least) the battery part to my GBA SP2…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6374711",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,973.835461 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/as-iss-enters-its-final-years-politics-take-center-stage/ | As ISS Enters Its Final Years, Politics Take Center Stage | Tom Nardi | [
"Current Events",
"Featured",
"Slider",
"Space"
] | [
"human spaceflight",
"international space station",
"iss",
"nasa",
"politics",
"roscosmos",
"space exploration"
] | There was a time when the idea of an international space station would have been seen as little more than fantasy. After all, the human spaceflight programs of the United States and the Soviet Union were started largely as a Cold War race to see which country would be the first to weaponize low Earth orbit and secure what military strategists believed would be the ultimate high ground. Those early rockets, not so far removed from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), were fueled as much by competition as they were kerosene and liquid oxygen.
Atlantis
docked to
Mir
in 1995.
Luckily, cooler heads prevailed. The Soviet
Almaz
space stations might have carried a 23 mm cannon adapted from tail-gun of the Tu-22 bomber to ward off any American vehicles that got too close, but the weapon was never fired in anger. Eventually, the two countries even saw the advantage of working together. In 1975, a
joint mission saw the final Apollo capsule dock with a Soyuz
by way of a special adapter designed to make up for the dissimilar docking hardware used on the two spacecraft.
Relations further improved following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, with America’s Space Shuttle making nine trips to the Russian
Mir
space station between 1995 and 1997. A new era of cooperation had begun between the world’s preeminent space-fairing countries, and with the engineering lessons learned during the Shuttle-
Mir
program, engineers from both space agencies began laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the International Space Station.
Unfortunately after more than twenty years of continuous US and Russian occupation of the ISS, it seems like the cracks are finally starting to form in this tentative scientific alliance. With accusations flying over who should take the blame for a series of serious mishaps aboard the orbiting laboratory, the outlook for future international collaboration in Earth orbit and beyond hasn’t been this poor since the height of the Cold War.
The Station’s Wild Ride
The most recent drama started with the docking of the long-awaited Russian
Nauka
module on July 29th. While it was successful in the end, the process was anything but smooth, resulting in an unexpected ride for the occupants of the Station.
After more than a decade of delays and redesigns, the arrival of
Nauka
would have been a historic event even had things gone according to plan. With a length of 13 meters (43 feet) and a mass of 20,300 kg (44,800 lb), the new multi-purpose module dwarfed all but the
Zarya
and
Zvezda
segments that served as the nucleus of the Station during initial construction. The new module wasn’t just notable for its size, either. With the Space Shuttle no longer in service,
Nauka
had to fly to the ISS under its own power and perform an autonomous docking; a sharp departure from how the majority of previous modules had been transported and installed.
Despite some early glitches everything appeared to have gone according to plan, and Russian cosmonauts were preparing to open the hatches to the new module when it suddenly began firing its onboard thrusters. Preliminary investigations have determined that
Nauka’s
guidance computer erroneously believed it to still be in free-flight mode, and for reasons which are still not fully understood, its automated systems attempted to back it away from the Station. But with the module firmly attached to the bottom-most docking port of the ISS,
Nauka’s
thrusters instead begin rotating the entire complex around its center of mass.
ISS rotation
visualized by Scott Manley
The Station’s guidance system noticed the shift from its intended position, and attempted to compensate using the Control Moment Gyroscopes (CMGs). When this wasn’t enough to stop the spin, thrusters on the
Zvezda
module and eventually the docked Progress MS-17 resupply vehicle were commanded to fire against the direction of rotation. While initial NASA estimates claimed the Station rotated only 45° off of its intended attitude, the agency has since admitted the complex spun 540° over the course of approximately 45 minutes.
The rate of rotation was low enough that crew members reportedly didn’t notice it until notified by Mission Control, but the tug of war between the modules which was causing the highly unusual maneuver was putting the structure of the Station under stresses it was never designed for. The slow tumble was also making communications difficult, as the Station’s antennas were continuously being pulled away from their intended alignment. Zebulon Scoville, the NASA Flight Director on duty, made the determination to officially declare a “spacecraft emergency” and the docked SpaceX Crew Dragon was powered up should the crew members be ordered to evacuate.
As Scoville later
explained in an interview with
The New York Times
, neither the crew aboard the Station nor Mission Control in Huston actually had the ability to command
Nauka
during the ordeal. As the module had not been fully integrated into the Station’s systems it could only be controlled from a Russian ground station, but none were in range. In the end, it’s believed that the module’s thrusters only stopped firing because they ran out of propellant.
In a scathing article published by
IEEE Spectrum
, former NASA engineer
James Oberg said the mishap was a worrying sign that the space agency is returning to the complacent mindset
that doomed Shuttles
Challenger
and
Columbia
. Specifically he questions the decision making process that allowed Russia to dock such a large and powerful module to the ISS without any provision for the crew or Mission Control to take command of it in an emergency situation, and calls for an independent investigation to determine if international politics is being given priority over crew safety.
An Explosive Accusation
In an apparent effort at damage control, Russian news agency TASS published a rebuttal to what it claimed was a
systematic attempt by Western journalists to sow doubt in the country’s space program
. With the support of an unnamed high-ranking official within Roscosmos, author Mikhail Kotov attempted to debunk twelve criticisms he’s identified in coverage from publications as diverse as
Ars Technica
and
The Daily Beast
.
Serena Auñón-Chancellor
Many of the claims have to do with funding, or more accurately, the lack thereof. But Kotov dismisses the idea that the meager budget of Roscosmos leads to shoddy engineering or limited innovation, in fact, he counters that fiscal conservatism is one of the agency’s core strengths. The article also goes on to explain the country’s efforts to replace Soviet-era facilities, spacecraft, and boosters.
The list of relatively timid quasi-official statements likely would have gone unnoticed for the most part if it wasn’t for the inclusion of an exceptionally inflammatory and completely unsubstantiated claim that
the hole discovered in a Soyuz capsule during a 2018 investigation
was not the product of an assembly mistake as long assumed, but a willful act of sabotage by American astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor. Quoting the anonymous official, Kotov states the first-time astronaut may have suffered an “acute psychological crisis” due to a blood clot in her neck, and that she could have damaged the Soyuz capsule in an effort to expedite the crew’s return to Earth.
In response to this unprecedented ad hominem attack against one of their astronauts, and potentially the unauthorized disclosure of a private medical condition she may have suffered while in orbit, NASA could apparently only muster the most tepid of responses. Kathy Lueders, the head of NASA’s Human Spaceflight Program,
took to Twitter to say the agency stands behind its astronauts
and that they don’t believe there’s any credibility to the allegations. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson later retweeted Lueder’s message, but no official post was added to the agency’s public relations website.
When it comes to defending the reputation of Auñón-Chancellor, a woman that has dedicated more than a decade of her life to the agency, it would appear NASA believes a 37 word tweet should suffice. It’s difficult to see such a milquetoast response as anything other than the administration worrying more about the political ramifications of definitively contradicting Roscosmos than the career of one of their astronauts.
A Parting of Ways
NASA and most of its international partners have pledged to support the International Space Station until 2028 or 2030, but Russia has been hesitant to commit to extending their involvement past 2024. As recently as June 7th, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin has been quoted as saying
Russia will terminate their involvement with the ISS program in 2025
if US sanctions against the country aren’t lifted by the White House. Earlier in the year,
Roscosmos also cited concerns over the age of the ISS
as one of the reasons they were planning on launching a domestically-developed outpost known as the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS) into a near-polar orbit. Its proposed course over the Earth would make ROSS an ideal platform for observing Russia and the Arctic, but puts it largely out of reach for spacecraft launching from Cape Canaveral.
Concept art for the International Lunar Research Station
The growing rift between the countries doesn’t end in low Earth orbit, either. Despite hopes they would
provide a module for NASA’s Lunar Gateway station
, Russia is
no longer listed among NASA’s international partners for the project
. Instead, Roscosmos and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) have announced plans to construct what they’re calling the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).
The robotic outpost would largely eschew human explorers in favor of advanced landers, telescopes, and highly mobile rovers. Neither country has provided a firm timeline for development and construction of the ILRS, but it’s not expected to become operational until the 2030s. Short duration human missions to the ILRS, if they happen, wouldn’t begin until closer to 2040.
While Russia will almost certainly remain involved with the International Space Station program until ROSS is operational, it seems clear that the end of the country’s scientific alliance with the United States is on the horizon. Though an improved relationship between the White House and Kremlin in the next few years could see Roscosmos contribute to NASA’s Artemis moon program in some capacity, sharing spaceflight technology with China is a line in the sand that the United States is unlikely to cross. | 40 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374714",
"author": "Miroslav",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T17:40:06",
"content": "You are beating around the bush. The real reason for the demise of ISS is continuing and ever increasing degree of sanctions against Russia. It came to a point where it’s impossible to continue joint eff... | 1,760,372,973.793622 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/how-do-you-make-a-raspberry-pi-on-a-stick/ | How Do You Make A Raspberry Pi On A Stick? | Michael Shaub | [
"News",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"ambilight",
"cm4",
"compute module 4",
"Compute Stick",
"hd video",
"hdmi",
"media player",
"raspberry pi",
"Raspberry Pi Compute Module",
"smart tv"
] | We agree with [magic-blue-smoke] that one of the only things more fun than a standard Raspberry Pi 4 is the Compute Module form factor. If they are not destined to be embedded in a system, these need a breakout board to be useful. Each can be customized with a myriad board shapes and ports, and that’s where the real fun starts. We’ve already seen projects that include custom carrier boards in everything from a
3D Printer
to a
NAS
and one that shows we can
build a single-sided board at home
complete with high-speed ports.
[magic blue smoke] used this ability to customize the breakout board as an opportunity to create a hackable media player “stick” with the Raspberry Pi built-in. We love that this
Raspberry Pi CM4 TV Stick
eliminates all the adapters and cables usually required to connect a Pi’s fiddly micro HDMI ports to a display and has heat sinks and an IR receiver to boot. Like a consumer media player HDMI stick, all you need to add is power.
This seems like a super-clean way to get a media player or retro gaming on a TV or start developing your own custom smart TV without all the security concerns that come with an off-the-shelf device. But wait, there’s more! [magic-blue-smoke] has already broken out 14 GPIO pins on the board for hardware hacks and plans to add connections for “Ambilight” LEDs in a future version. We’d like to see some IR LEDs to control older AV gear added too.
14 GPIO Pins, 3.3v and 5v solder pads broken out | 38 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374652",
"author": "Zack Freedman",
"timestamp": "2021-08-24T11:20:53",
"content": "That heat sink is pretty slick, where can I get one of them?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374825",
"author": "Jon",
"time... | 1,760,372,973.915156 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/25/tech-in-plain-site-check-digits-and-human-error/ | Tech In Plain Sight: Check Digits And Human Error | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider",
"Software Development"
] | [
"check digit",
"ISBN",
"upc"
] | Computers in working order and with correct software don’t make mistakes. People, however, make plenty of mistakes (including writing bad software or breaking computers). In quality circles, there’s a Japanese term,
poka yoke
, which roughly means ‘error avoidance’. The idea is to avoid errors by making them too obvious for them to occur. For example, consider a SIM card in your phone. The little diagonal corner means it only goes in one way. If you put it in the wrong way, it is obviously wrong.
To be successful at
poka yoke
, you have to be able to imagine what a user might do wrong and then come up with some way to make it obvious that it is wrong. There are examples of this all around us and we sometimes don’t even know it. For example, what do your credit card number, your car’s VIN code, and a UPC code on a can of beans have in common?
The answer is that they all are long strings of digits which are notoriously difficult for humans to enter correctly. People miss numbers or transpose them. So people who write applications that take numbers like this often want to check to make sure the person didn’t make a mistake.
Of course, a number is a number, right? If I tell you to enter a five digit zip code, I can figure out if you put in four digits or six, but it is hard to know if 77508 or 77580 is the one you meant. That’s why long and important numbers have one or more check digits.
A check digit is like a checksum or a CRC — you compute it from the other digits in the number and if your computation doesn’t match the check digit you got, then something was put in wrong.
A Simple Example
Just to keep things simple, suppose you have a a four digit PIN number 0000 to 9999 and we want to make a five digit code with a check digit. A simple way to do it would be to add all the digits together and throw away all but the last digit (that is, the remainder after dividing by 10 or modulo 10).
For example 0052 becomes 00527 and 9522 becomes 95228. Simple, right? Now you know that 10118 is not a valid number. Of course, 00527 is valid but so is 00257 or 52007. So maybe we can do better.
Real Life
In real life, algorithms try to take the position of the digits into account. There are a few ways to do this and, as you might expect, there’s a lot of math to decide what’s best. Many systems use a weighted algorithm where each digit has a different weight, usually a 1, 3, 7, or 9 with no two adjacent digits having the same weight. Since those numbers are coprime with 10, any single digit change causes a different check digit. Using that weighting also catches about 90% of single transpositions, other than those involving a 5 and a 2 (since 5 and 2 multiply to 10).
For example, the ubiquitous UPC code uses weights of 1 and 3 for alternate numbers with digit 1 being the rightmost digit (other than the check digit) followed by digits 2, 3, and so on moving to the left. The algorithm is:
Ignoring the check digit, start at the right and add all digits in odd-numbered positions together
Multiply the sum by 3 (the weight for odd digits)
Ignoring the check digit, add the remaining digits to the running total
Take the last digit of the sum (that is, the remainder after dividing by 10); if that digit is not zero subtract it from 10
For example, I have a can of spray air on my desk with a UPC of 681131309516. The first six digits are unique to the company. The next five digits are a unique ID and the final is the check digit. That means the odd-position digits are 1, 9, 3, 3, 1, and 6. The even-position digits are 5, 0, 1, 1, and 8. The first sum, then is 23 and multiplying by 3 gives 69. The even digits results in 15 for a grand total of 84 and a preliminary check digit of 4. Since this isn’t a zero, the real check digit is 10-4 or 6. Try changing any number or swapping any two numbers between the groups and see what result you get.
Even Better
ISBN-10 is even more robust. It uses a ten digit number where each digit has a different weight from 1 to 10 and takes the remainder after dividing by 11. This catches all common errors, but can result in a check digit of 10 which is represented by an X.
There are other even more robust algorithms such as
Damm
,
Verhoeff
, and
Luhn
. You can also add more check digits to get better performance, just as more bits of a CRC are usually more robust.
Meaning
These check digits aren’t made to act as a security device. Usually, the algorithm is well-known and easy to figure out. So it isn’t that bad guys can’t figure out how to make fake credit card numbers because of the check digits. They simply provide a little
poka yoke
so a program can immediately spot common errors in numbers like these. Something to remember next time you design an interface or anything else prone to human errors.
Of course, if you want to protect against computer errors, you are better off with a
CRC
. There are also other ways to
catch errors
if you aren’t worried about humans calculating the check digits. | 31 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6375028",
"author": "Sebastian",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T17:55:51",
"content": "Nice concise explanation. One addition:Redundancy can be used to detect errors but also to correct them, or any combination thereof. It the choice of the decoder.An interesting case is the IBAN, which e... | 1,760,372,974.257117 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/25/pedal-operated-cable-cam-for-hands-free-video/ | Pedal Operated Cable Cam For Hands Free Video | Danie Conradie | [
"digital cameras hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"cable cam",
"cable robot",
"guitar pedal hack",
"rc controller"
] | [Vintage Backyard RC] has built a nice little RC track in his backyard, and wanted a motorized dolly system to capture footage along the main straight with his GoPro. Using only junk box parts, he created a simple
pedal operated RC cable dolly
. (Video, embedded below.)
[Vintage Backyard RC] first experimented with a high speed car running on a length of model train track. However, it was bumpy at high speed, the track is expensive, and it needs 50 V running through the open tracks. The new cable cam gives a much smoother ride, and cost almost nothing with his supply of old RC gear. The cable cam is powered by a brushed motor from an RC airplane, running with plastic wheels on some weed trimmer line. Control is provided by an old 27 MHz RC system, with the controller’s internals transplanted into an old wah-wah guitar pedal.
The non-geared motor can drive the cable much faster than required, so [Vintage Backyard RC] needs to exercise some careful foot control to run it at a reasonable speed. This is easier said than done while also controlling an RC car with his hands, so he plans to replace the RC system with a newer 2.4 GHz system software end-point limits. We would be reaching for the ESP32 or any other microcontroller with wireless that we’ve come to know, but it’s worth remembering that most people are not familiar with these tools.
This is definitely the most minimalist cable cam we’ve covered this year, but just demonstrates how simple they can be to build. You can always upgrade to a
sleek folding frame from 3D printed parts
, and add
machine vision and long range video streaming
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6375026",
"author": "Nick Makes & Breaks Stuff",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T17:44:06",
"content": "Excellent use of old spare parts!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6375123",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2021-08-26T00... | 1,760,372,974.069035 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/25/keebin-with-kristina-the-one-with-the-index-typewriters/ | Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Index Typewriters | Kristina Panos | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Peripherals Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"adafruit",
"double shot keycaps",
"Esrille",
"Esrille NISSE",
"index typewriters",
"low-profile",
"macro pad",
"one-piece split keyboard",
"split keyboard"
] | You may have noticed that I neglected to write an introductory paragraph for the last one of these — I was just too excited to get into the keyboards and keyboard accessories, I guess. I can’t promise that I’ll always have something to say up here, but this week I definitely do: thank you for all the tips I’ve received so far! The readers are what make Hackaday great, and this little keyboard roundup column is no exception. Fabulous fodder, folks!
Kamina Chameleon
This is [deʃhipu]’s daily driver. Vroom!
Like any keyboard enthusiast worth their soldering iron, [deʃhipu] keeps trying for the ultimate keyboard — ideally, one that runs CircuitPython and makes a great daily driver for high-speed typing.
The latest version is
the Kamina, a one-piece split
with a SAMD21 brain that is slim and narrow without being cramped. [deʃhipu] started by splitting the Planck layout, spreading it, adding a number row, and eventually, an extra column of Kailh Chocs on the right hand. One-piece splits are great as long as the split suits your shoulders, because everything stays in place. When you do move it around, both halves move as one and you don’t have to mess with the positioning nearly as much as with a two-piece. And of course, since he designed it himself, it fits.
The really cool thing here is the center module concept. It’s functional, it looks nice, and as long as it doesn’t get in the way of typing, seems ideal. So far, [deʃhipu] has made a couple different versions with joysticks, encoders, and buttons, and is currently working on one with
a Home button
made for cell phones to take advantage of their built-in optical trackpads.
Esrille NISSE Looks Nice
This is
the Esrille NISSE keyboard
and it comes in two sizes! Okay, the two sizes don’t look that different, but the key spacing specs say otherwise. To me, this looks like an Alice with a better and ortholinear layout. These bat-wing beauties are new to me, but they’ve been around for a few years now and are probably difficult to stumble upon outside of Japan. Although Esrille doesn’t seem to make any other keyboards, they do make a portable PC built on the Raspberry Pi compute module.
Image via
Esrille
.
I love me a one-piece split when its done properly, and this one seems to be pretty darn close to perfect. How do I know? You can print out a paper-craft version to try out either of the two sizes. I didn’t take it quite that far, but you can bet that I opened
the smaller size’s image in a new tab
and put my hands all over the screen to test the layout.
I especially like the thumb clusters and the inside keys on this thing, but I think the innermost thumb keys would be too painful to use, and I would probably just use my index finger. I would totally buy one of these, but they’re a little too expensive, especially since the smaller one costs more. (What’s up with that?) The great news is that the firmware is open-source. Between that and the paper-craft models, a person could probably build their own.
Check out [xahlee]’s site for a review and a lot more pictures of the NISSE and similar keebs
.
Check This Out: Making Double Shot Polyurethane Keycaps
There’s more than one way to put legends on keycaps, and the double shot method is definitely the longest-lasting. Double shot keycaps are kind of what they sound like — they’re made in two pieces; one for the legend, and one for the rest of the keycap. Double shot keycaps are awesome because you can’t feel the legends and it’s impossible for them to wear off. They are forever, and making them requires an intricate process.
This dramatic video that’s set to
Ride of the Valkyries
doesn’t offer much in the way of explanation, but you will see every single step of this three-day process go by in what feels like more than five minutes. It starts out with a mold made of LEGO, so you might think this is something you can easily pull off in a weekend, but it gets complicated pretty quickly.
Big thanks to both [Inne Lemstra] and [Zane Atkins] for tipping about this one. The system works!
New Hotness: Adafruit’s RP 2040 Macropad
I got my Adafruit ADA BOX this week and (spoiler alert!) it features their
Raspberry Pi RP2040-based macropad
. The idea here is that you can scroll through and select different macro group profiles with the rotary encoder giving you nearly limitless bindings in a small package. You can use RGB to tell your menus apart, and you get enough space on the OLED to show a short label for each of the 12 keys that appear in a matching matrix.
Check out that glowy Jolly Wrencher!
Adafruit sent these out with Kailh reds (linear switches), which are totally not my jam, but I know linears are popular, and I suppose it’s better to err on the side of silence rather than clack a bunch of people into annoyance. I used a dozen Cherry MX clears at first, but those have all-black enclosures and don’t let the RGB through as well (though I think they look pretty cool anyway). Pictured here are Kailh box whites, which have clear upper housings, and they’re topped with the included translucent DSA keycaps.
Yes, that’s a Jolly Wrencher in the upper left! I was quite fortunate to receive an extremely limited-edition Hackaday keycap that’s 16 years in the making (thanks pt!). If you missed our
Python Your Keeb Hack Chat
with the crew from Adafruit, go check it out and peep this video of double shot beauty of a keycap. I’m not yet sure what I’ll do with my macro pad. I’m leaning towards work-related shortcuts, or maybe creating some kind of game that requires cranking the rotary encoder and pushing the keys somehow.
Historical Clackers: Index Typewriters
The AEG Mignon, which had interchangeable fonts and character sets. Image via
Wikimedia Commons
Index typewriters were invented in 1880 and fell out of fashion by the 1940s. They are called so for one of two reasons: either because it uses a pointer to choose from an index of characters, or because you use your index finger to work the pointer.
In either case, the pointer is mechanically linked to the corresponding type element that prints the character, and you just push a lever to type after making your selection. A second lever does the work of the space bar.
There were a few different styles of index typewriter over the years, and
many of the designs are interesting
. Compared with typewriters, they were all relatively small and lightweight, and cheaper to manufacture without the keyboard. As a result, index typewriters were mainly marketed to writers on the go.
The index typewriter is still around in the form of the handheld embossers that predate the electronic label makers of today. Many label makers and index typewriters are laid out alphabetically, and
some had their own non-qwerty layouts
.
In Case You Missed It
Have you ever heard of magnetic, Hall-effect key switches? You bet they’re the height of clacky. Well,
[riskable] is bringing them back en vogue with a modern twist
. These are magnetic separation switches in the sense that actuation forces two magnets apart, yes. But they’re also magnetic levitation switches — instead of a spring, there’s a third magnet in the keycap that helps it return to the home position.
What’s better than an IBM Model M? Not much if you ask us, but then we saw [Steve M. Potter] take all these lovely buckling spring switches and
give them handmade wooden keycaps with Scrabble tile veneers
. What a high-scoring build!
Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards?
Help me out by sending in a link or two
. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to
email me directly
. | 11 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374962",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T14:15:16",
"content": "SLA 3D printer of course",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6375006",
"author": "Jabberwock",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T15:41:02",
... | 1,760,372,973.976557 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/25/deceptively-simple-process-turns-bottles-into-filament/ | Deceptively Simple Process Turns Bottles Into Filament | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"bottle",
"filament",
"pet"
] | If you know that most soda bottles are made from PET plastic, you’ve probably thought about how you could make filament from them and have an endless supply of cheap printing material. [Mr3DPrint] says
he has a method
and shares a few videos that make it look easy. We wonder if the quality of the filament is up to par with commercial products, but assuming the videos are accurate, it appears that the resulting filament gets the job done.
The details are a little sketchy, but it looks simple enough. THe first step is to get any indentations out of the bottle. He has several demonstrations of this some using pressurized air in the bottle and some without. In each case, though, a drill holds the bottle through the cap and spins it over a flame until the surface is smooth.
Once mostly smoothed out, he cuts the bottom off the bottle and uses a mounted razor blade to cut the bottle into a thin strip. The next jig is a standard hot end with a 1.75mm nozzle mounted horizontally. We assume he drilled out a standard nozzle with a 1.75mm hole or, accounting for die swell, maybe a bit smaller hole.
Presumably, the razor produced strips narrow enough to fit the top of the nozzle. He pushes the plastic through and uses a printer heat break to tie it to a string and a little machine pulls the rest through while winding it up on a takeup spool.
Our guess is the diameter of the filament is all over the place and we wondered if placing the filament vertically or horizontally would give the best results. However, this seems like it would be an easy thing to cobble together if you wanted to try it. In the comments, [Mr3DPrint] mentions some temperature ranges to get you started, but we didn’t find any reference for the designs of the machines. On the other hand, they seemed simple enough to build, especially if you have a 3D printer.
The
extruders
we’ve seen are much more complicated. Most of
those
, though, use pellets. | 68 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374896",
"author": "norro211",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T11:07:31",
"content": "Well it’s not free, the time and energy cost exceed those of making a proper reel",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374929",
"author": "Ali... | 1,760,372,974.486469 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/25/eavesdropping-by-led/ | Eavesdropping By LED | Al Williams | [
"classic hacks",
"News"
] | [
"bug",
"bugging",
"bugs",
"eavesdropping",
"espionage",
"leds",
"spy",
"tempest"
] | If you ever get the feeling someone is watching you, maybe they are listening, too. At least they might be listening to what’s coming over your computer speakers thanks to a new attack called “
glow worm
.” In this novel attack, careful observations of a power LED on a speaker allowed an attacker to reproduce the sound playing thanks to virtually imperceptible fluctuations in the LED brightness, most likely due to the speaker’s power line sagging and recovering.
You might think that if you could see the LED, you could just hear the output of the speaker, but a telescope through a window 100 feet away appears to be sufficient. You can imagine that from a distance across a noisy office you might be able to pull the same trick. We don’t know — but we suspect — even if headphones were plugged into the speakers, the LED would still modulate the audio. Any device supplying power to the speakers is a potential source of a leak.
On the one hand, this is insidious because, unlike more active forms of bugging, this would be pretty much undetectable. On the other hand, there are a variety of low-tech and high-tech mitigations to the attack, too. Low tech? Close your blinds or cover the LED with some tape. High tech? Feed a random frequency into the LED to destroy any leaking information. Super spy tech? Put fake speakers in front of your real speakers that silently playback misinformation on their LEDs.
The video plays samples of recovered speech and, honestly, it was clear enough but not great. We wondered if a little additional signal processing might help.
Passive bugs
are hard to find. Even a fancy
junction detector
won’t tell you if your speakers are compromised by glow worm. | 23 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374882",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T09:51:42",
"content": "“Three people can keep a secret so long as two of them are dead.” Originally attributed to Benjamin Franklin. If you’re concerned about people listening to your LEDs, there really are better things you coul... | 1,760,372,974.319085 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/compact-sensor-keeps-you-safe-by-watching-co2-levels/ | Compact Sensor Keeps You Safe By Watching CO2 Levels | Dan Maloney | [
"Microcontrollers",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"air",
"air quality",
"carbon dioxide",
"co2",
"Covid-19",
"sensor"
] | Remember when work meetings were just a bunch of people filling up a small, poorly ventilated room with their exhaled breath? Back in the good old days, all you had to worry about was being lulled to sleep by a combination of the endless slide deck and the accumulation of carbon dioxide. Now? Well, the stakes may just be a little bit higher.
In either situation, knowing the CO
2
level in a room could be a handy data point, which is where
a portable CO
2
sensor like this one
could be useful. Or at least that’s [KaRMaN]’s justification for SYPHCOM, the “simple yet powerful handheld carbon dioxide meter.” The guts of the sensor are pretty much what you’d expect — an Arduino Pro Micro, a SenseAir S8 CO
2
sensor board, and the necessary battery and charging circuits. But the build does break the mold in a couple of interesting places. One is in the choice of display — a 1980s-era LED matrix display. The HDSP2000 looks like it belongs in a nice bench meter, and is surprisingly legible without a filter. It looks like it flickers a bit in the video below, but chances are that’s just a camera artifact.
The other nice part of this build is the obvious care [KaRMaN] put into making it as small as possible. The layout of boards and components is very clever, making this a solid, compact package, even without an enclosure. We’ve seen
CO
2
sensors with more features
, but for a quick check on air quality, SYPHCOM looks like a great tool.
Thanks to [Encarna Navarro] for the tip. | 21 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374858",
"author": "Helle Daryd",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T07:11:25",
"content": "Thing most likely confused for a bomb by the TSA, I love it as a bit of ridiculously compact engineering.Also has anyone done their own air quality monitoring on a an aircraft. I am rather curious now... | 1,760,372,974.378984 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/24/sqlite-on-the-web-absurd-sql/ | SQLite On The Web: Absurd-sql | Matthew Carlson | [
"Software Development"
] | [
"emscripten",
"indexedDB",
"sql",
"sqllite",
"web",
"webassembly",
"webdev",
"webdevelopment"
] | Love it or hate it, the capabilities of your modern web browser continuously grow in strange and wild ways. The ability for web apps to work offline requires a persistent local storage solution and for many, IndexedDB is the only choice as it works across most browsers and provides a database-like interface. However, as [James Long] found, IndexedDB is painfully slow on chrome and limited in querying ability. He set out to bring a tool he was familiar with, SQLite, and
bring it to the web browser as absurd-sql
.
Why absurd? Partially because most browsers (not chrome) implement IndexedDB on top of SQLite. So for many browsers, it is just SQLite on top of IndexedDB on top of SQLite. Luckily for [James] there already was a project known as
sql.js
that uses
emscripten
to compile the C-based SQLite into
WebAssembly
. However, sql.js uses an in-memory storage backing and all data is lost when refreshing the page. [James] tweaked SQLite’s method of reading and writing blocks. Instead of being memory backed, he added a layer to read and write blocks from IndexedDB. This means that only sections of the database need to be read in, bringing in huge performance gains.
That brings us to the other reason why it’s absurd. On chrome (as well as Firefox), absurd-sql beats IndexedDB on almost every benchmark. A query like
SELECT SUM(*) FROM kv
led to stunning results.
So what’s the downside? Other than a somewhat large WebAssembly file that needs to get downloaded (409KB) and cached, there really isn’t. Of course, it’s not all roses when it comes to web development. Native SQLite runs 2-3 times faster than absurd-sql, which demonstrates how slow IndexedDB really is.
There are other
storage standards on the horizon
for web browsers, but locking becomes an issue. SQLite expects synchronous reads and writes because it’s just simple C. IndexedDB and other storage solutions are asynchronous as the event loop of Javascript lends itself well to that model. Absurd-sql gets around that by creating a SharedArrayBuffer that is shared with a worker process. The atomics API is used to communicate with the buffer. In particular,
atomics.wait()
allows the worker to block main thread execution until the read or write has finished. From the perspective of SQLite, the operations are synchronous. IndexedDB provides transactions so multiple connections can happen (for example multiple tabs open). Multiple readonly transactions can occur in parallel but only one readwrite transaction can be in flight.
Why not pull up your browser and start playing around with it? You’re already
doomed to learn WebAssembly anyway
. | 12 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374834",
"author": "John",
"timestamp": "2021-08-25T04:26:23",
"content": "Pretty much every web language is a dumpster fire. HTML is the only one I bother with anymore, and I don’t even bother with much of it. I stick to a handful of tags. I like the novel without illustrations lo... | 1,760,372,974.543975 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/freezing-out-ice-cream-machine-competition/ | Freezing Out Ice Cream Machine Competition | Al Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Rants",
"Slider"
] | [
"hacking",
"ice cream",
"McDonald's",
"right to repair",
"softserve"
] | We always knew that McDonald’s soft serve (you can’t really call it ice cream) machines are known to be finicky. There’s even
a website that tracks where the machines are broken
and, apparently, it is usually about 10% or more of them at any given time. But when we saw a news article about a
judge issuing a restraining order
, we knew there must be more to the story. Turns out, these $18,000 soft serve machines are in the heart of something we are very interested in: when do you own your own technology?
Cold Tech
There are apparently 13,000 or so of these machines and they are supposedly high-tech marvels, able to produce soft serve and milkshakes at the same time. However, they are also high maintenance. Cleaning the machine every two weeks (try not to think about that) involves a complete teardown. Worse, if anything breaks, you need a factory-authorized service person.
At the heart of this is a secret menu that requires an undocumented set of keypresses to enter. We’ve seen that before, of course, and apparently, it isn’t that secret, since a quick search found
the exact sequence required
in their service manual from the manufacturer (Taylor). However, a third-party company developed a box called
Kytch
that intercepts data from inside the Taylor machine and presents it on WiFi including all the secret service data. Their website proudly proclaims it is a Raspberry Pi that you install inside the machine and somehow connects to an internal bus to monitor the machine’s operation. The add-on aims to make it easier to track what’s going on with the machine, and that includes keeping it in working order.
So?
Hackaday readers won’t find that whole concept very odd. We do this sort of thing all the time and the only reason we probably haven’t seen this on the tip line is the surprising lack of soft serve machines inside hackerspaces. But we’ve seen the same idea for
washing machines
and plenty of other gear.
The problem here is that Taylor and McDonald’s have been unhappy that restaurant operators are using the device. Kytch, who make the add-on box, are unhappy that Taylor has tried to acquire their device which contravenes the Kytch license agreement with its users and
filed a lawsuit about it back in May
(PDF). So there would seem to be plenty of lawyers involved.
Ironically, the founders of Kytch started by fixing the Taylor machines to combat problems in integrating the machines with their frozen yogurt robot, an endeavor supported by Taylor. They did decline to share the internal protocols of their machines with them, but otherwise were cooperative with the team and clearly knew they were thinking of closer integration between the two machines.
The Winner Is?
We don’t know which way the courts will finally resolve this issue. On the one hand, we are big fans of being able to hack equipment you own, especially machines that cost $18,000, break often (resulting in lost sales), and require exclusive service contracts.
On the other hand, it’s easy to see the McDonald’s corporation would want to ensure the consistent quality of the frozen treats and avoid any possible health hazard to the public. After all,
bad ice cream has killed before
. This is especially true for these machines.
Remember, I mentioned they have to be cleaned every two weeks? A normal ice cream machine needs to be cleaned at least every few days if not every day. The McDonald’s machine has a special 4-hour heating cycle that pasteurizes the contents of the machine so it doesn’t require cleaning as frequently. The machine heats up and then refreezes everything, presumably killing any bacteria starting to grow in the mix. This is a big time saver as you can see from watching someone clean out a regular machine in the video below.
Then again, there are a lot of dangerous things out there and only authorizing one company to work on them isn’t the answer. Electricity and natural gas are dangerous, but you don’t have to work for a utility company to do a job. You might need a license showing you understand what to do, but that’s a different proposition.
What If?
I think the logical thing is to play “what if”. What happens if you use the secret menu functions by yourself to repair the machine? You are relying on some fast food worker to clean the machine, after all. Does this add to that danger? Or does it even enable you to do anything differently? After all, working on a car can be dangerous, but no one would consider a code reader a safety hazard — it is just information.
For example,
a story from Wired
reports that a Kytch user found an employee was adding too much of a consumable into the machine and this was causing the cleaning cycle to fail. Apparently, that information was not available by traditional means and it doesn’t seem like there’s much harm to that.
The restraining order deals with the idea that Taylor acquired a Kytch machine for reverse engineering. They had attempted to just buy one, but when that didn’t work, they allegedly grabbed one off a machine sent in for service. Honestly, it is hard to imagine that Taylor couldn’t figure out how the device worked even without seeing one first hand. After all, they know what busses they expose and what’s on them. Building a Web interface on a Raspberry Pi isn’t exactly a top secrete technology.
On the one hand, we applaud people wanting to hack machines and make them better, more reliable, or easier to repair. We don’t like companies locking things up and holding you hostage for maintenance contracts. Yet we also think suing a company for getting a copy of your product that interfaces with theirs isn’t a great move either. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like restraint of trade or libel would be better attacks, at least from a merit standpoint.
What do you think? Other than, of course, you sure could go for a milkshake. | 47 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374416",
"author": "Bob",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T17:30:06",
"content": "My local McD stopped selling milkshakes. Don’t know if it’s related to this. Since that’s the only thing they sold that I liked, I have not been back. I would not think pasteurization is a big issue. I al... | 1,760,372,974.729874 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/esp32-video-input-using-i2s/ | ESP32 Video Input Using I2S | Chris Lott | [
"Video Hacks"
] | [
"autonomous rover",
"ESP32",
"I2S",
"qvga",
"rover",
"video"
] | Computer engineering student [sherwin-dc] had a rover project which required streaming video through an ESP32 to be accessed by a web server. He couldn’t find documentation for the standard camera interface of the ESP32, but even if he had it, that approach used too many I/O pins. Instead, [sherwin-dc] decided to
shoe-horn a video into an I2S stream
. It helped that he had access to an Altera MAX 10 FPGA to process the video signal from the camera. He did succeed, but it took a lot of experimenting to work around the limited resources of the ESP32. Ultimately [sherwin-dc] decided on QVGA resolution of 320×240 pixels, with 8 bits per pixel. This meant each frame uses just 77 KB of precious ESP32 RAM.
His design uses a 2.5 MHz SCK, which equates to about four frames per second. But he notes that with higher SCK rates in the tens of MHz, the frame rate could be significantly higher — in theory. But considering other system processing, the ESP32 can’t even keep up with four FPS. In the end, he was lucky to get 0.5 FPS throughput, but that was adequate for purposes of controlling the rover (see animated GIF below the break). That said, if you had a more powerful processor in your design, this technique might be of interest. [Sherwin-dc] notes that the standard camera drivers for the ESP32 use I2S under the hood, so the concept isn’t crazy.
We’ve covered several articles about generating video over I2S before, including
this piece
from back in 2019. Have you ever commandeered a protocol for “off-label” use? | 5 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374379",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T15:32:01",
"content": "Why not SPI and DMA?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374484",
"author": "Sherwin",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T20:20:00",
... | 1,760,372,974.593737 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/open-source-insulin-biohackers-aiming-for-distributed-production/ | Open-Source Insulin: Biohackers Aiming For Distributed Production | Dan Maloney | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Medical Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"bacteria",
"biohacking",
"cloning",
"diabetes",
"E coli",
"genetic engineering",
"insluin",
"medicine",
"pharmaceutical",
"recombinant",
"T1D",
"transgenic",
"yeast"
] | When you’ve got a diabetic in your life, there are few moments in any day that are free from thoughts about insulin. Insulin is literally the first coherent thought I have every morning, when I check my daughter’s blood glucose level while she’s still asleep, and the last thought as I turn out the lights, making sure she has enough in her insulin pump to get through the night. And in between, with the constant need to calculate dosing, adjust levels, add corrections for an unexpected snack, or just looking in the fridge and counting up the number of backup vials we have on hand, insulin is a frequent if often unwanted intruder on my thoughts.
And now, as my daughter gets older and seeks like any teenager to become more independent, new thoughts about insulin have started to crop up.
Insulin is expensive
, and while we have excellent insurance, that can always change in a heartbeat. But even if it does, the insulin must flow — she has no choice in the matter. And so I thought it would be instructional to take a look at how insulin is made on a commercial scale, in the context of a growing movement of biohackers who are looking to build a more distributed system of insulin production. Their goal is to make insulin affordable, and with a vested interest, I want to know if they’ve got any chance of making that goal a reality.
That’s a Lot of Pigs
To understand what’s involved in making artificial insulin, the best place to start is with a look at natural insulin. Insulin is a hormone involved in the regulation of blood glucose levels, secreted by the pancreas. Specialized cells, called beta cells, sense the level of glucose in the blood, which typically spikes after eating a meal, and secrete insulin into the bloodstream in response. Insulin quickly makes its way around the body, interacting with cells by stimulating their glucose transport system to take up blood glucose for their metabolic needs.
Primary structure of pig proinsulin (Show & Chance, 1968). The “connecting peptide” is cleaved after synthesis by proteases to form the active hormone. Source:
ResearchGate.net
In Type 1 diabetes, though, the ability of the pancreas to produce insulin has been destroyed. The reasons for this are unclear, but in general it’s thought to be at least partially related to autoimmunity, where someone’s own immune system recognizes the pancreatic beta cells as foreign cells and destroys them. Type 1 diabetics therefore lack the ability to sense and respond to rising blood glucose either partly or in total, meaning they have to inject insulin regularly to survive. Type 2 diabetes is a completely different disease, caused in part by the body becoming insensitive to insulin. It’s treated with a wide range of other medications, although some Type 2 diabetics take insulin too.
When first identified as a treatment for diabetes in 1920 by Canadian doctors Banting and Best, it came as a surprise to learn that insulin is actually a protein. Up to that point, it had been assumed that all hormones would be small molecules, so the discovery that insulin is actually a protein composed of 51 amino acids in two separate chains that are linked together in three places by disulfide bonds came as quite a shock. It would also open the door to the current recombinant insulins on the market today.
Insulin manufacturing, 1920s-style. The process started by grinding up tons of pig pancreases to get a few precious grams of the hormone. Source:
National Museum of American History
But, for the first 60 years or so of its commercialization, insulin was derived strictly from animal sources, chiefly from the pancreases of pigs. The amino acid sequence of insulin is highly conserved across species, and even insulin derived from fish has a clinical effect in humans. Porcine insulin differs from human insulin by only a single amino acid, but purifying it was a difficult process. It took two tons of slaughterhouse offal to create just 250 ml of insulin, through a thoroughly disgusting process of grinding, mincing, and extracting the insulin, and purifying it to the point where it was free enough from contaminating substances to not raise an immune response when injected. And yet, sometimes it still did.
All that changed in the 1980s with the introduction of recombinant insulin, made in genetically engineered microorganisms. By putting the human insulin gene into a small loop of DNA, called a plasmid, and coaxing those plasmids into bacteria or yeast, cell lines were created that were capable of producing vast amounts of insulin, in a way that was easy to scale up and far easier to purify than from mammalian tissue. It also had the advantage of being identical to natural human insulin, down to the last amino acid. And, it opened the door to tweaking the amino acid sequence with genetic engineering, to produce different kinds of insulin with specific characteristics.
Scaling Up
Today, most insulin is produced in the common bacterium
Escherichia coli
, although some manufacturers prefer to use the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae for their processes. Regardless of the microorganism, the process of producing a batch of insulin is pretty straightforward. Genetically modified cells are used to inoculate a large volume of liquid culture medium in a device called a bioreactor. This is basically a huge stainless steel tank to hold the fermenting culture, along with heaters, mixers, aerators, and an array of sensors to control and monitor the growth process. There are often multiple bioreactors in series, with the output of a smaller one being fed into a larger one, to step up the volume of culture gradually.
The genetically modified microorganisms are allowed to grow until they’ve reached the maximum growth rate, at which point they are harvested from the bioreactor. The first step is filtration, to separate the insulin-filled cells from the spent growth medium. The cells are then split open with a high-pressure homogenizer, leaving behind a mixture of cell debris and insulin inclusion bodies, which are sort of like crystals of the hormone that formed in the cells during fermentation.
This is the point where things get touchy. Up to now, the insulin has been pretty safe inside the cells. Once the cells are cracked open, though, all their proteins, including enzymes that degrade and recycle other proteins (proteases), can start acting on the insulin, degrading it and reducing the yield. Avoiding this is a matter of choosing the right buffers, adding the proper protease inhibitors, and keeping everything at a low temperature. Acting quickly is important too — the longer the insulin is exposed to the cellular debris, the more chance there is for degradation.
After a series of solubilization steps that further separates the insulin from cellular debris, a round of post-processing may need to be performed. In the body, insulin is expressed as a single long chain of amino acids, called proinsulin, which folds back onto itself and forms a tertiary structure between distant cysteine residues. Once that structure is established, the loop is cleaved in two places, leaving the active two-chain hormone. Manufactured insulin needs to replicate this structure; depending on the manufacturer, this may be achieved either by growing the A- and B-chains separately and combining them chemically, or by producing proinsulin and processing it after the fact.
Either way, the almost finished insulin still needs some final purification. This is often accomplished using affinity chromatography, where the insulin produced by the microorganisms is provided with a “tail” of protein. The tail allows the protein to bind to antibodies, which are attached to a solid-phase matrix of some sort. When a solution containing the fusion protein is allowed to flow over the matrix, anything not bearing the protein tail flows right out with waste, leaving the insulin fusion protein stuck to the matrix. The pure fusion product is then freed from the column by tweaking the pH of the solution, cleaved from the protein tail, and given a final purification with reverse-phase chromatography before going through rigorous QC checks and final packaging.
Smaller Might Be Better
While commercial insulin production is certainly complicated and expensive, it’s not because the process itself is difficult. Creating and maintaining transgenic cell lines, expressing fusion proteins, and purifying the end product is something that’s done by grad students in biology labs around the world every day. The complexity of commercial insulin production comes from the degree to which it must be scaled up to be financially viable, leading to huge labs with rows of bioreactors, endless miles of stainless steel piping, and an extremely complicated command and control system to make sure it all works. Comparing a modern biologics plant, which would make not only insulin but other biologic drugs like immunotherapeutics, to a semiconductor fab, is apt: both capture the essence of the problems and the potential for scaling — while
it’s entirely possible to make semiconductors in your garage
, it’ll never be commercially viable to do so.
Embracing this brutal reality is the key to solving the insulin supply problem, at least in the eyes of the
Open Insulin Foundation
. A team of biohackers with a wide geographic footprint, OIF is a non-profit focused on creating community-scale systems that can produce safe, affordable insulin. Over the past six years, their volunteers have been busy building transgenic bacteria, working on culturing processes and equipment, and dealing with the fussy purification steps, and they’ve succeeded in seeing the procedure all the way through to finished product.
Now that OIF has the science figured out, the next step is to scale it appropriately. In
a presentation from 2020
, Louise Lassalle, the group’s communication manager, gave a breakdown of the equipment needed to make insulin on a medium scale — in bigger batches than are possible on the benchtop, but far, far smaller than what commercial biologics plants are capable of. It’s not cheap — about $1 million worth of gear. But, that investment would produce enough insulin for 14,000 diabetics, meaning that a functioning, community-level insulin factory could conceivably be funded for about $70 per person. And that factory would produce insulin at around $6 a vial, taking into account everything from raw materials to salaries, rent, and utilities.
Granted, there are huge and potentially insurmountable legal and regulatory hurdles with this plan. It may well be that the insulin industry, with a vested interest in keeping prices high — at least in the United States — will let fly their legal dogs of war, and shut this group down if they ever get close to realizing their goal. And they’ll certainly have to deal with the Food and Drug Administration if they ever expect to actually use their insulin on humans. On the other hand, the efforts of the Open Insulin Foundation and other biohackers working on alternative sources of insulin might just win in the long run, by showing that making insulin just isn’t as hard as we’ve perhaps been lead to believe, and that maybe scaling everything up to massive proportions isn’t always in the best interests of the consumer, even if it’s profitable business.
This leads to another, possibly more important point. If the last year and a half have taught us nothing else, it’s that long supply chains need to be looked at with skepticism. When a pharmaceutical company builds a mega factory for financial reasons, it creates a single point of failure that probably doesn’t need to be there. We’ve seen how easily supply lines can be pinched, and it seems incredibly foolish to engineer into a system the potential to shut down the world’s supply of any medicine, especially one as vital as insulin. OIF’s vision of distributed mini-factories for insulin production seems smarter right now, and will probably only seem like a better idea as time goes on and complex systems become less and less reliable. | 74 | 26 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374360",
"author": "Abdulrahman Hamdy",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T14:15:01",
"content": "A lifelong dream for me. I have an old bookmark html that had my “FOS Insulin” folder.. Time to dig that up..I always found it astounding how the patents were made and how this market came to be... | 1,760,372,975.419689 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/math-optics-and-cnc-combine-to-hide-secret-images-in-acrylic/ | Math, Optics, And CNC Combine To Hide Secret Images In Acrylic | Dan Maloney | [
"Art",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"acrylic",
"caustics",
"lithophane",
"morphic",
"optics"
] | Magic mirrors, with an LCD panel hidden behind a partially reflectively mirror, are popular for a reason — they’re a good-looking way to display useful information.
A “Magic Window,”
however, is an entirely different thing — and from the look of it, a far cooler one.
If you’ve never seen a Magic Window before, don’t worry — it’s partially because you’re not supposed to see it. A Magic Window appears to be a clear piece of glass or plastic, one with a bit of a wave in it that causes some distortion when looking through it. But as [Matt Ferraro] explains, the distortion encodes a hidden image, visible only when light passes through the window. It looks a bit like
a lithophane
, but it’s projected rather than reflected, and it relies on an optical phenomenon known as caustics. If you’ve ever seen the bright and dark patches cast on the bottom of a swimming pool when sunlight hits the surface, you’ve seen caustics.
As for how to hide an image in a clear window, let’s just say it takes some doing. And some math; Snell’s Law, Fermat’s Theorem, Poisson’s Equation — all these and more are mentioned by [Matt] by way of explanation. The short story is that an image is morphed in software, normalized, and converted into a heightmap that’s used to generate a toolpath for a CNC router. The design is carved into a sheet of acrylic by the router and polished back to clarity with a succession of sandpaper grits. The wavy window is then ready to cast its hidden shadow.
Honestly, the results are amazing, and we marvel at the skills needed to pull this off. Or more correctly, that [Matt] was able to make the process simple enough for anyone to try.
https://mattferraro.dev/images/caustics/3dcat.mp4 | 45 | 16 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374333",
"author": "Krzysztof",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T11:17:39",
"content": "Watched video, thought to myself “Looks like with some more processing, he could make projection holograms, this already looks like a hologram”. Read the text – holy moly, this IS a hologram!.",
"pa... | 1,760,372,974.96184 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/ps2-gets-the-ginger-portable-treatment/ | PS2 Gets The Ginger Portable Treatment | Brian McEvoy | [
"Playstation Hacks"
] | [
"battery",
"Case mod",
"handheld",
"handheld gaming",
"playstation",
"portable",
"ps2"
] | The first thing we notice about this
portable PS2
is that the plastic looks like a consumer-grade shell, not a 3D printed case. It comes from [GingerOfOz], who has lots of portable conversions under his belt, so we are not surprised this looks like a genuine Sony device. When you are as experienced as he, details like plastic texture, and button selection, are solved problems, but shouldn’t be taken for granted by us mortals.
Of course, this isn’t just pretty, and if it weren’t functional, we wouldn’t be talking about it. The system plays nearly all PS2 titles from USB memory. The notable exceptions are the ones that refuse to load without a Dualshock controller. Rude. If you’re wondering if it plays games at full speed, yes. It achieves authentic speed because it uses a PS2 slim motherboard which gets cut down by a Dremel. Custom PCBs provide the rest of the hardware, like volume buttons and battery charging. There is no optical drive since they are power hogs, so your cinematic cut scenes may lag, and load times are a little longer.
Modern mobile phones
are one of the most powerful gaming systems ever built, but there is something about
purpose-built portable gaming hardware
that just feels right.
You know
?
Thank you for the tip, [Sven]. | 14 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374309",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T08:20:16",
"content": "Cutting a multilayer PCB is insane, why not just load up a PS2 emulator?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374323",
"author": "Ya... | 1,760,372,974.800459 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/22/rgb-led-matrix-helps-etch-a-sketch-scratch-out-a-21st-century-existence/ | RGB LED Matrix Helps Etch-a-Sketch Scratch Out A 21st Century Existence | Kristina Panos | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"arduino",
"arduino nano",
"etch a sketch",
"RGB LED"
] | We never did crack open our Etch-a-Sketch, but we did scrape out a window large enough to really check out the mechanism inside.
[MrLangford] is bringing the Etch-a-Sketch into the 21st century
while at the same time, bringing an even bigger air of mystery, at least for the normies.
Instead of scraping aluminum powder off of plastic by driving a stylus on an x-y gantry with a pair of knobs, this bad boy uses rotary encoders to move the cursor around and put down squares of colored light. The familiar movements are there — the left knob moves the cursor left and right, and the right knob moves it up and down. But this wouldn’t be a 21st century toy without newfangled features. Push the left encoder down and it cycles through eight color choices, or push the right one down to go through them backwards. We hope one of the colors is setting it back to darkness in case you screw up. And while we’re dreaming up improvements, it would be awesome to add an accelerometer so you could shake it clear like a standard Etch-a-Sketch.
Inside the requisite red enclosure with white knobs are an Arduino Nano and a 16×16 RGB LED matrix. The enclosure is four sheets of 6mm MDF glued together, and we like the use of protoboard to distribute GND and 5 V in the name of keeping the thing slim.
If you’re not much of an artist,
here’s a TV-sized Etch-a-Sketch build that can draw by itself
. | 3 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374305",
"author": "Duncan",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T08:00:43",
"content": "Looks like fun! A diffuser panel over the LEDs might be a nice addition.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6374359",
"author": "Jon",
"timestam... | 1,760,372,974.83938 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/22/artful-nixie-bot-sculpture-sees-thinks-and-talks/ | Artful Nixie Bot Sculpture Sees, Thinks, And Talks | Ryan Flowers | [
"Art",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arduino pro micro",
"art installation",
"dc to dc conversion",
"nixie",
"nixie tubes"
] | When [Tavis] and his father were inspired to lend their talents to
building a robot sculpture
, they split the duties. [Tavis]’ father built a robot head, and [Tavis] utilized designs old and new to breathe life into their creation.
Many a hardware hacker has been inspired by robotic art over the years. Whether it’s the vivid descriptions by the likes of Asimov and Clarke, the magnificent visuals from the formative 1927 film Metropolis, or the frantic arm-waving Robot from Lost In Space, the robots of Science Fiction have impelled many to bring their own creations to life.
For [Travis]’s creation, Two rare Russian Nixie Tubes in the forehead convey what’s on the robot’s mind, while dual 8×8 LED matrices from Adafruit give the imagination a window to the binary soul. A sound board also from Adafruit gives voice to the automaton, speaking wistful words in a language known only to himself.
A DC to DC converter raises the LiPo supplied 3.7v to the necessary 170v for the Nixies, and a hidden USB-C port charges the battery once its two-hour life span has expired. Two custom Nixie driver boards are each host to an Arduino Pro Micro, and [Tavis] has
made the PCB design available
for those wishing to build their own Nixie projects.
As you can see in the video below the break, the results are nothing short of mesmerizing!
Of course, we’re no strangers to robots here at Hackaday. Perhaps we can interest you in a drink created by
the industrial-grade Robotic Bartender
while you consider the best way to
Stop the Robot Uprising
. And remember, if you spot any awesome hacks, let us know via the
Tip Line
! | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,974.87604 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/22/hackaday-links-august-22-2021/ | Hackaday Links: August 22, 2021 | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Hackaday links"
] | [
"hackaday links"
] | It’s usually pretty hard to miss when Boston Dynamics drops a new video of one or more of their robots doing something flashy. But in case you’ve been under a rock the last few days, you might want to check out
the Atlas parkour video
. We last saw a pair of Atlas robots
busting some dance moves
with a few other Boston Dynamics robots, and while that was an incredible demonstration of the level of control they’ve engineered, they really were just playing back a series of preprogrammed moves. The obstacle course demo, though, seems like something different. There’s a good overview of the demo in IEEE Spectrum, where they point out that this is the first time we’ve seen Atlas show off using all four limbs at once for coordinated motion — that sweet vault over the fence. And really, it’s hard not to watch such human-like moves and not think that it’s just somebody in a robot suit. Even the stumbles feel human. What’s even more fun, though, is
the behind-the-scenes look at Atlas
. Especially for the face-plants and fails.
August 19 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of
Star Trek
. In the process of just trying to build a fictional universe to tell some interesting stories and make a little money, he managed to spawn not only an enduring science-fiction franchise but also to inspire generations of future scientists and engineers. The number of things that
Star Trek
writers invented to move their stories along that later showed up as actual products is astonishing, as are the weird coincidences like placing the fictional planet Vulcan in orbit around star 40 Eridani, only to find out that there’s actually a potentially habitable exoplanet circling that star. As a salute to Roddenberry,
the Deep Space Network was used last week to send a message to 40 Eridani
. One of the big dishes at the Goldstone DSN site in California blasted the 20-kW signal out on Thursday, starting it on its 16.5-year journey to the stars. We looked for details on what was sent, but the only description was that it contained a 1976 recording by the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself. Whatever it was, it’ll take at least 33 years to see if we get a response. Mark your calendars.
I’ve been doing a lot of work on cars lately, a task made considerably more approachable by the fact that the newest vehicle in the family fleet is from 2004. I find working on cars very satisfying, and I’m dreading the day when we’re forced to replace one of our old-timers with something more modern and less amenable to driveway repairs. That said, there’s also a lot to like about newer vehicles, particularly electric vehicles. It would be nice to have a way to move away from ICE vehicles while still being able to work on your ride. But if
Ford’s tease this week of an EV crate motor
comes to pass, it just might be the best of both worlds. The motor, bearing the unfortunate moniker “Eluminator” — just can’t resist putting that “E” in there, can they? — is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for an internal combustion engine, suitable for a “restomod” project. These car builds aim to make a car look as vintage as possible, but radically change the guts to add functionality — think a Raspberry Pi running a Spotify client that’s stuffed into a vintage Atwater Kent cathedral radio. We like the idea of electrifying an old car, but it seems to us that a crate motor is only part of the answer. Is there such thing as a crate battery?
And finally, there was an interesting article detailing a new approach to
repairing ruptured eardrums using 3D printing
. The tympanic membrane is a thin, delicate sheet of tissue that is easily punctured, whether by blunt-force trauma, infections, or even by loud sounds like gunshots or explosions. Hearing is compromised when an eardrum is damaged, and the hole can serve as a route for pathogenic microorganisms to get into the inner ear. Fixing the hole usually requires a graft from the patient’s own tissues, often sourced from the little dongle covering the ear canal. But this tissue isn’t nearly as thin as the natural eardrum, and while hearing can be restored, it’s often muddy and muffled. The new technique is to 3D-print a custom graft for the patient, using a special polymer and printer. The artificial membrane mimics the structure of the natural tympanic membrane and restores more natural hearing immediately. It also serves as a scaffold for the body to fill in with natural cells, hopefully returning natural function as the 3D-printed part is absorbed. It’s interesting work, and the video in the linked article is pretty fascinating too. | 22 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374272",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2021-08-23T00:18:35",
"content": "> We looked for details on what was sent, but the only description was that it contained a 1976 recording by the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself.The Great Bird of the Galaxy was the nickname of Star Trek ... | 1,760,372,975.023101 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/22/3d-printing-liquid-crystal/ | 3D Printing Liquid Crystal | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"liquid crystal"
] | If you think at all about liquid crystals, you probably think of display technology. However, researchers have worked out a way to use an ink-jet-like process to 3D print iridescent colors using a
liquid crystal elastomer
. The process can mimic iridescent coloring found in nature and may have applications in things as diverse as antitheft tags, art objects, or materials with very special optical properties.
For example, one item created by the team is an arrow that only appears totally green when viewed from a certain angle. The optical properties depend on the thickness of the material which, being crystalline, self-organizes. Controlling the speed of deposition changes the thickness of the material which allows the printer to tune its optical properties.
The ink doesn’t sound too exotic to create, although the chemicals in it are an alphabet soup of unpronounceable organic compounds. At least they appeared available if you know where to shop for exotic chemicals.
The iridescent coloring is common in nature, so art objects like butterfly wings are natural with this method. While inkjet printers aren’t common in the hacker community, they aren’t that hard to create, so this seems like it would be repeatable in a garage lab.
Liquid crystals have all kinds of
interesting properties
and we wonder if this material would help you print those sorts of things. If you want to experiment, we have seen a few
hacked inkjet printers
.
Thanks [jscotta] for the tip. | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374264",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-08-22T22:50:43",
"content": "Impressive. If they can do Folgers crystals they’ll have the market cornered.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374385",
"author": "Ren",
... | 1,760,372,975.111076 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/22/diy-led-cube-for-the-masses/ | DIY LED Cube For The Masses | Inderpreet Singh | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"fpga",
"LED cube",
"spinalhdl"
] | No matter what the size or shape of an LED, it brings out the curiosity in every hardware nerd, and is the lifeblood of badge life around the planet. Then there is the LED cube that takes LEDs to all sides — literally. [Tomverbeure] had his own adventure of creating an LED Cube by
piecing together Pixel Purses and a Cisco3G Modem
.
A quick search for Pixel Purse on the internet reveals a toy lady’s handbag with an LED matrix embedded in one side. [tomverbeure] tore down 12 of these so as to get two panels for each side of his creation. After a little bit of experimenting with PCB corner brackets, he finally got it right and he is able to merge the pieces together to form the cube.
Next comes the brain and the elected device An FPGA from an HWIC-3G-CDMA modem. Cisco routers have extension slots and the HWIC connector on this particular piece had usable GPIOs that connect directly to the Altera FPGA. Inside the FPGA, a RISC-V soft CPU is used to generate images that get processed and dispatched in a hardware block. [Tomverbeure] does a detailed explanation of the implementation for all the blocks which were written in SpinalHDL. The video below shows the project in action.
We love the detail that [Tomverbeure] provides and hope it does not drive up the prices of the pixel purse too much. If you are looking for a more fine pitched cube, look no further than
this one
. If you end up making your own, be sure to send us a link. | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374226",
"author": "Somun",
"timestamp": "2021-08-22T17:14:40",
"content": "“provides and hope it does not drive up the prices of the pixel purse too much”Read his post more carefully. He bought them when they were on sale for 6 bucks and he had to ask his colleagues for help as th... | 1,760,372,975.069626 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/22/80s-omnibot-goes-rc-and-gets-a-modern-refresh/ | 80’s Omnibot Goes RC And Gets A Modern Refresh | Ryan Flowers | [
"Robots Hacks",
"Toy Hacks"
] | [
"2.4 ghz",
"futaba",
"omnibot",
"radio controlled",
"robot",
"wireless"
] | Thrift stores, antique shops, knick-knack stores- Whatever you might call them in your locale, they’re usually full of “another man’s treasure”. More often than not, we leave empty-handed, hoping another shop has something we just can’t live without. But on rare occasions, when the bits all flip in our favor, we find real gems that although we have no idea what we’re going to do with them, just
have
to come home with us.
[Charles] ran into this exact situation recently when he walked into yet another shop among many dotting the highways and byways of Georgia and spotted it: A Tomy Omnibot beckoning to him from the 1980s. [Charles] didn’t know what he’d do with the Omnibot, but he had to have it. Not being one to have things just sit around, he set out to make it useful by
combining it with an era-appropriate Futaba 4 channel AM radio, and updating all of the electronics with modern hardware
. The Mission? Drive it around at car shows and meetups where he already takes his 1980’s era vans.
We’re not going to spoil the goodies, but be sure to read [Charles]’ blog post to see how he hacked a modern 2.4 GHz 7 channel radio into the vintage Futaba 4 channel AM radio case. We appreciated his analytical approach to meshing the older gimbals and potentiometers with the new radio guts. Not to mention what it took to get the Omnibot back into service using parts from his battle bots bin. You’ll love the attention to detail on the new battery, too!
We’ve featured [Charles] work in the past, and his
Power Wheels racer fed by a recovered Ford Fusion battery
is simply unforgettable. You might also appreciate
another Omnibot revival
we featured recently. And as always, if you have a hack to share, submit it via the
Tip Line
! | 5 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374251",
"author": "Tyler",
"timestamp": "2021-08-22T20:44:18",
"content": "I have one for sale but no remote",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6374258",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-08-22T21:36:43",
"con... | 1,760,372,975.154854 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/22/esp32-is-the-brains-behind-this-art-installation/ | ESP32 Is The Brains Behind This Art Installation | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"array",
"art",
"automatic",
"ESP32",
"led",
"music",
"random",
"scale"
] | The ESP32 has enabled an uncountable number of small electronics projects and even some commercial products, thanks to its small size, low price point, and wireless capabilities. Plenty of remote sensors, lighting setups, and even home automation projects now run on this small faithful chip. But being relegated to an electronics enclosure controlling a small electrical setup isn’t all that these tiny chips can do as [
Eirik Brandal] shows us
with this unique piece of audio and visual art
.
The project is essentially a small, automated synthesizer that has a series of arrays programmed into it that correspond to various musical scales. Any of these can be selected for the instrument to play through. The notes of the scale are shuffled through with some random variations, allowing for a completely automated musical instrument. The musical generation is entirely analog as well, created by some oscillators, amplifiers, and other filtering and effects. The ESP32 also controls a lighting sculpture that illuminates a series of LEDs as the music plays.
The art installation itself creates quite haunting, mesmerizing tunes that are illustrated in the video linked after the break. While it’s not quite to the realm of artificial intelligence since it uses pre-programmed patterns with some randomness mixed in, it does give us hints of
some other projects that have used AI in order to compose new music
. | 10 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374189",
"author": "Jan",
"timestamp": "2021-08-22T11:32:12",
"content": "I like the extremely solid base and the fact that the things that are mounted on top if it stick out in all directions. With their sharp corners poking around into the world, ready to hurt anyone who comes to... | 1,760,372,975.470947 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/22/electromagnetic-interference-for-fun-and-profit/ | Electromagnetic Interference For Fun And Profit | Jenny List | [
"hardware",
"home hacks"
] | [
"dimmer",
"phase difference",
"power meter"
] | There was an urban legend back in the days of mechanical electricity meters, that there were “lucky” appliances that once plugged in would make the meter go backwards. It probably has its origin in the interaction between a strongly capacitive load and the inductance of the coils in the meter but remains largely apocryphal for the average home user. That’s not to say that a meter can’t be fooled into doing strange things though, as a team at the University of Twente have demonstrated by sending some more modern meters running backwards. How have they performed this miracle?
Electromagnetic interference from a dimmer switch
.
Reading
the paper
(PDF link) it becomes apparent that this behavior is the result of the dimmer switch having the ability to move the phase of the current pulse with respect to the voltage cycle. AC dimmers are old hat in 2021, but for those unfamiliar with their operation they work by switching themselves on only for a portion of the mains cycle. The cycle time is varied by the dimming control. Thus the time between the mains zero-crossing point and their turn-on point is equivalent to a phase shift of the current waveform. Since electricity meters depend heavily upon this phase relationship, their performance can be tuned. Perhaps European stores will now brace themselves for a run on dimmer switches.
If you’re curious about these old-style dimmers,
take a look at some of their basic functionality
.
Thanks [Dorus] for the tip. | 24 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374178",
"author": "Onetruegod",
"timestamp": "2021-08-22T10:16:42",
"content": "I’m wondering what the small boards attached to the face of the meters are doing?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374179",
"author": "p... | 1,760,372,975.52997 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/21/two-part-primer-in-a-can-is-a-diy-dream-come-true/ | Two-Part Primer In A Can Is A DIY Dream Come True | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"filler",
"finishing",
"painting",
"primer"
] | When putting together a home workshop, available floor space is often the deciding factor when it comes time to pick tools and equipment. This ultimately leads to some very difficult decisions, and we’d wager there isn’t a hacker or maker reading this that hasn’t had to pass on a new piece of gear because they didn’t have anywhere to put it.
For example, the average home gamer isn’t going to have a paint booth and spraying equipment, so they have to settle for a rattle can in the backyard. Traditionally this has limited the kinds of products you can realistically apply,
but as [Eric Strebel] shows off in his latest video
, it seems like spray can technology is starting to catch up.
The finish after two coats of primer.
Specifically, he’s been working with a canned two-part primer that doesn’t require any complicated mixing or special equipment to apply. After hitting a plunger on the bottom, a small compartment containing the activator is ruptured and the reaction begins. From that point, you’ve only got 24 hours to use the contents of the can before it cures. But since you only need to wait about 10 minutes between coats, that should give you plenty of time to complete the project.
In the video, [Eric] demonstrates how quickly this high-build primer can smooth out the layer lines on a 3D print. While you’ll still need to sand and potentially break out the spot filler to achieve that perfect finish, it’s clear that the primer works much better than anything we’re used to seeing come out of a can. Even after just two coats, the results are truly remarkable.
If there’s a downside, it’s that a can of this primer will run you about $25 USD. That’s about five times the cost of the
Rust-Oleum Filler Primer that usually gets recommended in DIY circles
, but the results really do seem to speak for themselves. We wouldn’t necessarily use this on every project, but if you’ve got something that needs an especially fine finish, you’ve at least got an option that doesn’t involve borrowing somebody’s compressor and spray gun.
If you need help shaking your paint before spraying – definitely give this
3D printed paint shaker
a look! | 29 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374159",
"author": "jpa",
"timestamp": "2021-08-22T05:24:33",
"content": "There is also the Maston 2K series of two-component sprays. Instead of having the two components separate, it has a chemical inhibitor that stops inhibiting (evaporates? oxidizes?) when the spray hits air, al... | 1,760,372,975.594587 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/traditional-analogue-and-an-fpga-make-this-junkbox-hf-receiver-a-bit-special/ | Traditional Analogue And An FPGA Make This Junkbox HF Receiver A Bit Special | Jenny List | [
"FPGA",
"Radio Hacks"
] | [
"20m",
"fpga",
"HF",
"radio",
"receiver"
] | We will have all at some point seen a fascinating project online, only to find not enough information to really appreciate and understand it.
Such a project came [Bill Meara]’s way
over at the SolderSmoke podcast, and
he was fortunately able to glean more from its creator
. What [Tom] had made from junkbox parts was a fairly traditional analogue receiver for the 20m amateur band which would be quite an achievement in itself, but what makes it special is its use of an FPGA to augment the analogue tuning.
A traditional analogue radio has a local oscillator which is mixed with the signal from the antenna, and an intermediate frequency of the difference between oscillator and desired signal is filtered from the result and amplified. The oscillator on older receivers would have used a free running tuned circuit, while a newer device might use a phase-locked loop to derive a stable frequency from a crystal.
What [Tom]’s receiver does is take a free-running traditional receiver and use the FPGA as a helper. It has a frequency meter that drives the display, but it also uses the measured figure to adjust the oscillator and keep it on frequency. It has two modes; while tuning it’s a traditional analogue receiver, but when left alone the FPGA stops it drifting. We like it, it’s definitely a special project.
We’ve featured a lot of radio receivers over the years, and this
certainly isn’t the only one that’s a bit unconventional
. | 2 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373981",
"author": "geocrasher",
"timestamp": "2021-08-21T05:32:53",
"content": "Sounds like an FPGA version of Hans Summer’s Huff & Puff Oscillator Stabilizer, which is quite a good thing in my opinion.http://www.hanssummers.com/huffpuff.html",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": ... | 1,760,372,975.63463 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/re-engineering-an-rc-helicopter-via-tinkercad/ | Re-Engineering An RC Helicopter Via Tinkercad | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"cad",
"helicopter",
"r/c helicopter",
"radio control",
"tinkercad"
] | Radio control toys can be great fun to play with. However, at the bottom end of the market, sometimes you find you’ve bought something that just doesn’t work quite right. [saulemmetquinn] found that with a cheap RC helicopter,
and set about re-engineering the design in Tinkercad.
The entire frame of the original helicopter was discarded, replaced with one made out of CAD-designed and 3D printed components. The end result is far lighter and less cumbersome than the original design, while also managing to look a lot more like an actual helicopter. It also served to correct some of the problems which [saulemmetquinn] stated made the original toy difficult to fly.
Assembling your own tiny helicopter motors and mechanisms would be quite difficult, and time consuming. [saulemmetquinn] was instead able to leverage the good parts of the original design, and build something better from that. It’s very much the essence of hacking, right there.
We’ve seen other toy helicopters hacked too,
like the famous Syma S107G.
If you’ve got your own tiny flying hacks, be sure to
drop us a line. | 5 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374077",
"author": "Grey Pilgrim",
"timestamp": "2021-08-21T15:37:54",
"content": "Comment on photo: I had to go to the instructable to figure out which photo was the original. Seems common here to put the hack on left, original on right. Unsure why that is, but it’s counterintuiti... | 1,760,372,975.672977 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/spaghetti-detective-users-boiled-by-security-gaffe__trashed/ | Spaghetti Detective Users Boiled By Security Gaffe | Tom Nardi | [
"News",
"Security Hacks"
] | [
"cloud",
"computer vision",
"machine learning",
"Octoprint",
"security flaw",
"spaghetti",
"The Spaghetti Detective"
] | For readers that might not spend their free time watching spools of PLA slowly unwind, The Spaghetti Detective (TSD) is an open source project that aims to use computer vision and machine learning to identify when a 3D print has failed and resulted in a pile of plastic “spaghetti” on the build plate. Once users have installed the OctoPrint plugin, they need to point it to either a self-hosted server that’s running on a relatively powerful machine, or TSD’s paid cloud service that handles all the AI heavy lifting for a monthly fee.
Unfortunately, 73 of those cloud customers ended up getting a bit more than they bargained for when a configuration flub allowed strangers to take control of their printers. In a frank blog post,
TSD founder Kenneth Jiang owns up to the August 19th mistake
and explains exactly what happened, who was impacted, and how changes to the server-side code should prevent similar issues going forward.
TSD allows users to remotely manage and monitor their printers.
For the record, it appears no permanent damage was done, and everyone who was potentially impacted by this issue has been notified. There was a fairly narrow window of opportunity for anyone to stumble upon the issue in the first place, meaning any bad actors would have had to be particularly quick on their keyboards to come up with some nefarious plot to sabotage any printers connected to TSD. That said, one user
took to Reddit to show off the physical warning their printer spit out
; the apparent handiwork of a fellow customer that discovered the glitch on their own.
According to Jiang, the issue stemmed from how TSD associates printers and users. When the server sees multiple connections coming from the same public IP, it’s assumed they’re physically connected to the same local network. This allows the server to link the
OctoPrint plugin running on a Raspberry Pi
to the user’s phone or computer. But on the night in question, an incorrectly configured load-balancing system stopped passing the source IP addresses to the server. This made TSD believe
all
of the printers and users who connected during this time period were on the same LAN, allowing anyone to connect with whatever machine they wished.
New code pushed to the TSD repository limits how many devices can be associated with a single IP.
The mix-up only lasted about six hours, and so far, only the one user has actually reported their printer being remotely controlled by an outside party. After fixing the load-balancing configuration, the team also pushed an update to the TSD code which puts a cap on how many printers the server will associate with a given IP address. This seems like a reasonable enough precaution, though it’s not immediately obvious how this change would impact users who wish to add multiple printers to their account at the same time, such as in the case of a print farm.
While no doubt an embarrassing misstep for the team at The Spaghetti Detective, we can at least appreciate how swiftly they dealt with the issue and their transparency in bringing the flaw to light. This is also an excellent example of how open source allows the community to independently evaluate the fixes applied by the developer in response to a discovered flaw. Jiang says the team will be launching a full security audit of their own as well, so expect more changes getting pushed to the repository in the near future.
We were impressed with TSD when we first covered it back in 2019
, and glad to see the project has flourished since we last checked in. Trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose, but we hope the team’s handling of this issue shows they’re on top of things and willing to do right by their community even if it means getting some egg on their face from time to time. | 23 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373933",
"author": "Xasin",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T23:09:48",
"content": "This is a very interesting glitch – but what baffles me is that the adjustment they made still doesn’t quite tackle the security vulnerability.I’m reasonably sure that faking your public IP is somewhat doab... | 1,760,372,975.741428 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/realsense-no-longer-makes-sense-for-intel/ | RealSense No Longer Makes Sense For Intel | Roger Cheng | [
"hardware",
"News",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"computer vision",
"depth camera",
"depth sensor",
"intel",
"Intel RealSense",
"machine vision",
"Realsense",
"smart camera"
] | We love depth-sensing cameras and every neat hack they enabled, but this technological novelty has yet to break through to high volume commercial success. So it was sad but not surprising when CRN reported that
Intel has decided to wind down their RealSense product line
.
As of this writing, one of the better confirmations for this report can be found on
the RealSense SDK GitHub repository README
. The good news is that core depth-sensing RealSense products will continue business as usual for the foreseeable future, balanced by the bad news that some interesting offshoots (facial authentication,
motion tracking
) will be declared “End of Life” immediately and phased out over the next six months.
This information tells us while those living out on the bleeding edge will have to scramble, there is no immediate crisis for everyone else, whether they be researchers, hobbyists, or product planners. But this also means there will be no future RealSense cameras, kicking off many “What’s Next?” discussions in various communities. Like
this thread
on ROS (Robot Operating System) Discourse.
Three popular alternatives offer distinctly different tradeoffs. The “Been Around The Block” name is Occipital, with their more expensive Structure Pro sensor. The “Old Name, New Face” option is
Microsoft Azure Kinect
, the latest non-gaming-focused successor to
the gaming peripheral
that started it all. And let’s not forget OAK-D as the “New Kid On The Block” that
started with a crowdfunding campaign
and building an user community by doing things like
holding contests
. Each of these will appeal to a different niche, and we’ll keep our eye open in the future. Let’s see if any of them find the success that eluded the original Kinect, Google’s Tango, and now Intel’s RealSense.
[via
Engadget
] | 15 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373889",
"author": "Foldi-One",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T20:41:50",
"content": "Bugger, I was expecting to use a RealSense one day soonish – basically as soon as I needed either more compact or better data than the old kinect can manage, or the price dropped enough to make the upgr... | 1,760,372,975.846627 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/last-chance-to-reimagine-supportive-tech-for-the-hackaday-prize-is-this-weekend/ | Last Chance To Reimagine Supportive Tech For The Hackaday Prize Is This Weekend! | Mike Szczys | [
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize"
] | This is the final weekend to
enter your supportive tech project in the 2021 Hackaday Prize
. To goal is to find ways to make building or using electronics easier.
Accessibility is one obvious approach to this challenge. But you can also consider the example of reference designs in datasheets. Manufacturers know you don’t want to re-invent the wheel to use their switch-mode power supply so they give you information on how to lay it out on the PCB and what parts to choose. Now take that idea and run with it. This could be a modular design that takes the wizardry out of building electronic projects. But it could just as easily be a aimed at the end user — perhaps lab equipment that’s normally expensive and requires expertise to operate but you’ve reimagined it to have most of that expertise built in.
Need some more help figuring out what this is all about? Let’s look at some of the projects that have already been entered. With devices all around us that have superb cameras and dazzling screens, [Timo] realized
it wouldn’t take much to turn one into an inspection microscope
, which is just what’s been done with nothing more than a 3D-printed stand and a desk lamp.
[Alain] put his electronics knowledge, and the availability of cheap modules, to great use for his non-verbal son.
The PECS Communication Board
has a grid of sixteen images, each is a button to act as input. He makes the point that tablet apps exist for this, but durability and cost are both issues that his approach helps address.
There are already
a ton of other great entries for this round of the Hackaday Prize
, but it wouldn’t be complete without yours. Ten will be chosen to receive $500 each and move on to the finals with a $25,000 grand prize on the line. Start your project right now on Hackaday.io and use the left sidebar drop down menu on your project page to enter it.
You have until Monday morning when the next round begins. Good luck!
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,975.785409 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/get-your-flex-on-with-the-flowio-platform/ | Get Your Flex On With The FlowIO Platform | Dave Rowntree | [
"hardware",
"News",
"The Hackaday Prize"
] | [
"arduino",
"creative commons",
"javascript",
"soft robotics",
"web-gui"
] | Hackaday Prize 2021 entry
FlowIO Platform
promises to be to pneumatics what Arduino is to Electronics. The modular platform comprises a common controller/valve block, a selection of differently sized pumps, and a few optional connectivity and sensing blocks. With Arduino software support as well as as Javascript and web-GUI, there’s a way to program this no matter what the level of experience the user has.
flowIO exploded view from
http://www.softrobotics.io/flowio
This last point is a critical one for the mission [Ali Shtarbanov] from the MIT Media Lab is setting out for this project. He reminds us that in decades gone by, there was a significant barrier to entry for anyone building electronics prototypes. Information about how to get started was also much harder to by before the internet really got into gear.
It’s a similar story for software, with tools like Scratch and Python lowering the barrier to entry and allowing more people to get their toes wet and build some confidence.
But despite some earlier work by projects like the
Soft Robotics Toolkit
and
Programmable-Air
, making a start on lowering the bar for pneumatics support for soft robotics, and related applications, the project author still finds areas for further improvement. FlowIO was designed from the ground-up to be wearable. It appears to be much smaller, more portable and supports more air ports and a greater array of sensing and connectivity than previous Open Source work to date.
Creative Commons Hardware
Whilst you
can take all the plans
(free account signup required) and build yourself a FlowIO rig of your very own, the project author offers another solution. Following on from the Wikipedia model of free sharing and distribution of
information
, FlowIO
offers its
hardware
for free
, for the common good. Supported by donations to the project, more hardware is produced and distributed to those who need it. The only ask is that redundant kits are passed on or returned to base for upgrade, rather than landfill.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 7 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373903",
"author": "CRJEEA",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T21:20:50",
"content": "Guess it wouldn’t take much to modify this project to utilize hydraulics instead of pneumatics.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6373940",
"author"... | 1,760,372,975.89851 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/bitcoin-in-for-bumpy-ride-as-china-crackdown-shakes-things-up/ | Bitcoin In For Bumpy Ride As China Crackdown Shakes Things Up | Lewin Day | [
"Current Events",
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"bitcoin",
"china",
"cryptocurrency"
] | Bitcoin. The magical internet money is often derided as “worthless” and “made up” by those who forget that all currencies only have value because we believe in them. Perhaps the world’s strongest currency not backed up by guns and ammo, Bitcoin nonetheless remains a controversial invention, as do the many cryptocurrencies that followed in its wake.
Recently,
the Chinese government has cracked down on operations within the country.
With China hosting the world’s largest fraction of Bitcoin mining capability, it’s sent shockwaves through the network and had a huge effect in a multitude of ways. Here’s what’s going down.
A graph showing the wild swings in Bitcoin mining across various provinces in China. Source: CBECI
Chinese officials instructed miners in the Sichuan region and elsewhere to shut down, while also ordering local authorities to cut off power supplies to mining operations. Banks have also been instructed to close accounts or otherwise halt transactions suspected to be related to cryptocurrency operations. With the ability to strike out and make decisions in a way not typically possible in most democracies, the move has been swift and decisive.
Whispers of the political winds changing around Bitcoin had slowed investment in additional capacity for Chinese miners for some time. Prior to the move, Chinese mining operations accounted for anywhere from 60-75.5% of the global Bitcoin hashrate. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index (CBECI), however,
the number quickly sunk down to just 46%.
With many huge mining operations going offline, the power consumption of the Bitcoin network has dropped significantly. Earlier this year, there was much ado made around the fact that Bitcoin was now using more energy than the state of Argentina.
We crunched the numbers and found it to be a sound analysis
, and a particularly concerning one from an environmental perspective. At the time, Bitcoin was using roughly 15 GW around the clock, for an estimated annual consumption of around 129 TWh over a full year. However,
as it stands at the time of writing
, CBECI now measures Bitcoin as using just 11.92 GW for an estimated annual consumption of 87.3 TWh which has rebounded from a low near 10 GW earlier this month.
Graph showing Bitcoin mining spread across countries around the world. Source: CBECI
It’s a huge drop, and indicative of just how much mining capacity has gone offline. That has flow-on effects for the operation of the Bitcoin network, too. With less miners hashing, it takes miners longer to find solutions to solve Bitcoin blocks. The difficulty of mining is automatically changed by the Bitcoin algorithm every 2,016 blocks, based on current hashrates, in order to maintain a block solving time of approximately 10 minutes. In normal conditions this happens roughly every two weeks. However, with the huge sudden drop from the loss of Chinese miners, block solving times blew out to 14-19 minutes long
until the algorithm ran a correction on July 3
. Mining difficulty became 28% easier, a historically large drop for the cryptocurrency.
It’s good news for current miners, who will be sharing the spoils of their efforts with a significantly smaller pool of participants. That should last at least until Chinese operations get up and running in other jurisdictions (which may help explain the August uptick). You’ve probably never been to Kazakhstan, as the country does not prioritize tourism and thus has a poor infrastructure to enable it. However, it’s next door to China and has cheap electricity,
so has seen many miners moving their operations there.
The United States is also a popular choice for its lack of any organized political opposition to Bitcoin, cheap power, and ease of doing business.
Mining operations are selling gear online or shifting their operations overseas due to the crackdown in China. Source:
@ASIC_CHINA
The drop in energy use from 15 GW down to 10 GW was significant, marking a 33% drop. At its lowest recent point, instantaneous consumption had dropped even lower, to roughly 50% of the peak figure. If we take the current number though, we can run some calculations on the effect on emissions. The US Energy Information Administration quotes a figure of roughly
0.92 lbs of CO2 emissions per kWh
of energy generated in the USA in 2019. Using that as a ballpark figure, China’s move eliminated 18 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in just a few short weeks. That’s roughly equivalent to taking 3.9 million cars off the road,
according to an EPA calculator.
Obviously, switching off Bitcoin altogether would make a huge environmental saving. It would also be theoretically far easier than other efforts such as installing renewable energy sources, switching to cleaner transport, or reducing pollution from major industries. Arguments that mining operations could run on renewable energy ignore the fact that the very energy used to power their mining operations is energy that can’t be used by other users.
Of course, outside of China, it’s not as simple as the government sending a stern letter, and so it’s likely Bitcoin will continue to pollute significantly well into the future. Established, high-wealth players will fight tooth and nail against any force that could harm their investments, after all. Perhaps the biggest danger to the value and profile of Bitcoin, however, is the mere suggestion of government regulation or outright bans. Prices have dropped on the order of 30% from this year’s earlier all time highs, but have recovered strongly as hashrates climb back up and mining operations restablish themselves abroad. We suspect that Bitcoin will achieve much greater heights-and notoriety- before all is said and done. | 105 | 21 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373848",
"author": "ganzuul",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T17:08:50",
"content": "There is such cool things going on with tokenomics. Lots of people with big ideas about how to make the world a fairer place. We are on track for AI agents catering to our needs. Now is a good time to hav... | 1,760,372,976.32521 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/21/keep-cool-with-this-face-following-fan/ | Keep Cool With This Face-Following Fan | Chris Lott | [
"Lifehacks",
"News"
] | [
"electric fan",
"face tracking",
"head tracking",
"opencv"
] | [AchillesVM] decided to
build a tabletop electric fan
so it would track him as he moves around the room. Pan and tilt control is provided by a pair of servos controlled by a Raspberry Pi 3b+. How does it know where [AchillesVM} is? It captures the scene using a Raspberry Pi v2 Camera and uses OpenCV’s default face-tracking algorithm to find him. Well, strictly speaking, it tracks anyone’s face around the room. If multiple faces are detected, it follows the largest — which is usually the person closest to the fan.
The whole processing loop runs at 60 ms, so the speed of the servo mechanism is probably the limiting factor when it comes to following fast-moving house guests. At first glance it might look like an old fan from the 1920s, in fact [AchillesVM] built the whole thing by himself, 3D-printing case and using a few off-the-shelf parts (like the 25 cm R/C plane propeller).
It’s a work in progress, so follow his GitHub repository (above) for updates. Hopefully, there will be a front-mounted finger guard coming soon. If you like gadgets that interact with you as you move about, we’ve covered the
face-tracking confectionery cannon
back in 2014, and the
head-tracking water blaster
last year. In the “don’t try this” file goes the build that started a career —
the eye-tracking laser robot
. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374155",
"author": "rnjacobs",
"timestamp": "2021-08-22T04:16:54",
"content": "Next step: automatically cut the power when a hand gets too close?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374160",
"author": "oih",
"tim... | 1,760,372,976.136415 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/21/magnets-could-give-prosthetic-control-a-leg-up/ | Magnets Could Give Prosthetic Control A Leg Up | Kristina Panos | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"electromyography",
"exoskeleton",
"f'n magnets",
"Magnetic sensor",
"magnetomicrometry",
"magnets",
"muscle sensor",
"prostheses",
"prosthetic"
] | Today, prostheses and exoskeletons are controlled using electromyography. In other words, by recording the electrical activity in muscles as they contract. It’s neither intuitive nor human-like, and it really only shows the brain’s intent, not the reality of what the muscle is doing.
Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have figured out a way to use magnets for much more precise control, and they’re calling it magnetomicrometry (MM)
. By implanting pairs of tiny ball magnets and tracking their movement with magnetic sensors, each muscle can be measured individually and far more accurately than with electromyography.
After embedding pairs of 3mm diameter ball magnets into the calves of turkeys, the researchers were able to detect muscle movement in three milliseconds, and to the precision of thirty-seven microns, which is about the width of a human hair. They hope to try MM on humans within the next couple of years. It would be a great solution overall if it works out, because compared with the electromyography method, MM is cheaper, less invasive, and potentially permanent. Couple MM with
a new type of amputation surgery called AMI
that provides a fuller range of motion, less pain overall, and finer control of prosthetics, and the future of prostheses and rehabilitation looks really exciting. Be sure to check out the video after the break.
There’s more than one way to control prostheses, such as
deep learning
and
somatosensory stimulation
.
Thanks for the tip, [Qes]!
Via
TechExplore
. Images via
MIT Media Lab
. | 6 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374139",
"author": "Redhatter (VK4MSL)",
"timestamp": "2021-08-21T23:33:51",
"content": "… just don’t put the patient through a MRI scanner after inserting those “tiny ball magnets”… Ouch!!!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6374... | 1,760,372,976.182699 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/21/modern-tape-echo-made-easy/ | Modern Tape Echo Made Easy | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Musical Hacks"
] | [
"3D printed enclosure",
"analog",
"cassette",
"effect",
"music",
"tape",
"tape echo"
] | Modern popular music increasingly relies on more and more complicated and intricate equipment and algorithms to generate catchy tunes, but even decades ago this was still the case. The only difference between then and now was that most of the equipment in the past was analog instead of digital. For example, the humble tape echo was originally made by running a loop of magnetic tape over a recording head and then immediately playing it back. Old analog machines from that era are getting harder and harder to find,
so [Adam Paul] decided to make his own
.
At first, [Adam] planned to use standard cassette tapes in various configurations in order to achieve the desired effect, but this proved to be too cumbersome and he eventually switched his design to using the cassette internals in a custom tape deck. The final design includes a small loop of tape inside of the enclosure with a motor driving a spindle. The tape is passed over a record head, then a read head, and then an erase head in order to achieve the echo sound. All of this is done from inside of the device itself, with 1/4″ jacks provided so that the musician can plug in their instrument of choice just like a standard effects pedal would be configured.
The entire build is designed to be buildable and repairable using readily-available parts as well, which solves the problem of maintaining (or even finding) parts from dedicated tape echo machines from decades ago. We like the sound from the analog device, as well as the fact that it’s still an analog device in a world of otherwise digital substitutes. Much like this
magnetic tape-based synthesizer we featured about a year ago
. | 11 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374126",
"author": "BrendaEM",
"timestamp": "2021-08-21T21:38:32",
"content": "Cool!We need to sees the inside. Where is da inside?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374129",
"author": "Adam Paul",
"timestamp":... | 1,760,372,976.373722 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/21/interactive-musical-art-installation-mixes-vintage-modern-lasers-and-bubbles-bubbles/ | Interactive Musical Art Installation Mixes Vintage, Modern, Lasers, And…Bubbles? Bubbles. | Ryan Flowers | [
"digital audio hacks",
"Musical Hacks",
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"acorn bbc master",
"ampex",
"analog oscilloscope",
"Apple //e",
"bbc master",
"laser",
"vectrex"
] | Acorn BBC Master. Apple IIe. Ampex 270 Terminal. Vectrex game console. You’d be hard pressed to find a more diverse hardware collection in the average hacker’s lab. When you add seven Raspberry Pi’s, five CRT monitors, an analog oscilloscope and an LED wall to the mix, one starts to wonder at the menagerie of current and retro hardware. What kind of connoisseur would have such a miscellaneous collection? That’s when you spot smoke and fog machines sitting next to an RGB Laser.
Finally, you learn that all of this disparate paraphernalia is networked together. It is then that you realize that you’re not just dealing with a multi-talented hacker- you’re dealing with a meticulous maestro who’s spent lockdown finishing a project he started nearly twenty years ago!
AUVERN comes alive in a show of light and sound whenever someone enters its view.
The machine is called AUVERN
and it’s the product of the creative mind of [Owen]. Taking advantage of advances in technology (and copious amounts of free time), [Owen] laboriously put his collection of older rigs to work.
A Python script uses a Kinect sensor’s input to control a Mac Mini running Digital Audio Workstation software. The operator’s location, poses and movements are used to alter the music, lights, and multimedia experience as a whole. MIDI, Ethernet, and serial communications tie the hardware together through Raspberry Pi’s, vintage MIDI interfaces, and more. Watch the video below the break for the technical explanation, but don’t miss the videos on
[Owen]’s website
for a mesmerizing demonstration of AUVERN in full swing.
AUVERN makes use of the
Vectrex32 upgrade which we have previously covered
, and we are unavoidably reminded of another
pandemic inspired bubble machine
. Don’t forget to send us your hacks, projects, and creations through the
Tip Line
! | 3 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374121",
"author": "Tricon",
"timestamp": "2021-08-21T20:14:21",
"content": "Vetrex; no.Vextrex32; no.Vectrex; yes (I checked the box).Vectrex32; yes (I followed the link).I had to fight the autocorrect too.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
... | 1,760,372,976.418613 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/21/keep-scraps-around/ | Keep Scraps Around | Elliot Williams | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"newsletter",
"prototyping",
"scrap",
"testing"
] | When I’m building something, I like to have a decent-sized scrap pile on hand. Because when I’ve got to test something out — does this glue adhere to this fabric, how much force will this hold if I tap it and put a screw in, will it snap if reinforced with carbon fiber and epoxy — it’s nice to have some of the material in question on hand just for experimentation. So I pull a chunk out of the scrap pile!
But scrap piles can’t expand forever, and we all know that “too much of a good thing” is a thing, right? Scrap piles require constant pruning. You don’t really need more than a few aluminum extrusion cutoffs, so when you start building up excess inventory, it’s time to scrap it. I mean, throw it away.
A corollary of this, that I’ve only recently started to appreciate, is that if I limit the number of materials that I’m working with, it’s a lot more manageable to keep the scrap pile(s) under control. It’s simple math. If I’m working with twenty different materials, that’s twenty different heaps of scrap. But if I can get by with one weight of fiberglass for everything, that one pile of scraps can do double or triple duty. There is also the added benefit that I already know how the material works, and maybe even have old test samples on hand.
Indeed, I’m such a scrapaholic that it’s almost painful to start working with a new material and not have a scrap pile built up yet. I’m always loathe to cut into a nice square piece of stock just to test something out. But this too is part of the Great Circle of Life. By not testing things out beforehand, I’m almost guaranteed to screw up and create scrap out of what I had hoped was going to be a finished piece. See? No problem! Next version.
What do you think? Are scrap, offcuts, and their close cousins — test pieces and samples — worth keeping around in your shop? Do you have a disciplined approach, or do you just throw them in the corner? Purge per project, or only when the mountain of XPS foam gets as high as your head?
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
! | 30 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6374055",
"author": "Paul",
"timestamp": "2021-08-21T14:10:14",
"content": "And the next day after cleaning you discover that you need the exact junk piece that you cleared.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6374060",
"a... | 1,760,372,976.576167 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/21/pint-sized-sumo-robot-is-adorable-accessible-and-totally-awesome/ | Pint-sized Sumo Robot Is Adorable, Accessible And Totally Awesome | Chris Wilkinson | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"bbc",
"Micro:bit",
"robot",
"sumo"
] | We’ve seen plenty of impressive robots of all sizes here at Hackaday, but recently we were particularly inspired by [Hans Jørgen Grimstad] and his thrifty
mini sumo build
.
Using the BBC micro:bit platform as a starting point, Hans seized the opportunity to build a competitive mini sumo bot without breaking the bank. According to his blog, the enchanting little machine uses commonly available parts and cost around $30 when built in 2020 (or $50 according to the more recent video, perhaps taking into account the cost of hardware in these trying times).
The results can be seen in the video below. Some sacrifices were made – Hans admits that the 3.3 V linear regulator gets a little toasty, but the design is kept much simpler by doing away with a switching regulator. The 700 RPM N20 motors are wired directly up to the 6 V battery pack, giving this plucky wrestler plenty of sumo-smashing power.
Hans hopes that the build can lower barriers to entry for new builders in robot tournaments, being something that can easily be put together in a garage or local makerspace for a low, low price. The mini sumo form factor is a great beginner or amateur project, made even easier when makers like Hans
put all the nitty-gritty details up on GitHub
. This is certainly not the first accessible sumo robotics project that
we have covered
, and it won’t be the last. We hope we see loads more of these endearing robotic gladiators at future events. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,978.334464 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/21/occams-razor-gardening-edition/ | Occam’s Razor: Gardening Edition | Bryan Cockfield | [
"green hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"ESP32",
"load cell",
"moisture",
"plant",
"sensor",
"watering",
"weight"
] | While the impulse to solving problems in complex systems is often to grab a microcontroller and some sensors to automate the problem away, interfacing with the real world is often a lot more difficult than it appears. Measuring soil moisture, for example, seems like it would be an easy way of ensuring plants get the proper amount of water, but soil is a challenging environment for electronics and this solution often causes more problems than it solves. [Kevin] noticed this problem with soil moisture sensors and set about solving this problem with
a much simpler, though indirect, method of monitoring his plants electronically
.
Rather than relying on soil conductivity for testing soil moisture levels, he has developed an alternate method of determining if the plants need to be watered simply by continuously weighing them. The hypothesis that he had was that a plant that needs water will weigh less as the available water respirates out of the plant or evaporates from the soil. This means that using a reliable sensor like a load cell to measure weight rather than an unreliable one like a soil moisture sensor will result in more reliable data he can use to automate his plants’ watering.
[Kevin]’s build is based around an ESP32 and a commercially-available load cell which are all built into the base of the plant’s pot. The design hides all of the electronics in a pleasant enclosure and is able to communicate relevant info wirelessly as well. The real story here, however, isn’t a novel use of an ESP32 chip, but rather out-of-the-box problem solving by using an atypical sensor to solve this problem. That’s not to say that
you can’t ever use other sensors to directly monitor your garden and automate its health
, though. | 44 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373997",
"author": "Daniel Eichhorn",
"timestamp": "2021-08-21T08:26:57",
"content": "It’s already been six years since a built Thirsdee. Time is running:https://hackaday.com/2015/06/28/wirelessly-weighting-plants-with-the-esp8266/I have to admit that Kevin’s project looks much nic... | 1,760,372,978.410401 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/hackaday-podcast-132-laser-disco-ball-moores-law-in-your-garage-cheap-cyborg-glasses-and-a-mouse-that-detects-elephants/ | Hackaday Podcast 132: Laser Disco Ball, Moore’s Law In Your Garage, Cheap Cyborg Glasses, And A Mouse That Detects Elephants | Mike Szczys | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Podcasts"
] | [
"Hackaday Podcast"
] | Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys debate the great mysteries of the hacking universe. On tap this week is news that Sam Zeloof has refined his home lab chip fabrication process and it’s incredible! We see a clever seismometer built from plastic pipe, a laser, and a computer mouse. There’s a 3D printed fabric that turns into a hard shell using the same principles as jamming grippers. And we love the idea of high-powered lasers being able to safely direct lighting to where you want it.
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
(60 MB or so.)
Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast
Places to follow Hackaday podcasts:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
RSS
YouTube
Check
out our Libsyn landing page
Episode 132 Show Notes:
What’s that Sound?
That sound was from Doom 3
Unfortunately nobody got this one right. Tune in next week for a new What’s That Sound for your next chance!
Sad trombone, not sad trumpet.
New This Week:
Tesla Automatic Driving Under Scrutiny By US Regulators
Alfred Jones Talks About The Challenges Of Designing Fully Self-Driving Vehicles
Take Note: An E-Ink Tablet From Pine64
reMarkable 2
Mike finally made a mechanical “keyboard”
Photo of the 5-key macro keyboard
miniMACRO5 – custom programmable keypad from Leaf Cutter Labs on Tindie
QMK firmware
Interesting Hacks of the Week:
Robot Pet Is A Chip Off The Old Logic Block
The Zeloof Z2 Intergrated Circuit Has 100 Transistors
3D Printed Smart Glasses Put Linux In Your Face
This Wearable Computer SUCKS (on purpose) – YouTube
Light Painting With An 19th Century Inspired Plotter
USB Mouse Hack For Pachyderm Protection
3D Printed Fabric Stiffens On Demand
Robotic Gripper From A Squishy Ball
Quick Hacks:
Elliot’s Picks
The Faux-Vintage Becomes Vintage
Spiffy Summer Project Sources Solar Sounds From Scraps
Hacked IKEA Air Quality Sensor Gets Custom PCB
DIY Handheld Game Puts Its Brains On A Removable Cart
Mike’s Picks:
DOOM On A Desk Phone Is Just The Tip Of The Iceberg
Xbox Flexure Joystick Puts You In The Pilot’s Seat
Who Needs Pin Headers?
Can’t-Miss Articles:
Teardown: 3D Printed Space Shuttle Lamp
Of Lasers And Lightning: Thwarting Thor With Technology | 3 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373855",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T17:59:13",
"content": "Tesla’s AI chip REVEALED! (Project Dojo)https://youtu.be/DSw3IwsgNncTies in with their self-driving ambition.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373... | 1,760,372,978.56378 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/dedicated-box-makes-youtube-more-tv-like/ | Dedicated Box Makes YouTube More TV-Like | Kristina Panos | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"leds",
"mdf",
"PETG",
"raspberry pi",
"youtube"
] | [Exposed Wire] is a huge fan of YouTube and consumes a lot of content. If that sounds familiar, maybe you should
build a dedicated YouTube box
, too. You get to push buttons, there’s LEDs, and you can take a break from other screens to look at this one for a while. [Exposed Wire] wanted to make it easier to watch the latest videos from their favorite creators, but we would argue that this is more fun, too.
The Rasberry Pi 4 inside checks every five minutes for new videos by keeping track of the creator’s total number of videos in a text file and doing a comparison. If one of the channels has a new video, then the corresponding LED lights up and the new video’s URL is linked to the button. Press the button and the Raspi opens the browser, goes the the URL, maximizes the video, turns off the LED, and updates the video count in the text file.
We like the construction job here. The 1/4″ MDF walls are connected by 3D-printed L-brackets in PETG. At first, [Exposed Wire] mounted the LEDs and buttons to a PCB, but that was really fiddly so they printed panels instead. Combined with the bracket around the screen, the finished build looks good. Check out the build montage after the break.
Regular old YouTube videos not doing it for you anymore?
Try watching them at low resolution on an LED matrix
. | 19 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373817",
"author": "medix",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T15:23:49",
"content": "What?! No Rick-Roll button?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373837",
"author": "ziew",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T16:39:33",
"... | 1,760,372,978.23393 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/this-week-in-security-breaking-apple-id-political-hacktivism-and-airtag-tracking/ | This Week In Security: Breaking Apple ID, Political Hacktivism, And Airtag Tracking | Jonathan Bennett | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"News",
"Security Hacks",
"Slider"
] | [
"AirTag",
"qnx",
"This Week in Security"
] | Have you ever thought about all the complexities of a Single Sign On (SSO) implementation? A lot of engineering effort has gone into hardened against cross-site attacks — you wouldn’t want every site you visit to be able to hijack your Google or Facebook account. At the same time, SSO is the useful ability to use your authentication on one service to authenticate with an unrelated site. Does SSO ever compromise that hardening? If mistakes are made, absolutely,
as [Zemnmez] discovered while looking at the Apple ID SSO system
.
It all starts with the observation that
icloud.com
has a sign-on that talks to
apple.com
, two separate domains. The sneaky trick used to make this work is an iframe that embeds the Apple sign-on page in the
icloud.com
site. There are several security measures that are intended to prevent abuse of that embedded site. The first that must be overcome is the Oauth2
redirect_uri
is used to check for a white-listed domain, as well as setting the allowed domain for the
content-security-policy
header. Put simply, the attack must set a single string that appears to be
icloud.com
to the Oauth2 backend, but
OurEvilSite.com
to the browser checking the security policy header. How is this seemingly impossible feet accomplished? By abusing the extreme flexibility inherent in URI encoding.
https://OurEvilSite.com;@icloud.com
The two different security mechanisms understand it differently, allowing the embed.
The next problem to solve is that the embedded iframe passes messages back and forth with the
icloud.com
page, and nothing happens if that handshake doesn’t complete. This handshake can be spoofed fairly easily, except for one minor detail. The domain is specified again, based on that same
redirect_uri
. The trick here is realizing that this URI passes through the
decodeURIComponent
function two separate times, at various points in the page-load process. Double-encoding a question mark character allows for the needed additional trickery, controlling what this security check sees.
The last hurdle to overcome is the message origin check, a similar security feature. Rather than a clever parser attack, this is overcome with another loophole. If the message source is NULL, this check never happens. The way to accomplish this? Leave off the
allow-same-origin
flag. That creates an iframe that is partially sandboxed from the rest of the page. Sounds useless? The solution is to embed both iframes in the attacker page, and pass messages through the frame that has permission to do so. With this crazy combination, an attacker can successfully embed the
apple.com
login widget on their own page.
I know what you’re thinking. So what? Just rip the HTML, CSS, and images from that iframe, and you can replicate it yourself with none of the extra fuss. One more vulnerability turns this attack into something really impressive. To understand it, you first need to understand the
handlebars
JavaScript library for HTML templates. This library lets you write your page template, and include
{{someObject}}
expressions. You then run the template, specifying the data called by the expressions. The apple.com SSO page uses this library to display custom information from the calling page, like privacy information and the like.
The handlebar library has a special type of expression,
{{{the triple handlebar}}}
, that allows for unsafe HTML insertion. Put it together, and you could create a valid “Log in with Apple” button that redirects the user to Apple’s
idmsa.apple.com
page, but inject arbitrary code onto that page. Check out the demo below for the goods.
Hacktivism and Iran
“We attacked the computer systems of the Railway Company and the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development”
Checkpoint Research brings us
a report on recent cyberattacks
against Iranian transportation infrastructure. The attack used Active Directory to deploy the payload to connected computers, which were wiped and then modified to hang while booting, showing a message from the attackers. The goal seems to be disruption of the transportation system, and there was a clever exception coded into the wiper program. Machines bearing a handful of hostnames containing “PIS” were automatically skipped. That acronym stands for “Passenger Information System” — the big digital billboards showing status and delays. The attackers wanted waiting passengers to be able to see exactly how badly the system was affected.
Checkpoint believes this is the same actors as a previous attack on Iran, and a pair of incidents against targets in Syria. The self-claimed name is Indra, named after a Hindu god of war. For those of us not up-to-date on Hindu theology, Indra could be thought of as a character similar to Thor. The group claims to be essentially hacktivists against Iran and their funding for terror groups. While Indra has not claimed responsibility for the latest attack, Checkpoint does a good job making their case that the same attack is being used.
CVE Sluething — And Perl Quirks
[Justin Kennedy] from Atredis was in the middle of a red-team exercise, and
he came across the Sophos UTM9 threat management appliance
. This particular install hadn’t been updated to mitigate CVE-2020-25223, a pre-auth RCE. This was a big break for demonstrating an attack against the client, but there was one little problem. This CVE never got fully disclosed, and no one seemed to have exploitation details. He grabbed a pair of install ISOs, and ran virtualized instances of the vulnerable and patched appliance. Doing a diff on the two versions would be easy on some systems, but these employ a couple tricks to obfuscate the code. First, the Perl is compiled into
plx
binaries. This can be overcome through use of a debugger, and copying the deobfuscated script from memory. The second problem was that the Perl modules that do the heavy lifting weren’t a part of that recovered code. A fellow engineer at Atredis discovered that the needed modules were actually hidden in a BFS filesystem, appended to the end of the webserver
plx
. Now with the original Perl source in hand, he could get to business.
There was all of one change in the code itself, an added Perl regex in
asg_connector.pm
, that checked an incoming SID (Session ID) and potentially threw it out as invalid. Now Perl regex has quite a reputation for being unwieldy and hard for humans to parse. And this is an example of just that.
if ($sid =~ m/[^a-zA-Z0-9]/) { #SID is invalid .... }
[Justin] took a look at this, and thought to himself, ‘Oh, it’s a match string, looking for alphanumeric. And it starts with a caret, meaning it’s only checking the first character of the string.’ I know that’s approximately his thought process, because he wrote, “The updated code shows a check being added to the
switch_session
subroutine make sure the SID (Session ID) does not start with any alphanumeric characters.” In his defense, he took the hint and looked at how to abuse the SID value on incoming connections as the probable vulnerability, but that’s not what that regex does.
This is worth
a quick detour into Perl regex
to explain. The
=~ m/MyRegex/
construction is the match operator, and returns true if the string it’s acting on contains the text described by the pattern. Bracketed character classes are one of the ways to describe those patterns. So
[a-z]
would match a single lower case alphabetical character. You can combine them, as is done in the Sophos code:
[a-zA-Z0-9]
would match any upper or lower alphanumeric character. Now what about the caret “^”, what does that do? Here we see the complexity. Usually, a caret in a Perl regex represents the beginning of the line. This would match on the SID starting with an alphanumeric. However, when the caret is *inside* the brackets, it has a totally different effect. In this case, it works to invert the selection. All this to say, the regex above is actually checking for any characters other than simple alphanumerics, and marking the SID invalid if it finds them. Regex is hard sometimes.
That aside completed, what harm could be done through an SID containing special characters? To answer that, we have to drill down through the code, and see where that gets used. The Sophos system creates a file on the appliance filesystem in the name of each valid SID, and on a new connection, attempts to read that file with a Perl
open()
call. I hear you groaning, another Perlism. Yes. Perl has a very handy mechanism, that you can
open()
a pipe to or from another command on the system. It looks something like
open(Handle, "netstat -i -n |")
Perl will make the system call, and collect the output for you, just as if you were reading it in from a file. It’s very handy, but a terrible security problem if the end user has control over the filename — just like the SID in this case.
Our protagonist found this, and was elated! He had found the vulnerability! He tried it… and it didn’t work. The pipe symbol was removed, and his SID was oddly changed. But wait, while there was a single change in the code itself, there was also a change in a configuration file, the Apache
vhost
config. The version with the vulnerability fix removed a few settings, most notably an input filter that removes the pipe symbol. He worked for a while trying to find a hole in the
sed
string, to no avail. And then the answer became obvious: There was a rewrite rule that allowed requests to be sent to
/var
, and it would re-route to the webadmin endpoint, skipping the filter. And that is the pre-auth RCE. Simply make a request to
/var
on the device, and set the SID to
| touch /tmp/pwned
.
T-Mobile Breach
T-Mobile has suffered
another huge data breach
. Name, date of birth, Social Security Number, and driver’s license information for 40 million customers — anyone that applied for credit at T-Mobile. Additionally, something like 8.6 million current customers had data of some sort compromised as well. If you’re a T-Mobile customer, watch out for scams and fraud targeting you and your accounts. So far not much is known about how the breach happened, besides the standard official statement that it was a “highly sophisticated cyberattack”.
QNX Baddalloc
A series of vulnerabilities
have just recently surfaced in the QNX embedded OS
. This Unix System developed by Blackberry may not be one of the ones you are familiar with, but it shows up in quite a few devices around us. Just an example, the
Driverack PA2 speaker management system
runs an older version of QNX. (An older version that happens to have its own pre-auth RCE via a debug port, but that’s another story for another time) The most concerning place that QNX can be found is in transportation and medical workloads. Being a true real-time OS makes it a good candidate for some of those time-critical workloads, which is why CISA has stepped up with the warning.
Airtags for Justice
And finally, an uplifting story where a stolen electric scooter is recovered through technology. [Dan Guido] wasn’t your normal victim when his ride was swiped. He had hidden a pair of Apple Airtags in it ahead of time. Sure enough, he got a ping through Apple’s system, and knew about where the pilfered device was at. He contacted the police, and tried to convince them to help him recover it, and was met with understandable resistance.
Airtags are new, and police are the targets of scams like the rest of us. After taking a break for Black Hat, he went back to the police station to try to recruit official help once again. It took a crash course on Airtags and some skilled convincing, but he did manage to get an escort to go look around the indicated location for the scooter. The used e-bike store seemed like an obvious starting point, and his phone linked directly to his Airtag when he walked in the door. He was able to prove ownership, and take his scooter home.
My scooter was stolen last week. Unknown to the thief, I hid two Airtags inside it. I was able to use the Apple Find My network and UWB direction finding to recover the scooter today. Here’s how it all went down:
— Dan Guido (@dguido)
August 10, 2021
At the end of the thread, [Dan] gives his advice for replicating his success. First, hide the tags well, as thieves are already on the lookout for them. Second, don’t use Lost mode. The audible tones give the game away. Third, time is of the essence. Apple has rightly implemented a system to alert potential stalking victims if an Airtag seems to be following them too tightly. And finally, don’t try to play hero. Get the police involved and do the recovery the right way. | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373839",
"author": "tomás zerolo",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T16:46:56",
"content": "Perl regex:The caret in its dual role as the “beginning of line” and “negation whithin character class” (i.e. in [] bracketed expressions) is pretty standard across regex languages. It’s in POSIX. It... | 1,760,372,978.465372 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/inkplate-comes-full-circle-becomes-true-open-reader/ | Inkplate Comes Full Circle, Becomes True Open Reader | Tom Nardi | [
"Kindle hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"drm",
"e-paper",
"ebooks",
"epaper",
"epub",
"ereader",
"Inkplate",
"open source software"
] | Regular readers will likely remember the Inkplate, an open hardware electronic paper development board that combines an ESP32 with a recycled Kindle screen. With meticulous documentation and full-featured support libraries for both the Arduino IDE and MicroPython, the Inkplate makes it exceptionally easy for hackers and makers to write their own code for the high-quality epaper display.
Now, thanks to the efforts of [Guy Turcotte], the
Inkplate family of devices can now boast a feature-rich and fully open source ereader firmware
. The project started in October of last year, and since then, the codebase has been steadily updated and refined. Nearing its 1.3 release,
EPub-InkPlate
has most of the functions you’d expect from a modern ereader, and several that might take you by surprise.
For one thing, [Guy] has taken full advantage of the ESP32 microcontroller at the heart of the Inkplate and implemented a web server that lets you manage the reader’s library from your browser. This allows books in EPUB v2 and v3 formats to be uploaded and saved on the Inkplate’s SD card without any special software. There’s currently support for JPG, PNG, BMP, and GIF images, as well as embedded TTF and OTF fonts.
As of this writing
EPub-InkPlate
supports both the six and ten inch Inkplate variants, and uses the touch pads on the side of the screen for navigation. While it’s on the wishlist for the final 1.3 release, the project currently doesn’t support the Inkplate 6PLUS;
which uses the backlit and touch compatible displays pulled from Kindle Paperwhites
. With shipments the new 6PLUS model reportedly going out in November, hopefully it won’t be long before its enhanced features are supported.
With the rising popularity of ebooks, it’s more important than ever that we have open hardware and software readers that work on our terms. While they may never compete with the Kindle in terms of units sold, we’re eager to see projects like
EPub-InkPlate
and the
Open Book from [Joey Castillo]
mature to the point that they’re a valid option for mainstream users who don’t want to live under Amazon’s thumb.
Thanks to [Nathan] for the tip. | 15 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373801",
"author": "Feinfinger (today just a moderate meanie)",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T14:17:21",
"content": "That doen’t look like what I would like to use for my still purely hypothetical Emacs-PDA. I’d even would not like to see such page flips for whole pages. It just looks... | 1,760,372,978.621185 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/20/arduino-caller-id-display-is-better-late-than-never/ | Arduino Caller ID Display Is Better Late Than Never | Tom Nardi | [
"classic hacks",
"Phone Hacks"
] | [
"16x2 LCD",
"Arduino Uno",
"caller id",
"character lcd",
"decoder"
] | It’s no secret that the era of the landline telephone is slowly coming to a close. As of 2020, it was estimated that less than half the homes in America still subscribed to plain old telephone service (POTS). But of course, that still amounts to millions upon millions of subscribers that might get a kick out of this
Arduino caller ID developed by [Dilshan Jayakody]
.
The completed HT9032D board.
Truth be told, until this point, we hadn’t really given a lot of thought to how the caller ID system works. But as [Dilshan] explains, you can actually pick up a dedicated IC that can decode incoming caller data that’s sent over the telephone line. In this case he’s using a Holtek HT9032D, which comes in a through-hole DIP-8 package and can be picked up for around $2 USD. The chip needs a handful of passives and a 3.58 MHz crystal to help it along on its quest, but beyond that, it’s really just a matter of reading the decoded data from its output pin.
To display the caller’s information, [Dilshan] is using an Arduino Uno and common 16×2 HD44780 LCD. As a nice touch, the code will even blink the Arduino’s onboard LED when you’ve missed a call. As a proof of concept there’s been no attempt to condense the hardware or ditch the breadboard, but it’s not hard to imagine that all the components could be packed into a nice 3D printed enclosure should you want something a bit more permanent.
We’ve seen caller ID data being collected in previous projects, but
they used a USB modem combined with a software approach
. We really like the idea of doing it with a cheap dedicated IC, though we’ll admit this demonstration would probably have been a bit more exciting a decade ago. | 12 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373752",
"author": "Alice Lalita Heald",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T08:48:09",
"content": "AI to detect spammers?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6373754",
"author": "nasg",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T08:52:34",
"conten... | 1,760,372,978.517958 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/the-stretch-limo-of-game-boys/ | The Stretch Limo Of Game Boys | Matthew Carlson | [
"handhelds hacks",
"Nintendo Game Boy Hacks"
] | [
"body filler",
"game boy",
"game boy advance",
"gameboy",
"Gameboy Advance",
"gba",
"retro future"
] | Here at Hackaday, we see all sorts of projects, some born out of a deep necessity or itch that couldn’t be scratched. Others are born out of a world of “why not” and it is perhaps these projects that put the biggest smile on our faces. The
WideBoy Advance by [Elliot] of Retro Future is one such project
.
Starting with a working Game Boy Advance and a donor one with a busted motherboard, the frankenstein-ification could start. A Dremel split one case in half and removed the sides on another, while trusty old car body filler helps fill and smooth the gaps. A particularly clever trick is to use the Dremel to create channels for the filler to adhere easier. Several areas had to be built up with filler and glued in bits of plastic as a base. As you can see in the video below, the countless hours of sanding, priming, sanding, and more priming led to a beautifully smooth finish. The choice of purple paint really sells the impression of a factory-fresh Game Boy Advance.
The working circuit board was desoldered and the donor board was cut into pieces to fit in the extended sides. Using some magnet wire, connections were bridged over to the original motherboard via the test points on the PCB. [Elliot] didn’t opt to swap the screen to an IPS display or add a backlight. These quality of life improvements are nice, but a dead giveaway that Nintendo didn’t make it. The goal is to get the user to wonder, even if just for a second, what if Nintendo just happened to make this wide one-off handheld console.
[Elliot] made it simply because he found it interesting and enjoyed the form of the thing he made. Is it a hack? Is it art? Probably a little bit of both. This isn’t his first modified Nintendo handheld either. He previously made a
long Nintendo Gameboy DMG-01
. We love seeing all the wild hacks and tweaks made to Game Boy line, such as this
Game Boy Color inside the DMG-01
. | 6 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373749",
"author": "nah!",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T08:08:21",
"content": "with the long boy, the wide boy, theres only the thicc boy missing",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373759",
"author": "Wally Hulea",
... | 1,760,372,978.13538 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/beginning-the-machine-shop-journey-with-a-diy-cnc/ | Beginning The Machine Shop Journey With A DIY CNC | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"bootstrap",
"cnc",
"design",
"diy",
"mill",
"philosophy",
"precision"
] | Building a good quality machine shop may seem to present a chicken-and-egg problem, at least for anyone not willing to mortgage their home for the money needed to buy all of these tools new. Namely, that building good tools often requires good tools. To help solve this problem,
[Ryan] designed and built this CNC machine
which can be built with nothing other than common tools, hardware store supplies, and some readily available parts from the internet.
Since it’s being built from consumer-grade material, [Ryan] has the design philosophy of “buying precision” which means that most of the parts needed for this build are precise enough for their purpose without needing to be worked in any way before incorporation into the mill. For example, he uses a granite plate because it’s hard, flat, heavy, and sturdy enough at the time of purchase to be placed into the machine right away. Similarly, his linear guides do not need to be modified before being put to work with a high degree of precision and minimal calibration. From there, he applies the KISS principle and uses the simplest parts available. With this design process he is able to “bootstrap” a high quality mill for around $1500 USD without needing any extra tools than the ones you likely already have.
The RIG-CNC as it is known has also been made completely open source which further cements its bootstrapability, and there is a lot more detail on the project page and in the video linked below. This project is unique not simply for the mill build from common parts and tools, but because this design philosophy is so robust. Good design goes a lot farther in our builds than a lot of us might realize, and good design often results
in more maintainable, hackable things
that work for more uses than the original creators may have even thought about. | 24 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373720",
"author": "Brian",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T03:04:59",
"content": "Exposed ball-screw = Bad day in the CNC world",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373733",
"author": "Daniel",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20... | 1,760,372,978.299836 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/minimalist-robot-arm-really-stacks-up/ | Minimalist Robot Arm Really Stacks Up | Dan Maloney | [
"cnc hacks",
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"arm",
"cnc",
"minimalist",
"robot",
"robot arm",
"stepper",
"trash",
"wood"
] | There’s nothing like a little weekend project, especially one that ends up better than you expected. And when you literally
build a robotic arm out of workshop scraps
, so much the better.
Longtime readers will no doubt recognize the build style used here as that of [Norbert Heinz], aka “Homofaciens” on YouTube. [Norbert] has a way of making trash do his bidding, and has shown us all kinds of seemingly impossible feats of mechatronics with just what’s lying around. In this case, his robot arm is made from scrap wooden roofing battens, or what we’d call furring strips here in the US. The softwood isn’t something you’d think would make a great material for building robots, but [Norbert] makes its characteristics work for him, like using wax-lubricated holes for hinge points. Steppers and lead screws cannibalized from an old CNC build, along with the drive electronics, provide the motion. It’s a bit — compliant — but precise enough to pick up nuts and stack them nicely. The video below gives an overview of the build, and
detailed instructions
are available too.
We always appreciated [Norbert]’s minimalist builds, and seeing what can be accomplished with almost nothing is always inspirational. If you’re not familiar with his work, check out
his cardboard and paperclip CNC plotter
,
his tin can encoders
, or
his plasma-powered printer
. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373712",
"author": "rclark",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T02:13:04",
"content": "That is neat. I wonder how many of us think of using ‘wood’ for a robot arm…. I know I was thinking of having to design some 3D printed parts (or buy an already built)….. We have a saying in computer sci... | 1,760,372,978.178575 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/a-3d-printed-block-and-tackle-for-those-annoying-lifts/ | A 3D-Printed Block And Tackle For Those Annoying Lifts | Jenny List | [
"classic hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"3d print",
"block and tackle",
"pulley"
] | Perhaps the humble block and tackle — multiple parallel pulleys to reduce the effort of lifting — is not such a common sight as it once was in this age of hydraulic loaders, but it remains a useful mechanism for whenever there is a lifting task. To that end [semi] has produced
a 3D-printed block and tackle system
, which as can be seen in the video below the break, makes lifting moderately heavy loads a breeze.
It’s a simple enough mechanism, with the 3D printer supplying pulleys, chocks, and attachment points, and steel bolts holding everything together. It’s demonstrated with a maximum weight of 20 kilograms (44 pounds), and though perhaps some hesitation might be in order before trusting it with 200 Kg of engine, we’re guessing it would be capable of much more that what we’re shown. Should you wish to give it a try, the files can be found on Thingiverse.
The block and tackle should hold a special place in the hearts of engineers everywhere, as
the first product manufactured using mass-production techniques
. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this early-19th century factory came from the work of
Marc Brunel
, father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel
who we’ve made the subject of a previous Hackaday piece
. | 11 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373684",
"author": "DainBramage",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T21:07:02",
"content": "Really?Seems like an accurate enough title to me. Nothing sensational about it, just a statement on what the product is ans what it may be useful for. That’s not clickbait at all.What title would you ... | 1,760,372,978.716943 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/building-an-archery-mech-suit-to-skip-practice/ | Building An Archery Mech Suit To Skip Practice | Danie Conradie | [
"Tech Hacks"
] | [
"archery",
"compound bow",
"shane wighton",
"stuff made here",
"william tell"
] | According to legend, King Edward III once said: “If you want to train a longbowman, start with his grandfather.” Consistently making accurate hits with any bow, especially on moving targets, takes many hours of practice. Or, if you’re [Shane Wighton], you can spend a comparable amount of time building, debugging, and rebuilding a
robotically-enhanced bow
to do it.
The goal was to shoot flying targets out of the air, so [Shane] had to create a system that could track the position of the bow and the target, and automatically adjust the position of the bow and loose the arrow at exactly the right moment to intercept the target. The position tracking was done with the same Optitrack cameras [Shane] used on his
robotic basketball hoop
, with reflective marking balls on the bow, target, and the release mechanism. The auto-aiming is done with a two-axis rack and pinion mechanism driven by a pair of stepper motors. [Shane] first used the cheapest recurve bow he could find online, which caused accuracy issues likely related to
the Archer’s paradox
. The setup also made him repeatedly hit himself in the face, because the servo-operated release mechanism would release unexpectedly without having a proper anchor with his draw hand.
[Shane] eventually upgraded to a compound bow, which reduced the tension he had to hold while lining up the shot, but also increased the weight of the system dramatically. This leads him to fully embrace the mech suit look, and use a Steadicam vest to hold the weight of the bow. This finally allowed him to reliably William Tell shots and hit the flying targets.
Whether it’s an
all-in-one electronic golf club
, an
explosive baseball bat
, or a
robotic pool cue
, [Shane] is certainly adept at using impressive engineering skills to compensate for his lack of physical skill, or just his willfully closed eyes. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373653",
"author": "BillSF9c",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T19:29:53",
"content": "I recall an article from a magazine around 1965-70. A native American went shotgunning w the author, pheasant hunting. The NA (?!?,) went, and took his bow. Both were fairly expert. The bowman got 9 outt... | 1,760,372,979.111736 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/neuromorphic-computing-what-is-it-and-where-are-we-at/ | Neuromorphic Computing: What Is It And Where Are We At? | Matthew Carlson | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"artifical intelligence",
"deep learning",
"neurobiology",
"neuromorphic",
"neuroscience"
] | For the last hundred or so years, collectively as humanity, we’ve been dreaming, thinking, writing, singing, and producing movies about a machine that could think, reason, and be intelligent in a similar way to us. The stories beginning with “Erewhon” published in 1872 by Sam Butler, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” and the 1927 film “Metropolis” showed the idea that a machine could think and reason like a person. Not in magic or fantastical way. They drew from the automata of ancient Greece and Egypt and combined notions of philosophers such as Aristotle, Ramon Llull, Hobbes, and thousands of others.
Their notions of the human mind led them to believe that all rational thought could be expressed as algebra or logic. Later the arrival of circuits, computers, and Moore’s law led to continual speculation that human-level intelligence was just around the corner. Some have heralded it as the savior of humanity, where others portray a calamity as a second intelligent entity rises to crush the first (humans).
The flame of computerized artificial intelligence has brightly burned a few times before, such as in the 1950s, 1980s, and 2010s. Unfortunately, both prior AI booms have been followed by an “AI winter” that falls out of fashion for failing to deliver on expectations. This winter is often blamed on a lack of computer power, inadequate understanding of the brain, or hype and over-speculation. In the midst of our current AI summer, most AI researchers focus on using the steadily increasing computer power available to increase the depth of their neural nets. Despite their name, neural nets are inspired by the neurons in the brain and share only surface-level similarities.
Some researchers believe that human-level general intelligence can be achieved by simply adding more and more layers to these simplified convolutional systems fed by an ever-increasing trove of data. This point is backed up by the incredible things these networks can produce, and it gets a little better every year. However, despite what wonders deep neural nets produce, they still specialize and excel at just one thing. A superhuman Atari playing AI cannot make music or think about weather patterns without a human adding those capabilities. Furthermore, the quality of the input data dramatically impacts the quality of the net, and the ability to make an inference is limited,
producing disappointing results in some domains
. Some think that recurrent neural nets will never gain the sort of general intelligence and flexibility that our brains offer.
However, some researchers are trying to creating something more brainlike by, you guessed it, more closely emulates a brain. Given that we are in
a golden age of computer architecture
, now seems the time to create new hardware. This type of hardware is known as Neuromorphic hardware.
What is Neuromorphic Computing?
Neuromorphic is a fancy term for any software or hardware that tries to emulate or simulate a brain. While there are many things we don’t yet understand about the brain, we have made some wonderful strides in the past few years. One generally accepted theory is the
columnar hypothesis
, which states that the neocortex (widely thought to be where decisions are made and information is processed) is formed from millions of cortical columns or cortical modules. Other parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, have a recognizable structure that differs from other parts of the hindbrain.
The neocortex is rather different from the hindbrain in terms of structure. There are general areas where we know specific functions occur, such as vision and hearing, but the actual brain matter looks very similar from a structural point of view across the neocortex. From a more abstract point of view, the vision section is almost identical to the hearing section, whereas the hindbrain portions are unique and structured based on function. This insight led to the speculation by Vernon Mountcastle that there was a central algorithm or structure that drove all processing in the neocortex. A cortical column is a distinct unit as it generally has 6 layers and is much more connected between layers vertically than horizontally to other columns. This means that a single unit could be copied repeatedly to form an artificial neocortex, which bodes well for very-large-scale integration (VLSI) techniques. Our fabrication processes are particularly well suited to creating a million copies of something in a small surface area.
While a recurrent neural network (RNN) is fully connective, a real brain is picky about what gets connected to what. A common model of visual networks is that of a layered pyramid, the bottom layer extracting features and each subsequent feature extracting more abstract features. Most analyzed brain circuits show a wide variety of hierarchies with connections looping back on themselves. Feedback and feedforward connections connect to multiple levels within the hierarchy. This “level skipping” is the norm, not the rule, suggesting that this structure could be key to the properties that our brains exhibit.
This leads us to the next point of integration: most networks of neurons use a
leaky integrate-and-fire model
. In an RNN, each node emits a signal at each timestep, whereas a real neuron only fires once its membrane potential is reached (reality is a little more complex than that). More biologically accurate artificial neural networks (ANN) that have this property are known as
Spiking Neural Networks (SNN)
. The leaky integrate-and-fire model isn’t as biologically accurate as other models like the
Hindmarsh-Rose model
or the
Hodgkin-Huxley model
. They simulate neurotransmitter chemicals and synaptic gaps. Still, it is much more expensive to compute. Given that the neurons aren’t always firing, this does mean numbers need to be represented as
spike trains
, with values encoded as rate-codes, time to spike, or frequency-coded.
Where Are We at in Terms of Progress?
A few groups have been emulating neurons directly, such as the
OpenWorm project that emulates the 302 neurons in a roundworm known as Caenorhabditis elegans.
The current goal of many of these projects is to continue to increase the neuron count, simulation accuracy, and
increase program efficiency
. For example, in Germany, a project known as
SpiNNaker
is a low-grade supercomputer simulating a billion neurons in real-time. The project reached a million cores in late 2018, and in 2019, they announced a large grant that will fund the construction of a second-generation machine (SpiNNcloud).
Many companies, governments, and universities are looking at exotic materials and techniques to create artificial neurons such as
memristors
,
spin-torque oscillators
, and
magnetic josephson junction devices
(MJJs). While many of these seem incredibly promising in simulation, there is a large gap between twelve neurons in simulation (or on a small development board) and the thousands if not billions required to achieve true human-level abilities.
Shown in 2019, this 8 million neuron neuromorphic system used 64 Intel Loihi chips. Source:
Tim Herman/Intel
Other groups such as
IBM
,
Intel
,
Brainchip
, and
universities
are trying to create hardware-based SNN chips with the existing CMOS technology. One such platform from Intel, known as the Loihi chip, can mesh into a larger system. Earlier last year (2020), Intel researched
used 768 Loihi chips in a gird to implement a nearest-neighbor search
. The 100 million neurons machine showed promising results, offering superior latency to systems with large precomputed indexes and allowed new entries to be inserted in O(1) time.
The
Human Brain Project
is a large-scale project working to further our understanding of biological neural networks. They have a system known as the BrainScaleS-1 waferscale that relies on analog and mixed-signal emulations of neurons. Twenty wafers (each 8″) make up BrainScaleS, each wafer having 200,000 simulated neurons. A follow-up system (BrainScaleS-2) is currently in development, with an estimated completion date of 2023.
The
Blue Brain Project
is a Swiss-led research effort to simulate a biologically detailed mouse brain. While not a human brain, the
papers and models
they have published are invaluable in furthering our progress towards useful neuromorphic ANNs.
The consensus is that we are very, very earlier in our efforts towards creating something that can do meaningful amounts of work. The biggest roadblock is that we still don’t know much about how the brain is connected and learning. When you start getting to networks of this size, the biggest challenge becomes how to train them.
Do We Even Need Neuromorphic?
A counterargument can be made that we don’t even need neuromorphic hardware. Techniques like
inverted reinforcement learnings (
IRL
)
allows the machine to create the reward functions rather than the networks. By simply observing behavior, you can model what the behavior intends to do and recreate it via a learned reward function that ensures the expert (the actor being observed) does best. Further research is being done on handling suboptimal experts to infer what they were doing and what they were trying to do.
Many will continue to push forward with the simplified networks we already have with better reward functions. For example, a recent article in IEEE about
copying parts of a dragonfly brain with a simple three-layer neural net
has shown great results with a methodical, informed approach. While the neural network that was training doesn’t perform as well as dragonflies in the wild, it is hard to say if this is due to the superior flight capabilities of the dragonfly compared to other insects.
Each year we see deep learning techniques producing better and more powerful results. It seems that in just one or two papers, a given area goes from interesting to amazing to jaw-dropping. Given that we don’t have a crystal ball, who knows? Maybe if we just continue on this path, we will stumble on something more generalizable that can be adapted into our existing deep learning nets.
What Can a Hacker Do Now?
If you want to get involved in neuromorphic efforts, many of the projects mentioned in this article are open-source, with their datasets and models available on GitHub and other SVN distributors. There are incredible open-source projects out there, such as
NEURON
from Yale or the
NEST SNN simulator
. Many folks share their experiments on
OpenSourceBrain
. You could even create your own neuromorphic hardware like the
2015 Hackaday Prize project, NeuroBytes
. If you want to read up on more, this
survey of neuromorphic hardware from 2017
is an incredible snapshot of the field as of that time.
While it is still a long road ahead, the future of neuromorphic computing looks promising. | 31 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373635",
"author": "Ostracus",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T18:07:11",
"content": "Somewhere in there is…quantum.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373705",
"author": "Rog77",
"timestamp": "2021-08-20T00:27:53",
... | 1,760,372,979.281886 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/why-you-cant-make-build-a-wearable-display-with-a-just-a-transparent-oled/ | Why You Can’t Make A Wearable Display With A Transparent OLED | Danie Conradie | [
"Wearable Hacks"
] | [
"oled",
"transparent display",
"voidstar lab",
"wearable display"
] | After seeing the cheap transparent OLED displays that have recently hit the market, you might have thought of using them as an affordable way to build your own wearable display. To save you the inevitable disappointment that would result from such a build, [Zack Freedman] took it upon himself to test out the idea, and show why
transparent wearable displays are a harder than it looks
.
He put together a headband with integrated microcontroller that holds the transparent OLED over the user’s eye, but unfortunately, anything shown on the display ends up being more or less invisible to the wearer. As [Zack] explains in the video after the break, the human eye is physically incapable of focusing on any object at such a short distance.
Contrary to what many people might think, the hard part of wearable displays is not in the display itself, but rather the optics. For a wearable display to work, all the light beams from the display need to be focused into your eyeball by lenses and or reflectors, without distorting your view of everything beyond the lens. This requires, lightweight and distortion-free collimators and beam splitters, which are expensive and hard to make.
While these transparent OLEDs might not make practical heads-up displays, they are still a cool part for projects like a
volumetric display
. It’s certainly possible to build your own
smart glasses
or
augmented reality glasses
, you just need to
focus
on getting the optics right. | 38 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373592",
"author": "AlainsProjects",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T15:37:39",
"content": "Correct, you need an optical system that projects the image (virtual image) at least 25cm away from the eye.https://cdn.hackaday.io/images/2658771475041485969.jpg",
"parent_id": null,
"dept... | 1,760,372,978.977298 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/wheres-that-radio-a-brief-history-of-direction-finding/ | Where’s That Radio? A Brief History Of Direction Finding | Al Williams | [
"Featured",
"History",
"Interest",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"adcock",
"Bellini-Tosi",
"de forest",
"direction finding",
"gps",
"hertz",
"huff duff",
"loop antenna",
"radio direction finding",
"RDF"
] | We think of radio navigation and direction finding as something fairly modern. However, it might surprise you that direction finding is nearly as old as radio itself. In 1888, Heinrich Hertz noted that signals were strongest when in one orientation of a loop antenna and weakest 90 degrees rotated. By 1900, experimenters noted dipoles exhibit similar behavior and it wasn’t long before antennas were made to rotate to either maximize signal or locate the transmitter.
British radio direction finding truck from 1927; public domain
Of course, there is one problem. You can’t actually tell which side of the antenna is pointing to the signal with a loop or a dipole. So if the antenna is pointing north, the signal might be to the north but it could also be to the south. Still, in some cases that’s enough information.
John Stone
patented
a system like this in 1901. Well-known radio experimenter Lee De Forest also had
a novel system
in 1904. These systems all suffered from a variety of issues. At shortwave frequencies, multipath propagation can confuse the receiver and while longwave signals need very large antennas. Most of the antennas moved, but some — like one by Marconi — used multiple elements and a switch.
However, there are special cases where these limitations are acceptable. For example, when Pan Am needed to navigate airplanes over the ocean in the 1930s, Hugo Leuteritz who had worked at RCA before Pan Am, used a loop antenna at the airport to locate a transmitter on the plane. Since you knew which side of the antenna the airplane must be on, the bidirectional detection wasn’t a problem.
Basic Navigation
Radio navigation owes a lot to ordinary celestial navigation and surveying. Instead of sighting a lighthouse, the sun, or a star, you sight a radio transmitter.
Using the sun and moon gives two circles (lines of positions) and you can assume your ship is not over dry land around Argentina or Paraguay. Public domain.
Consider you are in a field that has a flagpole on it and you know the exact location and height of the pole. If you are somewhere in the field and want to know where you are, you can use the pole. You sight the pole and measure the angle to the pole. Since you know the height and the angle, you can use geometry to draw a circle around the pole that you must be on.
Of course, you could be anywhere on the circle — what navigators call a line of position. But what if you had two poles? You could draw two circles. If you are lucky, the circles will touch at exactly one point and that is where you are. However, it is more common to have two points and — presumably — one will be very far away from where you ought to be and one will be close to where you should be.
Even with a simple pair of loops, you can do the same trick if they are far enough apart. If station one shows an angle of 30 degrees (or 210 degrees; it is ambiguous) to the transmitter and station two shows an angle of 300 degrees, you can triangulate by drawing two lines and noting where they cross.
Improvements
A 2 MHz Adcock installation; public domain
Even so, there was a demand for something better. In 1909 Ettore Bellini and Alessandro Tosi introduced an innovation. The Bellini-Tosi system used two antennas at right angles that fed coils. A third loop moved inside the coils to find the direction. This allowed the large antennas to remain stationary. By the 1920s these were quite common and remained so until the 1950s.
By 1919, the British engineer Frank Adcock came up with a system that used four vertical antennas, either monopoles or dipoles. This arrangement wired the antennas to effectively make a square loop that ignores horizontally polarized signals, thus reducing the reception of skywaves. Adcock antennas were often used with Bellini-Tosi detectors.
Lightning Strikes
Huff Duff gear; Photo by Rémi Kaupp CC-BY-SA-3.0
In 1926, Brit Robert Watson-Watt was trying to detect lightning to help airmen and sailors avoid storms. Lightning signals are very fast, but it took about a minute for an experienced operator to line up a Bellini-Tosi detector. By coupling an Adcock antenna and an oscilloscope, Watt was able to rapidly lock onto a lightning bolt or a radio transmitter.
The military high-frequency direction finder or huff-duff proved invaluable during the war. The German U boats kept transmissions short to avoid detection, but with the huff-duff, that didn’t matter. The Germans didn’t figure out the technology improvement and estimates are that 25% of U boat sinking were due to the huff-duff.
Modern Times
Modern-day systems are much more sophisticated using phase locked loops and other techniques. Although some early systems like the one used by Pan Am used transmitters on the plane and receivers on the ground, most systems do the opposite. Older ADF — automatic direction finding — sets used motorized antennas to locate known transmitters. Modern sets use the Marconi system with multiple antennas, although the switch is electronic in this case.
Ham radio operators enjoy fox hunting — part of the event known as “radiosport” in most of the world — which is essentially hide and seek played with a radio transmitter. You can see more in the video below.
You might think that GPS has made radio direction finding a thing of the past. However, if you think about it, GPS is sort of a different form of radio direction finding. Instead of using a bearing of an antenna, you are measuring signal arrival time, but it is the same idea. The time delay gives you a circle from the known position of the satellite. Making multiple circles around multiple satellites gives you an exact position.
Sure, the technology is a far cry from Hertz’s loop antenna. But radio direction is still a key part of modern navigation systems. | 35 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373576",
"author": "StripeyType",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T14:48:04",
"content": "That’s Uruguay, friend, not Paraguay.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373612",
"author": "Menno",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T16:... | 1,760,372,979.064818 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/manitoban-makes-open-software-demo-of-proprietary-vaccine-verification-systems/ | Manitoban Makes Open Software Demo Of Proprietary Vaccine Verification Systems | Chris Lott | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"Covid-19",
"vaccination",
"verification"
] | [Mark Jenkins] wasn’t impressed with the Covid 19 vaccination verification systems that restaurants in Manitoba are required to use. Patrons must present a QR code, which must be verified by a mobile app available only from Apple or Google. With help from his local hackerspace, he came up with a
bash script solution
requiring only kilobytes vs the 50 MB of the mobile apps. [Mark] isn’t pleased with the exclusivity of the apps availability and the lack of an open API. His concern isn’t entirely theoretical, either — Google mysteriously pulled their app from the Play Store for over a week.
The interim result, shown in the video below, is a demonstration system called Alexandra. It consists of a receipt printer, a webcam being used as a QR scanner, and a 2005-era laptop running the script. This is merely a proof of concept, as [Mark] clearly notes. There is still some work to be done — for example, the method used to authenticate with the Google server is transient. But eventually [Mark] hopes to have a free software alternative soon, suitable for restaurant owners to use in their establishments.
What kinds of vaccination verifications systems, if any, are used in your part of the world? Is the system open or proprietary? Let us know in the comments below. | 31 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373518",
"author": "Sebastius",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T11:27:04",
"content": "In the Netherlands it’s fully open-source:https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-coronacheck-app-coordination, so you can make your own implementation if you like.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,... | 1,760,372,979.341754 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/custom-isolated-variac-is-truly-one-of-a-kind/ | Custom Isolated Variac Is Truly One Of A Kind | Tom Nardi | [
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"Arduino Uno",
"current sensor",
"Isolation Transformer",
"relay",
"test equipment",
"transformer",
"variac"
] | It’s no surprise that many hardware hackers avoid working with AC, and frankly, we can’t blame them. The potential consequences of making a mistake when working with mains voltages are far greater than anything that can happen when you’re fiddling with a 3.3 V circuit. But if you do ever find yourself leaning towards the sparky side, you’d be wise to outfit your bench with the appropriate equipment.
Take for example this
absolutely gorgeous variable isolation transformer built by [Lajt]
. It might
look
like a high-end piece of professional test equipment, but as the extensive write-up and build photographs can attest, this is a completely custom job. The downside is that this particular machine will probably never be duplicated, especially given the fact its isolation transformer was built on commission by a local company, but at least we can look at it and dream.
This device combines two functions which are particularly useful when repairing or testing AC hardware. As a variable transformer, often referred to as a variac, it lets [Lajt] select how much voltage is passed through to the output side. There’s a school of thought that says slowly ramping up the voltage when testing an older or potentially damaged device is better than simply plugging it into the wall and hoping for the best. Or if you’re like Eddie Van Halen, you can use it to control the volume of your over-sized Marshall amplifiers when playing in bars.
Secondly, the unit isolates the output side. That way if you manage to cross the wrong wire, you’re not going to pop a breaker and plunge your workshop into darkness. It also prevents you from accidentally blowing up any AC powered test equipment you might employ while poking around,
such as that expensive oscilloscope
, since the devices won’t share a common ground.
Additional safety features have been implemented using an Arduino Uno R3 clone, a current sensor, and several relays. The system will automatically cut off power to the device under test should the current hit a predetermined threshold, and will refuse to re-enable the main relay until the issue has been resolved. The code has been written in such a way that whenever the user makes a configuration change, power will be cut and must be reestablished manually; giving the user ample time to decide if its really what they want to do.
[Lajt] makes it clear that the write-up isn’t meant as a tutorial for building your own, but that shouldn’t stop you from reading through it and getting some ideas.
Whether you’re in the market for custom variac tips
or just want to get inspired by an impeccably well engineered piece of equipment, this project is a high-water mark for sure. | 32 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373173",
"author": "jake",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T20:28:39",
"content": "Man that is a nice build!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373184",
"author": "Phil",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T21:02:41",
"con... | 1,760,372,979.551114 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/why-buy-a-new-scope-when-you-can-just-build-one/ | Why Buy A New Scope When You Can ‘Just’ Build One? | Dave Rowntree | [
"The Hackaday Prize",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"2021 Hackaday Prize",
"oscilloscope",
"usb"
] | Hackaday Prize 2021 Finalist ThunderScope
is doing exactly that. [Aleska] is building a modular open source PC-connected oscilloscope aiming at four channels and a cool 100 MHz bandwidth with a low budget. The detailed project logs, showing how he is learning about ‘scope technology on-the-fly is a fascinating look into the mind of an engineer as he navigates the ups and downs of a reasonably complicated build.
We like how [Aleska] has realised early on, that keeping the project private and only releasing it when “I’m done” actually impedes progress, when you could open source from the beginning, log progress and get great feedback right from the start. All those obvious mistakes and poor design choices get caught and fixed before committing to hardware. Just think of all the time saved. Now this is an attitude to cultivate!
Modular Design
A modular approach to de-risk the hardware design is a good call, allowing upgrades or alternative functional modules to be dropped in as the need arises. Need to swap out a single-ended frontend for a differential one, or on one with some other specialised function? Sure, just pop it out and drop in the replacement and crack on.
A Neat USB 3.0 Trick
From numato.com
The data path pulls samples from the
HMCAD1511
ADC on eight 1-GBit/s LVDS lanes, feeding them into the SERDES blocks on a Spartan 6 FPGA. Inside that, a FIFO takes the deserialised (parallel) data and synchronises it into the clock domain of the USB interfaces, as well as buffering during periods when the USB is busy. This allows the use of an
off-the-shelf USB 3.0 FIFO interface chip
from our good friends at FTDI to deal with all that messy interfacing.
Next the ADC itself needs configuration, the programmable frontend also, not to mention the FPGA requires its bitstream loading via JTAG during development. All this ‘side-channel’ stuff is dealt with via a USB 2.0 interface chip (again from FTDI).
This
neat trick of inserting a USB 2.0 Hub
takes advantage of the way USB 3.0 connectors can have both USB 3.0 super-speed ports and high-speed ports operating in parallel, so you can wire the super-speed port direct to the FT601 interface chip, and stick a hub chip in the USB 2.0 path and then feed other USB 2.0 devices from the same connector. A simple, but clever trick to save both cost and complexity!
The eagle-eyed will notice that some of the traditional oscilloscope circuit functions are missing, notably a hardware trigger. This design is hinging on the speed of modern PCs to enable this function to be implemented adequately by the scope application when continuously fed with all the sample data.
We shall watch with interest how well this pans out.
The
Hackaday
Prize2021
is Sponsored by: | 26 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373148",
"author": "Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T18:39:40",
"content": "Fascinating post, thought provoking, thanks",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6373152",
"author": "mmmdee",
"time... | 1,760,372,979.415966 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/teardown-3d-printed-space-shuttle-lamp/ | Teardown: 3D Printed Space Shuttle Lamp | Tom Nardi | [
"3d Printer hacks",
"Art",
"Hackaday Columns",
"Slider",
"Teardown"
] | [
"3d printing",
"Additive Manufacturing",
"LED lamp",
"production",
"Space Shuttle"
] | Since the very beginning, the prevailing wisdom regarding consumer desktop 3D printers was that they were excellent tools for producing prototypes or one-off creations, but anything more than that was simply asking too much. After all, they were too slow, expensive, and finicky to be useful in a production setting. Once you needed more than a few copies of a plastic part, you were better off biting the bullet and moving over to injection molding.
But of course, things have changed a lot since then. Who could have imagined that one day you’d be able to buy five 3D printers for the cost of the crappiest Harbor Freight mini lathe? Modern 3D printers aren’t just cheaper either, they’re also more reliable and produce higher quality parts. Plus with software like OctoPrint, managing them is a breeze. Today, setting up a small print farm and affordably producing parts in mass quantities is well within the means of the average hobbyist.
Flickering LEDs provide a sense of motion
So perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I started seeing listings for these 3D printed rocket lamps popping up on eBay. Available from various sellers at a wide array of price points depending on how long you’re willing to wait for shipping, the lamps come in several shapes and sizes, and usually feature either the Space Shuttle or mighty Saturn V perched atop a “exhaust plume” of white PLA plastic. With a few orange LEDs blinking away on the inside, the lamp promises to produce an impressive flame effect that will delight space enthusiasts both young and old.
As a space enthusiast that fits somewhere in between those extremes, I decided it was worth risking $30 USD to see what one of these things looked like in real life. After waiting a month, a crushed up box arrived at my door which I was positive would contain a tiny mangled version of the majestic lamp I was promised — like the sad excuse for a hamburger that McBurgerLand actually gives you compared to what they advertise on TV.
But in person, it really does look fantastic. Using internally lit 3D printed structures to simulate smoke and flame is something we’ve seen done in the DIY scene, but pulling it off in a comparatively cheap production piece is impressive enough that I thought it deserved a closer look.
Now it’s always been my opinion that the best way to see how something was built is to take it apart, so I’ll admit that the following deviates a bit from the rest of the teardowns in this series. There’s no great mystery around flickering a couple LEDs among Hackaday readers, so we already know the electronics will be simplistic in the extreme. This time around the interesting part isn’t what’s on the inside, but how the object itself was produced in the first place.
The Star of the Show
I picked the Space Shuttle version of his lamp over the Saturn V because it’s by far the harder of the two to produce. I knew the iconic orbiter, along with its orange external tank and side-mounted boosters, would make for a more difficult FDM print than the cylindrical Apollo rocket. The Shuttle would almost certainly be printed in multiple pieces and glued together, and I wanted to see what kind of build quality could be expected in the worst case scenario.
But even upon close examination of the roughly 120 mm (4.7 inch) spacecraft, I have to admit they’ve done a pretty good job. Clearly a lot of finish work went into the piece, especially on the external tank and boosters, but the printer used to produce the Shuttle is obviously pretty well dialed in. You can see faint layer lines on the orbiter itself, but in my experience, they’re always hard to hide on white surfaces. Also note that the windows aren’t just painted on, but are actually tiny indentations in the print surface, as are the RCS thrusters on the nose.
Support interface along the rear of the wings.
In terms of production, it seems that the orbiter was printed separately from the tank and boosters, and then glued on after the parts had been painted. It’s also clear that all the parts were printed vertically, which is somewhat surprising, as the logical print orientation for the orbiter would be to have it laying flat on the bed.
Considerable support material must have been used to print the orbiter vertically, the remnants of which can be seen in the stepped surface on the back of the wings. I’m not sure why they would have taken this more difficult route, though it’s possible they’re printing them vertically to maximize how many can fit on the bed at once.
While the 3D printer owner in me is impressed by the quality of the final piece, the space nerd in me has to say that this isn’t a particularly good rendition of the Space Shuttle. The wingtips are all wrong, there are no OMS thrusters on the back, and the nose looks more like a sad cartoon dog than the legendary spaceplane NASA flew for three decades. Of course, the kid who’s room this lamp would probably end up in won’t know any of that.
Cranking Out Clouds
While the Space Shuttle itself was quite impressive, the plume of PLA it rides on is decidedly less so. Painting the plastic would have reduced the glowing effect, but the downside of leaving it unfinished is that even small surface inconsistencies are obvious. A close examination shows clear signs of under-extrusion, often a hint that the print speed has exceeded the extruder’s ability to melt the required volume of plastic.
Things are only worse on the inside. The plume was printed without an internal support structure to save time and material, and while that’s worked fine for the most part, there are a few areas where the print came quite close to failing. One patch near the bottom deformed so badly that it looks like it may have been scraping against the extruder, as there’s hints of discoloration and charring.
In general, my impression is that the plumes are being printed at a much faster rate than the Shuttle itself. It could even be that they are printed on a second set of less stringently maintained and calibrated printers, as they don’t need to have anywhere near the detail of the “hero” spacecraft they get mated to.
Lighting the Candle
As you probably suspected, the electronics inside the lamp aren’t anything to get excited about. The small PCB has eight LEDs (four red, four yellow) being driven by an unmarked 8-pin IC, and is hot glued directly to the top of an 800 mAh pouch cell.
A smaller board is responsible for charging the cell with a standard micro USB cable, and features the LTH7 battery management IC which
regular readers may recall we last saw used in the power supply circuit of some very bloated restaurant pagers
. The charging module looks like it might be repurposed from some other device, but the one-trick nature of the LED board makes me think it’s purpose built for these lamps.
Money Talks
It seems pretty clear to me that all the parts for this lamp have been produced using standard consumer 3D printers, as there’s nothing here that couldn’t be accomplished on an entry-level Ender 3. But what about the material costs? Well, this particular style of lamp weighs in at approximately 160 grams, and since we know from the included documentation that it was printed in PLA, we can easily calculate some interesting metrics.
3D Printing Cost Calculator
Namely, running each one off consumes slightly north of 52 meters of filament, at a cost of roughly $3.20 USD given current consumer PLA prices of ~$20 per kilogram. While this doesn’t take into account the support material which would have been required when printing the Shuttle, we can also bet that the companies printing these lamps aren’t paying full retail price for their filament. Even with the occasional failed prints skewing the number, it’s safe to say the material cost for each of these lamps is well under $4.
Given China’s infamously low cost of labor, and the minimal cost of the simplistic electronics required to kit them out, there’s quite a profit to be made on each lamp at $30. Such an operation could quickly recoup the cost of the initial print farm, at which point the only ongoing expenses would be a fresh supply of PLA, batteries, and LEDs.
In short, it looks like we were all wrong. Or at least, not imaginative enough to predict the quantum leaps that desktop 3D printing would make in a decade’s time. While it might be a stretch to say that it’s an ideal solution, products like this are proof positive that print farms of consumer 3D printers can not only churn out production-ready parts, but that they can potentially make you a hell of a lot of money doing it. | 14 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373134",
"author": "Rumble_in_the_Jungle",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T17:21:37",
"content": "With that flight path radius it is more of real life accident visualization lamp.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373174",
"a... | 1,760,372,979.475692 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/packing-heat-with-a-homemade-portable-soldering-iron/ | Packing Heat With A Homemade Portable Soldering Iron | Al Williams | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"Tool Hacks"
] | [
"soldering iron"
] | Small portable soldering irons are all the rage so [electronoobs] decided to
build one on his own
. While the design isn’t quite as sleek as a commercial unit, considering it holds its own batteries, it looks pretty good.
Of course, the question is: does it work? You can see in the video below that it does, melting solder in about ten seconds. The weight is about 100 g, so it should be very comfortable to use.
A small display shows operational parameters. We also liked the threaded mount for the tips. The tips need about 4 A from the battery which results in a 15 W iron. However, the tips don’t have a built-in thermocouple, so you can’t exactly temperature control the tip.
There was a bit of a problem with undervoltage detection, so you do need to be prepared to remove the battery manually if the voltage drops too low. This is somewhat painful, and we might have considered wiring a physical power switch to avoid having to open the 3D-printed case too often.
On the PCB is an Arduino, a MOSFET, and some instrumentation to monitor the battery current and the tip resistance. Naturally, you could do what you like with the firmware to make any number of customizations.
While the iron looks a little like a TS-100, that iron doesn’t contain batteries, so you have to carry an external supply or a battery. But there are
commercial irons with batteries
. Of course, there have been
other similar projects
, but we like the looks and expandability of this one. | 4 | 2 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373116",
"author": "WereCatf",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T16:08:36",
"content": "“On the PCB is an Arduino”No, there isn’t. Arduinos aren’t microcontrollers, they’re full dev-boards; the microcontroller there is just a basic ATmega 328.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"r... | 1,760,372,979.590004 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/of-lasers-and-lightning-thwarting-thor-with-technology/ | Of Lasers And Lightning: Thwarting Thor With Technology | Adam Zeloof | [
"Engineering",
"Featured",
"Laser Hacks",
"News",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"laser",
"lightning",
"weather"
] | Most of us don’t spend that much time thinking about lightning. Every now and then we hear some miraculous news story about the man who just survived his fourth lightning strike, but aside from that lightning probably doesn’t play that large a role in your day-to-day life. Unless, that is, you work in aerospace, radio, or a surprisingly long list of other industries that have to deal with its devastating effects.
Humans have been trying to protect things from lightning since the mid-1700s, when Ben Franklin conducted his fabled kite experiment. He created the first lightning rod, an iron pole with a brass tip. He had speculated that the conductor would draw the charge out of thunderclouds, and he was correct. Since then, there haven’t exactly been leaps and bounds in the field of lightning rod design. They are still, essentially, a metal rods that attract lightning strikes and shunt the energy safely into the earth. Just as Ben Franklin first did in the 1700s, they are still installed on buildings today to protect from lightning and do a fine job of it. While this works great for most structures, like your house for example, there are certain situations where a tall metal pole just won’t cut it.
Passive Lightning Protection (and the Radioactive Option)
Sometimes, the thing you’re trying to protect is, well, a tall metal pole. Radio towers make excellent lightning rods, and it’s hard to guarantee that the clouds will choose to discharge their pent-up electrons on a nearby pole instead of the tower itself. The type of lightning protection used on a tower or antenna depends on the application — many Ham Radio operators use lightning arresters to protect their equipment. These are small boxes that act as a passthrough for the antenna feedline. They are directly grounded, and in the event lightning strikes the antenna, are designed to provide a quick path to the earth for all that extra charge.
Many of us have secondary systems in place as well — automatic antenna disconnects, for example — just in case some excess energy “leaks through” the arrester. All this is designed to protect the expensive equipment in the shack, not the antenna itself, which you would probably need to replace after a direct lightning strike. What if we wanted to prevent lightning strikes altogether?
The radioactive tip of an old lightning rod. Source:
Management of Radioactive Disused Lightning Rods
(PDF)
Well, conventional lightning rods
do
help. A properly installed Lightning Protection System (LPS) can reduce the chance that an antenna or tower is struck by providing lots of enticing targets that the bolt can safely strike. Scientists have even tried to find ways to make those alternative targets a bit more alluring.
Back in the early 1900s,
it was thought that slapping a bit of radioactive material on the top of the rod would help to attract lightning.
The idea was that the radioactive material would partially ionize the surrounding air, making the area even more attractive. Several countries adopted their use in the 1970s and soon found that, in practice, this didn’t work as well as theory dictated. There was not a significant enough improvement over the conventional variety, especially considering the obvious health and safety complications that stray radioactive sources can cause. By 1990, many countries had banned their sale, and they have since been discontinued.
Radioactive or not, Lightning Protection Systems can get bulky. Take an airfield, for example. If we want to protect planes during takeoff and landing, we would need to cover a huge area with lightning rods and grounding lines… a huge area that becomes impassable to aircraft, for obvious reasons.
Lighting The Way
A recently-published paper just may be able to provide an alternative. It details the
Laser Lightning Rod (LLR) project which aims to, as its name suggests, create lightning rods out of columns of light.
Essentially, an extremely powerful laser is pointed at the sky, intersecting a conventional lightning rod along the way. The beam ionizes the air within it’s volume, creating a “wire” of sorts that guides lightning strikes into the lightning rod. The LLR team has proposed the system for use protecting buildings, rockets, and airports, and has even speculated that a series of lasers could be used around an airport to protect a large area (and the lasers could, of course, be selectively switched off when a plane approaches). The laser in question is a complex system, seeded by bursts from an emitter
built by the TRUMPF corporation
. The beam is amplified to around 800W, pulsing at 1kHz with each burst lasting around 1ps. The absolute maximum power of the system is not given, but
Jean-Pierre Wolf, the team’s leader, told CNN that “a single pulse at peak power is equal to that produced by all the nuclear power plants in the world”
— which sounds like it might be a
slight
exaggeration, but I wasn’t able to find an exact figure in the paper.
Smoke (okay, hopefully not) and mirrors: a diagram of the laser lightning rod. Source:
The laser lightning rod project
EPJAP CC-BY 4.0
The LLR system deployed at Säntis. Source:
The laser lightning rod project
EPJAP CC-BY 4.0
The team has built a prototype of the system, which they deployed at a communications tower on the peak of Säntis, the tallest mountain in the Swiss Alps. As can be expected, the tall metal structure at the peak of the tallest mountain in the region is no stranger to lightning strikes. In fact, in an average year it’s hit roughly 100 times.
The LLR team hauled a staggering
29 tons of materials and equipment
to the mountaintop (sound a bit familiar? Check out
this recent Hacker Challenge on Twitter
). After about two weeks of setup and testing, the laser was ready to go. In mid-July, the first series of experiments started, and the team expects to have some numbers to crunch when the trials end sometime in September. In the meantime, they’re just hoping for some nasty weather.
High-powered lasers might be a bit overkill for the vast majority of today’s lightning-protection needs (unless you’re building the world’s safest amateur radio shack, have millions of dollars, and can convince your local government to let you shoot lasers at the sky) but this research is indisputably interesting. After all, is there anything that isn’t instantly cooler when you throw lasers into the mix?
We’ve even seen laser headlights!
As with many new technologies, we’ll be watching this one closely (with the proper laser safety eye protection, of course) and looking forward to the day when, rather than sounding like something out of a Weather Control Matrix in Star Trek, it becomes a viable and maybe even ubiquitous Lightning Protection System. | 45 | 15 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373088",
"author": "reg",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T14:38:09",
"content": "Pilots bitch about getting blasted with 5mw laser pointers. They are going to love getting hit with the equivalent of all the nucellar power plants in the world if the thing misfires..",
"parent_id": nu... | 1,760,372,979.687882 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/wwii-hydrogen-peroxide-rocket-3d-print/ | WWII Hydrogen Peroxide Rocket 3D Print | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"monopropellant",
"rocket"
] | [Integza] was reading about a World War II-era rocket plane created near the end of the war by the Germans. The Heinkel He-176 wasn’t very practical, but he was intrigued when he read the rocket was cold and combustionless. He did a little research and found the engine was a monopropellent engine using hydrogen peroxide. This led to some
interesting experiments
and a 3D printed rocket engine, as you can see in the video below.
Usually, liquid-fueled rocket engines have a fuel and an oxidizer that mix and are either ignited or, in a hypergolic rocket, spontaneously combust on contact. With a monopropellent, the thrust comes from a chemical reaction between the propellant — hydrogen peroxide, in this case, and a catalyst.
There’s a common science demonstration that creates a huge volume of foam using common peroxide and a simple catalyst. For a rocket, though, you need concentrated hydrogen peroxide and certain catalysts. For some reason [Integza] tried different catalysts before settling on what the Germans had used, potassium permanganate. That was much more effective.
Since the reaction isn’t hot, this is a rocket where 3D printing on a consumer-grade printer is practical. In particular, he used a resin printer to create nozzles and a guide to properly mix the peroxide and a liquid catalyst.
For this test, the rocket didn’t go anywhere. Strapped to a fixed mount, [Integza] simply injected the materials with a syringe. The results, though, were impressive and we’d love to see an actual flying rocket or aircraft using this system.
This isn’t the first attempt he’s made at
printing a rocket engine
, If you want to go the
more traditional route
, we have some advice there, too. | 37 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373034",
"author": "YGDES",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T11:16:01",
"content": "IIRC, hydrogen peroxide + potassium permanganate were also used by the Germans to power the turbopump of the V2 rocket.And hydrogen peroxide rocketry has been revived by ARCA SPACE these last years.",
"... | 1,760,372,979.764742 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/take-note-an-e-ink-tablet-from-pine64/ | Take Note: An E-Paper Tablet From Pine64 | Jenny List | [
"computer hacks",
"Tablet Hacks"
] | [
"eink",
"note",
"Pine64",
"PineNote",
"tablet"
] | Over the years we’ve seen a variety of interesting pieces of hardware emerging from the folks at Pine64, so it’s always worth a second look when they announce a new product. This time it’s
the PineNote
, a tablet that packs the same Rockchip RK3566 as used in the company’s Quartz64 single board computers behind a 10.1″ 1404 x 1872 16-tone greyscale e-paper screen.
Fitted with 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128 GB eMMC flash storage, it will feature the same Linux support as previous Pine64 products, with the slight snag of the display driver not yet being complete for 5.xx kernels. They are thus at pains to point out that this is not a ready-to-go consumer device and that early adopters will be expected to write code rather than notes on it.
That last sentence sums up Pine64’s offering perfectly, they produce interesting hardware with open-source support, but sometimes the path from hardware release to stable and usable product can be a rocky one. If you’re interested in hardcore hacking of an e-paper tablet, then you may want to be an early adopter. Otherwise, hang back for a while and buy one once some of the bugs have been ironed out. Meanwhile you can see the whole update in the video below; it has a few other things including a nifty keyboard for the PinePhone.
We’ve mentioned Pine64 a few times over the years, it’s worth noting that their products also lie
outside the realm of Linux boxen
. | 20 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373000",
"author": "Daid",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T08:13:14",
"content": "> it will feature the same Linux support as previous Pine64 productsOn my experience of the (first) pinebook, so support will be crappy at best? Only a single distro manages to boot on mine, everything else ... | 1,760,372,979.869129 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/19/custom-compression-squeezes-classic-computer-choruses-into-a-tiny-controller/ | Custom Compression Squeezes Classic Computer Choruses Into A Tiny Controller | Ryan Flowers | [
"ATtiny Hacks",
"classic hacks",
"digital audio hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"2n2222",
"attiny85",
"c programming",
"music",
"PC speaker",
"python 3.0",
"retrogaming"
] | Geeks of a certain vintage will have fond memories of games that were simplistic by today’s standards, but drew one in all the same. Their low fidelity graphics were often complimented by equally low fidelity music being forced through the afterthought of a speaker that inhabited most computers. Despite the technical constraints of the era, these games didn’t just offer gameplay. They told stories, and they were immersive in a way that some would think wouldn’t be relatable to a younger generation.
That didn’t stop [Thanassis Tsiodras] from sharing the classic “The Secret of Monkey Island” with his niece and nephew when they were young. Excited to see his family after a year of separation due to COVID-19, [Thanassis] wanted to give them a handmade gift:
The music from “The Secret of Monkey Island” on a custom player
. What an uncle!
[Thanassis] could have just recorded the music and played it back using any number of chips made for the purpose, but being a long time software engineer, he decided to take the scenic route to his destination. First, DOSBox was hacked to dump the speaker output into a file. Python, C, and 30 years of experience were leveraged to squeeze everything into the 8 KB storage of an ATtiny85. Doing so was no small feat, as it required that he create a custom implementation of Huffman compression to get the data small enough to fit on chip. And when it fit, but didn’t work, even more optimization was needed.
The end result was worth it however, with the music from “The Secret of Monkey Island” playing in its original form from a speaker driven by the ever so humble but useful 2n2222. [Thanassis]’ site is replete with details too intricate to post here, but too neat to miss. Watch the video below the break for a demonstration.
Certainly the ATtiny85 is a miniscule but handy little creature. You may enjoy seeing it
pressed into service as a game console
, or even as a
Spectrum Analyzer
. Do you have your own ATtiny85 hack you’d like to share? Be sure to let us know about it via the
Tip Line
! | 14 | 8 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373494",
"author": "Alphatek",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T08:09:07",
"content": "“And when it fit, but didn’t work, even more optimization was needed”.Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s bugfixing, not optimising… :-)And giving someone that music? Pure evil, it’s one of the most perv... | 1,760,372,979.812446 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/commander-x16-a-dreamy-8-bit-computer-comes-closer-to-reality/ | Commander X16: A Dreamy 8 Bit Computer Comes Closer To Reality | Ryan Flowers | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"6502",
"65c02",
"commodore",
"commodore 64",
"Commodore PET",
"VIC-20"
] | Imagine the ultimate homage to 1980s 8-bit home computers. It might look like [David Murray] aka The 8-Bit Guy’s
Commander X16
.
As a core group of geeks, hackers, and developers age, we yearn for the computers of our youth. VIC-20s, Commodore Pets, 64s, 128s, Ataris, Apple IIes, and the list goes on and on. For many of us, our first hands on experience with a computer was with such a machine that is now called “retro”. Sadly, many of these relics are getting more expensive as demand increases and supplies dwindle. Working examples are harder to find, and even those can break down. Original monitors, peripherals, and accessories are also getting scarcer. This is all quite understandable when we consider that some of these classics are over 40 years old.
What was it that we loved about these old rigs that makes them so attractive? [David] decided to distil what makes a classic a classic, and then turn that list into a spec list for what he calls his “Dream Computer”. He found that things like a printed and spiral bound manual were a big part of the charm and utility of these early home computers. Booting directly to a prompt and being able to directly control the hardware was another highly desirable trait.
[David] also took the time to determine what people
don’t
like about these retro machines: Wacky keyboard layouts, composite video output, and glacially slow storage. Swapping multiple floppies to load a program or respooling a cassette tape is just as undesirable in 2021 as it was in 1981. Who knew?
The X16’s’ prototyping is still in progress.
The result of [David]’s research is the Commander X16. Inspired by the VIC-20, it’s a fresh take on the retrocomputer that only uses parts that are currently available. You can see the first video in a series about the development of the X16 below the break. Be aware that a
lot
of progress has been made since the video came out in 2019, but it still provides an excellent starting point for learning about the project.
The X16’s specifications read like dream list made in the mid 80s: 256 color VGA, up to 2MB memory, an 8 MHz 6502, plenty of expansion ports, and even ports for SNES style controllers. And what else will this dream machine include? You guessed it: A spiral bound manual!
It’s not possible to list all of the great features of the X16 in this space, so check out the
Commander X16 FAQ
for all the details. If this project makes your heart go pitter patter, you may be interested to know that they need help with software development! An emulator is available for development. The goal is to have a healthy software ecosystem in place when the X16 launches.
You may also enjoy reading about other 6502 retrocomputer reports such as this
“Brain in a vat” 6502
computer, or
a guided tour of the birthplace of the 6502 and the Commodore 64 with our very own Bil Herd
.
Thank you to [Truth] for bringing us a report of this fine project via the
Tip Line
. Keep those tips coming! | 34 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373480",
"author": "Eoopy",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T05:08:11",
"content": "When did HackADay stopped to provide hi-res pictures when clicking on thumbnails? Feels like 1995.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373498",
... | 1,760,372,979.947112 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/phased-array-levitation-is-science-in-action/ | Phased Array Levitation Is Science In Action | Lewin Day | [
"Science"
] | [
"acoustic levitation",
"levitation",
"science",
"ultrasonic levitation"
] | Levitation may seem like magic. However, for certain objects, and in certain conditions, it’s actually a solved technology. If you want to move small particles around or do experiments with ultrasonic haptic feedback,
you might find SonicSurface to be a useful platform for experimentation.
The build comes to us from [UpnaLab], and is no small feat of engineering. It packs in 256 ultrasonic emitters in a 16×16 grid, with individual phase control across the entire panel. This allows for the generation of complex ultrasonic wave fields over the SonicSurface board. Two boards can be paired together in a vertically opposed configuration, too. This allows the levitation of tiny particles in 3D space.
As you might expect, an FPGA is pressed into service to handle the heavy lifting – in this case, an Altera CoreEP4CE6. Commands are sent to the SonicSurface by a USB-to-serial connection from an attached PC.
The board is largely limited to the levitation of small spherical pieces of foam, with the ultrasonic field levitating them in midair. However, the project video shows how these tiny pieces of foam can be attached to threads, tapes, and other objects in order to manipulate them with the ultrasonic array.
It may not be a simple project, but it serves as a great basis for your own levitation experiments. Of course, if you want to start smaller,
that’s fine too
. If you come up with any great levitation breakthroughs of your own,
be sure to let us know
. | 8 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373483",
"author": "L",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T06:19:33",
"content": "I’d love to read about someone using this to make a clock with levitating segments/dots, rather than LEDs or nixies",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "63735... | 1,760,372,979.98961 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/diy-source-measurement-unit-shows-all-the-details/ | DIY Source Measurement Unit Shows All The Details | Dave Rowntree | [
"hardware"
] | [
"4-quadrant",
"scpi",
"smu"
] | An SMU or Source Measurement Unit works a bit like a power supply, in that it can source current into a load and a bit like an electronic load, in that it can sink current from a power source. It includes a crossover circuit, so that it cleanly and predictably swaps between sink and source modes automatically. This makes it terribly useful for testing all manner of power circuits, charging and characterizing batteries or just saving bench space by replacing two separate boxes.
This DIY-SMU from analog electronics guru [Dave Erikson]
is a full four-quadrant design, meaning that it can operate with both positive and negative voltages. The design shows excellent performance, comparable to commercial instruments that cost serious money, which is testament to [Dave]’s skill and experience.
Source: Wikipedia
The quadrants can be understood if you imagine a graph with voltage on the horizontal axis, and current on the vertical. Both axes can swing to both polarities, with quadrants I & III indicating power delivered into a load and quadrants II & IV power absorbed from a source.
The very detailed project logs show every gory detail, every problem found and the work to solve it. Its a long read, which for those interested in such devices, will be time well spent in this scribe’s humble opinion.
The DIY-SMU is mostly analog in nature, with the control portion courtesy of a Teensy 3.2, with a
Nextion
TFT display with touch for the user interface. The firmware even supports
SCPI
over USB to allow remote control and data gathering, so its ready to drop right into your test and measurement stack. For more reading goodness, checkout JSMU, a related project, taking inspiration from the DIY-SMU. Details
can be found on this project GitHub repo
.
Many power supply projects have graced these pages over the years, like this
2015 Hackaday Prize Entry
but this is one of the few four-quadrant designs to be found, so hats off!
Thanks [David Gustafik] for the tip! | 8 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373474",
"author": "Mike Massen, Perth, Western Australia",
"timestamp": "2021-08-19T04:02:59",
"content": "Ah nice one, it’s an interesting concept as specialised tool eg harmonics, power data logging, thanks for posting:-Fwiw. I had an HP 6813A few years ago which is an AC source... | 1,760,372,980.482834 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/build-an-amphibious-robot-using-pool-noodles-for-wheels/ | Build An Amphibious Robot Using Pool Noodles For Wheels | Lewin Day | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"foam",
"foam wheels",
"pool noodle",
"robot",
"whegs"
] | If you only think of wheels as round, you’re limiting yourself from experiencing the true wider world of whacky designs. [wadevag] has been experimenting with some such concepts, and has had success building an amphibious robot platform using star-shaped wheels
built out of pool noodles
.
The concept is similar to that of whegs. A portmanteau of wheel-legs, they’re in effect a form of leg that moves with a rotating motion. Essentially, the points of the stars on the wheels act like legs, pushing the robot along one by one, rather than having continuous contact with the ground as in a typical round wheel.
The flotation provided by the foam allows the robot to easily sit on top of the water’s surface, and the star shape allows them to act as viable paddles too. This is perhaps their primary advantage. A round wheel would not provide anywhere near as much forward propulsion.
[wadevag] shows off the concept’s abilities on water, concrete, and snow, and it handles them all ably. Impressively, it can both enter and exit the water under its own power. While it’s probably not a viable solution for a very heavy robot, for a lightweight design, it could work wonders.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen some oddball wheel designs, either
. Video after the break. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373420",
"author": "maxx",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T20:12:58",
"content": "there was a toy i had when i was a kid with wheels like thatlittle 4wd and they were sponge, amphibious. horrible thing that couldnt keep water out of the battery commpartment",
"parent_id": null,
"d... | 1,760,372,980.526602 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/raspberry-pi-powered-standing-desk-rises-to-new-heights/ | Raspberry Pi Powered Standing Desk Rises To New Heights | Matthew Carlson | [
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"desk",
"ergo",
"pi zero",
"raspberry pi",
"standing desk"
] | Like many office workers, [David Kong] found himself the lucky recipient of a motorized sit-stand desk. Also like most office workers with such a desk, he found himself mostly sitting. Reminders on his phone did little to change habits and [David] resolved
to automate his desk to rise on a schedule
.
Taking off the front panel of the control box required a few screws and [David] was delighted to find some testing pins right on the PCB.By connecting the right pins together, he could simulate any button being pressed. A Toshiba TLP222A solid-state relay made it simple to connect the pins together, the next step was triggering the relay on some sort of timer.
Speaking of timers, the oft-lauded 555 timer was considered. However, the length of time desired wasn’t as well suited for the 555, and the appeal of just tweaking a file to adjust the interval was tempting. Going to the other end of the spectrum, [David] had a Raspberry Pi zero laying around he had been meaning to play with.
After soldering the relay to pin 17 and writing a quick 10 line python script that is executed on startup, [David] had a working solution that could be taped to the underside of the desk, out of sight. Rather than being on a fixed timer, the desk raises every 45 to 60 minutes. The impact on his life has been wonderful, which was the goal of this particular project. It’s been a few months and he hasn’t had to tweak or fix anything. Is a whole 64-bit multicore processor a bit of an overkill for toggling a pin every hour or so? Yes. But we can’t really fault him for reaching for what was already lying around. The results speak for themselves.
Perhaps this would be something you would incorporate when you’re
building your own standing desk
? | 15 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373407",
"author": "derpy",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T19:40:17",
"content": "but isn’t the pi zero single core and 32-bit?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373441",
"author": "Arthur Wolf",
"timestamp": "2021-0... | 1,760,372,980.335117 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/golden-rices-appearance-on-philippine-store-shelves-and-the-rise-of-biofortification/ | Golden Rice’s Appearance On Philippine Store Shelves And The Rise Of Biofortification | Maya Posch | [
"Hackaday Columns",
"Science",
"Slider"
] | [
"biofortification",
"genetic engineering",
"golden rice"
] | After decades in development, the Philippines became the first country on July 21st of this year to formally
approve the commercial propagation
of so-called golden rice. This is a rice strain that has been genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene in its grains. This is the same compound that has made carrots so famous, and is a significant source of vitamin A.
Getting enough
vitamin A
is essential for not only children and newborns, but also for pregnant and lactating women. Currently, vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is the
primary cause of preventable childhood blindness
and an important cause of infant mortality. While VAD is hardly the only major form of world-wide malnutrition, biofortification efforts like golden rice stand to dramatically improve the lives of millions of people around the globe by reducing the impact of VAD.
This raises questions of how effective initiatives like golden rice are likely to be, and whether biofortification of staple foods may become more common in the future, including in the US where
fortification
of foods has already become commonplace.
Making Plants Do Our Bidding
The domestication of plants is an ongoing process, started by humankind thousands of years ago when
early farmers
began to select for and cultivate specific plants with desirable traits. Over many generations of plants, this would gradually produce many domesticated crops with which we are familiar today. This artificial selection process increased the size of fruits and grains, made crops easier to process and consume, and increased yield.
The 20th century saw the rise of intensive agriculture, leading to the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ between the 1940s and 1970s during which world-wide agriculture saw major boosts in yields through technology: artificial fertilizer, improved irrigation, and improved harvesting methods, but also a more concentrated artificial selection of plants.
The present-day
gamma garden
at the Institute of Radiation Breeding, Hitachiohmiya, Japan. (
source
)
Through
mutation breeding
– also known as mutagenic, or variation breeding, as well as mutagenesis – plant seeds are exposed to mutagenic sources of chemicals, radiation or enzymes to create genetic mutants. This introduces random changes to the genome of the plant’s cells, which may result in desirable changes on which can be selected.
Or not. Effectively this isn’t very different from what happens naturally, except much faster and at a much greater pace, and with unfortunately the same problem of undesirable mutations creeping up as well, which may
cripple or kill
an affected plant. Although this makes it a slow and laborious process, mutagenics is responsible for thousands of fruit and vegetable types we buy in the supermarket today.
Genetic modification can be contrasted with genetic engineering (GE), where the plant’s genome is directly edited in order to effect the desired alterations. The benefits of genetic engineering are obvious: changes appear instantly, and undesired mutations are avoided.
In addition, in GE plants, genetic abilities can be introduced that are otherwise foreign to the plant, such as producing beta-carotene in its grains. Even with mutagenic GM plants, such a major change is unlikely to ever occur spontaneously. In the current version of golden rice (GR2), the CrtI gene from
Pantoea ananatis
and the phytoene synthase gene (Psy) from
Zea mays
(
maize
) are added to complete the beta-carotene pathway which is incomplete for the rice grain.
Gene construct used to generate Golden Rice. RB, T-DNA right border sequence; Glu, rice endosperm-specific glutelin promoter; CrtI, carotene desaturase from Pantoea ananas; tpSSU, pea ribulose bis-phosphate carboxylase small subunit transit peptide for chloroplast localisation; nos, nopaline synthase terminator; Psy, phytoene synthase gene from Narcissus pseudonarcissus (GR1) or Zea mays (GR2); Ubi1, maize polyubiquitin promoter; Pmi, phosphomannose isomerase gene from E. coli for positive selection (GR2); LB, T-DNA left border sequence. (
Source
)
Making The Case For Beta-Carotene In Rice Grains
Carotenes are
generally considered
to be an essential component in the ability of plants to photosynthesize. This explains why beta-carotene is a common component in leafy greens, such as kale, spinach and broccoli, as well as pumpkins and carrots. Unfortunately, none of these leafy greens, nor animal sources of vitamin A, are readily available in many parts of the world, or affordable if they are.
As noted by
Saeed Akhtar et al.
, there are three ways to fix VAD: supplementation, fortification, and dietary diversification. Vitamin A supplementation is only somewhat effective because it relies on a government organization providing everyone in need with regular supplementation. Supplementation with vitamin A also becomes less efficient when one’s body has less fat because it is fat-soluble. Similarly, fortification requires that someone adds vitamin A (or beta-carotene) to the food stuffs, which presumes that government regulations on food fortification aren’t dodged, as Akhtar et al. found to be common in some areas.
Akhtar et al. came to the conclusion that a diversified, multi-prong approach is most likely to be effective here, as a weakness in one approach can can be covered by another approaches despite their weaknesses.
As golden rice does not require anything beyond the usual planting and harvesting of rice, it adds no extra burden, but merely raises the question of how effective it is. That is, how much vitamin A does a person who consumes a certain amount of golden rice convert from the beta-carotene in the rice grains?
A 2019 study by
Swamy et al.
found that in an analysis of golden rice versus regular rice as grown in the Philippines during 2015-2016, the only noticeable difference was the presence of beta-carotene and other provitamin A
carotenoids
. Based on the levels of beta-carotene present, they calculated that 100 grams of raw golden rice could provide 30-40% of the recommended daily intake (RDI) of vitamin A for children, and 11-13% for adult women. It’s not a complete solution by any means, but it helps.
Nobody Is Perfect
1920s advertisement for vitamin-enriched donuts. Not condoned by the FDA then, or now. (
source
)
Perhaps the most ironic thing about malnutrition is that merely living in a country where one has ready access to (fortified) food and supplements does not guarantee that one cannot suffer from especially micronutrient deficiencies. Scurvy due to lack of vitamin C has been making a
resurgence in the US
(
Al-Dabagh, et al.
), as well as France (
Chalouhi et al.
), and
in Australia
. Overcooking food and eating heavily processed fast food are common factors here.
This touches upon the psychological causes behind malnutrition, where people
willingly refuse
to eat a diet that contains the nutrients they need to consume in order to stay healthy. Who doesn’t know the image of the child who doesn’t want to eat their veggies, only to be told by their parents about the poor children in developing nations who would jump at the chance to eat their meal instead?
However, when in developing nations the main problem is the lack of a diverse diet that provides all of the required nutrients for a healthy development, how does one go about addressing malnutrition in developed countries? The struggle against malnutrition does appear to have many faces, for which a multitude of solutions would be required.
It should be noted here first and foremost that there is no evidence of a drop in the nutritional value of vegetables, beyond an increase in carbohydrates which can be attributed to the dilution effect caused by the increased yield. This is
detailed by Robin J. Marles
in a 2016 literature review article. Essentially, if one were to eat their vegetables and fruit, along with protein sources, no nutritional deficiency should exist in developed nations.
Easy And Hard Questions
When it comes to solving malnutrition in developing nations, it seems clear that biofortification efforts like golden rice can help reduce the health issues that come from lack of micronutrients. The effort required is also relatively low. With Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and now
the US having declared
golden rice safe for consumption, it seems that at least this biofortified food source may herald the beginning of the end of malnutrition in developing countries.
Even so, unhealthy diets are a global issue, according to the
2017 Global Burden of Disease
(GDB) study, despite many of the people affected having ready access to the ingredients for such a healthy diet. A major issue in developed nations was for example the significant intake of sugar-sweetened beverages, along with the elevated intake of processed meat, sodium, and red meat.
It’s perhaps ironic that solving particular sources of malnutrition in developing nations is as straightforward as changing to a crop like golden rice or other biofortifed foods, while in richer countries the problem is behavioral and much less obviously solved. | 45 | 10 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373376",
"author": "Pat",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T17:38:08",
"content": "“Although this makes it a slow and laborious process, mutagenics is responsible for thousands of fruit and vegetable types we buy in the supermarket today.”This is always the point to respond to those who are... | 1,760,372,980.617201 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-pips-the-pc-for-mission-critical-computing-at-nasa/ | Retrotechtacular: Amiga Pips The PC For Mission-Critical Computing At NASA | Chris Wilkinson | [
"Retrocomputing",
"Retrotechtacular"
] | [
"amiga",
"commodore",
"nasa",
"retrocomputing",
"Retrotechtacluar"
] | In 1986, a group of NASA engineers faced a difficult choice in solving their data processing woes: continue tolerating the poor performance of PC architecture, or pony up the cash for exotic workstations. It turns out that the Commodore Amiga was an intriguing third choice, except for the fact that, paradoxically,
it didn’t cost enough
. Oh, and Apple wanted nothing to do with any of it.
Steeped in history, NASA’s Hangar AE is a hub for launch vehicle telemetry and other mission communications, primarily during prelaunch phases for launches at Cape Canaveral. Throughout the late 20th century, Hangar AE supported NASA launch vehicles in all shapes and sizes, from the Atlas-Centaur evolutions to the mighty Titan family. It even supported user data from the Space Shuttle program. Telemetry from these missions was processed at Hangar AE before being sent out to other NASA boffins, and even transmitted worldwide to other participating space agencies.
Coming down from decades of astronomical levels of funding, the 1980s was all about tightening the belt, and NASA needed budget solutions that didn’t skimp on mission safety. The Commodore Amiga turned out to be the right choice for processing launch vehicle telemetry. And so it was still, when cameras from the Amiga Atlanta group were granted permission to film inside Hangar AE.
The video below was filmed in 1998, over a decade after the first Amiga computers were installed at Hangar AE. It’s fascinating (and unsurprising) to hear that the Apple Macintosh was the first choice of computing hardware. Being a closed system, however, engineers couldn’t access the Macintosh at the level required, and weren’t able to develop the custom hardware that was needed to support their operations. In contrast, Commodore were more than willing to send NASA an enormous stack of documentation to help them out. Nice of them!
Gary Jones, then Principal Systems Engineer for NASA, goes on to say that the Amiga was an unpopular choice for his employer. “They want us to buy PCs and run Windows 95 and NT. We keep trying to tell them its not fast enough so they tell us to buy DEC Alphas. We tell them its too expensive. They don’t like the Amiga; it doesn’t cost enough.” Yikes.
The video takes place during STS-89 and its mission to the Mir space station. It appears that some of it has been lost to time, however
an old blog post fills in some knowledge gaps
, it’s well worth a look and is retro-tastic in its own right. Reports indicate that these machines were in use as late as 2006, and one
was actually for sale
not too long ago.
So the jingle goes, “only Amiga makes it possible”.
[Thanks to JohnU for this great retro computing tip!]
[Pictures from Amiga Atlanta/Mike Ellenberg] | 46 | 14 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372966",
"author": "Truth",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T05:17:53",
"content": "“you need an operating system that’s very efficient very fast and the Amiga has that it’s got very little overhead that’s what makes it nice we don’t load down the sister running the overhead we can just go... | 1,760,372,980.275049 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/tesla-automatic-driving-under-scrutiny-by-us-regulators/ | Tesla Automatic Driving Under Scrutiny By US Regulators | Al Williams | [
"car hacks",
"News"
] | [
"autonomous car",
"NHTSA",
"self-driving",
"tesla"
] | The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened
a formal investigation about Tesla’s automatic driving features
(PDF), claiming to have identified 11 accidents that are of concern. In particular, they are looking at the feature Tesla calls “Autopilot” or traffic-aware cruise control” while approaching stopped responder vehicles like fire trucks or ambulances. According to the statement from NHTSA, most of the cases were at night and also involved warning devices such as cones, flashing lights, or a sign with an arrow that, you would presume, would have made a human driver cautious.
There are no details about the severity of those accidents. In the events being studied, the NHTSA reports that vehicles using the traffic-aware cruise control “
encountered first responder scenes and subsequently struck one or more vehicles
involved with those scenes
.”
Despite how they have marketed the features, Tesla will tell you that none of their vehicles are truly self-driving and that the driver must maintain control. That’s assuming a lot, even if you ignore the fact that some Tesla owners have gone to great lengths to bypass the need to have a driver in control. Tesla has promised
full automation for driving
and is testing that feature, but as of the time of writing the company still indicates
active driver supervision is necessary
when using existing “Full Self-Driving” features.
We’ve talked a lot about
self-driving car safety
in the past. We’ve also covered some of the more
public accidents
we’ve heard about. What do you think? Are self-driving cars as close to reality as they’d like you to believe? Let us know what you think in the comments. | 66 | 17 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372928",
"author": "Ken",
"timestamp": "2021-08-17T02:11:27",
"content": "So Tesla says the cars aren’t designed to operate without human supervision, yet people still act like they don’t need to pay attention while “driving” and they are hitting fire trucks and ambulances. Why is ... | 1,760,372,980.77937 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/diy-handheld-game-puts-its-brains-on-a-removable-cart/ | DIY Handheld Game Puts Its Brains On A Removable Cart | Tom Nardi | [
"Arduino Hacks",
"ATtiny Hacks",
"handhelds hacks"
] | [
"Arduboy",
"arduino",
"cartridge",
"oled"
] | Over the years we’ve seen plenty of homebrew handheld game systems that combine an AVR microcontroller, a few buttons, and an small OLED display. Some of them have even been turned into commercial products, such as the Arduboy. They’re simple, cheap, and with the right software, a lot of fun. But being based on an MCU, most of them share the same limitation of only being able to hold a single game at any one time.
But not the Game Card, by [Dylan Turner]. This handheld was
specifically designed so that games could be easily swapped out using physical cartridges
. But rather than trying to get the system’s microcontroller to boot code from an external flash chip, the system relocates the MCU to the removable cartridge. That might seem a bit overkill, but given how cheap the ATTINY84A on each cartridge is, it’s not exactly going to break the bank.
With the microcontroller on the cartridge, the only hardware that stays behind on the Game Card is the SSD1306 128×64 OLED display, buttons, and the battery. That means the handheld is effectively non-functional unless a game is slotted in, but that could be said of most early cartridge-based game systems as well. On the other hand, it also opens up the possibility of producing cartridges with more powerful microcontrollers down the line.
Using a different microcontroller for each game is a neat hack, but it’s not the only solution to the problem. We previously saw a
community effort to add expandable storage to the Arduboy
in the form of a DIY cartridge, which ultimately led to the development of
an official flash chip upgrade for the handheld
. | 10 | 6 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372901",
"author": "SPD",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T23:06:29",
"content": "https://hackaday.com/tag/business-card/?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6372907",
"author": "Hirudinea",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T23:33:03",
... | 1,760,372,980.668848 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/new-part-day-raspberry-pi-hat-for-ieee1588-precision-time-protocol/ | New Part Day: Raspberry Pi HAT For IEEE1588 Precision Time Protocol | Dave Rowntree | [
"FPGA",
"Network Hacks",
"Raspberry Pi"
] | [
"fpga",
"IEEE1588",
"New Part Day",
"PTP",
"raspberry pi hat",
"xilinx"
] | The new
Real-Time HAT
by InnoRoute adds
IEEE1588
PTP support in hardware to a Raspberry Pi 4 nestled beneath. Based around a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA and a handful of gigabit Ethernet PHY devices, the HAT acts as network-passthrough, adding accurate time-stamps to egress (outgoing) packets and stripping time-stamps from the ingress (incoming) side.
This hardware time-stamping involves re-writing Ethernet packets on-the-fly using specialised network hardware which the Raspberry Pi does not have. Yes, there are software-only 1588 stacks, but they can only get down to 10s of microsecond resolutions, unlike a hardware approach which can get down to 10s of nanoseconds.
1588 is used heavily for applications such as telecoms infrastructure, factory equipment control and anything requiring synchronisation of data-consuming or data-producing devices. CERN makes very heavy use of 1588 for its enormous arrays of sensors and control equipment, for all the LHC experiments. This is the
WhiteRabbit System
, presumably named after the time-obsessed white rabbit of Alice In Wonderland fame. So, if you have a large installation and a need for precisely controlling when stuff happens across it, this may be just the thing you’re looking for.
IEEE1588 PTP Synchronisation
The PTP client and master device ping a few messages back and forth between themselves, with the network time-stamper recording the precise moment a packet crosses the interface. These time-stamps are recorded with the
local
clock. This is important. From these measurements, the time-of-flight of the packet and offset of the local clock from the remote clock may be calculated and corrected for. In this way each client node (the hat) in the network will have the same idea of current time, and hence all network packets flowing through the whole network can be synchronised.
The beauty of the system is that the network switches, wiring and all that common infrastructure don’t need to speak 1588 nor have any other special features, they just need to pass along the packets, ideally with a consistent delay.
The Real-Time HAT configures its FPGA via SPI,
straight from Raspberry Pi OS
, with multiple applications possible, just by a change on the command line. It is possible to upload custom bitstreams, allowing the HAT to be used as a general purpose FPGA dev board should you wish to do so. It even stacks with the official PoE HAT, which makes it even more useful for hanging sensors on the end of a single wire.
Of course, if your needs are somewhat simpler and smaller in scale than a Swiss city, you could just
hack a GPS clock source into a Raspberry Pi
with a little soldering and call it a day. | 18 | 7 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372888",
"author": "doragasu",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T20:54:27",
"content": "Very nice, but it’s a shame you have to add a complex hat just for PTP. If I am not mistaken, adding PTP support to an Ethernet chip requires very little additional logic, so it could just work out of th... | 1,760,372,980.838304 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/voice-controlled-smart-home-from-the-foundation-up/ | Voice-Controlled Smart Home From The Foundation Up | Bryan Cockfield | [
"home hacks"
] | [
"automation",
"central",
"ESP32",
"home",
"mqtt",
"node",
"privacy",
"raspberry pi",
"server"
] | Smart homes are becoming an increasingly popular way to automate one’s home, whether it’s turning on lights, closing blinds, or even feeding pets. But the commercial offerings often rely on an internet connection to reach servers in order to work, which invites a lot of privacy concerns for a large percentage of us as well as being inconvenient when the internet is down. Essentially the only way to have a privacy-respecting, self-sufficient smart home is to build one on your own from the ground up,
which is exactly what [Xasin] has done with this project
.
This build is based on ESP32 modules with a Raspberry Pi as a hub, but it’s not as simple as a MQTT implementation. Not only does the self-contained home automation setup not rely on any outside services, but a failure of the central Pi server will not impact the nodes either as they are configured to continue operating independently even without central control. This allows for a robust home automation implementation without a single point of failure, and also includes some other features that are helpful as well including voice control, all while retaining a core design philosophy that makes it relatively easy to build.
Not only is the build technologically impressive for its standalone capabilities and its elimination of privacy concerns, but [Xasin] also did an excellent job with the physical design as well, adding plenty of RGB and a hexagonal enclosure that gives it a unique look wherever its is placed. If you’re renting right now or otherwise unable to interface any automation with your current home, be sure to take a look at some projects that do
home automation without making any permanent changes
. | 20 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372870",
"author": "Jason Barnett",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T19:15:32",
"content": "A smart home done right!Definitely stealing some of these ideas for my own smart home.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373015",
"aut... | 1,760,372,980.990645 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/valve-sells-software-so-whats-with-all-the-hardware/ | Valve Sells Software, So What’s With All The Hardware? | Drew Littrell | [
"Featured",
"Games",
"hardware",
"Interest",
"Slider"
] | [
"handheld gaming",
"pc",
"pc gaming",
"steam deck",
"valve",
"Valve Software"
] | Steam branding is strong. Valve Corporation has turned their third-party marketplace into the first place millions choose to buy their PC games. The service has seen record-breaking numbers earlier this year with over 25 million concurrent users, so whatever they are doing is clearly working. Yet with all those software sales, last month Valve announced a new piece of hardware they call the Steam Deck.
Use the colloquialism you’d like, “not resting on your laurels” or “Mamba Mentality”, it’s not as if competitors in the handheld PC space are boasting ludicrous sales numbers. At their core, Valve is in the business of selling computer games. So why venture into making hardware?
One of the first things that (Valve) are often asked by people whenever we’ve told people we’re creating a new controller is, “Why?” There’s a bunch of good dual analog stick controllers out there…unfortunately in the PC space most games weren’t designed to work with a traditional controller.
Scott Dalton, GDC 2016 Presentation
Where Did All That Steam Come From?
Valve’s first commercial attempt in the world of hardware development came in the form of the “Steam Machines” branding. Valve partnered with established PC hardware manufacturers in 2013 in order to create a common set of specifications for gaming PC builds. The specs amounted to good, better, or best. Three options that sought to simplify PC gaming albeit with one major issue, SteamOS. Valve customized a version of Debian Linux with the same approach Ray did in
Field of Dreams
, “If you build it, (the games) will come”. They didn’t. The better part of a decade later it is still the exception, rather than the rule, that PC games receive ports to Linux.
The first of the ill-fated Steam Machines, the Valve Piston modular computer, reportedly could run Crysis.
A couple years later, Valve flirted with the idea that PC games should be on TV. This idea took the physical form of the Steam Link and Steam Controller. The tandem of devices, when paired with a proper gaming PC, would allow users to remotely play their game libraries on any TV in the house. If both the PC and Steam Link were hardwired into ethernet, the experience was generally pretty good. If left alone with WiFi, it was a decidedly worse experience (because everybody’s WiFi sucks). Though the legacy of this hardware excursion for Valve was summed up by
the day they liquidated their inventory in 2019 for five bucks a pop
. That’s why Steam Link is just an app now.
Valve was working on virtual reality tech as early as 2012, but opted to partner with smartphone manufacturer HTC for a commercial VR headset in 2016. The rhetoric surrounding VR at the time was as if the word saccharine had extra sugar on top. Tastes would sour on VR when the people counting the number of virtual shooting galleries ran out of fingers. The market stagnated. Lessons learned there obviously led to Valve creating their own product (Valve Index) a few years later, so the story of Valve in VR has yet to be written. However, the most telling statistic may be that
only about a quarter of VR headsets connected to Steam are one of theirs
.
What If You Get The Steam On Your Hands?
Here’s how the Steam Deck stacks up with past handhelds. Photo credit: Jan Ochoa
The concept of a portable gaming device is more than proven.
Nintendo’s history of handhelds has seen over a half billion served
, so it’s no wonder Valve saw an opportunity with a handheld of their own. The Steam Deck is a foot long slab with four core AMD Zen 2 APU, 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, on a seven inch 1280×800 IPS display wrapped with the full suite of controller buttons. All that for an entry price of $399. What’s not to like?
For one, the Steam Deck ships with SteamOS 3.0 which is based on Arch Linux. Open source software is something to be celebrated in most scenarios, but the reality of gaming on Linux has been more famine than feast. Valve plans to remedy that situation with their compatibility tool, Proton. This software acts as a translation layer between Windows API calls into portable operating system interface calls via Wine, another tool many Linux users are all too familiar with. It means that Valve is no longer waiting for developers to bring native ports to Linux, and just as with human language translations some goofiness is to be expected. An independent group of
software testers outside Valve have compiled a database of Proton’s performance
, and the results speak for themselves. It’s way better than how games used to be on Linux, but it is still early days yet.
Valve has been refreshingly open by letting potential customers know they can install an alternative OS on the Steam Deck. Multiplayer game enthusiasts will certainly want to take advantage.
Many of the anti-cheat services that run in the background with games like PUBG and Fortnite do not currently work on SteamOS
. A Windows install would solve that, however, while readers of Hackaday are no stranger to creating bootable media the truth is most players will stick with the default.
By this writer’s estimation the Steam Deck represents Valve’s third major push into designing their own hardware. Previous efforts like the Steam Controller are commendable for their audacity to “reinvent the wheel”. The Index VR headset design is widely considered best in class. Though it would be remiss not to note the strange relationship Valve has always had with the number three. If you ever needed convincing of this phenomena…just ask Gordon Freeman.
For more on Valve Software’s history, check out
this article on the company’s VR and AR prototypes
.
[Main image source:
Steam Deck
] | 47 | 12 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372851",
"author": "Pierce Nichols",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T17:09:21",
"content": "I want an IP67 version of the Steam Deck to use as a robot controller.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6372864",
"author": "Rory Sch... | 1,760,372,980.927351 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/game-development-hack-chat/ | Game Development Hack Chat | Dan Maloney | [
"Hackaday Columns"
] | [
"engine",
"game",
"gaming",
"Hack Chat",
"physics"
] | Join us on Wednesday, August 18 at noon Pacific for the
Game Development Hack Chat
with Kyle Donnelly!
Chances are we all have fallen into the time trap of computer games at one point or another. It’s easy to do — the worlds that games put before us can be immersive and addictive, and even if they’re populated by fantastical creatures hell-bent on our virtual destruction, they offer a degree of escapism and relaxation that can be hard to come by with any other form of entertainment.
But what does it take to build these virtual worlds? How exactly does one come up with all the ideas needed to make a game fresh and exciting? And once you’ve got the ideas, how do you turn them into the code needed to make the whole thing work? Kyle Donnelly has quite a bit of experience with the game development process, seeing his idea through from initial prototyping to working with a publisher and even getting the game demonstrated at conventions. Along the way, he picked up a collection of tips and shortcuts to make the process easier, as well as developing a small suite of tools to help set up and test game levels quickly and easily, and to deal with the custom physics of his virtual world.
Join us as Kyle stops by the Hack Chat to talk about game development from an angle that rarely gets much coverage — from the software side.
Our Hack Chats are live community events in the
Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging
. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, August 18 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a
handy time zone converter
.
Banner Art:
Video Games Awesome Fanart
by sacolin99. | 0 | 0 | [] | 1,760,372,981.026339 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/design-improvements-make-diy-oxygen-concentrator-even-better/ | Design Improvements Make DIY Oxygen Concentrator Even Better | Dan Maloney | [
"Medical Hacks"
] | [
"COVID",
"medical",
"oxygen",
"pandemic",
"zeolite"
] | A lot of projects we feature on these pages are of the “one and done” variety — tactical builds that serve a specific purpose with little need for further development. Some projects, though, come out as rough prototypes and then go through multiple rounds of refinement, a process we really enjoy tracking down and following. And when the project is something as important as
an oxygen concentrator that can be built and maintained easily
, all the better.
The need for cheap oxygen concentrators stems directly from the COVID-19 pandemic, which suggested that high-flow oxygen therapy was a better choice than invasive intubations and mechanical ventilation. But medical-grade oxygen isn’t always easy to come by in all parts of the world, so easily built oxygen concentrators, which rely on the nitrogen-adsorbing properties of the mineral zeolite, are meant to fill the gaps.
Early versions of the M19O2
and the related
OxyKit concentrator
, had a very homebrew feel to them, built on wooden frames as they were. And while the rustic nature of the early builds didn’t detract from their utility, the hackers behind them, including our own [Anool Mahidharia], have been making incremental improvements aimed at not only making the devices work better, but also making them easier to build.
The hackers at
Maker’s Asylum
have done a fantastic job at documenting their work, with everything posted to
a GitHub repo
so that anyone can undertake a build. And really, for something as important as making oxygen when it’s needed, there’s really no reason not to give this a try. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373390",
"author": "Michael",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T18:27:32",
"content": "I heard all you need is a paper mask to separate oxygen from the atmosphere.Gonna go run out and patent that right now./sAmazing project, nice.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
... | 1,760,372,981.188394 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/airdropping-live-fish-is-a-thing-and-it-looks-magnificent/ | Airdropping Live Fish Is A Thing And It Looks Magnificent | Lewin Day | [
"Featured",
"Interest",
"Misc Hacks",
"Original Art",
"Slider"
] | [
"air drop",
"airdrop",
"aquaculture",
"fish",
"fish drop",
"fishery",
"fishing"
] | Utah is a place that features a wonderful and varied wilderness. Its mountainous terrain is home to many valleys, ponds, and streams. They’re a particular favorite of recreational anglers who visit the region for the great fishing. Oftentimes, however, these areas are fished out by visitors and need to be restocked. Other environmental factors also come into play in reducing populations, too.
A plane delivering live fish to the lakes of Utah via air drop. Source: Utah DWR
When this happens in some areas, it’s as simple as driving up a truck full of water and fish and dumping them into the lake. The problem is that many of these lakes and streams are difficult to access by foot or by road. Believe it or not, the most practical method found to deal with the problem thus far
is dropping in live fish by air
. Here’s how it all goes down.
Live Cargo
Typically, the fish dropped into these remote watercourses are quite young, and on the order of 1-3″ long. The fish are specifically raised to later be fished, and are also usually sterile, making it easier for Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources to manage numbers. When it comes time to restock remote lakes, waterbombing planes are pumped full of water and loaded up with fish.
A variety of trout and other species are specifically hatched to repopulate the streams and lakes of Utah for fishing. The fish dropped are usually just 1″-3″ long, with their small size and light weight helping them survive the drop due to their low terminal velocity. Source: Utah DWR
The small, lightweight fish tend to flutter down with the water, and survival rates are very high. Officials estimate that 95-99% of the fish dropped survive the fall into the water. While it sounds stressful, they say it can be less harmful to the fish than comparable road journeys. In these conditions, it can be difficult to maintain good oxygen levels for the fish for the long journey to the water.
The practice has been carried out for quite some time
(
Cached
). Before the airdrop procedure became standard in the 1950s, fish were often loaded into old milk cans and carried up into the mountains on horseback. Other methods are still used depending on the area to be serviced. Buckets may be used, or backpacks filled with water and fish can be carried by hiking teams deep into the wilderness. In what Utah DWR biologist Matt McKell calls “extreme fish stocking”, ATVs and dirt bikes have been used to access remote waters to reload them with fish.
Small general aviation planes are used for the purpose, not dissimilar to those used for aerial waterbombing of wildfires. The planes can deliver 35,000 fish on a single flight, far eclipsing what can easily be achieved by other methods. The fish chosen for airdropping are typically those favored by anglers that are also well suited to the Utah environment. Fish raised for the purpose include rainbow trout, cutthroat trout, brook trout, tiger trout, splake and Arctic grayling.
Restocking as Environmental Control
Controlling the fish stocks is key to avoiding environmental problems in the lakes of Utah. Keeping native species happy and watercourses healthy requires careful management of both the areas themselves and the regulations surrounding them. This year, the Utah DWR has faced particular issues with high temperatures and low water levels as a drought rages on in the summer. It’s recently
raised fishing quotas
—
twice this month actually
— to try to deal with the problem. Higher temperature waters store less oxygen, and low water levels exacerbate the problems. Fish numbers have to be reduced in turn, lest there be disease or mass dieoffs which could cause a bigger problem for authorities to clean up later.
While the Utah DWR may have its work cut out for it this summer, it’s well experienced and well armed to deal with the issues. Bombing lakes with a cargo of live fish might seem a little ridiculous on the face of it, but the procedure has over 70 years of good results to back up its effectiveness and it does the job well. Hopefully when water levels rise in the winter, the agency is able to resume topping those lakes up and keeping everything humming along smoothly. | 52 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373327",
"author": "Starfix",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T14:26:25",
"content": "Happy for not being a fish !",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6373329",
"author": "Rex",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T14:39:24",
"content": "S... | 1,760,372,981.406856 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/boat-brings-bathers-beverages/ | Boat Brings Bathers Beverages | Al Williams | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printing",
"beverage",
"boat",
"pool"
] | Chilling in the pool is great, but what a drag to have to get out to grab a cold brew. [Alister] had his eye on a commercial drink float, but the company was out of business. But 3D printing, of course,
comes to the rescue in this video
, also embedded below.
The payload amounts to four bottles and some snacks. Brushless thrusters allow the bartender to steer the little robot around the pool to deliver libations.
A resin overcoat allows the 3D printed material to float. After the hull and thrusters are done, the rest is pretty simple: an RC receiver and some speed controllers round it out. For festivity’s sake, the boat sports an MP3 player, a water cannon, and a remote-control flagpole.
It looked like fun to drive around a pool. It might not be seaworthy enough for a trip to the ocean, but it would probably be workable on a quiet lake. We don’t know what the service life of the little device will be, but we wonder if you couldn’t sell these to resorts for delivering things to swimmers.
We’ve seen [Alister] print
boats
before. We thought a
hovercraft
version of this would be cool until we thought about lifting heavy bottles and messing up swimmer’s hair. | 15 | 9 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373293",
"author": "abjq",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T11:09:05",
"content": "Bonzer! The only possible way that could be improved is to get the water cannon to dispense rum, in pirate mode!",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373... | 1,760,372,981.258436 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/18/running-six-vga-projectors-from-a-single-esp32/ | Running Six VGA Projectors From A Single ESP32 | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"ESP32",
"projector",
"starfield",
"vga"
] | Today’s microcontrollers are high-speed powerhouses that can do absolutely wonderous things. By virtue of fast clock speeds and special DMA hardware, it’s often possible to achieve great feats that seem almost ridiculous at face value. [Bitluni] decided to demonstrate just that,
running six (6!) VGA displays from a single ESP32.
(Video, embedded below.)
The ESP32 clocks in at 240 MHz at top speed. It also features some nifty DMA hardware along with GPIO mapping that makes it perfectly suited to this task. [Bitluni] was thus able to set it up to drive up to six VGA displays at one bit per pixel monochrome output. Alternatively, ganging up six output pins into two sets of three, he was able to run two VGA displays with 3-bit color. The resolution is an impressive 640 x 400 in both cases, and [Bitluni] demonstrated the hardware by driving six projectors with a starfield display.
Is it useful? Perhaps not yet, but there’s certainly a few applications we could think of. Share your own ideas in the comments. In the meantime, check out [Bitluni]’s
other great works for the ESP32
.
[Thanks to anacierdem for the tip!] | 6 | 3 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373358",
"author": "Somun",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T16:42:51",
"content": "“features some nifty DMA hardware along with GPIO mapping”What makes that DMA nifty? GPIO mapping?So many questions. Thanks Lewin for the technical bread crumbs.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
... | 1,760,372,981.141837 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/boston-dynamics-atlas-dynamic-duo-tackles-obstacle-course/ | Boston Dynamics Atlas Dynamic Duo Tackles Obstacle Course | Roger Cheng | [
"Robots Hacks"
] | [
"atlas robot",
"boston dynamics",
"depth perception",
"legged",
"Legged Locomotion",
"motion planning",
"parkour",
"perception",
"robot"
] | Historically, the capabilities of real world humanoid robots have trailed far behind their TV and movie counterparts. But roboticists kept pushing state of the art forward, and Boston Dynamics just shared a progress report:
their research platform Atlas can now complete a two-robot parkour routine
.
Watching the
minute-long routine on YouTube
(embedded after the break) shows movements more demanding than
their dance to the song “
Do You Love Me?
“
And according to Boston Dynamics, this new capability is actually even more impressive than it looks. Unlike earlier demonstrations, this routine used fewer
preprogrammed motions that made up earlier dance performances
. Atlas now makes more use of its onboard sensors to perceive its environment, and more of its onboard computing power to decide how to best move through the world on a case-by-case basis. It also needed to string individual actions together in a continuous sequence, something it had trouble doing earlier.
Such advances are hard to tell from a robot demonstration video, which are frequently edited and curated to show highlighted success and skip all the (many, many) fails along the way. Certainly Boston Dynamics did so themselves before, but this time it is accompanied by
almost six minutes worth of behind-the-scenes footage
. (Also after the break.) We see the robot stumbling as it learned, and the humans working to put them back on their feet.
Humanoid robot evolution has not always gone smoothly (
sometimes entertainingly so
) but Atlas is leaps and bounds over its predecessors like
Honda Asimo
. Such research finds its way to
less humanoid looking robots like the Stretch
. And who knows, maybe one day real robots will be like their TV and movie counterparts that have, for so long, been played by humans inside costumes.
[via
Ars Technica
] | 35 | 11 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373252",
"author": "ian 42",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T05:23:43",
"content": "I still think wheels solve 99% of use cases..",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373262",
"author": "vib",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T06... | 1,760,372,981.823091 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/spiffy-summer-project-sources-solar-sounds-from-scraps/ | Spiffy Summer Project Sources Solar Sounds From Scraps | Ryan Flowers | [
"Art"
] | [
"art",
"beam",
"beam robotics",
"beep boop",
"circuit bending",
"pv solar",
"solar"
] | [Gijs Gieskes] has a long history of producing electronic art and sound contraptions, and his
Zonneliedjes (sunsongs)
project is certainly an entertaining perpetuation of his sonic creations. With the stated goal of making music from sunlight, the sunsongs most prominent feature is solar panels.
Although It’s not clear how the photons transform into the rhythmic crashes and random beep-boop sounds, the results are quite satisfying. We have a strong suspicion that the same principals that turn random junk into BEAM robots are at work, maybe with some circuit bending sprinkled on for good measure. One detail we were able to glean from a picture of the device he calls “mobile” was a 40106 oscillator, which [Gijs]
has used in previous projects
.
The construction style that [Gijs] uses reminds us of the “Manhattan” construction style the amateur radio homebrewing community favors. Squares of copper PCB are glued directly to the back of the solar cells and the circuits are built atop them. Looking carefully at the pictures we can also see what look like cutoff leads, suggesting a healthy amount of experimentation to get the desired results, which we can all relate to.
Be sure to check out the video after the break, and also [Gijs] website. He’s been hacking away at projects such as these for a very long time, and we’ve even featured his projects
going back more than 15 years
. Thanks for the continued hacks, [Gijs]. We look forward to seeing what you come up with next!
If the terms “BEAM robotics” and “circuit bending” are unfamiliar to your ears (or if a refresh is due), be sure to check out our
recent re-introduction to BEAM robotics
and our classic “
Intro to Circuit Bending
” to get acquainted. | 8 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373239",
"author": "Stephen Walters",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T02:59:55",
"content": "Imagine leave a dozen of the weird noise devices like this in a forest or park trees",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6373284",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,981.591204 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/17/casting-silicone-parts-with-3d-printed-inserts-for-stiffness/ | Casting Silicone Parts With 3D-Printed Inserts For Stiffness | Donald Papp | [
"3d Printer hacks"
] | [
"3d printed",
"casting",
"custom",
"silicone",
"silicone casting"
] | Prolific maker [Jan Mrázek] shared his process for casting soft silicone parts that nevertheless have some added stiffness, which he accomplished by
embedding porous, 3D-printed “ribs” into the pieces during the casting process
. The 3D-printed inserts act as a sort of skeleton, and as a result, the parts have a soft silicone surface but gain structure and rigidity that simply wouldn’t be obtained if the part were cast entirely in silicone. The nice thing is that no new materials or tools were needed; [Jan] 3D printed both the molds for the parts as well as the structural inserts. It’s always nice when one can use the same tool and materials to accomplish different functions.
The parts [Jan] is making are interesting, as well. He observed that the process of swapping resin in his printer’s build tank was an unpleasant experience for a number of reasons, chief among them being that resin is sticky and messy, and the shape of the build tank doesn’t make pouring resin from it a clean job.
His solution was to design a pour spout that could be pressed onto the build tank, and some specially-designed squeegees to allow scraping the tank clean with ease. Silicone is the ideal material for the parts because it turns out that sticky resin beads nicely on silicone’s surface. Anywhere else, resin tends to spread out and form a sticky mess, but on silicone resin it forms tidy drops and is much easier to clean up.
It’s a technique worth keeping in mind, because one never knows when it could come in handy.
Fabricating soft robots
for example tends to involve silicone casting and clever techniques. See [Jan]’s parts in action in the video, embedded below. | 8 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6373243",
"author": "Karl Ramboz",
"timestamp": "2021-08-18T03:59:49",
"content": "3d printed baculums can now be a thing in certain industries.",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6373308",
"author": "Hurp McDerp",
... | 1,760,372,981.75745 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/solving-ultra-high-vacuum-leaks-has-an-elementary-solution/ | Solving Ultra High Vacuum Leaks Has An Elementary Solution | Ryan Flowers | [
"hardware",
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"Applied Science",
"gasket",
"helium",
"leak",
"leak detection",
"science",
"science lab",
"ultra high vacuum",
"vacuum",
"vacuum chamber"
] | When we think of a vacuum leak we generally think of a car that just doesn’t want to run quite right. Most normally aspirated internal combustion engines rely on the vacuum created by the pistons to draw in the air fuel mixture that’s produced by the carburetor or fuel injection system. Identifying the leak usually involves spraying something combustible around common trouble areas while the engine is running. Changes to the engine speed indicate when the combustible gas enters the intake manifold and the leak can be found.
What if your vacuum leak is in a highly specialized piece of scientific equipment where the pressures are about 12
times
orders of magnitude lower than atmospheric pressure, and the leak is so small it’s only letting a few atoms into the vacuum chamber at a time? [AlphaPhoenix] takes dives deep into this very subject in his video “
Air-tight vs. Vacuum-tight.
” which you can watch below the break.
Not only does [AlphaPhoenix] discuss how a perfect pressure vessel is sealed, he also explains the specialized troubleshooting methods used which turn out not to be all that different from troubleshooting an automotive vacuum leak- only in this case, several magnitudes more complex and elemental in nature.
We also enjoyed the comments section, where [AlphaPhoenix] addresses some of the most common questions surrounding the video: Torque patterns, the scarcity of the gasses used, and leaving well enough alone.
Does talking about vacuums get you pumped? Perhaps you’d enjoy such vacuum hacks as
putting the toothpaste back in the tube
in your
homemade vacuum chamber
.
Thank you [Morgan] for sending this one in. Be sure to send in your own hacks, projects, and fantastic finds through the
Tip Line
! | 34 | 13 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372826",
"author": "Tim",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T15:07:02",
"content": "“about 12 times lower than atmospheric pressure” Maybe should be about 12 orders of magnitude lower?",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6372831",
... | 1,760,372,982.55619 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/linux-fu-walk-chew-gum/ | Linux Fu: Walk, Chew Gum | Al Williams | [
"Linux Hacks"
] | [
"background",
"bash",
"linux.shell script",
"parallel",
"task"
] | If you ever think about it, computers are exceedingly stupid. Even the most powerful CPU can’t do very much. However, it can do what it does very rapidly and repeatably. Computers are so fast, they can appear to do a lot of things at once, too and modern computers have multiple CPUs to further enhance their multitasking abilities. However, we often don’t write programs or shell scripts to take advantage of this. However, there’s no reason for this, as you’ll see.
Bash Support
It is surprisingly easy to get multiple processes running under Bash. For one thing, processes on either side of a pipe run together, and that’s probably the most common way shell scripts using multiprogramming. In other words, think about what happens if you write
ls | more
.
Under the old MSDOS system, the first program would run to completion, spooling its output to a temporary file. Then the second program will run, reading input from the same file. With Linux and most other modern operating systems, both programs will run together with the input of the second program connected to the first program’s output.
That’s easy because the programs synchronize themselves over the input and output channel. However, it is just as easy to start multiple programs independently. The key is using “&” to separate programs or end the script line.
It is easy enough to convert a script like:
find /mnt1/usr -name '*.so' >/tmp/libs1
find /mnt2/usr -name '*.so' > /tmp/libs2
# to
find /mnt1/usr -name '*.so' >/tmp/libs1 &
find /mnt2/usr -name '*.so' > /tmp/libs2 &
In the first case, the searches occur one at a time, and only proceeds after the last find has run. In the second case, both commands run at the same time and the script will continue even while both commands are still going.
The Problem
There’s only one problem. While you can spin off multiple programs to run together, it is rare that these programs don’t need to coordinate with each other.
Not that it would be useful to really run these in parallel, but take a look at the output of this command:
alw@Enterprise:~$ banner hello & banner goodbye
[1] 173
# # ###### # # ####
#### #### #### ##### ##### # # ######
# # # # # # #
# # # # # # # # # # # # #
###### ##### # # # #
# # # # # # # ##### # #####
# # # # # # #
# ### # # # # # # # # # #
# # # # # # #
# # # # # # # # # # # #
# # ###### ###### ###### ####
#### #### #### ##### ##### # ######
[1]+ Done banner hello
Not what you expected. Depending on your system, the first program may (or may not) get all of its output done in one go. Interspersing output isn’t really what you want.
Control
There are other problems. You might want to find out the PID of the new process. You could use
bash’s job control
. However, you don’t really need to go that far.
The
jobs
command will show you what you have running in the background from the current shell. If you add
-l
or
-p
you can also learn the PID.
An easier way to learn the PID of a command is using
$!
. Of course, if you are running from the shell’s command prompt, it also tells you the PID of the last run command. For example:
ls / & echo PID=$!
[2] 178
PID=178
Of course, your PID number will almost certainly be different.
Then What?
Armed the PID, what can you do with it? There are two things you’ll find most useful. First, you can use
wait
to understand when a process (or processes) are complete.
The other thing you can do is use
kill
to send
signals
to the background program. That’s beyond the scope of this post, but you can use signals to create complex communication between programs or to invoke default behaviors like termination.
An Example
Consider a case where you have a bunch of
jpeg
files and you want to convert them to
png
files for a website using
ImageMagick
. You might try this simple script:
#!/bin/bash
for I in *.jpg
do
convert "$I" "png/$(basename "$I" .jpg).png"
done
echo Copying files now...
ls png
This will do the job. Presumably, the last line will have some file copy command like an
sftp
following it, but I used a directory listing just for an example.
Instead, you could launch all the conversions at once, taking advantage of multiple processors, and wait for them all to finish up. Without the wait command, the simulated copy would start before the conversions were complete unless there were very few conversions to do.
#!/bin/bash
for I in *.jpg
do
convert "$I" "png/$(basename "$I" .jpg).png" &
done
wait
echo Copying files now...
ls png
Still a Problem
There is still one problem. The wait command will wait for any subprocesses active in the shell. That might not be what you want, although in this case, it is probably OK. However, let’s fix it:
#!/bin/bash
PIDs=""
for I in *.jpg
do
convert "$I" "png/$(basename "$I" .jpg).png" &
PIDs+="$! "
done
wait $PIDs
echo Copying files...
ls png
If you run the timing with a good number of files, you’ll see a big difference. On my laptop with a handful of pictures, the straight versions took about 40 seconds. It took just over 10 seconds with the final version.
Wrap Up
It is easy to forget that you can do more than one thing at a time pretty easily. Of course, this also opens up a whole new realm of problems. If you need to protect your programs from each other, check out our
earlier post about critical sections
. Not everyone thinks
bash
is a great programming language, but it is
surprisingly capable
and while it might not be good for everything, it is great for some tasks. | 7 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372822",
"author": "Joel",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T14:25:43",
"content": "The GNU “parallel” command is a performant solution for separable batching operations where output order _must_ be preserved. It also allows scaling beyond a single machine to perform such tasks.I have only... | 1,760,372,981.546284 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/tree-of-life-branches-out-with-a-twist/ | Tree Of Life Branches Out With A Twist | Kristina Panos | [
"LED Hacks"
] | [
"adafruit QtPy",
"dementia",
"Neopixels",
"QtPy",
"RGB LED",
"tree of life"
] | In the middle of 2020, [charlie] challenged himself to conceive of and finish one project every month for the next twelve. Here we are a year later with [charlie]’s last project of the challenge:
a tree of life with a bit of a twist to it
.
The idea was to build a tree with lights that would represent the leaves and change as the tree went through the seasons. After a lot of searching, he found a really elaborate model meant for CNC carving, but the model maker converted it to an STL. [charlie]’s original plan was to poke the LEDs through the print. After consulting a wise woman, he decided to take the two-color approach and make the background translucent so that the 16 RGB LEDs can shine through.
So, what’s the twist? Well, over time, the tree will develop dementia. One by one, the leaves will lose awareness and go through the seasons backward, or slow down their cycle, or speed up. Eventually, the entire tree recedes into a rainbow of confusion. Sadly beautiful, isn’t it?
No printer? No problem.
Trees of life come in all forms, including free-form
. | 1 | 1 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372806",
"author": "vib",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T11:25:17",
"content": "Gosh, sometimes I´m not far to regret fidget spinners, USB hubs for Raspberry and even Benchoff…",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
}
] | 1,760,372,981.709884 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/the-faux-vintage-becomes-vintage/ | The Faux-Vintage Becomes Vintage | Bryan Cockfield | [
"Retrocomputing"
] | [
"apple II",
"game",
"gaming",
"graphics",
"homestarrunner",
"peasant's quest",
"retrocomputing",
"videlectrix",
"vintage"
] | For those who might have missed it, there was a brief period in the mid-00s where gamers everywhere eschewed consoles and PCs in favor of simple Flash-based games to be played in a browser. Among these was the game Peasant’s Quest, created by the folks at Homestar Runner and modeled after video games from the 80s. [deater] was a fan of this game and wondered
if it would actually be possible to play this retro-styled game on actual retro hardware
.
For the experiment he decided on using an Apple II since this computer is featured as a prop rather often by the developers at Videlectrix. It turns out that with some determination it’s actually possible to run this game on the late 80s hardware with very little modifications. Squeezing the sprites into the required space was a challenge, as well as getting the sound tracks to play properly, but in the end the game runs within the hardware’s 280×192 resolution with 6 colors. There are also
detailed notes
on how the complicated graphics system on the Apple works for those willing to take a deep dive. There’s a lot going on here, but surprisingly few compromises needed to be made to get this to work.
The game itself is available on the project’s webpage for anyone who still has an Apple II kicking around, or for anyone who is willing to try it out in an emulator. Of course you could always play the original Flash version but that’s missing a certain charm that decades old retrocomputers have with games. We certainly aren’t seeing
video game controllers like those built for the Apple II
anymore, for example. | 7 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372804",
"author": "poiuyt",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T11:09:41",
"content": "Should be credited to [deater] rather than [deter]",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": []
},
{
"comment_id": "6372815",
"author": "Bryan Cockfield",
"timestamp": "2021-0... | 1,760,372,981.868569 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/15/light-painting-with-an-19th-century-inspired-plotter/ | Light Painting With An 19th Century Inspired Plotter | Lewin Day | [
"Misc Hacks"
] | [
"light painting",
"mechanism",
"stepper motor"
] | The geometric chuck was a device that stacked up multiple rotating wheels that could vary their speed and their offset to a central shaft, in order to machine ornate designs using a lathe. It’s this piece of machining obscura from the 19th century that inspired
this light painting build from [Ted Kinsman].
Rather than the complicated gears and wheels used in the distant past, [Ted] instead elected to use stepper motors. Three stepper motors are stacked on top of each other, each one able to rotate at an independent rate. The design only implements three steppers as the slip rings needed to send power and control signals to each stepper are prohibitively expensive.
An Arduino is programmed to run the show, changing the speed of each motor and thus the patterns the system generates. Put LEDs on the spinning plates, or install a pen to mark a piece of paper, and it’s possible to generate all manner of beautiful spirograph-like patterns. Vary the motor speeds or the positioning of the lights, and the patterns vary in turn.
It’s a fun build for light painting, with some great visuals produced. We also appreciate the use of the Arduino which makes varying the parameters far easier than having to change out gearsets in classical designs.
If you miss the old school spirograph,
you can always build one out of Lego
. Else, consider experimenting with
other light painting techniques
. If you’ve built a fancy rig of your own,
be sure to let us know!
[Thanks to zit for the tip!] | 9 | 5 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372761",
"author": "Christian",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T05:16:59",
"content": "Nice built. I built a similar thing:https://hackaday.io/project/176622-laser-circles",
"parent_id": null,
"depth": 1,
"replies": [
{
"comment_id": "6372781",
"author": ... | 1,760,372,981.959118 | ||
https://hackaday.com/2021/08/15/robot-pet-is-a-chip-off-the-old-logic-block/ | Robot Pet Is A Chip Off The Old Logic Block | Ryan Flowers | [
"FPGA",
"Robots Hacks",
"Software Development"
] | [
"2 wheel robot",
"assembler",
"fpga",
"fpga bootcamp",
"servo",
"sonar"
] | When [Ezra Thomas] needed inspiration for his senior design project, he only needed to look as far as his own robot. Built during his high school years from the classic 1979 Frank DaCosta book “How to Build Your Own Working Robot Pet”, [Ezra] had learned the hard way the many limitations and complexities of the wire wrapped 74xx series logic chips surrounding its 8085 processor.
[Ezra] embarked on a quest to recreate the monstrosity in miniature, calling it
Pet on a Chip
. Using a modern FPGA chip allows the electronics to shrink by an order of magnitude and provides flexibility for future expansion. Implementing an 8 bit CPU on the amply sized FPGA left plenty of room for a VGA GPU, motor controller, serial UART, and more. Programming the CPU is handled by a custom assembler written in Python.
The results? Twelve times less weight, thirteen times less power draw, better performance, and a lot of room for growth. [Ezra] hints at an I2C bus expansion as well as a higher level programming language to make software development less of a hurdle.
The Pet On A Chip is a wonderfully engineered project and we hope that we’ll be seeing more such from [Ezra] as time goes by. Watch his Pet On A Chip in action in the video below the break.
If [Ezra]’s FPGA escapades have you wondering how to get started, you can check out
this introduction to FPGA
from the
2019 Hackaday Superconference
. And if you have your own FPGA creation to share, please let us know via the
Tip Line
! | 10 | 4 | [
{
"comment_id": "6372740",
"author": "Michael Black",
"timestamp": "2021-08-16T02:18:22",
"content": "About 1968, I went to a science fair. I was eight, the one thing I remember was a “robot”.A bit thing, all it could do was move around, and it was controlled by a box connected by a relatively shor... | 1,760,372,981.916814 |
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